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Washington, D.C. (June 29, 2023) -- This week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy covers the impact of immigration on the American education system. Two experts from the Center for Immigration Studies join us to discuss this issue. Steven Camarota, Director of Research,  talks about the impact of both legal and illegal immigration on public schools throughout the United States, which was the subject of a recent report that provides a visual representation of the impact on the education system in each community. Todd Bensman, Senior National Security Fellow, focuses on how a recent influx of illegal immigration has affected one specific community outside Houston, Texas.

The findings in Camarota’s report show that students from immigrant households account for an enormous share of public school students in many areas. Moreover, a larger share of students from immigrant households come from low-income families and speak a foreign language at home, creating significant challenges, often in areas already struggling to educate students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Bensman examines the effect of immigration on public schools in Liberty County, Texas, about 40 miles north of Houston. In just the last five years, tens of thousands of illegal-immigrant families with school-age children have taken up residence in the county.. Case studies in communities near the border where illegal immigrants often settle are important in understanding the impact of illegal immigration, because, as Bensman says on the show, “Public school districts are going to be probably first impacted in the visible, noticeable, pocketbook sort of way, because this mass migration crisis is very child-centric.”

In his closing commentary, host of the podcast and Executive Director of CIS Mark Krikorian highlights a series of important Supreme Court decisions on immigration, which will be the subject of next week’s podcast episode.