The issues of immigration and immigration enforcement affect the children in immigrant families and the public schools that serve those children.
How Are Schools Serving Immigrant Children?
Immigrant Teens Struggle with Formal Schooling, a NY Times investigation, explores the challenges for "Students with Interrupted Formal Education," children from refugee camps or from countries in civil war, children who may arrive in the United States at age 15 or 17, but who may never have experienced formal education. Perhaps they are the first in their families to enter school. Even in New York City, where 15,100 such students are known to be among the 150,000 English Language Learners enrolled in the city's public schools, the challenges can be overwhelming for student and school alike.
Immigration Raids and Children
Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America's Children, a new report from the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute, explores how workplace raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), raids aimed at identifying and deporting undocumented adults, affect the children in those families and the institutions that serve those children. The report profiles three raids, in Grand Island, Nebraska; Greeley, Colorado; and New Bedford, Massachusetts.
In "Iowa School District Left Coping with Immigration Raid's Impact," Education Week tells the story of the spring 2008 Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) workplace raid at a meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa. Public schools are always involved when a catastrophe strikes a community's children and families.
The DREAM Act
The DREAM Act is the proposed law that, if passed, would grant some children, brought at a young age to this country by undocumented parents, the right to qualify for college entrance, college scholarships, military service, and a path toward citizenship. When this bill finally came to the Senate floor for a vote after being introduced year after year since 2001, its bipartisan sponsors hoped it would make a space in this country for the roughly 65,000 high school graduates who face this situation each year. Faith-based advocates will, we hope, continue to urge members of Congress to reintroduce this bill until it passes. We hope you will also share the stories of these children in your congregation and among your friends and neighbors, for a large majority of the adolescents who would be assisted by passage of the DREAM Act have lived in the United States since they were young children. They have grown up here; in many cases they have no familiarity with another country to which they could return.
September 30, 2008... California columnist Peter Schrag bemoans a recent decision by 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento, a decision that denies in-state tuition for undocumented students at California's universities and community colleges: "...in a state struggling to keep students in school and to raise their achievement, any cloud on an already uncertain future is yet another invitation to give up and drop out." Many undocumented students "were brought to this country by their parents at an early age, don't know any other country or language, were educated in this country..." "We have a huge investment in them.... At a time when millions of boomers are retiring and the nation badly needs skilled workers to replace them, slamming the door on ambitious, potentially productive people is crazy."
July 8, 2008... Los Angeles Times article explores the lives of undocumented students who have been able to complete college, despite their immigration status, but who have no real place in the world of work.
Justice and Witness Ministries 2008 Message on Public Education explores the theme of public education and the public good. Elements of two cultural narratives, the Common Good and the American Dream, are embedded into the way we understand our public life. They are also used by politicians to manipulate us and sometimes to obscure the real issues. We are influenced by the narrative beneath the surface when laws and policies are framed in the language and assumptions of these familiar stories. As we explore the relevance of these two stories to the No Child Left Behind Act, the charter school experiment in New Orleans, the June, 2007 Supreme Court decision turning away from school integration, and the DREAM Act, we will try to discern the important role of the voice of the church. Each section is followed by discussion questions.
