Stop touching Lou's Eyes!

I caught Lou Dobbs yesterday after the Speech. He was beside himself with fury, and fired off canard after canard to the hapless completely GOP panel of cranks, along with a captive and apparently terrified Wolf Blitzer. Now Lou is pretty tame next to the racist screeds you can tune into on talk radio every day, but it is a pretty good clearing house for the standard scripts.. One of my favorites is how our schools are being overwhelmed by those terrible immigrant kids. The nice folks at Education sector provide some empirical information on educating immigrant kids. Here are a few data points that jumped out at me:

Third, most children of immigrants are proficient in English. As Chart Three shows, there were 10.8 million school-age children of immigrants living in the United States in 2000, compared to only 3.3 million students who have been categorized as Limited English Proficient (LEP).

Roughly a third of the total number of immigrant kids are LEP. Now tie that in with this:

First, most foreign-born students aren't Mexican. As Chart One shows, 63 percent of foreign-born students in grades PK-5 were born in Europe, Canada, Asia, Africa, and other countries. Mexico is a much larger source of students than in past decades, but it still only provides a little more than one-third of foreign-born children.

Doesn't sound like quite the tidal wave Lou makes it out to be. But wait, there's more:

Fourth, most LEP students aren't foreign-born. In fact, a significant number of LEP students aren't the children of immigrants at all. As Chart Four shows, less than half of students with limited English proficiency are first-generation immigrants. Significantly, more than one in five LEP students are third-generation immigrants, indicating that some of the biggest challenges in helping students learn English lie with native-born children in linguistically isolated households.

Bottom line: The line about immigrant students ruining American education and overwhelming our resources is false. A worthless allegation not supported by the data.

Now let's be clear, Mexican immigration, illegal and legal, has a significant impact on schools in the border states. However, so does the immigration from Asia, which in California is quite large. Each brings unique challenges in education and integration. I would argue it would be prudent and fair to provide additional support and funding to school districts from the Feds to support this important process. I certainly sympathize with the burden placed on local and state taxpayers to educate a unique demographic that is difficult to plan for and is a result of Federal policies. But running around making it out to be the biggest problem facing these schools is absurd, and distorts the other very real problems with have in education. Look, we have problems making our own native born kids in many districts English proficient. LEP students are the tip of the iceberg.

Address Education issues as a whole, and you'll be amazed how the issues caused by LEP students and immigrant students fall into line.

Lou, don't use these kids to support your immigration hysterics. They deserve better.