This includes the children of legal immigrants and illegal aliens. The schools won't provide information on which children have or don't have SSNs or their birth certificates.
Table 20 shows that there are 11.1 million school-age children from immigrant households. Some 20 percent of these students are immigrants themselves. The children of immigrants account for such a large percentage of the school-age population because a higher proportion of immigrant women are in their childbearing years and immigrants tend to have somewhat larger families than natives.
Table 20 shows that children from native households are significantly more likely to be in private school than children from immigrant households. As a result, children from immigrant households are a slightly larger share of public school students than they are of the school-age population. The 10.5 million children from immigrant households in public schools are 21.5 percent of all students in public schools.
Just because a language other than English is spoken at home does not mean the students struggle with English. Most of these students were born in the United States. But providing appropriate language instruction for the millions of students for whom English is not their first language is a significant expense for many school districts. This fact, coupled with the much larger size of immigrant households and their lower than average incomes means that school budgets often will be strained by the arrival of large numbers of immigrant families in their school district.
It really doesn't matter if the children or their parents are legal immigrants or illegal aliens. The point is that there is an enormous cost to immigration at the state and local levels. I will give you a personal example.
The Fairfax County. VA public school system has 181,000 student. 31,500 students are in ESOL classes. There are about 1,000 ESOL teachers. The total costs for ESOL instruction alone is about $105 million annually. These numbers have been increasing dramatically over the past few years. Property taxes are being raised again to pick up the costs. The annual school budget is $2.4 billion a year, which is about 56% of the annual county budget.
The costs associated with these children go beyond just the ESOL costs. There is the annual per capita costs of 13,500 a year; many are special needs children; and currently one in 4 students receives free or subsidized meals. Immigration, legal and illegal, is cost us close to $500 million a year. Fairfax County is one of the five richest in America. We have been able to absorb these increases, but the tax base is starting to decline. Older people on fixed income are having problems as property taxes increase.
As a country, we need to start understanding the costs of immigration, legal and illegal. Immigrants use our welfare system to a much greater degree than the native born. They get back more in government services and benefits than they pay in taxes. And they have a negative impact on the quality of education. Some individual schools have 50% to 70% of the students enrolled in ESOL classes. This affects non-immigrant children and the ability of teachers to speak to the students. We have many schools using trailers as classrooms because the number of students has outgrown the available classrooms.
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Apples and oranges when added together represent a a significant cost to our communities. And as these "children" (85% are teenagers) come flooding across the border, our schools and communities will have to absorb the costs. And by the way, the courts have been legalizing most of them so they now have a right to be here.
Obama has already legalized 560,000 DACA dreamers who have been given work permits and SSNs. The approval rate for applicants has been 99.5%. And when he legalizes 6 million illegal aliens in a few weeks, the costs will go much higher.