The “massive immigration wave” on President Joe Biden’s watch is straining public schools across the United States, the Wall Street Journal details.
Since 2021, the Journal reports, “as many as one million children … have arrived with their families or on their own” to the United States, most through the nation’s porous southern border where nearly eight million migrants total have been encountered thus far under Biden.
As a result, public schools where migrant children are resettling have been hit with financial and staffing burdens they have not experienced before. Specifically, the Journal chronicles the school district of Stoughton, Massachusetts, “a suburb of Boston,” where more than 500 migrant children are enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL) programs — twice as many compared to three years prior.
“The increase was fueled partly by 90 students, ranging from kindergarten to high school, placed by the state in two nearby hotels serving as homeless shelters. Many are from recently arrived Haitian migrant families,” the Journal reports.
As the Stoughton school district has had to add staff, with almost 20 ESL teachers now, and pay for school buses to pick up and drop off migrant children from the hotels they are living in, the financial burdens have been enormous.
For Stoughton, with fewer than 30,000 residents, the mass immigration to their community has made the school district dish out at least half a million dollars in additional costs. State officials said all of the funds will be reimbursed — eventually.
The school district’s officials said it is not only ESL programs that have had to be expanded; there is also an emotional component, as many migrant children arrive with trauma either from their native country or from the often-deadly journey they had to endure coming across the southern border.
“There are huge trauma issues,” Superintendent Joseph Baeta told the Journal. “There are students who don’t even have basic skills in their first language. In some cases they have lived in two, three, or four countries and are not even five years old.”
Researchers with the Center for Immigration Studies analyzed the impact of mass immigration under the Biden administration, finding that in 2021, 1 in 4 public school students in the United States were from immigrant households — more than double the share in 1990 and over triple from 1980.
With more immigration, the researchers found, comes more poverty in the nation’s public schools.
“Immigration has added disproportionately to the number of low-income students in public schools,” the researchers wrote. “In 2021, 21 percent of public school students from immigrant households lived in poverty and they accounted for 29 percent of all students living below the poverty line.”
States where public school students from immigrant households have increased in share the most include Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Georgia, Virginia, Texas, Florida, and Minnesota.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
