Statistics showing a major drop in the number of kids of illegal migrants enrolled in California’s schools is saving the state millions in education budget dollars.
The number of what liberals euphemistically call “newcomers” has dropped precipitously since President Trump came to office for his second term and decisively shut down Joe Biden’s open borders policies.
Oakland, California, is a typical example. From 2017 to 2024, the Oakland Unified School District took in an average of 1,300 extra “newcomer” students each year. But in 2025 the district only saw 498 “newcomers” enter the schools, and this year that number fell to 212, according to EdSource.
The huge cut in the number of foreigners entering Oakland’s school district spurred administrators to cut programs for bilingual and Spanish-only students and reassign staffers and teachers to other duties. And the funding decline makes a big dent in the Democrat political machine’s power and cash flow.
Oakland noted that last year the district had 17 special programs for “newcomers” in its middle schools, but this year that number has fallen to six.
The savings to taxpayers are not just from special and expensive programs for migrants. Because school budgets are based on overall student enrollment numbers, budget dollars are decreasing all the way around in all of the state’s schools that have lost high numbers of children of illegal migrants.
Nicole Knight, executive director of English language learner and multilingual achievement at Oakland Unified, openly admitted that the school districts love having the children of illegal migrants flooding into their schools because the artificial padding of enrollment numbers works to pump up the money they get from the state. And as she told EdSource, “We’re suffering from declining enrollment, and it does make visible how much newcomers were helping us stay afloat.”
Oakland is far from alone. L.A. schools saw a drop of 46.5 percent in “newcomer” students, and San Juan Unified lost 13.6 percent of their “newcomer” kids.
But these numbers are about to take an even bigger dip. Kids who enroll as “newcomers” lose that label once they have been in school for three years. And with Trump’s success at shutting down the border, that means those students who have already been in the system for a few years are about to phase out of the “newcomer” program, and with very few “newcomers” replacing them, the number of migrant students in the system is about to crater over the next year or two.
“We’re about to reach a cliff where we’ll have had a couple years without significant entries,” Sam Finn, executive director of the California Newcomer Network told EdSource.
With budgets declining already, once this demographic “cliff” is reached, the amount of education dollars thrown at “newcomers” will necessarily see huge cuts in funding over the next few years.
It will mean fewer teachers that teach solely in Spanish will be needed and Spanish-only programs and classes will not be needed. And it will mean the infrastructure and administrators for these programs will also become unnecessary, and the taxpayers will not have to throw as much money into school budgets.
It is an example of the way Donald Trump’s policies are making America great again.
No comments:
Post a Comment