Bilingual Education: Why should tax dollars be spent to meet the needs of immigrants?
by Kate GawfNovember 6th, 2005 at 11:11:55
People object that language accommodations for immigrant children in our schools cost too much and complain that the bill is footed by us taxpayers. Wait a minute. Immigrants don’t have to pay taxes? When did that start? and where do I sign up?
This might be a good time to check in with our inner dictionary and make sure the word immigrant isn’t listed as synonymous with illegal.
There are three kinds of immigrant workers:
1. Those with legitimate documentation
2. Those with fake documentation
3. Those with no documentation
Of those three groups, the first two pay just as many taxes as the rest of us. The first group are welcomed legal guests in our country. They’re not hiding anything, they’re not doing anything wrong.
As for the second group, though their ID or SS numbers are not legitimate, their jobs are legitimate. Employers are required to make a reasonable effort to ensure their employees’ legality, but they’re not required to be the secret service. If an individual’s paperwork looks plausible, the employer will roll with it until la Migra storms in and informs him otherwise. OK, so where’s the “don’t pay taxes†part of this? There isn’t one. Like the first group, their paychecks have just as many chunks subtracted out as the rest of ours. No matter how fake or expired someone’s documentation may be, that worker is paying taxes. So while people think that illegal immigrants are freeloading tax dollars that they haven’t contributed, the opposite is occurring for this group: they are paying tax dollars but can be denied access to many of the services that tax dollars fund. And if they’re here long enough to collect social security, chances are slim that they’ll see any of that social security they’ve paid into. Those checks will be paid out to whomever that social security number really belonged to, or if they’ve used numbers of fictional or deceased people, that money will bounce back to the government.
The third group is being paid under the table (unlike any native-born Americans we know, right?) and is earning a wage so measly, benefitless, and unprotected that you wouldn’t for a minute envy their tax-free status. The party shirking taxes in group 3 is the employer, who is most likely American born. By hiring people off the record, he is saving himself from paying legally required taxes such the employer’s portion of social security and workers’ compensation, not to mention minimum wages. Plus these employers know full well that these workers have no legal standing from which to complain – about anything. When paying workers clandestinely, these employers aren’t including them in the standard system by which taxes are paid — so who’s the negligent party in that picture?
Immigrants should wonder more than the rest of us where all their tax money is going.
November 6th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
Excellent points, Kate. My husband’s father studied and worked in the US for several years. He paid Social Security taxes, along with the other taxes, but will never see a penny of what he contributed to SS. This is just the way it is, which is fine because it’s part of our system, but to berate immigrants for for being a drain on the system while they’re actually contributing has always perplexed me.
November 7th, 2005 at 9:41 am
Well– OK, but how come immigrants with other native languages can’t get equal treatment?
November 7th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
Karl: Do you mean other native languages besides Spanish? I’ll assume that’s what you mean, since that’s the language option most often discussed under the topic of bilingual education. I think you’re asking, “If we offer help to the Spanish speakers, how fair is that to the speakers of about a hundred other immigrant languages we can find in our schools?”
An excellent question, of course. It’s a huge and complex problem. The answers lie in the various models of bilingual education, which I plan to illustrate in future postings. One model is that every student in the school (native and non-native speakers alike) learns half their lessons in English and the other half in a chosen other language. (That’s usually the model for the prestigious private schools where parents are paying tons of tuition to turn their kids out fluent in one second language.)
But there are other approaches, such as the involvement of tutors for particular language groups. Bilingual education doesn’t have just one meaning. And in the end, it’s unlikely we’ll ever succeed in addressing all the needs of every language group represented. Any given school might need to come up with a bilingual Hmong biology tutor, a bilingual Eritrean civics tutor, a bilingual Mongolian calculus tutor. It’s mind boggling. But we have to start with something.
My biggest underlying point is not that we can please everyone, but that we need to develop kids who will turn into a population of bilingual Americans. Our country needs that. And as we address the needs of our non-native children, we are at the same time moving in that direction.
November 7th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
It will be interesting to see how Arizona votes tomorrow on their anti-immigration initiative…
November 7th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
From what I’ve read, people in Arizona are pretty anti-immigrant. I thought this was an interesting piece from the NYT about how much tax money illegal immigrants are actually contributing to the system. Just for Social Security alone, illegals are pumping in 7 billion a year and none of them will ever get to collect on SS when and if they retire.
November 7th, 2005 at 11:37 pm
Oh, and don’t forget those low low prices at Wal-Mart:
A pair of senior Wal-Mart executives knew cleaning contractors were hiring illegal immigrants, many of whom were housed in crowded conditions and sometimes slept in the backs of stores, according to a federal agency’s affidavit.
Ahhh, the free market.
November 30th, 2005 at 12:50 pm
Hola! Or should I say, “Hello!” I believe that bi-lingual (Latin for “two tongues”) education is extremely important for our “ninos” (children.) I find that when I go to a foreign country, I am often befuddled by the multitude of signs where all the letters are all jumbled up and don’t look like words I know. At these times, I find myself thinking, “Gosh, I sure wish that I were bi-lingual where one of the two langues I speak is the language that is sign is in.” But dadgum it is so darn hard to learn a first language, so the way I figure it, I am doomed to travel the world and be befuddled by the majority of the signs therein. But what can we do to help our children? BI-LINGUAL EDUCATION!
March 5th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
I understand the topic of this entry and totally agree with the point made of immigrants pay into the tax dollars. But I live in an area of a state where the Spanish speaking community out numbers the English speaking community. In our school districts we are teaching them English. Which is fine by me, but my point is that we are not spending an equal amount of money to teach the English speaking students Spanish so that they are competitive in the work force. In “Work Source” they send the Spanish speaking adults to FREE English classes at the local community college, where should I, an English Speaking Adult, want to learn Spanish so I can get the jobs that require you to be Bilingual I have to pay to attend a Spanish class. Not only are they teaching Spanish that is not used in the United States (Colloquial Spanish used in Spain) they are making me pay for it. This is unfair treatment. I should have been able to go to “Work Source”, the reason that I am there is because I don’t have the education or the Bilingual language to get a job, that is why “Work Source” was created, to give a person a chance to earn a living. But yet when I do find a job and pay tax dollars that supports the “Work Sources” of the United States I still have to pay to learn the Second Language that is spoken here. If the tax dollars would go to help student and adults, either Spanish or English speaking alike, to learn the second language of the area, I would not complain so much. But to get back to the point of this entry, immigrants have it easy, they are taught English for free, they have classes or “Work Source” type places that will send them to classes to learn English. We live in a country that is supposed to speak English as its dominate language, yet there are immigrants that don’t have a lick of English in them so we compensate and spend tax dollars to teach them, yet we don’t even think about our children in the work force being competitive with these languages and just let them flounder and move on to other places just because an immigrant was taught English and can speak both languages where my child only know English.
March 15th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
I love this discussion. It’s such an intricate one, and one that our country needs to address with more vigor, especially nowadays. As someone who learned Spanish later in life and would have done anything to be bilingual from the get-go, I agree with the movement towards bilingual education. But first of all, I would NEVER say that immigrants have it easy, regardless of how many free classes they are given. And I do think that native English- speakers should have the option to get 2nd language aquisition classes for less. There are a few languages I would love to learn. My point is that we’re not yet at the point in America where Spanish is as prevalent as English. Personally, I would love it to be! I think it’s about time for Americans to stop being so stinking egotistical about refusing to learn other languages and personally invest the time (and yes, the money) to learn them. I’ve traveled to several other countries and spent a year in Spain, and I’ve yet to see another population that values bilingualism less than America’s.
But the majority here still speaks English. I think it’s fair to say that people NEED to speak English to get along here. We have very few translated signs/pamplets/media and even fewer bilingual governmental figures or teachers. To be “fair” would mean spending a disproportional amount of money to offer blanket 2nd language classes to all English speakers, and if we have a hard time funding languages already, this will only worsen the problem.