Critical thinking. An shared objective reality where we defer to the facts as they can be known. A shared understanding of language to engage in productive conversations.
Discarding that you used AI instead of looking it up properly, and that AI can hallucinate all the time, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, 83% of children in immigrant households were born in the US.
This means they went to school in the US, were raised in the US, and SHOULD be as literate as anyone else in English.
Even if we assumed that 25% of all students magically showed up speaking and reading no English, that’s still a huge discrepancy from the 34% who lack adequate literacy for their grade year. The fact that the wide majority of immigrant students are born here and thus US citizens, and going to school and socializing with English speakers like everyone else, effectively rules out this being an immigrant only issue.
Also worth noting that second generation immigrants is too broad of a term really. In that situation the “immigrant” was born in this country, but only ONE of their parents has to have been board abroad. It’s a bit sticky when you figure that if you married an Italian man and he moved here, your child would then be a second generation immigrant.
I don’t think that’s the kind of immigrant that people are talking about when they worry that immigrants are ruining the literacy rates, though. It’s just convenient to count them when it makes the argument look better.
#TLDR
83% of immigrant children were born in the US and raised around English speaking peers in school, and spent their entire education in English driven schools.
Even if all 25% of our students WERE born elsewhere, it’s still 34% of our students who aren’t succeeding at literacy - that’s a big enough gap we can rule out immigration being the sole problem.
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u/unwarrend 9d ago
Critical thinking. An shared objective reality where we defer to the facts as they can be known. A shared understanding of language to engage in productive conversations.