With less than two weeks until election day, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance has begun attacking immigrant children in multiple swing states. At rallies this week in Arizona and Nevada, Donald Trump’s running mate said that children whose parents are undocumented are ruining the “quality of American education.”
Immigration has been a main focus of the Trump campaign; there have been promises of mass deportations of even people who are here in the U.S. legally, as well as vicious lies spread about Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio. Those rumors led to multiple bomb threats at local schools in the city.
At a rally in Peoria, Arizona, on Tuesday, Vance said there are thousands of children who don’t speak English in Arizona schools. “What does that do to the education of American children when their teachers aren’t teaching them, but they’re focused on kids who don’t have the legal right to be here?” he said.
There are 273,000 undocumented immigrants in Arizona and 15,000 of them are children enrolled in public schools, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
“Nothing against the children, but we can’t have a border policy that ruins the quality of American education,” Vance added.
In Arizona, however, children who aren’t yet proficient in English learn separately from other students, thanks to an Arizona law passed in 2000 that bans bilingual education.
Studies are mixed on the impact of immigrant children in public schools. At least some of the negative outcomes are tied to the fact that non-immigrant families start to flee school districts with growing immigrant populations. One study earlier this year that attempted to control for that effect found that “greater exposure to immigrant peers correlated with better math and reading scores among U.S.-born students,” according to Education Week.
Either way, accusing immigrant children of making America worse is part of a racist trope that blames Black and brown immigrants for straining public services or bringing diseases across the border.
On Wednesday, Vance made similar comments in Nevada, saying teachers are overwhelmed with “thousands upon thousands” of immigrant children and are forced to “focus on kids who don’t even speak English.”
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“Nevada’s children are getting the short end of the stick and not getting the education they deserve,” he said.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, Nevada has 168,000 undocumented immigrants, and 9,000 of those are children in the school system. The state has a robust English language learners program that supports local districts in helping students reach English proficiency.
Vance’s comments come at a time when education has emerged as another leading issue for conservative voters. Elected officials and right-wing activists have been promoting false claims about indoctrination and sexually explicit content in schools.
Under the guise of “parental rights,” which in practice has meant the right of conservative parents to object to any material that’s being taught in schools that they personally don’t like, far-right groups and parents have launched an all-out culture war on schools by working to get extremists elected in school board races, attempting to ban books and smearing LGBTQ+ teachers as abusers.
Though these groups and parents say they’re protecting children, critics of the so-called parental rights movement have said its cause doesn’t extend to non-white or LGBTQ+ children — and Vance’s latest comments on how immigrant children are degrading the quality of public schools may just prove those critics right.