“Our kids” versus “Illegal” children?:Local Public Debates and Votes on Children of Immigrants in Schools

• In Event: The Increasing Significance of Local Context in Immigrant Integration

Abstract

“The hate over there has to stop!” yelled a teacher in the Port Chester school board meeting, pointing to a group of middle and retirement age adults sitting about 4 or 5 rows behind me in the auditorium. The loudest commenter was a local woman who vehemently objected to the meeting being held bilingually – Speak English! This is America! That’s why they don’t assimilate!. The meeting was being held in English in Spanish because more than half the students in Port Chester’s schools were children of Spanish speaking immigrants. Some Spanish speaking parents and their children sitting next to me grew visibly nervous at these outbursts, and moved their seats. This School Board meeting was a key step in strongly defeating a School Bond vote for needed building in local schools, where one line of argument was that the Bond was so big because the town had too many “illegal” children. However, the following year, a second, larger School Bond was strongly passed.

This paper (a chapter in a book I am writing) analyzes the dynamics of this School Board meeting and its aftermath, where explicitly anti-immigrant messages first won out, and then were defeated in passing School Bonds. Drawing on long-term ethnography (since 2008), I analyze how and why anti-cost and anti-immigrant arguments at first succeeded to defeat the First School Bond vote, but were subsequently analyzed and defeated in a Second School Bond vote. Moreover, the chapter analyzes how Port Chester’s schools – whose students are mostly children of immigrants from low-income families – has been able to promote disproportionate success for these and for all children. Finally, the chapter analyzes the key role of local institutions in the exclusion or integration of children of immigrants, and empirically documents how interventions to defeat such exclusionary measures were done and worked.

Author

• Robert Courtney Smith, Baruch College, CUNY