unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors

  Adult illegal immigrants have to face many problems in society. They need to find a shelter to live, a job to feed their family, and medical treatment for any health issues. However, for unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors, they have to deal with more issues. Recently, a large amount of children from Mexico and Central America tried to cross the border and came to the United States without documents. These children do not have parents or guardians accompanying them. Most of them are growing up on the street in their home countries. When they come to America, they have to solve many problems, and education is an important one. It's necessary for them to get opportunities to receive education. Educating new immigrants can also ensure the stability of society. However, in order to educate immigrant students, the government has to face financial problems, since the expenses for education come of the taxes and government subsides. Helping unaccompanied minor children will indirectly reduce the education expenses for local students whose families had paid more taxes. In addition, accepting the undocumented children to the public schools will also cause the problems about immunisation, academic levels, and also security problems, since schools barely know their students' background.Therefore, the policies from illegal immigrant minors are controversial and crucial for the country's development.

  Through the years, the population of children immigrants has increased largely, and most of the children come from Central America. From the statistics of Washington Times, an estimated 90,000 children may illegally cross American threshold by Sept.30, 2014. The population will keep increasing through the next few years. Therefore, the educational system is under the pressure to accept all these students. Depending on the recent policies, immigrant minors have the right to go to the public schools in America, so the states governments will need to afford the educational expense for these children. Most of the time, the government needs to pay an extra 30% of the money to educate non-English speaking students as compared to local english speaking students. Also, in order to accept this large amount of students, the government has to enlarge schools and recruit faculties, because the original classroom can hardly fit all these students. Schools also need more teachers to take care of these students. The health and immune systems need to pay attention to these immigrant children as well. Most of these unaccompanied children are orphans or lack of the supervision of guardians, so they may not receive the immunization as well as essential vaccines. If they come to school with certain viruses, it is pretty easy to spread the disease among students. Lack of the security check of the students will also bring schools trouble. In the Mother Jones, it talks about a story of a 17 years old boy Adrain who came across the border without guardians. He was instigated by a drug trafficker to carry some marijuana to sneak into America. Adrain was poor and did not have a family; he did not have any other choice. Therefore, he went across the border to become one of the unaccompanied immigrant minors. A lot of children are in the same situation as him. They were involved with the local drug dealing and the gangsters. These students' unwell behaviors may bring negative influences to the local public schools' students. Also, most of them did not systematically accept education, so it is really hard to find a proper academic level for them to fit in.

"Two young girls sit in their holding area where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center on June 18, 2014, in Nogales, Arizona." (centre for American progress, by Tom. K Wong)

  Even though accepting unaccompanied illegal immigrant children will bring inconvenience to the educational system, I believe that the country should still provide the opportunities to these children. Educational background is important for a person's development. If the government ignores the existence of these children and refuses to provide them educational opportunities, they may have to live on the street and raise themselves by stealing and begging.Since these children can not get education, they can hardly find any decent jobs, so later their future families' living conditions will stay in a vicious circle. They may cause violence to their neighbourhoods, so the crime rates will increase in the future years. Thus the conflicts among races will be more intensive. Fortunately, now the policies allow these children to stay in the countries and help them to find them sponsors or families. The public education is open to them as well. Even though helping these children will cause the burden of the government, non-profits organizations and agencies still keep working to provide these children better conditions.














Resources

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/child-migrants-surge-unaccompanied-central-america

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/02/cost-educating-new-class-illegal-immigrant-minors-estimated-at-over-760m/

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/18/simmons-its-school-time-do-you-know-where-the-ille/?page=all

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/news/2014/07/08/93370/statistical-analysis-shows-that-violence-not-deferred-action-is-behind-the-surge-of-unaccompanied-children-crossing-the-border/