On Thursday, Vox reported that the Trump administration is considering promulgating new rules that could force immigrants to leave the United States if they received a variety of public benefits, including enrolling their U.S. born children in Head Start. As someone who studies and works with Head Start programs, I find this proposal deeply troubling. It is both morally wrong and deeply short-sighted.
Head Start is a federally funded comprehensive child development program that was created as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty to break the cycle of poverty by improving early learning and development for young children, while also improving their families’ economic well-being and ability to support their children’s learning. Head Start programs do not solicit or report information on children’s or their parents’ immigration or citizenship status, so we don’t actually know how many children these proposals could affect.
But in a nation where one in four children under age six has a foreign born parent (and 96 percent of those children are themselves U.S. citizens), the proposed policy has the potential to affect a significant percentage of the nearly 1 million U.S. children enrolled in Head Start.
The 1996 welfare reform legislation, known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, limited immigrants’ eligibility for many “federal public benefits.” But Head Start is not considered a “public benefit” under that law, and past federal rules and guidance have reiterated this. As such, the Trump administration’s proposed rule would go against decades of established policy and practice.
Moreover, discouraging immigrant parents from enrolling their U.S. citizen children in Head Start is horribly short sighted. Research shows that adults who attend Head Start as children have better long-term life outcomes: They are more likely to graduate high school, attend college and obtain some form of postsecondary education, and are better parents. These outcomes don’t just benefit Head Start children themselves: They also yield significant benefits to society at large, in the form of a more productive workforce, greater tax contributions and reduced need for public assistance in the future. (Remember: we’re talking about children who are U.S. citizens here.)
Other research shows that preschool programs have particularly strong benefits for dual language learner students (e.g. those who speak a language other than English at home) and appear to produce larger gains for Hispanic children. As such, discouraging Hispanic immigrants from enrolling their children in Head Start seems particularly foolish.
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With this proposed rule the administration appears willing to inflict economic harm on future generations of Americans – not just U.S. born children of immigrants, but all Americans who will participate in the future economy with them – simply to indulge its bias against immigrants today. That is foolish, it’s perverse and it’s morally wrong. Because Head Start serves children in poverty and prioritizes enrollment based on child need, these programs serve the nation’s most vulnerable youngsters. Penalizing them, or any child, for their parent’s immigration status is simply wrong. And it runs counter to our nation’s historical values. Policies to penalize families for enrolling their children in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and Women’s Infants and Children’s nutrition programs are also deeply problematic, and could have serious negative consequences both for individual children and families and for broader public health.
These proposals could also harm Head Start and the public education system more broadly. Children of immigrants likely comprise a significant percentage of Head Start enrollment in some programs and communities. If these proposed rules lead these families to withdraw their children from Head Start (and note that mere awareness of the proposal could have this effect even if it’s never fully enacted), this could have a variety of harmful effects. Head Start programs are required to maintain full enrollment, so rapid withdrawal of children by immigrant parents could lead to a loss of Head Start slots, undermining access to early care and education for all children in these communities. Moreover, if parents choose to avoid Head Start enrollment in order to remain in the United States, and their children are U.S. citizens anyway, these children are eventually going to enroll in public schools, but they’ll be less well-prepared when they get there, and the public school system will have to make up for what children missed.
For the past year, I’ve heard anecdotal reports from some Head Start grantees that Immigration and Customers Enforcement agents have appeared in their neighborhoods, pursuing parents who were taking their children to Head Start. Such practices – undertaken without participation or approval of Head Start programs – violate the climate of trust that is essential for quality early childhood education and family engagement, and have in some places already dissuaded families from enrolling their children in early care and education programs. The revelation this week of these proposed policies appears to document an explicit administration agenda to dissuade immigrant parents from enrolling their children in Head Start. That runs completely counter to everything in the program’s history and values – and, I still believe, our country’s.
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