It also jogs my memory about calling your attention to a wonderful Christopher Caldwell piece about immigration in a small Delaware town (one Washingtonians drive through on the way to their beach resorts in Rehoboth,Bethany & Ocean City). The whole thing is worthwhile, but on the topic of welfare, he bolsters with anecdotal evidence my contention that welfare and "immigrant-based" programs undermine immigrant assimilation. Here comes a long excerpt, but read it:
Given their vulnerability, their high levels of illiteracy, and the language barrier, one naturally expects the children of these immigrants to be struggling a bit. They are not. They are doing extremely--almost shockingly--well.
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Hispanics in the third grade at Georgetown North are outscoring both whites and blacks in reading comprehension.
In other words, immigrants aren't destined to fail --nor to fail to assimilate.
This should not surprise us as much as it probably does.
Obsessed as we are with upward social mobility, Americans harbor a sneaking assumption that only educated parents can have educated children. Learning, the thinking goes, is a matter of playing Mozart in pregnancy and keeping the Classic Children's Books strewn tastefully about the bedroom. This is quite wrong. You don't learn by aping the learned classes--you learn by taking the work of learning seriously. Latino children come to school as ready to work as their parents do at the plant. Asked if Latino parents did anything differently, James Hudson, the principal at North Georgetown, says, "The first question parents ask at parent-teacher conferences is not 'How are my child's grades?' but 'How is my child's behavior?'"
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One great advantage of the Delaware immigration, it turns out, is that it happened after a lot of baseless nostrums of the caring professions were discredited. Institutions were built up in the more pragmatic spirit of Gingrich Republicanism, without any immigrants'-rights establishment protecting its entrenched programs and its turf.
Asked about bilingual education, Hudson gives a look as if he's never heard the term before. "The key is that all kids have access to the regular curriculum," he says. "You don't want to isolate them from what the other kids are learning." North Georgetown has three English-Language Learner teachers. One of them, Meg Lawson, says that her immigrant students are possessed of a great curiosity. "They like the nonfiction more than the fiction. That surprised me."Her second-graders last year particularly liked learning about hibernation and migration. What about teaching them about their culture? "I try to do different books that aren't about their own culture," she says. "They know their own culture. Some tests try to use more names like José or Juan. I don't think that makes a difference."
