Students protest against banning critical race theory in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District in 2022. Such bans could further limit education about immigrants.
When it comes to immigration, this country is facing a dangerous and rapidly growing threat.
However, the threat is not what is depicted in most media coverage. It’s not related to jobs in this country, the safety of our citizens or even the caravans of people flooding the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead, this threat has humbler roots: it’s in our classrooms, and it’s causing us to view immigrants through a warped and distorted lens.
Despite the integral roles they play in nearly every aspect of American life, immigrants are relegated to minimal coverage in kindergarten through 12-grade curriculum. Perhaps worse, the few instances that students do learn about immigrants, they are primarily depicted as a part of our past. From the moment children enter kindergarten until they graduate 13 years later, students will primarily learn about immigrants fleetingly in U.S. and world history.
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The History–Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools, for example, mentions immigration and immigrants only 21 times across the K-12 framework. A third of those instances show up in 11th grade U.S. history and include a focus on industrialization, the Immigration Act of 1965 and “the expanding religious pluralism … that resulted from large-scale immigration in the twentieth century.” These are important topics, but alone, they........