When it comes to addressing mass illegal immigration, most people agree that the first ones to deport are the violent criminals who pose a direct threat to Americans. Aside from a few open-borders radicals, few people will defend the presence of “bad hombres” in the country.

But what about the dumb hombres?

We need to acknowledge the challenge of integrating immigrants into our economic, political, and cultural system.

According to a recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies, most of the new immigrants who have come into the country in recent years are poorer and less educated. The report found that “41 percent of adult immigrants who had lived in the country for less than three years had at least a bachelor’s,” that “the share of new arrivals with no education beyond high school increased from 36 percent in 2018 to 46 percent in 2024,” and that “the median earnings of new adult immigrant men fell from 80 percent of the median for U.S.-born men in 2018 to only 52 percent in 2024.”

These numbers might come as a shock. After all, prominent faux conservatives like David French or tone-deaf political aspirants like Vivek Ramaswamy have assured us that incoming migrants were smarter and harder working than the mediocre mass of working-class Americans.

The report easily refutes this narrative. Already bad in past decades, the demographic situation predictably worsened during the Biden administration: “The surge in new arrivals with less education means that immigration has added enormously (3.5 million) to the nation’s low-income population in just the last three years.”

Ideally, American institutions would work their magic and turn these huddled masses into fully assimilated, thriving American citizens. Sure, many of them come with nothing except the clothes on their back, but they came for a better life and are willing to do what it takes to succeed in this country. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Unfortunately, this social alchemy becomes less plausible when the immigrants in question are far less educated and far more numerous than those in the past.

The American dream denied

Rather than live out the American dream, these people will be shut out from the economy and general culture and live out their days as members of a permanent underclass. They may learn a few scraps of English and do honest work, but many will be tempted to criminal activity and remain ensconced in their ethnic enclaves.

For those who think that fast-tracking citizenship and increasing social welfare entitlements can mitigate such an outcome, they can see for themselves how this is going in Western Europe, where every major city now has large suburbs of poor immigrants who refuse to assimilate. Why bother with formal education, working a job, or following the host country’s laws when they can count on receiving a generous check and free services from the government?

To avoid this fate, American leadership traditionally has leaned on public schooling to help new arrivals. True, some immigrants may be relegated to low-skilled work and living on public assistance, but their children and their higher-potential peers could make use of America’s local education systems to learn the skills and concepts to successfully adapt to the American way of life. We just need to train up and pay some more educators to teach ELLs — English-language learners — and deploy them in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods.

In all fairness, this approach has proven surprisingly effective. Although many will criticize American public education (I most of all), it is the best in the world at taking in immigrants from the third world and teaching them to operate in the first world. Even if American education fares poorly when compared to that of other countries, this changes when the numbers are broken down. Most immigrants perform better academically than the natives of their home countries.

Nevertheless, educating ELLs, especially from the undeveloped world, comes with tremendous costs that few pro-immigration advocates fully appreciate.

One-size-fits-all doesn’t

In my own state of Texas, every school and district have a sizable ELL department staffed with highly credentialed specialists working through a complex web of requirements of assessing, accommodating, and properly placing ELLs. In most districts, it is mandatory for teachers to be ELL certified, a process that involves several hours of professional learning and passing a four-hour exam.

As one might expect, this eats up a huge portion of state and local budgets. It’s also the very opposite of equitable. For every tiny ELL class with a team of teachers tending to the needs of a handful of students, there are several large AP classes with throngs of students pestering their one poor teacher about their grade. For every ELL regulation to be fulfilled, some other instructional objective goes unfulfilled.

Always remember, no matter how many resources schools commit to this effort, many students will inevitably complete the ELL program without learning to speak English or develop useful skills.

Americans have a few options for educating newly arrived immigrants. The first is to maintain the current system, which is unsustainable given the overwhelming number of arrivals. The second is to deport every illegal alien and their household — a deeply unpopular and likely impractical approach that could violate civil and human rights.

The third option is a middle ground that deports a sizable number of illegal immigrants by expanding criteria to include those with little or no education while reforming ELL policies. Instead of the current bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all approach that burdens many school districts, English-language education should be decentralized and subsidized on an individual basis for greater effectiveness.

At a minimum, we need to acknowledge the challenge of integrating immigrants into our economic, political, and cultural system. While education remains a worthwhile goal, it involves trade-offs that many Americans may not accept. To preserve civil harmony and sustain economic progress, we must adopt a realistic approach that balances national needs with a workable path forward for both current and future Americans.