Migrantólogos

By: Claudio Sanchez, NPR ~ April 3, 2017

As President Trump moves to fulfill his campaign promise to deport millions of immigrants who are in the country illegally, they'll most likely include Mexicans whose children were born in the U.S.. 

Over half a million of these kids are already in Mexico. Researchers call them "los invisibles", the invisible ones, because they often end up in an educational limbo of sorts. Most don't read or write in Spanish, so they're held back. Many get discouraged and stop going to school. In some cases schools even refuse to enroll them.  In the border city of Tijuana, however, there's a model program designed to help these children.

Anthony could have stayed in California because he's a U.S. citizen, but his parents are not. They were forced to return to Mexico and didn't want to split up the family.

"I was like, 'Oh no, I'm going to have to make new friends, new school, new everything,' " says Anthony. "But now I'm happy here."


Anthony's fourth-grade teacher says his Spanish is "a work in progress," but he has learned how to read and write in Spanish fairly quickly. It wasn't easy switching from English to Spanish in class or when doing his homework, says Anthony. He's still not used to saying the name of his school in English - 20 November. "It's kind of weird," he chuckles.

At 20 de Noviembre, children like Anthony are not segregated or put in some corner of the school. They're paired with native Spanish-speakers and they get lots of one-on-one tutoring to build their vocabulary and grammar in Spanish. To keep them from feeling frustrated or isolated, they're allowed to mingle with other English-speaking kids during the day so it's not uncommon to hear English at recess or lunch. There's no stigma to speaking English because it's a highly prized skill in Mexican schools.

Researchers say this is the model for how schools should treat and teach the half million U.S.-born students who've enrolled throughout Mexico. It has become more urgent because their numbers are growing, says Amparo Lopez, a state coordinator with Baja California's Department of Education. 

"This school year alone, she says, more than 12,000 students from all parts of the U.S. enrolled in schools across the state. That's on top of the 58,000 who were already here. Only the border state of Chihuahua has received more."

Lopez says the surge began in 2006 with a sharp increase in deportations, followed by even bigger increases during the Obama administration. And it wasn't just because people were being deported. Many Mexican immigrants working illegally in the U.S. returned on their own because they lost their job during the recession...

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