During a House Education Committee hearing Tuesday, Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) spoke about the number of migrant children that have entered the United States and the impact they have on public education systems.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Since coming to Congress, it's no secret that the border security has been one of my top priorities.
00:05 As the only member of the Texas delegation, either Republican or Democrat, that sits on the Education and Workforce Committee,
00:11 this is a great intersection of issues that I know very intimately.
00:15 Earlier this year, my resolution condemning the administration's open border policies passed the House,
00:21 called upon the President to end those policies, and in fact got bipartisan support.
00:26 Not just Republicans recognized it, but Democrats as well recognize that the President's current policies for open borders
00:33 are hurting America top to bottom, and we see it in the education institutions in Texas and other ways.
00:39 Public schools are operating on constrained budgets, and now with thousands of migrant children showing up at our southern border,
00:44 these schools are carrying even a larger burden.
00:48 Schools and students are trying to catch up from massive education loss, as all of you know,
00:53 from long-term school closures during COVID, and now the federal government is yet again adding more obstacles to their education.
00:59 It's unacceptable. Students don't deserve this. Parents don't deserve this. Teachers don't deserve this.
01:05 It's well past time for the administration to do its job to close our border and to restore order to our communities.
01:11 I want to go start with you, Ms. Camaro. I thought I heard you say earlier,
01:16 did you say $13 billion in funding is contributed annually to the U.S. economy by illegal immigrants?
01:22 Is that the number I heard you say? Not illegal. These are DACA recipients who have the right to vote.
01:30 Did I get the number right? $13 billion, is that right? That's right.
01:32 Do you know what the cost is to the open border crisis that we're dealing with right now? I do not.
01:41 Well, I'll tell you, the House Budget Committee estimates that the total net cost to the United States from the border crisis,
01:47 quote, is more than $150 billion a year, with the lion's share of that going to educate children who are here illegally themselves
01:54 or whose parents are here without authorization, end quote. That's from the House Budget Committee.
02:00 That's a deficit of $137 billion per year.
02:04 Who do you think is picking up that $137 billion tax, that price tag?
02:10 So DACA recipients are just one set of taxpayers.
02:13 We also have taxpayers like myself who want to make sure children are educated,
02:18 and I'm more than happy to pay my taxes for that effort.
02:20 And most of the tax dollars that are coming to support our educational institutions are coming from local communities.
02:25 All of you guys know that no matter which state you're in, they typically come from local communities.
02:31 Ms. Rodriguez, you mentioned that Texas has received the most unaccompanied minors, more than 58,000 since 2021.
02:38 That number is staggering to me.
02:40 Can you talk about the impact on those districts that are seeing the influx of those numbers,
02:46 in particular, the impact on the taxpayers as well?
02:48 Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate your comment of recognizing the fact that it is mostly state and local funding that funds the public schools.
02:55 I mentioned in my testimony that over 2,600 unaccompanied minors have been released into my county alone of Tarrant,
03:02 Tarrant County in North Texas. That's a population of four elementary schools.
03:07 That's roughly the population of Trinity High School that I graduated from, the entire student body population.
03:13 Meanwhile, in my area, my next door neighbor, who was an elderly widow woman,
03:18 had to move out of her home because she could no longer afford the property taxes.
03:23 So even though our state legislature has made moves to try to make property taxes decrease,
03:29 it's a drop in the bucket and pales in comparison to the cost of especially the schools and the hospital systems that local property taxes have to pay for.
03:36 Ms. Egorov, I want to come back to you because you were talking about New York City schools a little bit earlier.
03:41 And I presume that what you're seeing in New York City is the same across America and same with what we see in Texas.
03:45 And that is we'd love to pay our teachers more. We'd like to hire more teachers.
03:49 We'd like to provide higher quality education to our students.
03:54 A lot of that's made on the local and the state level.
03:57 Can we keep doing that if we're spreading our resources thinner and thinner for undocumented migrants or illegal immigrants that are coming across the border?
04:05 The challenge in New York City, it's not funding.
04:08 We're spending more than $39,000 per student.
04:11 New York City is the highest spending district in the country.
04:15 So we have a lot of resources.
04:17 But the problem is that stability in the system.
04:21 When you have a principal who doesn't know how many students are coming next week,
04:26 who doesn't know which language they speak, who doesn't know how many years these children have not been in school because they were crossing the border.
04:35 And God forbid what they have seen at the border.
04:37 We know that the statistics, 70% of women and girls suffer sexual violence when they're crossing the border.
04:43 This is ending up in our classrooms.
04:45 The teachers are on the front line having to deal with the trauma, the violence.
04:50 And, you know, if you're a boy, maybe you saw your mother suffering sexual violence.
04:54 It's a travesty. I want to see education for every student in this world, every child in this world.
04:58 Education gets some advancement.
05:00 But the truth is America does not hold the responsibility to educate the world.
05:04 We do not and we cannot.
05:06 The taxpayers that are spending U.S. dollars cannot educate every person in this world.
05:12 Every country needs to take that on for themselves.
05:15 We need to close our borders. We need to focus on our kids here to give them a fighting chance.
05:19 Thank you. I yield back.
05:20 Thank you very much, Representative.