Fox reported the story on Tuesday:

It’s good to have a specific estimate of the education costs, however that’s just the tip of the iceberg. While an urban Mexican child probably has attended school, speaks Spanish (rather than Kanjobal) and knows how a pencil works, the Central American kiddies may have none of those advantages. The Centrals need to brought up to zero (if possible), and that will cost a lot of American tax dollars.

Mayor Judith Kennedy of the overwhelmed city of Lynn, Massachusetts remarked in an August 27 CIS panel:

A lot of the children gave a birthdate of January 1st. A lot of them could not sign their names; they had to sign their names with an X. And a lot of them were illiterate, not only in English, but also in Spanish, and spoke a tribal dialect, a mountain dialect, so it really made it difficult to place these students in any kind of a classroom setting.

In addition to being educational deprived, many of the kids will arrive psychologically damaged after the hazardous journey north. One indication: some parents give birth control pills to girls because of the likelihood they will be raped. Plus, there are kidnap gangs en route and sometimes kids are killed because it’s dangerous to travel on the top of freight trains.

Trauma can have long-lasting effects. The young “Lost Boys” of Sudan endured great hardship in their long trek to escape the civil war at home. As a result, an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Lost Boys suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which can lead to substance abuse, depression and crime according to an expert on the condition.

The current border-crossing kids will need lots of special services, including expensive psychological treatment for trauma, and La Raza types will demand it if adequate welfare goodies are not forthcoming.

Many of the Central American kids will drop out of school because the latin culture does not stress scholarship as a top value the way Chinese values do. School sounds like a swell idea in the abstract, but Centrals don’t understand the daily grind of studying as a prerequisite to success.

And because there will be even fewer jobs for unskilled foreigners in the near future, many of today’s needy kiddies will turn to crime in a few years to get by. Some of the teens already have gang tattoos, so there will be plenty of opportunity to hook up with experts.

Back to the near-term educational cost estimate: it’s likely that most of the new stuff for foreigners will mean cutbacks in what American students get at school.