Leaving America: With shaky job prospects and Trump promising crackdowns, immigrants return to Mexico with U.S.-born children

The L.A. Times reports:

There are nearly half a million children who are U.S. citizens enrolled in Mexican schools, the Mexican government said last year. Researchers have found some students struggling to integrate because they cannot read or write in Spanish.

Mexico has not had the long history of immigration like the U.S. and so has not had to grapple with how to accommodate non-Spanish-speaking students in their schools.

“They haven’t thought about creating classes of Spanish as a second language,” said Patricia Gándara, a UCLA professor who heads up education for the UC-Mexico Initiative.

“Without programs to help integrate these kids into the schools and without even the acknowledgment on the part of many teachers that these kids have special needs, they’re not likely to fare really well in the Mexican school system,” Gándara said. “We think it’s a real crisis.”

If large numbers of English-speaking U.S.-born children began heading south, they could swamp the Mexican school system.

There were an estimated 4.5 million U.S.-born children under the age of 18 living with undocumented parents, according to a 2012 Pew Research Center study. A USC analysis found that about 13% of children in Los Angeles County were U.S. citizens with at least one parent without legal status.

An American citizen with a parent who is a Mexican national can become a dual citizen through "registro de nacimiento," or birth registration.

In 2016, from January through August, the Mexican Consulate in L.A. registered 991 births. This year, over the same months, more than 2,000 were registered.

Going home is a great opportunity for future cancer researchers.