Why are we looking to deport ambition?
Immigrant students are passionate learners who will help us compete in the global economy. Fear of ICE is driving them out of schools.
Recently, the Boston Globe reported that enrollment in the Chelsea Public Schools is down roughly 350 students from last year, a decrease that school leaders say is driven in part by fear of immigration enforcement and deportation.
Years of real strides made by the district in improving attendance have been shaken by raids and by the rumors that follow them. Similar patterns are emerging elsewhere in Massachusetts, as immigration fears ripple into classrooms and families keep children home.
But even alongside this bad news, there is hope. For every policy that pushes families into hiding, there are schools and community programs pulling students toward opportunity. They recognize what immigrant ambition brings to this country. Two Americas are on display at once: one scaring kids away from classrooms, the other investing in their futures.
What’s at stake doesn’t matter only to places like Chelsea. When raids and deportation fears keep young people out of school, we are not just disrupting individual lives, we are weakening the country’s future.
These students are tomorrow’s nurses, engineers, teachers, artists, and entrepreneurs. Driving them from classrooms is a moral failure, but also an economic one: It makes the next generation smaller, less educated, and less able to compete in a global economy that depends on talent and drive. We are shooting ourselves in the foot.
Yet there is resilience. Two Chelsea High seniors, Jasmine and Rochelly (I’m not using their real names), born in the US to Guatemalan and Mexican parents, go to school every day excited about their Early College and AP courses. They have already picked Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Pratt Institute in New York as top choices, and are on track to be the first in their families to attend college.
In their homes, getting food on the table has sometimes meant standing in bread lines. One family counts on government assistance after the death of the father; the other depends on a brother’s income while the dad drives a taxi. Both families have friends or relatives who have been picked up by ICE. Despite this, Jasmine and Rochelly earn good grades, enjoy school, and are involved in after-school activities, like singing in a church choir.
They’ve stayed on track with college in their future for two reasons: their own ambition and support from La Vida Scholars, a free college-prep program founded in 2009 and now operating in Lynn and Chelsea. La Vida provides advising, academic support, and hands-on help with college and financial aid applications, and builds a cohort culture where students and families push one another forward.
Programs like La Vida exist across Massachusetts and the country. What makes the difference is the ambition students bring with them, and the way these programs protect it, give it structure, and keep it alive when life tries to snuff it out.
That ambition is hard to erase. It can be tested by grief, poverty, instability, even deportation, but it rarely disappears. The very act of migration demands resilience, and families carry that determination with them. Studies of migrants constantly show that they carry more ambition across the border than they find in their new communities.
What’s happening in Chelsea is not just a local enrollment story. It is a slow civic injury. When families are too afraid to send children to school, raids don’t only remove people; they remove trust, stability, and time. They interrupt learning, derail college plans, and threaten to dash the dreams of students like Jasmine and Rochelly, young, ambitious people who, in every generation, have helped make the United States stronger.
Is it that ambition that scares ICE? No matter how hard they try, they can’t stamp out the impact it has on the rest of us. While America sleeps tonight, Jasmine and Rochelly will be studying for their AP exams with dreams of what colleges await them and the kind of future they can build beyond that.
Robert Hildreth is the founder La Vida Scholars, Inversant, and Hildreth Institute. He has also been a major supporter of MIRA, La Colaborativa, the Ernestina-Morrissey Schooner, and other immigrant-focused organizations. He was named a Bostonian of the Year by the Boston Globe in 2008 for bailing out immigrants arrested in the 2007 ICE raid of the Bianco textile plant in New Bedford.
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