Migrant K-12 Enrollment Falls in MA Amid Trump Migration Enforcement

The number of migrant students enrolled in high schools across Massachusetts tumbled more than 20 percent with President Donald Trump’s enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.

The numbers come from a study conducted by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, which crunched the numbers from the 2007-2008 school year up to the 2024-2025 school year.

According to the study, migrant student high school enrollment went from a high of 6,400 students in 2024 to 5,300 last year.

Amid the falling enrollment, the numbers also show that Massachusetts schools are still graduating many migrant students who are not proficient in the English language.

“This landscape is one that changes really rapidly and districts are constantly feeling like they are on the back foot in terms of responding,” to immigrant students’ needs, Ann Mantil, the report’s author and a research scientist at the Annenberg, said, according to the Boston Globe.

The Globe reported that only a tiny six percent of “high school newcomers who arrived in the US with low English skills” graduated with proficiency in English. Almost invariably, if kids arrived in the state’s schools without being conversant in English and able to read it, they graduated without having gained those skills.

High schoolers are not the only ones lagging in English skills. According to the Boston Herald, about half of the state’s middle school students are not meeting grade-level literacy expectations. This is across the board, not just migrant students.

The paper notes that a report by EdTrust found that “nearly 150,000 of the students statewide fell behind grade-level benchmarks.” Again, this refers to all students, not just migrant children. Still, there is a sharp difference in literacy between white and Asian students on the one hand, with higher percentages of literacy, and other ethnic groups on the other.

“The gaps are greatest for multilingual learners, with between 65% and 75% of multilingual learners in grades six through eight and 10 not yet meeting expectations,” the report found.

Still, with fewer migrant students enrolling, it seems likely that the disparate numbers may level off as fewer non-English-speaking students enroll in the state’s schools.

Education budgets will also likely find cuts looming in the near future if the number of migrants continues to decline and fewer dollars will be needed to serve the migrant students. After Joe Biden’s administration flooded the country with millions of uneducated migrants, forcing so many school systems to hike education budgets to try to meet the demand caused by Biden’s influx, Democrat-controlled cities were thrilled to find reasons to pump more tax dollars into failing schools.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: Facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston, or at X/Twitter @WTHuston