Indrani Das, 17, won the Regeneron Science Talent Search this year for her study of a possible approach to treating the death of neurons due to brain injury or neurodegenerative disease. The New Jersey resident also plays the piccolo and volunteers as an emergency medical technician with the local ambulance service.

Half of the winners — and 13 of 40 finalists — were Indian-Americans, notes The Hindu. Twelve have Chinese last names.

Indrani Das won the $250,000 first prize  in the nation’s top science competition for her research on neuron death in brain injury.

The prestigious science competition is sometimes called the Junior Nobel Prize.

In the 2016 contest, then known as the Intel Science Talent Search, 83 percent of finalists were the children of immigrants reports Forbes, citing a new study.

Thirty of the 40 finalists had at least one parent who came on H-1B visas and later became U.S. citizens; 27 had a parent who’d been an international student.

Fourteen had parents both born in India, 11 had parents both born in China, and seven had parents both born in the United States.

Other countries of origin were Canada, Cyprus, Iran, Japan, Nigeria, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

The percentage of finalists who are children of immigrants is rising, the study found.

Here are this year’s finalists, the brightest science aces in the nation.

Posters calling for “white Americans” to report “illegal aliens” alarmed  Gustavus Adolphus College students, who flooded Bias Response lines with complaints. Who were the alt-rightists proclaiming “America is a white nation?”  It turned out to be the Minnesota college’s “Diversity Leadership Council,  reports Campus Reform.

In a statement, the Council said  it had posted the signs in hopes of  “forcing individuals to have dialogues about forms of hate and bias.”

There was some dialogue in the comments:

“Sometimes I walk around crowded theaters yelling ‘fire!’” one person commented sarcastically. “I do it because I want to create awareness; thus no punishment is warranted.”

If hate and bias are such a terrible problem on campus, why are these hate hoaxes necessary?

Most of the bomb threats to Jewish community centers were the work of an 18-year-old Jewish teen,  an American-Israeli with “health” problems. Was he trying to raise “awareness” of anti-Semitism? Israeli police say he was upset because the army found him unfit for service.

Elementary schools have contributed to national discord by neglecting to teach American history and civic principles, writes E.D. Hirsch Jr. in Democracy Journal.

America is not a melting pot, but a mosaic that’s held together by “our national language and its public culture, including laws, loyalties, and shared sentiments, that make the language intelligible,” he argues.

Over the past six decades, changes in the early grades of schooling have contributed to the decline of communal sentiment. Under the banner of “Teach the child not the subject!” and with a stress on skills rather than content, the decline in shared, school-imparted knowledge has caused reading comprehension scores of high school students to decline.

. . . (Ignorance) not only weakened their ability to read and communicate; it has left them with weaker patriotic sentiments, and with a diminished feeling that they are in the same boat with Americans of other races, ethnicities, and political outlooks.

“Both multiculturalism and multiple-intelligence theory” have “caught on like wildfire in recent decades,” writes Hirsch. Schools stress individualism rather than community.

More recently, one’s individuality has become conceived through “intersectionality.” A child is to be understood as an intersection of multiple essential groups and tribes—“Hispanic and gay,” for example—not as an “American,” which is assumed to be a nonessential trait.

During and after the Vietnam War, opposition to nationalism came to be seen as “a higher patriotism, as an effort to make our nation fairer and better,” writes Hirsch.

As a result, the sentiments of “Our country right or wrong,” and “Our country is the greatest in the world” (not very admirable sorts of jingoistic nationalism) got replaced by a recitation of the ways that our country failed to treat everyone as an equal, and how it mistreated whole classes of its people: American Indians, blacks, women, Japanese. “Our country is pretty bad.”

Some Massachusetts schoolchildren told NPR’s Judith Kogan they’d never heard of My Country ‘Tis of Thee,  America the Beautiful or God Bless America.

Kogan interviewed teachers who explained that songs like “The Star-Spangled Banner” were too militaristic, and that “God Bless America” mentioned God. Other patriotic songs, they said, were too narrowly nationalistic, and might offend children from other nations and cultures.

Hirsch wonders “what is wrong with America the Beautiful, which aims to ‘crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea’?”

If that’s not good enough, he dreams that Hamilton‘s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, will write a rap-hip-hop song “celebrating the stars-and-stripes national community.”

Nihar Janga and Jairam Hathwar were co-champions at the 2016 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Illustration: Eda Akaltun/Harper’s Magazine

In Bee-Brained, in Harper’s Magazine, Vauhini Vara, a former spelling champ, visits the all-Indian-American North South competition, which includes spelling, vocabulary, math, essay writing, public speaking, “brain bee” and geography contests.

A father named Kalyan Mysore told other spelling dads why his son was competing in vocabulary but not spelling.

“You expend effort in this, you won’t get anything out of it beyond doing well in the spelling bee. Because these days, we have word processors, spell-check. So I decided to keep him away from spelling bees.”

The spelling dads nodded in a we-hear-you-but sort of way. “We used to feel that,” Satish said. “The difference is, my daughter is really good at it.” […]

Later Vara asks North South coordinator Mirle Shivashankar, the father of national spelling bee winners, “What, after all, is the point of this?”

Mirle turned to me with derision. “Tell me, what does Usain Bolt use the hundred-meter dash for?” . . .  “Nothing,” he said…

Later, Mirle told another spelling dad what I’d relayed to him about the question of purpose. “No, no, no,” the man said. He turned to me with an apothegm at the ready. “As Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Everything you do is insignificant, but you have to do it.’ ”

I think that’s cool.

Via Nobody Sasses A Girl in Glasses

Students at GEO International High School in Kentucky, all recent immigrants or refugees, present history projects to the class. Photo: Meredith Kolodner

“Segregating” refugees may help them integrate, suggests the Hechinger Report’s Meredith Kolodner. Bowling Green, Kentucky has opened a special “international” high school for newly arrived refugees and immigrants next to a comprehensive high school.

Faris Nakhal, 18, who survived a kidnapping in Syria, chose to attend GEO International High with “Somali, Iraqi, Burmese, Bhutanese, Ethiopian and Latin American teenagers,” writes Kolodner. Many of his classmates also had fled violence, often leaving family members behind. They all were struggling to learn English.

GEO International High School, with about 185 students, is connected to the Internationals Network for Public Schools in New York City; its schools have been more successful than traditional schools at educating new, and often traumatized, immigrants, and at boosting their emotional and social well-being, as well.

Many of the student arrivals, especially the older ones, struggled in the local high schools. Most came with no English, others were illiterate in their own language and had experienced brutality and deprivation unimaginable to their American peers.

Zaid Ali, 18, who saw a suicide bomber blow himself up on an Iraqi street, now works at a White Castle after school, is taking a dual-credit course and is headed for the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “Here everyone is the same as you, so we help each other,” he said. “They know what you’re going through.”

His two closest friends are from Pakistan and Somalia, so English is their only common language.

Students needed to learn English quickly, while they learned other subjects, said Skip Cleavinger, director of Warren County’s English language learner programs.

Designing a school for the needs of very needy students doesn’t strike me as “segregation.” It’s smart.

Teens Take Charge publicizes students’ views on school segregation in New York City. Photo: Brett Rawson

When Yacine Fall went from a Harlem middle school to a selective public high school five miles away, she discovered “an A in Harlem was not the same as an A in a majority-white high school,” she wrote for a podcast by a group called Teens Take Charge.

Fall was one of the few students at her middle school to comb through the high school catalog in search of better opportunities, she writes.  She gained admission to a public high school with selective admissions, Beacon High School, where she’s now a senior.

At her old school, “poverty is high and expectations are low,” she wrote. Teachers quit after a year or two. “What happened in five miles that determined who got to graduate, who went to college, who got to explore their talents, who learned to question?”

Being an A student at her Harlem middle school didn’t prepare her for an “elite education system,” Fall writes.

I was a black girl who was the daughter of immigrants. Education was my only hope for redefining my life. . . .

I walked into a school where my black and brown peers struggled to stay afloat and were barely passing their classes. I came into a school where we were made to leave our identities and struggles out of the classroom. My elite school thought diversity ended when you put black and white students together and did not create a space for us to learn from those identities. No one told me about the rooms and spaces I would need to create for myself in order to survive.

Learning how to meet higher expectations — and create your own space — will be valuable to her in college.

Hajar Assaf (middle) walks down a school hall with two fellow Syrian refugees. Photo: Alyssa Schukar/Chicago Magazine

Chicago’s Sullivan High has raised its enrollment and test scores by welcoming immigrants and refugees, reports Elly Fishman for Chicago Magazine.

Forty-five percent of the school’s 641 students are immigrants: 89 refugees — many of them Syrian — arrived in 2016-17. Of 35 languages spoken by Sullivan students, the third most common,  after English and Spanish, is Swahili.

Sarah Quintenz teaches English to students who are learning the language.

Quintenz’s class looks like a junior United Nations. The front row is occupied by a quartet of girls from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, wearing hijabs, Muslim headscarfs. Today something has them laughing. “Hey, Syria,” Quintenz snaps, using shorthand to address the four, “you’re being rude.”

In the back sit a group of boys from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda. Among the five of them, they speak Swahili, Kinyarwanda, French, and Kirundi, and most conversations—soccer is a favorite topic—move seamlessly from one language to another.

Across the room, beneath the windows, a cluster of Malaysian, Burmese, and Congolese boys hover over their phones, playing video pool.

My mother, the daughter of Russian immigrants, was graduated from Sullivan High in 1944.

Chess is popular in Brownsville, Texas schools. In this 2012 photo, Hannah High School students consider their moves. Photo: Will Van Overbeek

Only 4 percent of schools have closed the economic achievement gap, according to the Education Equality Index. Brownsville, Texas, a border town with high poverty rates and many Spanish-speaking families, does the best at educating low-income students, according to the index, a project of GreatSchools and Education Cities.

Eight of the top 10 cities are in Texas, including El Paso and McAllen, notes Lauren Camera in U.S. News.

In Brownsville, 95 percent of students are poor, 33 percent aren’t fluent in English — and 90 percent earn a high school diploma.

At least one commonality among the cities doing a good job educating low-income students, the researchers underscored, is the intense and constant focus on those students.

“Because low-income students constitute a majority of the student body in these cities,” they wrote, “instructional strategies, wraparound programs, social-emotional learning approaches, and community partnerships are all aligned explicitly to support low-income students and their learning needs.”

That sounds like an argument against economic integration of schools. However, I’m not sure how persuasive it is: Most cities with concentrated poverty have lousy results.

Even in Brownsville, “only 37 percent of low-income students scored ‘proficient’ on state math exams, and 25 percent on reading exams, well below the averages for wealthier students,” notes the Hechinger Report.

Michael Krell teaches statistics at the International Academy, a program for  immigrant students at Cardozo Educational Campus in Washington, D.C. Photo: Natalie Gross

Special schools designed for recent immigrants are helping students learn English quickly and catch up academically, reports Natalie Gross in The Atlantic.

But some critics worry the model segregates immigrants, while others complain about “focusing too many resources on immigrant children when the test scores and graduation rates of native-born students of color also lag behind those of their white peers,” writes Gross.

The Internationals Network for Public Schools targets students who’ve been in the U.S. for less than four years and score in the bottom quartile of an English proficiency assessment. These students usually do poorly in traditional high schools.

The network, which has grown to 24 schools, started in New York City and has spread across the country to places like Bowling Green, Kentucky.  Indianapolis has established similar programs.

Though the majority of students at Internationals Network schools are from Spanish-speaking countries, the children come from all over the world and speak close to 100 languages total—from French to Farsi. Some have little to no formal education and others are on par academically with their American peers, said Internationals Network Executive Director Joe Luft.

The schools focus on language development in all classes.

According to graduation statistics in New York City, the approach seems to be working. Last year, 74 percent of graduates at network schools finished in four years, compared to 31 percent of English-language learners citywide. The network’s six-year graduation rate was also higher—78 percent compared to 49 percent.

The number of Hispanic students has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and now makes up 22.7 percent of enrollees from preschool through college, according to a new Census report.

Graduation rates have risen sharply for Hispanic students, reports Marilyn Garateix on the Education Writers of America site. “In 1996, 35 percent of Hispanics ages 18 to 24 had not completed and were not enrolled in high school. By 2016, the figure had plummeted to 9.9 percent, 4 points higher than the national average of 6.4 percent.”

More Hispanic students are enrolling in college, especially low-cost, open-admissions community colleges, but graduation rates are low.

Latinos’ high school graduation rates have soared and they’re far more likely to enroll in two- and four-year colleges. However Latino college graduation rates have stalled, reports Catherine Gewertz in Education Week.

“Only two in 10 Latinos earn bachelor’s degrees, compared to nearly 1 in 3 blacks and 45 percent of whites,” according to a new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, Latino Education and Economic Progress: Running Faster but Still Behind.

Two-thirds of Latino students enroll in community colleges with low graduation rates, the study finds.

However, 60 percent of Latinos complete certificates, compared to a 47 percent completion rate for whites and 37 percent for blacks. As a result, Latinos have made progress in qualifying for “middle-skill” jobs that require some college but not a four-year degree.

While Latinos with high SAT/ACT test scores are as likely as whites to enroll in college, 63 percent of high-scoring Latinos complete a degree or other credential compared to 78 percent of whites with similar test scores.

Latinos have improved their rate of degree completion, but not as much as whites and African-Americans have. In the last 15 years, the proportion of Latinos with college degrees rose from 35 percent to 45 percent. But that 10-percentage-point gain is outpaced by the gains of black students (22 percentage points) and white students (16 points), according to the Georgetown study.

Six in 10 U.S.-born Latinos have some postsecondary education, compared to only one-third of Latino immigrants.

KIPP helps its graduates select colleges with good success rates for first-generation students, then links them to mentors, writes Richard Whitmire.

More than 10 percent of New York City students are classified as English Language Learners.

Beginning English Language Learners (ELLs) need direct instruction in English writes Arthur Goldstein, an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher at a New York City high school, in Gotham Gazette.

If that sounds obvious, it’s not. New York state has decided that newly arrived immigrants can learn English in history, math and science classes, while learning those subjects, writes Goldstein. “Beginning ELLs who formerly took three classes daily in direct English instruction may now have as few as one.” They’ll also have less time with teachers who know how to support newly arrived immigrants.

I know a Spanish teacher, dual-licensed in ESL, whose principal asked her if she minded the school using her class to grant ESL credit to students. Can you imagine newcomers studying Spanish and getting credit for English?

. . . A friend teaches social studies in Brooklyn. In his class, currently oversized with 41 students, he has several ELLs. There is an ESL teacher who comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays, and New York State says they are therefore getting English instruction. I have no idea how. My friend says the class is completely incomprehensible to the students. Yet there they sit, and twice a week an ESL teacher sits in the same room. According to New York State, they are therefore learning English.

It sounds like the goal is to award ESL credit, not to teach students enough English to succeed in mainstream English-language classes — or in an English-speaking workplace.

In The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom, journalist Helen Thorpe describes the progress of newly arrived teens at Denver’s South High.

Immigrants from Mozambique, Vietnam, Burma, Eritrea, El Salvador, Mexico, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bhutan, Tajikistan and Mauritania, “most had little or no facility with English, and most had no one else in the classroom who could speak their native language,” writes Sharon Peters in a USA Today review.

Eddie Williams, an English Language Acquisition teacher at South High, works to help students prepare for mainstream classrooms.

The book is “extraordinary,” writes Sandra Dallas in the Denver Post.

Most newcomer students live in abject poverty. They “spend hours each day just getting to school and are sometimes harassed and told to go back to where they came from,” writes Dallas. While a few want to return home, most “work hard to become Americans — to learn English, complete high school, and find good jobs.”

Longreads and Chalkbeat have excerpts from the book.

The “Ivy sisters,” who came from Cameroon to the Bronx, will be attending Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard in the fall, reports NBC.

A video of Xaviera Zime finding out she was admitted to Harvard went viral.

The sisters arrived with only the English they’d picked up from watching TV. “We started learning English, going to the library, reading books and using dictionaries,” Xaviera said.

They attended Democracy Prep Charter High, where nearly all graduates go on to college and 80 percent earn degrees, writes Charles Sahm.

“Nearly all Democracy Prep graduates are from low-income families,” Sahm writes. “Nationally, less than 20% of high school graduates below the median of household income receive bachelor’s degrees within six years.”

Like other charters, Democracy Prep features a longer school day, rigorous academics and data-driven instruction. But the network sets itself apart from other high-performing charters by taking on the toughest challenges.

Unlike other charters that don’t accept new students after a certain grade, Democracy Prep — which operates elementary, middle, and high schools — takes in new students whenever a new spot opens up, even in later grades. The network has also participated in a number of school turnarounds, taking over troubled, low-performing schools. (Most charter networks prefer to start fresh with young students and build out one grade at a time.)

Democracy Prep “encourages students to be actively engaged citizens,” he writes. “Students travel to City Hall, Albany and Washington, D.C., to lobby elected officials on issues ranging from charter school funding to the DREAM Act. . . . All seniors complete a capstone college-level research project that examines a social or political issue of their choosing.”

The motto is “Work Hard, Go to College, Change the World.”

Middle-class, native English-speaking, white parents are flooding into dual-immersion bilingual programs, writes Conor Williams in The Atlantic. In some gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re crowding out children from immigrant families. 

Let’s say a school offers a dual-immersion program in Spanish and English. The model calls for about half the students to come from Spanish-speaking homes (some may speak English too) and half from English-speaking homes.

Mural by students at Broadway Elementary School in Los Angeles

Los Angeles Unified is tripling the number of dual-immersion bilingual programs, but there’s a catch, reports Kyle Stokes for KPCC. Worried that their children won’t learn English, most immigrant parents are rejecting bilingual education. Only six percent of the district’s 150,000 English Learners have enrolled in a dual-language program.

In dual language programs, students spend at least half – if not most – of their day learning in a languages ranging from Spanish, Mandarin or even Armenian. Each dual language classroom features a mix of native English speakers with students who speak the “target language” proficiently.

The expansion is driven by research suggesting there could be a huge upside for English learners: dual language instruction has the potential to help this needy population deepen their native language abilities while — all at the same time — becoming proficient in English and growing other academic skills.

Last year, California voters passed Proposition 58, which repealed limits on bilingual education. “As many as 137 dual language programs will be up and running district-wide next year, up from 42 six years ago,” reports Stokes.

Dual-immersion students learn English, said Hilda Maldonado, who runs L.A. Unified’s Multilingual and Multicultural Education Division. In addition, “you’re going to learn your content areas in a language that you understand, so you don’t fall behind.”

Educated, English-speaking parents are enthusiastic about dual immersion. Some fear they’ll crowd out English Learners, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods.

The dual-immersion model appear to be far more effective than old-style bilingual education, which often relied on bilingual aides rather than teachers. To quote myself, “usually a boutique program, dual immersion can’t rely on unqualified aides because the middle-class parents won’t stand for it. They also won’t accept a dumbed-down curriculum, the other besetting sin of the old bilingual model.”

Don’t blame technology for teen suicides, writes Mike Males in the Washington Monthly. Rates are much higher for rural and small-town whites — teens and adults — than for urban dwellers.

Smartphones and social media addiction have “destroyed a generation,” argues Jean Twenge, a San Diego State psychology professor, in the Atlantic.

She cites several surveys indicating teens who use more social media also report being more depressed; depression among teens is rising, as is suicide; the increases in both track the introduction of the smartphone in 2012; therefore, the smartphone must be causing or contributing to more teens killing themselves.

“The trend in suicide rates among teens basically tracks the trend among the adults around them,” Males responds. Furthermore, “rising suicide is overwhelmingly a feature of rural America, where teenagers have less access to smartphones and use Facebook less than urban teens do.

“Los Angeles and New York City teenagers have lots of smartphones” and plenty of stress, writes Males. “Yet teenagers living in and around the nation’s two largest cities are one-fourth as likely to commit suicide as teenagers in rural areas.”

Centers for Disease Control

More than half of Los Angeles and New York youth have at least one immigrant parent, Males points out. “Asians and Latinos who make up the bulk of immigrants have distinctly lower suicide rates than native-born populations.”

Rural and suburban areas where whites are concentrated are seeing “suicide, firearms, and addiction-related ‘deaths of despair‘” rising rapidly, Males writes. Foster-care placements and teen homelessness are up. Opioid abuse is epidemic. If the kids aren’t alright, the fault is not in their phones.

Immigrant students are thriving in Canada, reports Kavitha Cardoza in Ed Week. Within three years of arriving, “children of new migrants do as well as native-born children.”

Thirty percent “of Canada’s schoolchildren are either immigrants themselves or have at least one parent born abroad,” compared to 23 percent of U.S. students, writes Cardoza. Canada has few illegal immigrants.

“Canada selects immigrants using a competitive point system that favors skilled, well-educated applicants” who are proficient in English or French, rather than the family reunification approach used in the U.S., writes Cardoza.

On a scale of 100, prospective immigrants can earn up to 25 points for education. . . . almost 75 percent of first-generation immigrants are born to parents who are at least as educated as the average parent of a non-immigrant student; in the U.S. it’s less than a third.

But even “wealthy immigrant children” do better in Canada than in U.S. schools, says Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Developments, or OECD.

Teaching practices in Canada don’t sound any different from the U.S. It may just be that Canada’s school system is more effective.

Haitian migrants flooded into Florida schools after a devastating earthquake in 2010. Although the newcomers were far behind their classmates in reading and math skills, the influx didn’t hurt student outcomes, concludes a Brookings study. It may have had a “very small positive” effect.

Georgia Tech’s online master’s in computer science program enabled mid-career workers to earn a degree that would have been out of reach before, concludes a new study.

The “typical in-person program applicant is a 24-year-old recent college graduate from India,” researchers found. (Think about that for a moment.) By contrast, the typical online student was a 34-year-old working American.

Online applicants come from less elite colleges and are less likely to have majored in computer science, write the authors. “But despite their somewhat weaker average level of preparation, online students slightly outperformed in-person students when Georgia Tech blindly graded final exams for online and in-person students taking the same course from the same instructor.”

More than 85 percent of applicants to Georgia Tech’s traditional computer science master’s program come from India or China, less than 10 percent from the U.S., according to the chart.

Nationwide, “foreign nationals account for 81 percent of the full-time graduate students in electrical engineering and petroleum engineering, 79 percent in computer science, 75 percent in industrial engineering, 69 percent in statistics, 63 percent in mechanical engineering and economics, statistics, 59 percent in civil engineering and 57 percent in chemical engineering,” according to a 2017 policy brief from the National Foundation for American Policy.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which linked eligibility to schooling, led to a 15 percent increase in high school graduation rates for undocumented immigrant youth, according to a working paper.

DACA also was linked to a 45 percent drop in teenage births, a 3 percent increase in high school attendance and a 22 percent increase in college enrollment for Latinas.

Under the eligibility rules of DACA, applicants had to have graduated from high school or earned a GED or be enrolled in an educational or job program or be an honorably discharged veteran.

The “Dreamers” rhetoric implies that most undocumented immigrants are college-bound or college students. Not surprisingly, the children of low-income, poorly educated immigrants often do poorly in school, especially if they arrive with poor English skills.

DACA provided a strong incentive to enroll in GED and job-training programs, reports a Harvard study called the National UnDACAmented Research Project.

Twenty-two percent of adult DACA recipients (17 percent of those eligible) have earned a bachelor’s degree, compared to 32 percent of U.S. adults, researcher Roberto Gonzalez found. About 21 percent of DACA recipients dropped out of high school, compared to 5.9 percent of all adults.

Take Sandra, for example. Sandra began working at the age of 13, cleaning houses with her mother to help support her family. Family needs, growing frustrations due to her unauthorized status, and her inability to envision a promising future compelled her to drop out of high school. When DACA was announced in 2012, Sandra was 26 years old and had two children. She enrolled in a GED program to gain eligibility and to receive DACA’s benefits. But she didn’t stop there. After she passed her GED exam, she pursued a medical assistant program through a local nonprofit in Arizona. Her life has dramatically improved, and she said she feels as though she can provide her children with a better life. With her new job, she is working to save money, and her next goal is to pursue a bachelor’s degree in nursing.

With the ability to get drivers’ licenses, work permits and, sometimes, college aid, many DACA recipients have qualified for better jobs. They’re not more skilled or educated than other young Americans. They may be more motivated.

There are about 800,000 people using DACA. The typical beneficiary came here from Mexico at the age of 6 and lives in California.