Their Future Is Ours (LINK)

An editorial entitled "Their Future Is Ours" in today's New York Times raises the issue of education for the children of immigrants:

"There are 16 million children in immigrant families in the United States, one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. It’s an old American story made new in the age of globalization, when waves of human displacement in recent decades have led to immigration on a scale not seen since Ellis Island. But a country that has been so good for so long at integrating new Americans is stumbling under the challenge."

Why worry about educating immigrant children?  Today's reality is there are more students in honors programs in China and India than we in the U.S. have students in school.  In a global economy, we simply need every smart, hardworking young person we can educate for the U.S. to compete in the global economy.  Putting up roadblocks to education is putting up roadblocks to America's future success.

For every young entrepreneurial immigrant we block from getting an education and who might have have founded the next Google or Intel (both started by immigrants), we miss opportunity to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the U.S. and to sustain our technological leadership in the world.

As the editorial notes, in conclusion:

"This is the great challenge that is forgotten in the heat of the immigration debate. The children of immigrants are Americans. “They” are “us,” a cohort of newcomers who will be filling the demographic void left as the baby boomers start fading away. Their future is our country’s future."