Open Borders Do Not Fund Schools
Decreased school attendance may hurt some districts temporarily, but it ultimately helps state budgets.
Mass deportation sometimes causes school districts to lose funding in states that don’t plan for sudden attendance losses. In Texas, a newspaper tried to use this fact to argue against immigration enforcement. All it did was remind the public that the federal government needs to apply the law consistently before the problem of illegal immigration gets out of hand for local schools.
This past April, the Houston Chronicle ran a story titled “Kids Missing from Schools.” It focuses on how school districts lose funding when stricter immigration enforcement leads to fewer immigrant students, whether through forced removals and self-deportations or because illegal alien parents keep their children home out of fear
Texas schools receive around $6,000 per student from the state, based on average daily attendance. When students’ families get deported, a district therefore loses money the following school year. This is a real inconvenience, albeit a temporary one. Districts cut programs, lay off staff, and reduce bus routes after attendance falls for any reason. In the end, they adapt.
According to a 2024 poll, most Americans don’t believe taxpayers owe anything to the children of trespassers and visa overstayers. However, many do blame public education’s failure on a lack of funding. Convincing readers that deportation harms education is a smart strategy to turn them against it.
The Chronicle complains that 20 Houston-area districts lost a combined 8,300 immigrant students between the 2024–25 and 2025–26 school years, with nearly 4,000 alone from the Houston Independent School District (ISD). Those are drops in the bucket. Findings from the University of Houston’s Education Research Center, for instance, show that Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, enrolled nearly 177,000 students in 2024–25.
Deportations alone did not drive down attendance in those districts, which the story admits. Data from the Baker Institute suggest Houston ISD’s immigrant student losses represent roughly half of its overall student decline of 7,919. And in the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, year-over-year immigrant student growth simply slowed, even as overall attendance fell 2.7 percent.
The share of revenue these districts lost was smaller than their attendance dips would suggest. Spring Branch ISD lost $6 million, or 1.2 percent of its revenue, against a 3.1 percent decline in enrollment. Cypress-Fairbanks ISD lost $13 million, or 1.1 percent of its revenue, against its 2.7 percent decline. Meanwhile, property tax audits in the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD turned up an unexpected $26 million, more than offsetting its loss of state funding.
Texas lacks “hold harmless,” a rule that would cushion sudden attendance drops by phasing down funding. But any shortfall districts may experience represents a gain for the state’s budget and its taxpayers because of how the state funds education.
Property-wealthy districts that raise more than the state’s allotment must send their excess tax dollars to the Foundation School Program (FSP), a process known as “recapture” or “Robin Hood.” Property-poor districts that don’t raise enough tax to trigger recapture then receive state aid from the FSP in proportion to their need.
No matter where illegal alien families live, the state budget loses. If they live in a recapture district, their children’s school attendance lowers the district’s contribution to the FSP. If they live in a non-recapture district, the state must send that district more money. So, although deportations often cost individual districts a little, they improve the state’s bottom line.
Even that modest trade-off is limited to states like Texas. States with “hold harmless” provisions insulating district funding levels against enrollment fluctuations have less fiscal reason to object to mass deportations. New York, for instance, has guaranteed districts at least the prior year’s funding since 2008.
In Plyler v. Doe (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot deny children of illegal aliens a free education. This burdens border states when the federal government doesn’t secure the border, because reduced-price lunches, bilingual aides, and building expansion aren’t free.
The real danger comes when presidents ignore immigration law in the country’s interior. This signals de facto amnesty and serves as a magnet for more illegal aliens. That influx then forces districts to add new classrooms, and often new schools, on the assumption that the new enrollment is permanent. When voters inevitably elect a president to restart deportations, districts can cut operating costs with little pain. However, they cannot easily slash debt, leaving taxpayers to cover the capital costs on buildings for nonexistent students.
People should suspect an ulterior motive behind any cost-benefit analysis from opponents of immigration enforcement. Even if the Chronicle is sincere in its concern for the modest funding loss that deportations cause, enforcing immigration law consistently from the start would prevent districts like those around Houston from losing revenue for which they should never have planned.
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