Immigrants and the Distribution of Resources Within an Urban School District Amy Ellen

In New York City, where almost 14% of elementary school pupils are foreign-born and roughly half of these are "recent immigrants, " the impact of immigrant students on school resources may be important. While immigrant advocates worry about inequitable treatment of immigrant students, others worry that immigrants drain resources from native-born students. In this article, we explore the variation in school resources and the relationship to the representation of immigrant students. To what extent are variations in school resources explained by the presence of immigrants per se rather than by differences in student educational needs, such as poverty or language skills, or differences in other characteristics, such as race? Our results indicate that, while schools resources decrease with the representation of immigrants, this relationship largely reflects differences in the educational needs of immigrant students. Although analyses that link resources to the representation offoreignborn students in 12 geographic regions of origin find some disparities, these are again largely driven by differences in educational need. Finally, wefind that some resources increase over time when there are large increases in the percentage of immigrants in a school, but these results are less precisely estimated. Thus, elementary schools appear not to be biased either against orfor immigrants per se, although differences in the needs of particular groups of immigrant students may lead to more (or fewer) school resources.