Immigration Article of the Day: Blind Spots: Choice, Colorblindness, and the Contemporary Experience of Latinx Immigrant Students in America's Schools by Rachel E. Moran

Blind Spots: Choice, Colorblindness, and the Contemporary Experience of Latinx Immigrant Students in America's Schools by Rachel E. Moran, Arizona State University Law Review, Forthcoming 2027

Abstract
Our nation’s understanding of educational opportunity for Latinx immigrant students in the United States is shaped by two prominent narratives about the public school system. The first focuses on White immigrant children’s experiences in the late 1800s and early 1900s. At that time, public schools played a pivotal part in Americanizing newcomers, providing them with the knowledge and skills to become fully participatory members of society. Those resources enabled immigrant children not only to become independent adults but also to develop strong attachments to their new home. The second narrative emphasizes the Black community’s experience, as advocates pursued public school integration to overcome slavery’s legacy of separate and unequal education. Like the Americanization project, this campaign also had a unifying mission. Reformers hoped that interracial contact would not only equalize educational opportunity but also harmonize race relations.

These two accounts show that public schools can play an integral role in safeguarding the health of our democracy by bringing children together and socializing them to share common ideals. Yet, neither of these historical experiences fully accounts for the challenges facing today’s Latinx immigrant students. The current climate is markedly different from the one that White immigrants confronted at the turn of the century. When newcomers from Europe arrived in the United States, public-school leaders were strongly committed to fostering national solidarity through a program of Americanization. Those efforts were predicated on a belief that immigrant children could assimilate to a common American identity and that assimilation was vital to the country’s unity and future prospects. Today, by contrast, the school choice movement emphasizes an ethic of privatization that allows parents to choose what sort of instruction their children will receive. The prioritization of parental rights makes it difficult to determine what assimilation actually means for Latinx immigrant students. In a deeply fragmented and polarized society, there is no clear-cut national identity to which immigrant children can aspire.

As for the Black experience, public-school integration has been predicated on a promise of equal citizenship, another dynamic that also does not fully address the Latinx immigrant experience. There is no doubt that Latinx students, like Black students, suffer from ongoing patterns of segregation in the schools. In fact, some scholars describe the “triple segregation” of Latinx youth based on ethnicity, poverty, and language. However, for Latinx immigrant children, relying on the rights of citizens to cure inequality is problematic because policing membership in our body politic can be deeply exclusionary. With rising nativist rhetoric about the need to secure the country’s borders, those barriers have grown increasingly prominent, especially for undocumented youth. These students struggle to find a path to citizenship and to preserve full access to public schools.

By acknowledging the unique features of the Latinx experience, there are important lessons to be learned, particularly about the ongoing viability of narratives rooted in the White immigrant experience and the Black civil rights movement. In earlier times, policymakers considered the public schools foundational in building a shared identity that was deemed essential to our nation’s democratic integrity. Today, a turn to individualism, expressed through the school choice movement, has weakened any collective impulse to incorporate children from different walks of life through a common educational experience.

This tendency toward individualism is further reinforced by the United States Supreme Court’s embrace of colorblindness in addressing racial inequality. That normative framework treats individual identity as highly particularistic, so that group-based traits are deemed largely irrelevant, even meaningless. The Court has made these implications clear in its recent decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, which struck down affirmative action in higher education admissions. There, the majority questioned the viability of racial and ethnic classifications. Citing the category “Hispanic” as an example, the Justices concluded that the concept was so internally heterogeneous as to be largely incoherent.

The current emphasis on the individual—reflected in both school choice and colorblindness—makes clear that Latinx immigrant students face very different prospects for inclusion through the public schools because these institutions are no longer seen as critical sites of nation-building in the face of group differences. Individualism has triumphed over any vision of the common good, making it less likely that Latinx immigrant students can look to the educational process for a path to full incorporation.