Massachusetts public school enrollment has long been stagnant, with international arrivals balancing out a low birth rate and high numbers of residents moving out of state.
Who benefits when public schools are jammed with undocumented migrants?
The drop in the number of students means less funding for the districts. State aid formulas provide every district with at least $150 per student, but some districts receive more than $17,000 per child on average because they serve a high number of children who require additional resources for being low-income and English learners, and do not have as much local revenue. Any cost savings from the reduced number of students tends to be far less than the amount of lost funding for those districts.
(i.e., the government workers are able to turn a profit on the migrants)
My question to ChatGPT:
Here’s a Boston Globe article that says “Massachusetts public school enrollment has long been stagnant, with international arrivals balancing out a low birth rate and high numbers of residents moving out of state.” Is this an example of native-born Americans being replaced by immigrants? https://archive.is/zbSbM
Answer:
That’s a thoughtful question. The short answer is: no, the Boston Globe article’s statement alone does not support the claim that native-born Americans are being “replaced” by immigrants. But it does reflect important demographic dynamics worth unpacking. Let’s go through what the article says, what it doesn’t, and how to interpret it.
What about Grok?
No, the quote from the Boston Globe article does not describe an example of native-born Americans being “replaced” by immigrants. Instead, it highlights a demographic balancing act in Massachusetts public school enrollment
On October 9, 2025, the Everett[, MA] Police Department arrested a 13-year-old alien from Brazil on dangerous weapons charges for allegedly possessing a firearm and a 5-7-inch knife.
The teen is mentioned 11 prior police complaints filed by Everett PD for a laundry list of criminal behavior, including ‘flash mob’ style shoplifting, consuming alcohol underage, breaking and entering, vandalism, theft, fighting and more.
“They didn’t give me any information,” said [Josiele] Berto[, speaking in Portuguese], who is from Brazil and along with her family have had a pending asylum application since arriving in the United States in 2021. “I asked where [Arthur Berto] was being taken, and they said they weren’t allowed to say.”
Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria said in a news conference a teenage boy – whom he declined to name because he is a juvenile – was arrested last week after Everett Police received a “credible tip” accusing him of making “a violent threat against another boy within our public school.”
Here’s the mischievous tyke who won’t be attending Maskachusetts public schools at least for the next few days:
A former “illegal alien” is no longer “undocumented” but rather “with uncertain immigration status”:
What if the worst happens and a “Massachusetts man” who arrived in the U.S. a few days earlier is being hauled away?
Note that, due to the two-acre zoning minimum, the typical neighborhood in Lincoln, MA is home only to those undocumented migrants who have at least $1 million to spend on a vacant lot. The town does, however, have a small public housing development in which those who don’t work, regardless of immigration status, can live at taxpayer expenses.
Here’s a friend’s photo from near the Town Hall:
In addition to the advertisement for the event, the photo includes a righteous hater of inequality who has bought him/her/zir/theirself an expensive Audi. He/she/ze/they could have made due with a Camry and donated the extra $40,000 to the worthy poor, but apparently that wasn’t an option. The photographer’s comment:
paint is coming off the house, ugly pipes on the ground and ugly wiring
(As a Floridian I’ve become allergic to the sight of utility poles and exposed wires and boxes like the ones in the photo.)
As we get our houses ready for National Immigrants Day (October 28), from a friend in Maskachusetts:
I just drove on Sandy Pond Rd in Lincoln. A Somali (I assume, since he was black with lighter skin and curly hair) took out a prayer mat, oriented it toward Mecca and was doing a midday prayer on the side of the road (there’s no sidewalk). Right in front of a house belonging to a family with a last name of Goldstein.
(Note the hateful failure to capitalize “Black”, but the friend who used the hateful language is an immigrant and, therefore, it would be wrong for me to criticize him while he is enriching us with his presence.)
In April, we posed–and eventually distilled–a question in response: What if we activated one of our spaces–the parsonage–to provide urgently needed temporary housing to refugees?
We wish to state clearly that using the parsonage for refugee housing is not necessarily what will be proposed at a special congregational meeting on September 29, but the “what if” of this hypothesis (some might even call it a lightning rod) is what we are working with to ground our debate, open our hearts, and stretch our imaginations.
*The recommendations for length of stay per family vary from several months to about a year.
In Massachusetts, appropriate housing is hard to find and expensive. Newly arriving refugees are often put up in a crowded hotel room for up to 90 days while they are connected with essential services and look for other housing. Some families are transferred to shelters.
A Biden-style trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag is at the bottom of every page of the church’s web site:
The July post had estimated the cost to the church of helping out migrants at roughly $48,000 per year, mostly in foregone rent. I contacted a friend who is a member of the church to ask whether this expenditure had been approved by the congregation:
That issue was put to rest before the meeting, thank Heaven. … What we voted on is a $7 million improvement of the stone church, which I favored. 95% of the Church agreed. Progress!
So the Righteous voted to spend $7 million on themselves and nothing on the migrants whose cause they champion.
The rub: Because of flaws in our state’s law, theory differs from practice. It takes just minutes to file a public records request, but as I painfully learned, to actually get a request fulfilled may require months upon months of follow-up; a nontrivial sum of money; a lawyer or two; and persistence verging on a pathological inability to let go.
Just after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the schools superintendent sent out two messages that sparked instant backlash. “As you are likely already aware, violence is escalating rapidly in Israel and Palestine,” began one note, sent to the entire school district community. Though the town includes large Jewish and Israeli populations, the note neither decried the Hamas atrocities nor expressed sympathy to the many affected local families. A separate note to staff recommended an undeniably slanted set of teaching resources. It included links to pro-Palestinian sources like Visualizing Palestine and Decolonize Palestine but no similarly pro-Israel sources to balance them, and nothing on Hamas.
(I’m not sure that it is reasonable to call the October 7, 2023 event “Hamas attacks” given that there were fighters from UNRWA and Palestinian Islamic Jihad involved, as well as “civilian” Gazans. By saying that it is only “Hamas” that wants to destroy the Zionist entity and achieve river-to-the-sea liberation the implication is that if the 6 or 7 remaining Hamas-affiliated Gazans were removed the Gazans would cheerfully accept the existence of Israel.)
On Oct. 16, 2023, when I filed my request, I figured I was just asking for a couple of days’ worth of one official’s emails on a specific topic. Type a few terms into a search bar and done, right? Wrong. It took more than 18 months to get that modest request fulfilled, and I still don’t have one central document (but I’ve given up). It took enlisting pro bono lawyers; appeals to the supervisor of records, the state team that handles public records requests; countless nagging emails; two speeches and a half-dozen emails to the School Committee. … I refiled the request in May 2024. This time, when it was once again met with silence, I knew enough to appeal after 10 days to the supervisor of records. That office promptly ordered the town to respond.
In July 2024, the Brookline town counsel did send over a document. Only one, but still — a document! Sadly, it was nothing but an email saying a draft of a Google Doc for the Oct. 7 messaging had been created. All names were blacked out, without the justifications for those redactions that are required by law. Also, I knew the superintendent had received many emails responding to his messages; our local Brookline News had even covered them. Where were they?
Stymied, I finally sought legal help through the Anti-Defamation League’s project on antisemitism in K-12 schools, and it provided two top-notch pro bono attorneys. In mid-December, I wrote to the town counsel conveying, for the first time in my life, the ultimate attention-grabber: “You’ll be hearing next from my lawyers.”
Soon came the count — the town counsel’s office had identified 368 potentially relevant emails — and the price tag: they estimated that at least 39 hours of staff time would be needed to process the emails, at a cost of $926.25.
In April and May of this year, the town counsel sent over four batches of repetitive, sometimes irrelevant emails, sprinkled with a few gems. Several indicated that two senior district staffers had led the drafting of the messages: a senior director of teaching and learning, and the director of the Office of Educational Equity.
Any Massachusetts taxpayer who wants to fund “education” instead of “educational equity” can move to Florida, I guess.
Queers (“Lesbian Summer Camp”) and and “All Are Welcome” Rainbow Flag church:
A Harvard students-only dating app advertisement shows a happy couple that matched via the app:
Stoners (a healing recreational cannabis dispensary in the middle of Harvard Square):
For Palestine, a $7 million house whose fence is covered in “Genocide in Gaza” signage:
(Online property records indicate that the house is owned by two people who both have typically male first names.)
Speaking of “Free Palestine”, the riverside bike path in front of Harvard Business School:
The local high schoolers still walk past a homeless encampment and under a sacred Black Lives Matter banner to enter their temple of learning:
(Despite a death sentence, renowned graduate Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev remains alive and well and living comfortably at taxpayer expense, just as he did before bombing the Boston Marathon in 2013.)
Lots of people wear masks, indoors and out. The Staples that closed during coronapanic remains closed and the “social distancing” signs in its mini-mall are still there:
Remember that Long COVID “patients “survivors” are the real heroes:
I stopped into Harvard Bookstore to find an all-white/Asian staff and customer gathering. That’s not to say that Black Lives weren’t richly represented on the shelves, though:
What should one celebrate in a bookstore catering to an exclusively non-Black customer base? Black bookstores:
These photos were taken before Charlie Kirk got shot, but the Bookstore reminds us that if progressives don’t shoot and kill more Republicans, the still-living MAGA folks will “end democracy”:
Also, the “far right” control our elections, there is no need to follow orders from the Supreme Court (they hand out injustice, rather than justice), and the democracy that is about to be ended (or that has been ended?) was poisoned by racism:
Throughout all of this, remember that only a fool would believe that humans are divided into male and female:
When it is time to assign blame, though, it is easy to determine which humans can be classified as “men” (those who have imposed a patriarchy):
Back in Harvard Yard, the university advertises its now-free art museum (more than $50 billion accumulated so far at the “non-profit”) and shows a typical patron:
(I’ve never seen a Black visitor in this art museum.)
Happy National New Hampshire Day to those who celebrate.
During last month’s trip to Boston, I talked to a private banker who handles mostly $20-400 million accounts. He says that the relatively new Maskachusetts “millionaire’s tax” in which the progressive state finally has a progressive income tax rate (9% for income over $1 million) has provided quite a few of his clients with the final push that they needed to pack up and get out. “It’s happening slowly,” he said, “but it is definitely happening. It takes people a few years to get a move organized.” New Hampshire recently abolished its personal income tax (2025 is the first tax-free year; previously, the state was tax-free only for W-2 earnings) and it lacks an estate tax so I expected NH to be a popular destination (MA estate tax is 16%). It should, after all, be easier to move 50 miles than to move 1,000+ miles. “Florida is still the most popular destination,” the banker replied. “My California clients are moving to Texas, but from the Northeast they’re still going to Florida.”
What else did I see in downtown Boston before and after this conversation? Boston leadership in health care and pharma is evident from all the ads for home delivery of healing marijuana:
The folks who say that they’re passionate about social justice are content to simply stroll by any number of people who are reduced to sleeping on the sidewalk:
What’s across the street from this guy? A law school that says it has a “commitment” to social justice:
The advancement of diversity and social justice is a cause that many attorneys may address in their careers. Suffolk University Law School’s commitment to these important objectives reflects itself in the wide range of courses that address issues of diversity, inclusion, and social justice. While many courses at the Law School reflect these objectives, the courses gathered here are notable in that they are addressed in a particular way to this cause and will be of interest to students who wish to focus their careers on the advancement of diversity, inclusion, and social justice.
Instead of helping their homeless neighbors, however, the law school righteous decided to build themselves a fancy crib:
Michael Dukakis inaugurated a grand Massachusetts tradition in 1988 (US News):
(Unlike Tim Walz, however, Dukakis did not claim to have suffered PTSD after his tank ride.)
The locals were carrying on this tradition on the Boston Common, August 21, 2025:
Also, if you want to see where you non-Medicaid/Medicare tax dollars went to die…
Today at the Norwell, Massachusetts library: “Join Norwell Library for the Pride Month session in our Issues Facing Democracy series part 2 or 4. This time, we will be focusing on the LGBTQ+ experience.” Both June and July are Pride Months? Or maybe every month in Maskachusetts is a Pride Month? (the official calendar says that we are currently in between International Drag Day and Gay Uncles Day)
On my way to Bar Harbor, I stopped in Boston. The federal tax dollars keeping the economy going (higher education, pharma, health care) have resulted in truly horrific traffic jams (4th worst in the U.S. as of 2023). This makes it easy to get photos of all the marijuana-related billboards, e.g.,
The healing cannabis landscape is best seen from the windows of a Saab 9000 (parked just outside my friend’s house):
His Brookline neighbor in a house that Zillow says is worth $3,217,600 (Prius is being charged under the sacred protection of the intersex-and-trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag):
(As the sign notes, refugees are welcome in this neighborhood so long as they are refugees from a diamond mine and have $3+ million to spend.)
The Brookline Police are celebrating Pride, as is the local veterinarian (albeit with a non-trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag):
Outdoor and indoor maskers are saving lives (Brookline and Fogg Art Museum in Harvard Square):
Why get groceries delivered by the Latinx essential workers when one can go to the supermarket and run the risk of SARS-CoV-2 exposure? (Star Market on Commonwealth Ave, next to an abortion care clinic and across the street from an essential marijuana store.)
In case shoppers have forgotten, the supermarket reminds us that “June is Pride Month”:
Next to Harvard Yard, stickers remind us to support “Palestine” and fight Transphobia:
The Harvard Bookstore tells us to “Read with Pride” and reminds us that “America” has been destroyed by the “antitax movement” (taxes having fallen from 2% of income around the time of our traitorous rebellion against legitimate British authority to only 27-37% of GDP today depending on which source you believe (37% source)). Maybe we could be great again if we restored taxation to the level that prevailed when the Founding Fathers were alive?
There were no Black customers in the store when we visited, but if one did come in by accident this book was ready for him/her/zir/them:
Americans no longer need to comply with Supreme Court rulings because the court itself is illegitimate and “lawless” (“no one is above the law” but the law itself is lawless):
The Pride collection did not disappoint:
We exited Boston via Massport’s Hanscom Field, under the sacred Rainbow Flag that was missing its intersex and trans enhancements:
The new Signature FBO is complete (let’s thank part-owner Bill Gates for his role in fighting climate change!), but all of the KBED FBOs are now fully locked down. One must ring a doorbell to gain admittance. It seems that there has been an outbreak of protests on the themes of (1) climate change, and (2) anti-ICE (see “Clarifying the facts about detainee flights” from the US Air Force base that shares the airport).
Our AI Overlords at Meta want me to become Facebook friends with our son’s former kindergarten teacher. She works at an all-white private school in an all-white suburb of Boston. Here’s what her profile looked like in April 2025 (I did some blurring in Photoshop):
Masks are still relevant, but wearing them underneath one’s chin works just fine. Black Lives Matter remains a high-priority social justice cause among those who’ve chosen to live and work in Black-free parts of a notably white state.
