<p>I’ve been a volunteer literacy teacher for over 20 years to adults, most of whom are illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala. I’ve noticed some very big changes in the population in the last 7-ish years. Where the students used to be family men (and sometimes women) who wanted to make better lives for their families and did so based on incredibly hard work and determination, in recent years the immigrants are from deeper within Mexico and Guatemala and are more likely to be members of indigenous groups that don’t speak English or Spanish and have no history of literacy in any language. We can’t really help those people in any meaningful sense and the hard truth is that they won’t be assimilable within the first three generations, if not longer. The two main differences with other immigrant groups are that (a) we can’t translate for them very well and (b) it’s HARD to teach the concepts of literacy to adults, and those adults do not pass along the same educational aspirations as we find desirable in our culture. This is one of the situations where people have to be honest with themselves in saying that it’s not always kind to encourage immigration without limits. This specific population would be much better off in its own culture with support from its own government in its own language.</p>