Immigration enforcement hurts many aspects of public life, and public schools have not been spared. ICE enforcement campaigns in cities like Washington and Minneapolis have turned public schools into staging grounds for raids: ICE agents are arresting parents and students who are suspected to be undocumented, and spreading fear among immigrant children and their families and school officials. Additionally, anti-immigration advocates are making a play to overturn a landmark Supreme court ruling, Plyler v. Doe, which ruled that states cannot deny students a free public education based on their immigration status.

In the last two years, Republicans in Tennessee have attempted to push legislation that would violate Plyler to set the stage to challenge the court decision (although neither proposal passed). Last year, the state proposed charging undocumented students tuition for public schools, and this year, Tennessee attempted to pass legislation to track the immigration status of all public school students.

The 1982 ruling of Plyler v. Doe is notable because it stated that the harm of not educating undocumented children would be worse for society than providing a basic education to all children in the U.S. The ruling recognized the huge positive spillovers public education has on the U.S. labor market, public health, and civil society and that leaving immigrant children out of public education would create an “underclass” in U.S. society.

Moreover, if the move to deny public education to children in the U.S. is successful, particularly in pockets of the country where immigrant children are a substantial share of the student population, it will lead to an extraordinarily high cost for the students who remain in public school.

Some school costs are hard to adjust, regardless of the number of students

Across the country, an estimated 17% of school-aged children live with at least one noncitizen adult, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. If these students were to leave suddenly, schools would be left to educate a fewer number of kids without any time to adjust their fixed costs. For example, when Alabama passed an immigration data collection law, more than 13% of Hispanic schoolchildren withdrew from classes.

At first, it would seem that reducing enrollment would reduce both total revenue and the number of students needing educational services proportionately, which should leave the schools’ ability to provide education unaffected. But schools can’t adjust every educational cost quickly: School bus routes still need to circulate to all stops, even if there is one fewer child in need of transit; buildings need to be heated and cooled, even if classroom size goes down; and guidance counselors and support staff are still required to support the remaining students.

School districts will pay more per pupil if student enrollment declines because of immigration enforcement

Since these fixed costs can’t be adjusted in the short run, when total revenue declines due to families’ fears of deportation, districts are stuck paying more per pupil on costs they can’t adjust. Effectively, native-born students who remain in public schools receive no additional benefit when immigrant students are denied services and rights. Districts instead will be paying more on costs that can’t be adjusted and getting less on the costs that can be adjusted for fewer students.

Calculating the cost under two different scenarios

We call all the costs of downward adjustment that occur when enrollment is reduced the fiscal externality. This means the per-pupil funds each district would require to maintain the same level of spending for remaining public school students due to a rapid decline in enrollment. This cost is entirely borne by state and local education budgets and leaves districts unable to deliver the same level of instruction to the remaining public-school pupils.

For districts with a large share of school-aged children in immigrant families, the costs of losing these students could be substantial. Table 1 shows the top-25 school districts, based on the number of K–12 students that are in immigrant families and the corresponding fiscal externality for two scenarios. In the first scenario, half of these students stop attending public school (referred to as the lower bound in the table). In the second scenario, all of these students stop attending public school (referred to as the upper bound in the table).

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The implications of a reversal of Plyler v. Doe or any type of policy restricting immigrant children’s access to public education would be extreme for these districts. In Houston, Texas, where 62% of students in the school district are Hispanic, we estimate that nearly 63,000 students may live in a household with immigrants and as such, might be vulnerable to dropping out of school due to anti-immigration efforts. The lower bound shows the costs if half of these students stopped showing up. Houston School District would have to reduce services by $1,654 for each remaining (and disproportionately native-born) public school student. This decline translates to a total fiscal externality of $268 million a year, or 11% of the total budget for the school district.

The extraordinarily high cost to native-born students of losing students in immigrant families due to anti-immigrant policies highlights the hypocrisy in the anti-immigrant movement. If all students in immigrant families stopped attending public school tomorrow, not only would those students suffer from the lack of public education, but the quality of public education would be much worse for the remaining students in those same schools. In short, no one wins. When the costs are tallied up, it’s clear that these policies are not about improving education quality for native-born students, but instead are malicious attacks on the institution of public education in the U.S.

On July 1, the minimum wage will increase in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, D.C.—lifting wages for more than 361,000 workers and collectively raising their earnings by more than $221 million (see Figure A). In addition to these two states and D.C., 14 cities and counties are also increasing their minimum wage this summer, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Figure A

These increases continue to be crucial for low-wage workers as they contend with the affordability crisis. The average increase in annual wages for a full-time, year-round worker resulting from these minimum-wage hikes ranges from $573 in Oregon to $811 in Alaska. These pay raises directly boost workers’ incomes, giving them a leg-up in the race against rising prices—a straightforward example of how policymakers can often more easily tackle affordability challenges through policy decisions that boost wages, such as setting strong wage floors.

A higher minimum wage has a positive impact on more than just the workers who currently earn the minimum wage; indirectly affected workers will see their pay go up too as employers adjust their wage ladders to the new wage floor. Our analysis of the increases in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., accounts for these “spillover” effects and finds:

• Women make up more than half (56.3%) of affected workers.
• The wage increases disproportionately benefit Black and Hispanic workers. Black workers make up 15.3% of affected workers, despite making up 10.4% of the workforce across the three areas. Hispanic workers make up a similar percentage of the workforce (12.4%) but make up more than a fourth (26.0%) of affected workers.
• The vast majority (89.3%) of affected workers are age 20 or older, and more than 3 in 5 workers (62.1%) are 25 or older.
• More than half (52.9%) of the affected workers work full-time.
• The increases will raise wages for those who need it the most. Half (50.5%) of affected workers belong to households whose incomes are less than 200% of the poverty line.
• More than 1 in 5 (23.6%) of affected workers are parents.

Table 1 State and local policymakers should combat cost-of-living challenges with minimum wages

Because costs of living can vary significantly within a state, local policymakers should establish strong wage floors if the state minimum wage is inadequate for their area. In June, city councilors in Albuquerque, New Mexico, took an important step in that direction, passing a minimum-wage increase to $15 an hour by 2029. Whereas the current state minimum in New Mexico is $12 an hour, EPI’s Family Budget Calculator shows that a living wage for a single adult working full-time in Albuquerque is $17.56 an hour.1 The proactive step taken by local elected officials will provide significantly more economic security for low-wage workers in the city.

This summer, the minimum wage will increase in localities in California, Illinois, and Maryland (Table 2) due to “indexing”—automatic annual adjustments written into the minimum-wage law that require the wage floor be adjusted for price increases each year. Without indexing, the minimum wage is worth less and less every year as prices rise. With time, this can dramatically erode the value of the minimum wage. For example, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—which has not increased since 2009—has now lost 30% of its purchasing power.

Table 2

Indexing to inflation is a commonsense policy enacted in dozens of cities and states across the country, but it is not the strongest way to protect the value of the minimum wage. Adjusting for price increases mostly protects the real value of a low-wage worker’s paycheck (although low-wage workers are more vulnerable to inflation than top-of-the-line inflation measures indicate). However, in a well-functioning economy, wages for most workers—especially higher wage workers—will grow faster than inflation. If the minimum wage only rises at the rate of price growth, then over time, this can increase inequality between low-wage workers and everyone else.

One way to address this issue and ensure that low-wage workers do not fall further away from the middle class is to index the minimum wage to median wage growth. EPI’s latest vision for a federal minimum wage explicitly targets a wage floor that rises to two-thirds of the median wage and remains indexed there thereafter. This policy both creates a high floor that provides significantly higher wages for workers across the country and protects the minimum wage’s value against price increases and increases in wage inequality over time.

Oklahoma fails to pass minimum-wage ballot measure

In June, a minority of eligible Oklahoma voters rejected a ballot initiative (State Question 832) that would have increased the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2029. The initiative’s failure is a costly missed opportunity to increase wages for Oklahoma workers. More than 1 in 5 workers in the state earn less than $15 an hour, and if passed, the ballot initiative would have provided more than $783 million in increased earnings for low-wage workers.

During a time when cost of living and inflation are some of the most important concerns for voters, Oklahomans might have worried that increasing the minimum wage would have hurt affordability in the state. In fact, the opposite is true. Although raising the minimum wage can lead some affected businesses to increase prices, the resulting price increases are extremely modest—far smaller than the increase in pay that would go to low-wage workers. Even some of the most ambitious wage floor policies, such as California’s $20 fast food minimum wage, only increased fast-food prices 2.1% (around eight cents for a $4 item). A 10% increase in the minimum wage is associated with a 0.14 percentage point increase in CPI increase. In contrast, a 10% minimum-wage increase boosts income at the 10th percentile by around 3.6%, an order of magnitude greater. The average full-time, year-round Oklahoman worker affected by SQ 832 would have gained $2,322 in annual wages if voters had approved the initiative.

It is also important to highlight SQ 832’s winding path to the ballot. Ballot initiatives have historically been an important mechanism for passing minimum-wage increases in states with conservative-dominated legislatures like Florida, Missouri, and Nebraska. While Oklahoma is one of only three states in the South that has a ballot initiative process, conservative politicians have been increasingly curtailing it.

The Oklahoma minimum-wage ballot initiative is a prime example of this. Advocates originally began collecting signatures for SQ 832 in the lead-up to the November 2024 general election. Despite collecting nearly twice the necessary signatures in enough time to qualify for the ballot, advocates were thwarted when Governor Kevin Stitt delayed the State Question until the June 2026 gubernatorial primary election, a low turnout election in contrast to a general election with presidential candidates on the ballot. Voter turnout in the 2026 primary election was 26%, around half of what it was in the 2024 election.

In response to the emergence of SQ 832, the Oklahoma legislature also passed restrictions on the signature-gathering process, limiting the number of signatures that can be gathered from populous areas like Tulsa and Oklahoma City. These restrictions will make it more costly and logistically challenging to pass a future minimum-wage increase in Oklahoma. With such low voter turnout and marked interference in the ballot initiative process, it is difficult to say that SQ 832’s failure reflects a lack of popular support for minimum-wage increases in Oklahoma. Regardless of the cause, without a future minimum-wage increase, the issue of low pay in Oklahoma is only going to grow.

When policymakers like those in Oklahoma fail to adequately set the wage floor, it suppresses worker pay, not just for the lowest-paid workers, but for low-wage workers in general. Workers need a raise to help them overcome the affordability crisis, and the minimum wage is an evidence-backed tool under policymakers’ control to help them do that.

1. Assuming 81% of income comes from wages.