but we’ll be better off for it (and so, of course, will they).
School systems are preparing for the influx with programs and care packages to welcome the new students.
Much needs to be done
In the long run, it will do good. In the short run, various aspects strike me.
One is that 53,000 refugees isn’t many, that’s 1 per 5,000 Americans. Compare with what seem to be 800,000 Vietnamese refugees admitted over a few decades.
But worse, I get the depressing feeling that the impact of these refugees (like all others) will be very uneven, and specifically, the short-term negative effects on schools will be absent from suburbs with “good schools”, that is, having tight building controls, high housing costs, and consequently a dearth of lower-income students. Refugees will simply be excluded by economic forces, so they won’t have any effect on the resources of those schools.
OTOH, in a sense this is the payoff for being an Afghan who helped the US. The GDP per capita of the US is 30 times that of Afghanistan, and now your kids get a piece of that. And over time, you can sponsor other relatives in. Whereas otherwise, it looks like the fraction of Afghans that get US green cards is less than 0.1% per year.