From Enforcement to Investment

When people hear about ISAE, the part that most often wins them over is not the technology. It is the learning: English, civics, and the everyday know-how most of us picked up growing up and assume everyone knows.

That instinct is widely shared. In a 2024 Pew survey, over three-quarters of U.S. adults said speaking English is key to being “truly” American, and immigrants agreed at the same rate as the U.S.-born (80% and 79%).^[6] The National Academies found that immigrants do integrate over time, that integration is a two-way process, and that legal status is a key factor that can slow or block it.^[7] ISAE turns that into a concrete, measured program.

• Living in America lessons: traffic rules, paying taxes, schools and parents’ duties, tenant and workplace rights and safety,^[8] when to call 911, trash and recycling, neighbors, punctuality, how local government works, volunteering, and which duties are for citizens only, such as federal jury service.^[9]
• Founding ideas and civics from the official USCIS materials.^{[10] [11]}
• In the learner’s own language and culture: written by native-speaker educators, using familiar sayings and examples, in regional varieties, and checked by community reviewers. Indigenous languages use human voices, never machine-only text.
• Real people: volunteer mentors from parishes, adult schools and libraries.

This is civic integration, not erasure: shared rules, rights and responsibilities, with a person’s language, faith and traditions treated as assets. Lessons count toward the Green Path Civics milestone, but a proctored check by a partner, never the app, decides it.

See the Living in America track →

The United States is operating the largest interior immigration enforcement apparatus in its history. The question is no longer whether the government can spend more on removal. It is whether removal-first spending is the best use of each enforcement dollar and each officer hour.

The costs are not only fiscal. In one week of October 2026 (Oct. 5–11), a local nonprofit counted 75 people taken into custody in Santa Barbara County, 55 of them in Santa Maria. These are unofficial counts reported by the press; no official figures were available.^[12] A Westside bakery closed for two mornings.^[13] A 65-year-old U.S. citizen in Guadalupe told a reporter, “That was the last day I went to church.”^[12]

Families now avoid schools, festivals, businesses, churches and food programs. That trust deficit is a public-safety problem, an economic problem and a moral one, and it is the strongest practical argument for a different model.

This is not happy talk. ISAE would be difficult and controversial. It would need a rigorous pilot, and in the end an act of Congress. But the relevant comparison is not ISAE versus a costless status quo. It is ISAE’s risks, which can be managed and measured, versus the certain costs of continuing on the current course.

Read the full problem statement →