How much does ESL cost our government?

If you're an American, English as a First Language might be a better idea

How I look forward to the day, not far off now, when Spanish becomes your new official language and you benighted, god-blighted former colonials can stop buggering about with the one you borrowed from us!

I teach ESL. It doesn't cost the government anything. Even ESL classes taken as part of the formal process for immigrants seeking US citizenship, the students pay for in-full. I know because I've taught those classes on occasion as a substitute or when asked to because of a shortage of teachers. The cost is not insignificant and is often a real hardship for students who often work minimum-wage jobs and even below minimum-wage jobs, like sewing and instead of getting paid hourly, getting paid piecemeal a rate per item sewn that averages out to less than minimum wage for the time it takes to sew each item while also having to pay a "lease" fee on the sewing machine they use.

The ESL classes I normally teach, the ESL classes I teach as my profession, are part of a state university program for foreign students to prepare for and pass the TOEFL, which is an exam that a non-native English speaker must pass in order to receive college credit in the United States. Students pay top dollar, paying three times what in-state students pay for full-time attendance at the state university where I teach ESL, which is a university of about 30,000 students. Having attended nationwide conferences where I have met and discussed with my counterparts at educational institutions and universities throughout the country teaching ESL, I know it is the same everywhere.

The only instances where ESL is taught at government expense is at state- and locally-funded primary and secondary schools, but that cost is generally offset by intermixing the classes with English speakers and using it as means to teach English speaking students a second language. So an area with a lot of kids entering primary school or secondary school who speak Spanish as their first language, those kids will be put in a classroom where they're learning English as a second language through immersion but English-speaking students are at the same time learning Spanish as a second language through immersion in a truly bilingual classroom setting, a scenario that yields a level of proficiency well beyond, for example, typical high school Spanish class.