The local public elementary school is typically not the first place one thinks of when discussing the immigration crisis that has engulfed the country since President Joe Biden implemented his porous border policies.

But, in a testament to the strain that illegal immigration can place on the infrastructure of a country, state, or city, school districts from Austin, Texas, to Brooklyn, New York, have been forced to accommodate thousands of illegal immigrant children in their classrooms.

On Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education held a hearing on how the Biden border crisis has affected schools around the country. The hearing took place the same day that Biden announced a series of election-year executive actions that he said would help resolve the crisis at the border that his own administration’s policies have caused.

“In just four states — California, New York, Texas, and Arizona — the cost of integrating illegal immigrant children into public schools reached nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in one fiscal year,” subcommittee Chairman Aaron Bean (R-FL) said during the hearing. “If we assume that every illegal immigrant child encountered by Border Patrol enters the school system, the cost nationwide would be over $2 billion annually.”

But the price tag is only one part of the picture. Emails from Washington, D.C., Public Schools that were obtained by Parents Defending Education and reported by Fox News Digital show school district officials stressing to accommodate the massive influx of immigrant students into the school system. Siblings were even separated and sent to different schools.

“We are now finding that seat availability in all of the grades needed is very challenging,” one email said. “While we were trying to keep all siblings in one school, we have had to split up several families as far as school placement.”

During the hearing, Bean noted that teachers in Austin, Texas, “had to conduct classes in hallways and conference rooms to accommodate over 400 newly enrolled illegal immigrant children.”

The Biden administration and the leftist activists that have pressured it have tried to sell open border policies as a compassionate and necessary policy that holds with the tradition of the United States as a nation of immigrants. But forcing a community to reduce its standard of living because of influxes of illegal immigrants is not compassionate at all, and neither is jamming schools full of students who cannot be accommodated.

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Public schools are financed with taxpayer dollars, and every dollar spent on a migrant student is another dollar that is not going to a student who is a natural-born citizen and whose parents’ tax dollars are paying for the public school system. This is all the more troubling because major city school districts already tend to be among the lowest-performing schools in the country.

The Biden administration may have preached compassion for immigrants, but it has delivered only contempt for the people who rely on the services and infrastructure that their tax dollars go to. And when it comes to schools, students are the ones that suffer the most.