Abstract
For undocumented students, the high school–to–college pipeline is filled with social, economic, and psychological stressors. Yet very little is known about the impact of legal status on the experiences of undocumented Latinx college students living in states without tuition equity policies. Using qualitative data from 37 interviews exploring undocumented college students’ educational trajectories in Massachusetts and North Carolina, the authors examine the impact of legal status on the emotional well-being of undocumented Latinx students, including those who benefited from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The findings show that even when undocumented students gain access to higher education, barriers to legal status generate chronic feelings of despair and hopelessness that persist throughout their educational trajectories. Additionally, the authors find that academic motivation and persistence do not always equate with emotional resilience. The authors propose strategies to help facilitate emotional well-being for undocumented students.
Each year approximately 98,000 undocumented students graduate from U.S. high schools (Nunez and Holthaus 2017). Most undocumented high schoolers do not transition to college, and they represent only 2 percent of all students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities. Contrary to popular belief, most undocumented college students are not eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) (Feldblum et al. 2021), and the high school–to–college pipeline is often riddled by financial stressors related to the prohibitive cost of college tuition. Navigating the precariousness of legal status results in a range of emotional challenges in young adults such as elevated rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, fear of deportation (Cavazos-Rehg, Zayas and Spitznagel 2007; Patler and Pirtle 2018; Perez et al. 2009), feelings of isolation from peers (Suarez-Orozco, Teranishi, and Suarez-Orozco 2015), hopelessness (Gonzales, Suárez-Orozco and Dedios-Sanguineti 2013; Perez et al. 2009; Suarez-Orozco et al. 2015), and erosion of ontological security, that is, the loss of trust in their social and material environment (Vaquera, Aranda, and Sousa-Rodriguez 2017). The work of Aranda and Vaquera (2015) shows how immigration enforcement continues to exacerbate and perpetuate legitimate feelings of despair, anxiety and fear in undocumented young immigrants by subjecting immigrants to arrest, detention and deportation via racial profiling. Situated in this body of work, we focus on 37 Latinx undocumented students who pursued higher education. These were students whom, with or without DACA, decided to persevere educationally and forged a path to college despite their formal exclusion. Specifically, we analyze undocumented students’ experiences of despair and hopelessness in high school and as they matriculated into college in two states where in-state tuition and financial aid are not afforded to undocumented college students. In doing so, we shed light on the ongoing emotional strain that undocumented youth and young adults experience because of legal status limitations throughout a critical period in the life course.
Undocumented Students, Education, and Immigration Policy
For undocumented youth, the transition from high school to college is burdened with barriers and uncertainties. In K–12 education, all children and youth living in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are allowed to enroll in U.S. public schools. This provision was made possible in 1982, when the U.S Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional (Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S 202 [1982]) for any state to deny school-aged undocumented children free public education. As a result, all undocumented children and youth became eligible to receive free public education starting in kindergarten. Since then, undocumented children have been learning alongside their U.S. citizen peers and becoming part of American society through their socialization in American schools. Yet the educational paths of undocumented students are interrupted in high school when they begin to consider their options for college. These students often face the realization that excelling academically does not guarantee entry into college in the same way that it might for their peers who have legally privileged immigration statuses such as permanent residency or U.S. citizenship (Enriquez 2017; Gonzales 2016; Olivas 2012, 2020). Plyler v. Doe’s provisions do not extend beyond the 12th grade, so once undocumented youth graduate from high school, they encounter a higher education system that, in most states, restricts their access to college by marking them ineligible for in-state tuition and financial aid.
In an effort to make higher education accessible for undocumented students nationwide, the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act was introduced to Congress in 2001. The DREAM Act would have allowed undocumented students to pay in-state tuition and become eligible for federal financial aid. Yet despite bipartisan support and multiple reintroductions to Congress since 2001, the DREAM Act has been unsuccessful. In response to activist demands for a more comprehensive immigration policy that would lift the threat of deportation from undocumented youth, in June 2012 the Obama administration released a memorandum granting consideration for deferred action to certain undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. A press release from the Department of Homeland Security outlined the provisions granted to beneficiaries of deferred action: Certain young people who were brought to the United States as young children, do not present a risk to national security or public safety, and meet several key criteria will be considered for relief from removal from the country or from entering into removal proceedings. Those who demonstrate that they meet the criteria will be eligible to receive deferred action for a period of two years, subject to renewal, and will be eligible to apply for work authorization. (DHS 2012)
Even though DACA did not offer beneficiaries a path to citizenship, as the DREAM Act would have, the eligibility criteria of DACA were similar to the DREAM Act’s. The implementation of DACA provided undocumented students with access to higher education that before was limited without social security numbers and/or employment authorization cards. Estimates suggest that as of June 2022, 594,120 undocumented immigrants benefit from DACA, yet the DACA-eligible population nearly doubles that figure (Migration Policy Institute 2022). In 2021, a federal court ruling declared that DACA was illegally implemented and blocked undocumented immigrants from submitting new applications; currently only renewals are being processed (National Immigration Law Center 2022). For many DACA-benefited college students, the educational hurdles they experienced before DACA, such as the inability to qualify for federal financial aid and in-state tuition, continue to hamper their educational journeys (Bjorklund 2018).
Geographic Differences in Access to Higher Education
Studies have established that multiple political and institutional contexts create varied experiences of inclusion and exclusion for young undocumented immigrants even when they have DACA or live in the same state (Cebulko 2014; Cebulko and Silver 2016; Enriquez et al. 2021a; Morales Hernandez and Enriquez 2021). Although inclusive state and institutional policy contexts are advancing the inclusion of undocumented students in higher education (Cebulko 2014; Enriquez et al. 2021a), shifting political structures exacerbate or mitigate perceptions of material and nonmaterial exclusion for young undocumented immigrants (Burciaga and Malone 2021; Cebulko 2014, 2018; Cebulko and Silver 2016; Morales Hernandez and Enriquez 2021; Silver 2018). Despite the evidence that symbolic political acts such as restrictive in-state tuition laws vary by state, most research on undocumented students has centered on populations in the western and southwestern regions of the United States (Abrego and Gonzales 2010; Perez et al. 2009; Rodriguez 2020). Correspondingly, most of the scholarship focuses on undocumented students in regions such as California, with large Latinx immigrant populations. In contrast, Massachusetts and North Carolina, where this study took place, yield a low share of total undocumented high school graduates (1 percent and 3 percent, respectively) (Zong et al. 2017). Although an estimated 325,000 undocumented immigrants live in North Carolina and 250,000 live in Massachusetts (Pew Hispanic Center 2019), financial resources for undocumented college students in these states are inadequate. Unlike California, where all University of California and California State University system schools, have Dreamer Resource Centers, Massachusetts and North Carolina do not. As such, most undocumented college students in these states must rely on informal social networks to access financial resources for college.
Previous studies have identified some important trends in state-level policy effects (Cebulko 2014; Cisneros and Valdivia 2020; Enriquez et al. 2021b). For example, California, the state with the largest undocumented immigrant population in the country, leads the nation in their provision of undocumented student services via local- and state-level resources that alleviate some of the financial obstacles undocumented students face in other states (Enriquez et al. 2021b). Namely, undocumented college students in California qualify for in-state tuition via AB 540, which also allows undocumented students to receive need-based financial aid packages (Cebulko 2014; Cisneros and Valdivia 2020; Peña 2021). The California Dream Act provides undocumented students with access to institutional, private and state funded financial aid at public and private universities, and the California Dream Loan program allows students to receive up to $20,000 in loans (Enriquez et al. 2021b). Notably, the implementation of DACA did encourage some states such as Massachusetts to offer in-state tuition to DACA-benefited undocumented students, albeit without offering the same provisions to undocumented students who did not qualify for DACA (Cebulko 2014). Most states, like North Carolina, continue to withhold in-state tuition benefits from undocumented students.
Although DACA has been marked by exclusionary practices such as denial of in-state tuition, research indicates that beneficiaries have reaped material, psychological and symbolic benefits from DACA (Patler, Hale, and Hamilton 2021; Patler and Pirtle 2018) but that these benefits vary across state contexts (Cebulko 2014; Cebulko and Silver 2016). In their examination of young undocumented immigrants residing in North Carolina and Massachusetts, Cebulko and Silver (2016) found that DACA facilitated legitimacy, job security, and a sense of identity. Massachusetts recipients were able to leverage educational gains into upward job mobility compared with their North Carolina counterparts. Still in North Carolina, lack of state tuition equity laws for DACA recipients and “no legal status” notification on driver’s licenses fostered a sense of exclusion (Cebulko and Silver 2016). We build on this body of research to examine the impact of illegality on the emotional well-being of undocumented college students in Massachusetts and North Carolina, which unlike California are not at the forefront of implementing services and institutional policies to meet the unique needs of undocumented college students.
Legal Violence, Ineligibility for Personhood, and Undocumented Students
According to developmental psychologist Jeff Arnett, young adulthood (ages 18–30 years) is a critical time in the life course for building the foundations of financial independence, family, and identity formation. He called this the age of possibilities (Arnett 2000, 2007) and argued that for many young adults this is a time of exploration in which they can postpone adulthood by pursuing higher education or job training. The age of possibilities is off limits to many undocumented students, as inconsistences in federal, state, and local approaches to immigration control block their chances of pursuing and/or completing higher education. For those who do matriculate, it is not unusual to work one or more jobs to pay for college. As such, financial and other barriers may dampen the feelings of freedom, hope, and possibility that typically accompany this stage of the life course for college students.
Menjívar and Abrego’s (2012) legal violence framework offers a lens to examine how the state and its institutions regulate and contain immigrants. By drawing attention to how immigration law and criminal law converge to create social, material, and psychological injuries for immigrants, legal violence illustrates how immigration laws create a new axis of stratification (i.e., legal status) that determines access to valued goods and services (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). Specifically, the legal violence framework identifies the structural and symbolic ways that immigration laws legitimize social, psychological, and material harm against immigrants (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). In particular, the increasing convergence of immigration law and criminal law promotes a view of immigrants as “undeserving,” shoring up their dehumanization and discrimination. Standardized practices create and sustain structural violence (e.g., loss of income and wages) by excluding undocumented immigrants (even when they have liminal legal status) from mainstream labor markets and higher education via ineligibility for federal financial aid or in-state college tuition. Over time, repeated exposure to inequalities and exclusion may be internalized by immigrants, even those who are deemed “legal” by the state, in the form of negative emotional states such as fear of deportation, uncertainty about the future, and prolonged feelings of insecurity. Some immigrants also normalize the barriers placed in their path to legal status, educational, and job attainment, blaming themselves for their perceived failures (Menjívar and Abrego 2012).
In addition, in her seminal work on the social death of populations of color, Lisa Cacho (2012) argued that in the United States, immigrants are viewed as de facto criminals. To be an immigrant is to be seen as undeserving of constitutional rights such as innocence until proven guilty. The denial of such rights thus renders immigrants ineligible for personhood. Cacho defined ineligibility for personhood as the state of being legally recognized as rightless, located in the spaces of social death where demands for humanity are ultimately disempowering because they can be interpreted only as asking to be given something sacred in return for nothing at all. (p. 7)
For undocumented immigrants, ineligibility for personhood manifests through regulation and containment by the state and its institutions, and by the lack of legal protections by these same structures. We use ineligibility for personhood to explore how undocumented college students are stripped of their personhood by state and federal policies and financial aid restrictions that impinge on the ability of undocumented students, including those who benefit from DACA, to attend and complete a college education. The degree of violence inflicted by ineligibility for personhood intends to not only subjugate but also effectively incapacitate and make invisible an entire group (in this case the undocumented) through social death. For undocumented college students who strive to “earn” personhood by pursuing higher education, experiencing legal violence and ineligibility for personhood may further place them at risk for poor mental health. In this article, we pair legal violence and ineligibility for personhood to show how state violence toward Latinx undocumented students—who are rendered socially underserving by virtue of their race, nationality, and/or legal status—creates and maintains psychological harm.
Data and Methods
This article is based on qualitative interviews conducted from 2013 to 2018. Bazo Vienrich conducted 37 in-depth interviews with Latinx college students who at the time of the interview were undocumented, had DACA, or were undocumented or had DACA while they were in high school. Participants attended high school and college in North Carolina and Massachusetts. Interviews were conducted in the Piedmont Triad and Research Triangle, North Carolina, and in Boston, areas that have large immigrant populations and a high concentration of colleges and universities. Students were recruited through snowball sampling, as Bazo Vienrich posted flyers at colleges and universities, churches, health clinics, and other community areas frequented by Latinx young adults. E-flyers were circulated on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, and e-mails with information about the study were sent to key contacts at colleges and universities in both states. Of the 37 students interviewed, 20 lived in North Carolina and 17 in Massachusetts, and 29 were women. Most participants were born in Mexico and Central America. On average, they had lived in the United States for 15 years or longer, and the mean age of arrival to the United States was 7 years. All participants were enrolled in or had recently graduated from 2- and/or 4-year private and public colleges and universities. Throughout data collection, case study logic and sequential interviewing (Small 2009) were used to identify participant characteristics that would allow for theoretical replication in subsequent interviews. By adding or removing questions on the basis of participants’ responses during prior interviews, Bazo Vienrich was able to conduct interviews that resulted in very little distinction and to reach saturation.
Participants in both states were interviewed in cafes, restaurants, college campuses, and occasionally participants in Boston were interviewed in Bazo Vienrich’s office space at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Interviews lasted between one and three hours, and the interview guide consisted of five sections covering students’ personal backgrounds and immigrant stories, educational trajectories, experiences in college, community experiences, and participation in the labor market. Although interviews took place before the presidential election of Donald J. Trump and during his first two years in office, students’ narratives indicated that their feelings of hopelessness and despair preceded the 2016 election. Participants interviewed during the Trump campaign voiced their fear around the future of DACA if Trump won the election, and these fears manifested when Trump rescinded DACA on September 5, 2017.
Given the focus on undocumented students’ experiences in the high school to college pipeline, Bazo Vienrich anticipated that the emergent themes would be primarily academic and/or financial in nature. Surprisingly, mental health emerged as a small number of participants volunteered past experiences with suicidal ideation. In particular, Bazo Vienrich was struck when two students voluntarily reported having contemplated suicide and one reported having attempted it. These students directly linked their suicidal ideation to the barriers their immigration status posed for higher education. Upon further rounds of focused coding (Charmaz 2000), it became clear that although only a few of the students had actually attempted or contemplated suicide, feelings of hopelessness and despair were present across most interviews. Having been an undocumented college student herself, Bazo Vienrich could identify with students’ feelings of hopelessness and despair. Her coping strategy, however, had been to bury her emotional distress in work and academic accomplishments Bazo Vienrich 2018, and it was not until students began disclosing their emotional distress in interviews that she recognized hopelessness and despair as a key theme. Insofar as Bazo Vienrich was open with participants about her own undocumented status in college, she may have built the trust and rapport necessary for undocumented students to disclose their suicidal ideation (Bazo Vienrich, 2021). The fact that students volunteered sensitive feelings without being directly asked may reflect the finding that “status matching” can enhance the validity of interview data (Baca Zinn 1979; Stanfield 1994; Warren 1988).
A grounded theory approach was used to code the interview transcripts. As Bazo Vienrich encountered the themes of mental health and suicidal ideation that emerged through initial coding (Charmaz 2000), Bazo Vienrich sought out author 2’s expertise in undocumented students’ mental health and emotional well-being. We drew on Timmermans and Tavory’s (2012) abductive analysis to theoretically embrace mental health as an unexpected theme that emerged from the raw data. Timmermans and Tavory called attention to the usefulness of grounded theory for producing new theoretical insights that researchers may not have initially identified. Both authors used focused coding (Charmaz 2000) to look for finer themes and categories within all data initially coded as “mental health” and “suicidal ideation.” To interpret the data, we drew on Pavot and Diener’s (1993) work on the life satisfaction component of subjective well-being, which treats life satisfaction as “a judgmental process, in which individuals assess the quality of their lives on the basis of their own unique criteria” (Shin and Johnson 1978). In short, we relied on students’ retrospective accounts of their mental health as evidence of their subjective experiences of mental health and life satisfaction. Through this iterative process of coding and analysis, we uncovered hopelessness and despair as key themes woven throughout students’ narratives. Finally, following Pavot and Diener, we returned to the raw data to trace the social contexts and conditions that gave rise to students’ feelings of hopelessness and despair.
Findings
In what follows, we center the narratives of Rita, Rafael, and Viv (all pseudonyms). Following the principles of analytical generalization (Firestone 1993; Yin 1989), which allows the generalization of a specific set of results to a theoretical framework, we focus on three participants whose experiences capture the generalized sense of hopelessness and despair that the undocumented college students interviewed for this study reported. In doing so, we show how student experiences with legal violence and ineligibility for personhood placed their emotional well-being at risk at different moments in their educational trajectories, generating feelings of hopelessness and despair even when they persevered educationally and attended college.
Negotiating Belonging in Educational Spaces
In 2015, Rita, a 28-year-old Brazilian student who arrived in the United States when she was 5 years old and grew up in a suburb south of Boston, was interviewed for this study. Rita had graduated from high school in the mid-2000s, years before DACA was announced, and she had been a college student in Massachusetts, a state without in-state tuition for undocumented students, for 8 years at the time of her interview. Rita discussed feeling excluded in high school because of her immigration status, as she was aware that her peers did not think she belonged in this country and believed that “they would rather see me dead than exist in the United States.” Rita emphasized that the realization that her illegality shaped people’s perceptions of her “was a really hard thing to grasp.” For Rita and other undocumented students, school was not always a space of opportunity and belonging. It was a space where legal violence and ineligibility for personhood were reproduced. Rita reflected on how school affected her emotional well-being: I think one of the most painful experiences in high school was, it was a sociology class, and we were talking about immigration, and someone was like “why don’t we just shoot illegals to save money on deportations?” and I was sitting right there, like near this person and my teacher didn’t really do much about it. And I was like “wow this person would wanna kill me because I’m undocumented.” So, knowing that or having people say really violent things about undocumented people, that was kinda scary.
Like Rita, many of the students I interviewed recalled the persistent legal violence and ineligibility for personhood they experienced in school. The fear that Rita experienced through the actions of her peers and the inaction of her teachers was echoed by other students. In interviews, many shared the fear, anxiety, and isolation elicited by discriminatory comments their classmates made, as well as legal violence inflicted by school policies and institutional agents such as teachers and high school counselors. For some, the harmful impact on their emotional well-being was heightened by immigration enforcement in their communities.
This almost constant school and community violence stemming from others’ assumptions of their illegality led some students to keep a low profile and to not draw attention to themselves at school. For others, it meant hiding their legal status from teachers, peers, and school administrators. Their desire to “go unnoticed” in order to preserve a sense of safety contributed to students’ contested legal presence and exclusion. Going unnoticed, as Rita described it, was not wanting people to know too much about me, I just felt very different all the time. It’s so much of a process to have people see me as another fellow student, like I just don’t wanna go through that, like I don’t want them to think of me as like the other. Even though I went to a school where the majority of people were [people] of color, a lot of them were immigrants, I just felt like I was different from everyone else. So I just kinda shut down.
Although Rita attended a minority-majority high school with a significant immigrant student body, she believed that invisibility was the only way to avoid being the target of xenophobic rhetoric. Rita’s experiences in high school took place years before DACA was part of the conversation around undocumented youth. Thus, the level of awareness that exists about this group today may not have been present at the time. Sadly, undocumented students’ attempts to go unnoticed only intensified their feeling of being out of place and socially excluded. It also heightened the feelings of loneliness and social isolation that are prevalent among undocumented youth. The social exclusion that Rita and others experienced is a harsh reminder that ineligibility for personhood deprives undocumented students of their right to fully occupy classrooms and other school settings—not sporadically, but on a daily basis. In these spaces, undocumented youth are frequently cast as criminal and undeserving. In response, many undocumented students withdrew behind a wall of anonymity and seclusion.
Illegality and Lack of Hope for the Future
In 2016, just a month before the presidential election, Bazo Vienrich met Rafael, a community college DACA-benefited Mexican student, at a fast-food restaurant in North Carolina. Rafael had graduated from high school that same year, and during a three-hour-long conversation he described how his high school years were filled with feelings of hopelessness. He recalled going through the motions as he did what it took—or so he thought—to be a high-achieving high school student. He knew that his path to college would not be linear like it seemed to be for his classmates and friends. But Rafael was a hard worker, and his high school grade point average (GPA) exceeded 4.0. He achieved all the things he thought would help him overcome his immigration status. When asked how being undocumented affected his educational dreams and goals, Rafael appeared overcome by hopelessness. He reflected, Throughout all high school they told me, join clubs, do community service, do sports, get honor roll, do this, do that, and at the end I achieved it, but at the end, when I graduated high school, I graduated with a four something GPA, vice president of a club, I was in swimming, soccer varsity, I feel like I achieved more than the average student that went to a decent school, but at the same time, the fact that they were gonna go, in the fall, to higher education, to enjoy life, while I was gonna stay home in community college. It crushed my heart.
As a DACA beneficiary living in North Carolina, Rafael was not eligible for in-state tuition. As such, the most affordable college option for him was to attend a community college where he could pay tuition as an out-of-state resident and live at home with his parents. Despite Rafael’s impressive academic record and extracurricular accomplishments, the realization that he would have to follow a different path than his legally privileged peers took an emotional toll on him. He went on to describe how knowing that his dream of attending a four-year-college would not come to fruition caused him to uninvite his parents from his high school graduation. Rafael said, “I felt like I accomplished nothing.” These feelings persisted even as he made progress toward the completion of his associate’s degree. Rafael’s experience illustrates how the legal violence of states’ denial of in-state tuition to undocumented students can bring their hopelessness and despair to a climax even before they get to college. Rafael’s decision to uninvite his parents from his graduation stemmed from the hopelessness he felt after working so hard to accomplish his dream of attending a four-year college, only to have it deterred by his legal status.
Like Rafael, Rita described the anxiety and despair that filled her transition from high school to college. In discussing her decision to apply to college, Rita stressed the uncertainty she felt about her chances of attending college, saying, “I fluctuated [on whether I would attend college] a lot in high school because of my [immigration] status.” At times, Rita really wanted to go to college. At other times, she was overcome with doubt and asked herself, “Wait a minute, can I even go to college at all?” Although paying for college was an important component in her decision to apply, Rita also worried about what colleges would admit her without legal documentation. More than once she asked herself, “Am I even legally allowed to be in college?” For Rita, the college application process, coupled with her uncertainty surrounding whether she had the right to matriculate because of her immigration status, negatively affected her emotional well-being in high school. She kept her head down and buried her feelings in work. However, it was not long before her feelings of confusion and hopelessness turned into depression: There were moments when I was working towards college and there were moments when I just felt depressed and unmotivated about it and I would still do fine in school but I was also working at the same time so like my friends were being part of after school clubs and doing all these things, and I was always working.
Although Rita did not let her grades drop during her depression, her resilience enabled her to persevere in school and achieve high grades. She was frustrated by the fact that keeping her grades up and being involved in extracurricular activities (both of which conflicted with her work responsibilities) would not be enough to get into college. Her uncertainty partly stemmed from the “guidance” of her high school counselor. After multiple meetings, Rita decided to finally disclose her immigration status to a school official. She recalled that the counselor “didn’t exactly have all the right information and wasn’t the most helpful.” The fact that Rita was trying to go to college in Massachusetts before the implementation of DACA, meant that she too experienced legal violence and was made ineligible for personhood by the state’s refusal to grant undocumented college students, including DACA beneficiaries, in-state tuition.
Viv, like Rita and Rafael, felt that her immigration status dampened her hopes for attending college. Viv had come to Massachusetts from Brazil with her parents as a young child and was a 23-year-old senior in college in 2017 when she was interviewed. As a high school student prior to the announcement of DACA, she had not envisioned a future in which she would benefit from DACA and thereby qualify for in-state tuition. Viv was critical of her parents’ actions in bringing her to the United States, and she bitterly said, “part of me will always hate my mom and dad for making me this stereotype.” Viv was angry that she had to be “illegal,” as she referred to herself and her family, and did not see the structural forces that had illegalized (Bacong and Menjívar 2021) her and her family once their tourist visas expired. She not only blamed her parents, but also herself for the difficulties she faced. As Viv shared, it was not until middle school or high school that she had learned about her legal status. She described how hopelessness tainted her experiences in high school: “I didn’t care. I thought, I was like, ‘you’re illegal. There’s no way they’re going to pass DACA.’ When I brought up the DREAM Act in a classroom once, no one knew what it was.”
Viv’s account, and the fact that she called herself “illegal”, suggests that she had internalized ineligibility for personhood and legal violence. For Viv, the defeated promise of the DREAM Act and the hopelessness around the possibility of legalization meant that school was not something worth excelling in. Viv shared how being undocumented had affected her educational dreams even after she began college and received DACA. As she put it, Like I said, that first semester, I still just didn’t believe anything was going to come out of all of this. I was still like, “Yeah this is bullshit.” So I didn’t want to do really . . . I was just too depressed. Like I’d look at the work, and just was like, “There’s no point. There’s no point in any of this. You saw how like, it’s been years you’ve been here. Nothing’s changed.” So that was the big effect.
Throughout her educational journey, Viv was dogged by the feeling that there was no point in pursuing college. The hopelessness Viv described was not new. She had felt hopeless in high school after receiving a prestigious scholarship that would have covered most of college, only to have it rescinded because of her immigration status. Although Viv managed to navigate the college application process—albeit without continuing to seek scholarships—she mentioned that during this time she was deeply depressed. Her depression affected her grades during her first semester of college, to the point that “I bombed most of my classes. I didn’t give a fuck. I was very, very depressed.” When asked why she had been so depressed, Viv claimed that she didn’t remember, but that she ultimately “snapped out of it” during her second semester of college. Viv’s story echoes those of other students who like her buried and blocked out their feelings. Instead of reckoning with the hopelessness and despair they experienced, they worked through the pain and emotionally checked out. In the absence of supportive institutional agents, students resorted to social isolation and buried their feelings, which may have placed their mental health at risk.
Academic Perseverance in the Midst of Despair
Hopelessness about the future was a constant for the students in this study. The fact that they had to navigate college as undocumented students meant that the uncertainty they felt in high school endured after they entered college. Moments of despair were not unusual. For example, Rafael reflected on his feelings about the state’s treatment of undocumented and DACA students. He said the situation made him feel “horrible,” adding that his legal status sunk him with feelings of despair. He said, It feels like I can’t put the blame on nobody. I can’t put it on my parents for not having me here, I can’t put it on the government for treating me the way they treat me. At the end it makes me want to hate myself. At times it gets me, all the pressure and all the negativity, I hate myself at times. I have to put all the blame on somebody at least, if it’s not gonna be on my parents, cause they don’t deserve it, but if it’s not gonna be on the institutions or anybody, I’ll put it on myself. It makes me feel like I did something wrong throughout life to have all these burdens and boundaries and right in front of me. I put it on myself.
Despite the chronic sense of despair he felt, Rafael continued to pursue his college dreams. For Rafael, perseverance was tied to his desire to transcend “boundaries on who you can become or what you can achieve.” His desire to spend his life working with computers and technology set him on the difficult path of pursuing college as a DACA beneficiary in a state without tuition equity policies. Nevertheless, Rafael continued to struggle with uncertainty about the future.
Like many of the students interviewed, and much of the American public in general, Rafael feared for the future of the DACA program under a Trump presidency. His anxiety and worry about the future, along with the steep financial burden of paying his way through college, weighed heavily on him. He explained, If undocumented students at least have the same opportunities, not necessarily financial aid, but being able to pay in-state-tuition, that would make a big difference. I don’t understand why we can’t pay in-state tuition, I’ve been living in North Carolina since I was about four years old. Spent my kindergarten to senior year here. Been working since junior year and I pay taxes and I follow the laws. I have a clean record, nothing on my criminal record, nothing. I feel like I’ve been a good Samaritan, a citizen. I don’t see why I can’t pay in-state tuition.
When Rafael was asked about what he thought of his situation as a DACA beneficiary with so many state-imposed barriers to college access, he described how working at a restaurant as a busboy made it possible for him to pay tuition at community college. However, he felt very alone on his educational journey. Rafael could not imagine how he would pay for tuition at a 4-year college: I feel like DACA, for me, is the opportunity to work like a slave and education is possible but the thing is, they’re telling you you’re on your own. I don’t know how you’re gonna get the $40,000 to $50,000 a year for a nice school but you’re on your own. I feel like it was like that on purpose. I don’t understand why other states can’t be like California or if not help students, at least give them the same platform, the same standards of in-state tuition.
The despair behind Rafael’s words was palpable. He not only felt hopeless after realizing that his efforts in school were in vain, but he was overwhelmed by self-loathing. After interviewing Rafael, it was difficult to discern if in the end he would be able to fulfill his dream of attending a four-year college. His work ethic, resilience, drive, and determination would likely make it possible for him to finish community college, yet he lacked the structural and institutional support systems known to help undocumented college students pursue higher education. For Rafael, there were no Dreamer Resource Centers or readily available information about tuition costs (or financial aid) for DACA students. The reality was that he faced an uncertain future and two potential scenarios. In the first, he would succumb to hopelessness and despair and leave the United States to seek a four-year college education in Mexico. In the second, he would beat the odds and transfer to a four-year college within the United States as a DACA beneficiary.
Financial need and the pressures of balancing school and work exacerbated the hopelessness and depression that marked Rita’s high school years. Rita did not think “the structure of the school”—in which her racialized Latinx identity meant that she was policed by teachers and administrators—was positive for her. Rita’s hopelessness turned into despair when she won the same prestigious state scholarship that Viv had won, and like her, was unable to use it because of her immigration status. She went on to say, It mostly just made me really angry, I think by senior year I was just fed up with everyone and everything. . . . I was so done with how I was being treated and how people around me were being treated that I thought the best use of my energy was to be better than they thought I could be. So I took a different approach than some of the other people.
Rita’s motivation and perseverance marked her as a standout among her high school peers. For Rita, motivation lied in her desire to prove to others that she was not a just another criminalized youth of color. Although her fighting spirit ultimately earned her admission to college, Rita’s college trajectory was peppered by hopelessness and despair. When she was interviewed, she was in her eighth year of college, but only held junior status because of multiple school interruptions stemming from her inability to afford tuition.
Rather than fighting stigma as Rita did, Viv internalized legal violence by seeing herself as an “illegal.” This, paired with the hopelessness that characterized her educational trajectory, even after she got to college, sunk her into a depression that lasted through her first semester of college. Nevertheless, the meaning education held for Viv was the motivation she needed to keep her college dreams alive: Education means power. Like I said, once I snapped out of that depression where I thought nothing would change, I’m like, “No, you messed up in high school not studying more.” Which if you pay more attention to that, you could have applied to scholarships in some other country or something. Like, if you’re here, you have the opportunity to get this. You do it because then you will feel empowered and like everything is in control, and it’s so true.
Although Viv was almost done with her four-year college degree, this perseverance came at an emotional cost. Going to college meant that she pushed herself instead of allowing herself the time to focus on her mental health. When Donald J. Trump rescinded DACA in 2017, Viv once again experienced despair. She seriously considered leaving the United States after college graduation. She said, The reason I’m not stressing about DACA or Trump or even a year ago, when I knew he was going to become president, I mapped everything out with schools, like Yeah, no. You can finish it. You can do well, and after that, you’ll figure out. Even if you don’t know what you want to do, as long as you have that degree, that’s . . . You have a one-up on so many people. So just make sure you study, make sure you learn. Always be learning, expand whatever.
For Viv, the legal violence and anti-immigrant rhetoric that led to Trump’s electoral college victory and inauguration in 2017 caused her to consider leaving the country rather than being ineligible for personhood in Trump’s America. Similarly, Rafael considered leaving the United States, or “ending the struggle,” as he put it. For him, the decision was bound up in the difficulties inherent in obtaining a four-year college degree in the United States. Both accounts show how despair, stemming from the manifestations of legal violence and ineligibility for personhood, were not uncommon in undocumented college students’ lives. Despite these feelings of despair, many valiantly struggled to achieve their college dreams. Yet this often put their mental health at risk.
Discussion and Conclusion
The aim of this study was to examine the impact of legal status on the emotional well-being of 37 undocumented Latinx college students living in two states where in-state tuition and financial aid are not afforded to undocumented college students. Our work showed that for undocumented students academic perseverance did not always translate into emotional resilience. This underscores how legal violence and ineligibility for personhood increase the risk for poor mental health in undocumented students during what Arnett (2007) called the age of possibilities. Legal violence, which for these students was largely embedded in state jurisdiction over tuition and financial resources for higher education, amplified feelings of chronic hopelessness, despair, exclusion, and otherness. Making undocumented students ineligible for personhood through laws and regulations that have historically been used to justify violence against marginalized groups ensures that full citizenship will continue to be out of reach for this group. Yet despite the emotional toll, the students in this study attempted to regain personhood through continued hard work and academic perseverance.
Furthermore, the students in this study were aware that the treatment they received because of their illegality shaped their experiences in school settings. For some students, the inability to pursue their desired goals because of their states’ refusal to grant in-state tuition to undocumented students and the precariousness of DACA led to prolonged future uncertainties, hopelessness, and despair. The work of Vaquera et al. (2017) shows how negative emotional states have the potential to paralyze undocumented young immigrants in their pursuit of social mobility via the erosion of ontological security.
These experiences eventually led many of the undocumented college students interviewed for this study down a path of hopelessness and despair. For Rafael, this began when he realized that attending a four-year college would be nearly impossible because of North Carolina’s exclusionary tuition policies. Like Rafael, financial barriers imperiled Rita’s sense of belonging in educational spaces. However, it was through her peers’ attitudes about immigrants as less than human and the inaction of teachers to intervene that Rita most directly experienced legal violence and ineligibility for personhood. Whereas Rita recognized the structural forces that stigmatized her and fought against these forces, Viv blamed herself and her parents for the legal barriers that thwarted her progress. Unwilling to blame the nation-state or his parents for being unable to attend a four-year college despite his heroic efforts to prove himself worthy, Rafael slipped back to blaming himself. Like Rafael, Viv also blamed herself but for different reasons, and she saw not being a better student as the reason she could not obtain scholarships. Although both students experienced self-blame, Rafael was mindful of the structural limitations imposed upon him, whereas Viv was unable to see how “illegal” status was a discriminatory creation of the nation-state. This resonates with Menjívar and Abrego’s (2012) conceptualization of symbolic violence wherein immigrants accept and internalize the social injuries they experience and in some cases go as far as to legitimate the structures that produce these barriers and stigmatizing ideologies in the first place.
Within the current political landscape, in which the broken immigration system and incongruous policies, programs, and practices negatively affect undocumented students’ lives, where they live and attend school continues to matter. The social, economic, and psychological harms inflicted by ineligibility for personhood (Cacho 2012) and legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego 2012) intersect with geographic spaces to constrain undocumented students’ access to and ability to succeed in higher education. The students in this study experienced legal violence and ineligibility for personhood in Massachusetts and North Carolina. Although these states have distinct migration histories and immigration policies, their responses to undocumented higher education exhibited some similarities. Most significantly, neither state offered in-state tuition for undocumented students at the time of this study. And although Massachusetts did offer DACA-benefited college students in-state tuition, they were not eligible for state financial aid. The fact that neither state had tuition equity policies to facilitate undocumented students’ access to college intensified their hopelessness and despair. Cebulko and Silver (2016) found that for immigrants, the meaning of inclusion and exclusion is not shaped just by state-level policies but also by how state and national policies interact to foster or diminish feelings of belonging. This may explain why, although these students lived in different cultural, political, and geographic contexts, hopelessness and despair were defining experiences in both.
Recent studies reveal that the pseudo-legality that DACA beneficiaries gained had positive effects on their mental health (Burciaga and Malone 2021; Morales Hernandez and Enriquez 2021). Some of the reported benefits are a sense of independence, sense of security, lowered anxiety, a sense of purpose (Burciaga and Malone 2021), as well as college preparation and pursuits (Morales Hernandez and Enriquez 2021). In a study of University of California and California State University undocumented college students, the researchers found that despite heterogeneity in their experiences structural and interpersonal inclusion translated into a strong sense of campus belonging. For DACA students in particular, DACA provided benefits including less financial strain and lower deportation concerns (Enriquez et al. 2021b). Unfortunately, the 2017 repeal of DACA following the election of Donald Trump was a stark reminder of the precariousness of DACA and the legal uncertainty it granted beneficiaries. For instance, for DACA recipients in Colorado, rescission of DACA in 2017 intensified feelings of impermanence and liminality that were already present since the inception of DACA while demonstrating resilience in the face of increasingly harmful immigration policies (Burciaga and Malone 2021). For DACA beneficiaries in California, where access to tuition and financial aid for undocumented and DACA students surpasses any other state in the country, the prospect of DACA ending has led to persistent feelings of exclusion and anxiety (Delgado 2022; Mallet-García and García-Bedolla 2021) which for some students jeopardized their ability to successful prepare for their desired careers (Morales Hernandez and Enriquez 2021). Insofar as state-specific legislation plays a key role in undocumented students’ access to higher education (Castrellón 2022; Cebulko 2014; Cebulko and Silver 2016; Suarez-Orozco et al. 2015), it would not be surprising if—in states like North Carolina and Massachusetts, where the financial barriers to higher education were already formidable—the specter of revocation threatened beneficiaries’ emotional well-being even more significantly.
Practice and Policy Implications
Our work has implications for future research considering how exclusionary policies (e.g., refusing to grant in-state tuition to undocumented students) that abound in geographical and policy contexts pose risks to undocumented students’ mental health. It is imperative for scholars to more intentionally seek out and amplify the voices of undocumented students. The financial, social, and psychological barriers they continued to face extended well beyond their college admission, as did their feelings of despair and hopelessness. Working with practitioners to implement professional development opportunities for administrators, faculty and high school and college counselors designed to (1) raise awareness of the social and emotional needs of undocumented students, (2) promote holistic support services and career guidelines including mental health supports, (3) increase knowledge on immigration laws, and (4) foster skills in how to guide undocumented students is crucial to undocumented students’ academic success. Unfortunately, the research indicates that institutional agents are often not afforded the appropriate informational supports to respond to the needs of undocumented students (Bjorklund 2018; Crawford 2018; Nienhusser and Espino 2017; Peguero and Bondy 2020; Walley and Knight 2018). Making educational training programs mandatory would help alleviate the burden to educate institutional agents, which at present is often carried by undocumented students themselves, who have the most to lose in disclosing their legal status and educating authority figures about their situation. Such professional development and training programs shift the onus to the professionals who are charged with providing resources to promote the academic success and socioemotional well-being of all students. Although some efforts do exist in the higher education landscape in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and nationally, with few exceptions, they are ad hoc and insufficiently funded. There is evidence that educational trainings designed to provide higher education personnel with awareness, knowledge, and skills for responding to the presence and needs of undocumented students are effective at least in the short term for increasing practitioners’ competency and self-efficacy for working with undocumented students (Cisneros and Cadenas 2017).
To protect undocumented students from the legal violence they experience in schools it is essential to conceptualize how violence manifests differently for immigrant students. The work of Peguero and Bondy (2020) illuminates understandings of this by pointing to areas that should be explored in the creation of school safety efforts for the children of immigrants. Many of the factors that affect school safety for this group are also relevant to the experiences of undocumented students, such as language barriers, legal status, and anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United States. Additionally, the fact that schools serve as central agents of socialization for immigrant students suggests that school violence may have more dire consequences on undocumented students who may already be experiencing additional burdens because of their intersectional identities, including their racialization as undocumented students of color. Institutional and social supports are key for academic achievement and development of civic engagement for undocumented college students (Borjian 2018), yet educational professionals often lack the appropriate information to address the social and emotional needs of undocumented students.
Overlooking these considerations will make it difficult to ensure undocumented students’ protection from school violence, setting the stage for their depression, hopelessness and despair. In so far as the legal violence and ineligibility for personhood these undocumented students experience remains invisible to most Americans their mental health will continue to be at risk. Another way to alleviate the harmful effects of illegality is to foster safe spaces, such as civic engagement, that promote community and challenge stigma (Vaquera et al. 2017). Our findings suggest that in pursuing college, undocumented students actively produce counternarratives (Delgado and Stefanic 2001) that challenge societal views of Latinx undocumented immigrants as criminals who are unworthy of belonging in educational spaces. Fostering social awareness about immigration, variations in immigration status, and the economic and political forces that lead people to immigrate to the United States could help reduce anti-immigrant sentiment and the stigma around undocumented and/or liminal legal status. Vaquera et al. (2017) found that civically engaged young adults’ in immigrant advocacy organizations helped recast their negative emotions into positive ones and in turn restored ontological security and feelings of belonging through social bonding.
Promising efforts are under way in some universities, even in states such as North Carolina that has been deemed hostile to immigrants (Cebulko and Silver 2016). For example, the Immigrant Ally Training Series as part of the Immigrant Mountaineer Movement at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, educates students, faculty members, and staff members about anti-immigrant sentiment and offers participants—undocumented students and allies—opportunities to become leaders for social change (Arriaga et al. 2022). Similar anti-bias programming could be implemented for all staff and faculty members. Offering participants a certificate or badge, as is widely practiced in safe zone trainings for LGBTQ+ inclusion, may further destigmatize illegality. If immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented, continue to be associated with criminality in the public eye, little progress will be made to reduce the stigma and discriminatory treatment that undocumented students experience at the hands of their peers, teachers, counselors, and other institutional agents. Coordinated effort on multiple fronts—from schools to communities to the policy level—can create the culture change necessary to promote a sense of belonging and emotional well-being for undocumented students.
Although prevention efforts tailored to support undocumented students’ mental health can be made at various levels, structural changes such as policy reforms that foster affordable access to higher education would have the greatest impact. These policy reforms include legalization not only for undocumented youth and young adults but also for their family members whose legal vulnerability heightens emotional distress for undocumented students. Comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) would offer undocumented students, many of whom have benefited from DACA, and their families a path to citizenship, as well as access to in-state tuition and financial aid. In turn, these federal policies would facilitate more effective conversations with education professionals—including high school counselors, teachers, college admissions staff members, and college advisers—who could offer resources to promote undocumented students’ college access and academic success. In lieu of CIR, state-level practices would help ameliorate the plight of undocumented students. Massachusetts and North Carolina could follow the example of California by offering in-state tuition and financial aid to undocumented students. This would reduce the financial barriers associated with ineligibility for scholarships and financial aid and, for many undocumented students, their parents’ inability to provide economic support. Lessening undocumented students’ financial barriers could go far in fostering undocumented students’ emotional well-being and mental health. In light of the precariousness of DACA, the lack of bipartisan support for CIR, and the incongruent tuition policy landscape, the mental health well-being of undocumented students should be at the forefront of future scholarship, practices, and policies.
