Discourses of Opportunity: Undocumented Students and Higher Education Policy

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Abstract: This project provides a critical analysis of one of the most controversial policy mechanisms across America today—In-­‐State Resident Tuition (ISRT) policies for undocumented immigrant students in higher education. Historically, higher education policy has been the purview of state government, while immigration has been understood as a federal responsibility. ISRTs represent a tension in which these policy domains intersect, provoking important questions about the role of education in democracy. Of primary concern is the educational opportunity for immigrant students, particularly undocumented immigrants. This project uses Critical Discourse Analysis and Policy Discourse Analysis to interrogate the operating assumptions and ideologies that circulate in ISRT policy and the political contexts from which they emerge. By first applying policy discourse analysis to the actual text of ISRT policies and then applying critical discourse analysis to the political and popular rhetoric surrounding them, this project asks and answers the questions: How are students produced in ISRT policies? What problem does ISRT policy try to solve? And, how do the political contexts of ISRT policy inform these constructions? At stake in each of these questions are the discursive opportunities made available for enabling and/or constraining educational opportunity, particularly for undocumented immigrant students. As a project firmly rooted in critical policy studies (Ball, 1994), this interrogation of the relationships between policy, democracy, opportunity, and immigration treats ISRT as a policy regime, wherein a new and dynamic architecture of possible subjects, problems, and solutions is drawn. This project seeks to disentangle the architecture, exposing its ideological foundations, contradictions, and material configurations. Thus far, preliminary analyses of policy texts reveal at least four competing identity discourses producing complex subjects of the policy: Criminal, Exceptional, Alien, and Innocent. Likewise, at least four competing discourses produce the problem of undocumented immigration in higher education: Equity, National Security, State Rights, and Civil Rights. One of the next steps is to more deeply contextualize each of these discourses, both within the context of the policies themselves, but also within the broader popular discourse, as represented by national, regional, and institutional media.Altogether, preliminary analyses suggest that the ISRT policyregime has very little to do with extending or restricting opportunity, but rather produces uncertainty around the stability of the emocratic project and reflects a perennial social conundrum across the tension between individual rights and collective well-­‐being. The role of higher education in addressing these plausible consequences of the ISRT policy regime briefly will be examined.

Author

• Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, University of Denver