"Education, Not Deportation": The Graduate School Experiences of Undocumented Doctoral, Medical, and Law School Students

• In Event: Latino Immigrant Educational Experiences Across the Life Course: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Abstract

In its landmark decision, Plyler v. Doe, 357 U.S. 202 (1982), the U.S. Supreme Court held that undocumented school children could not be denied access to a K-12 education due to their legal status. Writing the majority opinion Justice William Brennan noted that undocumented status was to be temporary and the youth could potentially adjust their status in subsequent years through marriage, employer sponsorship or immigration reform legislation. Unfortunately, in the period since the Court’s decision, changes in the legal landscape that would have improved undocumented immigrant youth’s access to citizenship have been slow to come.

While in June 2012 President Barack Obama announced the Deferred Action for Early Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which expanded opportunities for current and future generations of undocumented young people, states such as Georgia banned undocumented students from attending the top 5 public colleges and universities. The uneven nature of the legal landscape – with some states passing inclusive policies going beyond the scope of DACA and others implementing more restrictive measures – has led to a political opening within the legal opportunity structure for activism to occur.

Despite the numerous barriers to attending college, students who were beneficiaries of the Court’s decision in Plyler have not only graduated from college, but have continued on to complete graduate and professional school degrees. Utilizing the framework of the undocumented (im)migrant educational pipeline, this paper focuses on the experiences of undocumented graduate students in doctoral, medical and law school programs (Covarrubias and Lara, 2014). To better understand the experiences of these students during this juncture in the educational pipeline, I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork with 15 undocumented students, both those who were applying to graduate programs and those who had matriculated into graduate and professional degree programs. Students interviewed were located in San Francisco, CA and Chicago, IL, two of the undocumented immigrant rights movement’s primary epicenters (Voss and Bloemraad, 2011).

In this work I found that undocumented graduate and professional students, in navigating the undocumented (im)migrant educational pipeline, developed highly specialized, field-specific networks that in turn facilitated their entry into and successful completion of these programs. Moreover, these networks developed into national organizations known as Pre-Health Dreamers, the Dream Bar Association and Graduates Reaching a Dream Deferred (GRADD) and serve three primary purposes: (1) the facilitation of resource sharing across geographically dispersed communities; (2) the creation of spaces for the discussion of the challenges undocumented graduate students faced at their colleges and universities and (3) the coordination of advocacy efforts to national admissions and licensing bodies.

Rather than waiting as passive bystanders for federal and state laws to change, undocumented graduate and professional school students have advocated for educational institutions and associations to better address their community’s needs. Doing so has also helped to expand the conversation regarding undocumented student experiences, a community that is predominantly Latina/o, beyond the K-12 and undergraduate levels and into the graduate and professional school context, highlighting the resilience of these students in pursuing their academic and career goals.

Author

• Kevin Escudero, Brown University