A s a founder of the University Leadership Initiative, an advocacy group for undocumented students in Texas, Julieta Garibay sorts through the numerous e-mails her organization receives daily.
Before the economic downturn, most of the e-mails were from students in the state. Now, because Texas is a rare exception in allowing undocumented college students to receive state financial aid, Garibay fields requests from undocumented students across the country inquiring whether they too would be eligible for aid in Texas.
She has to tell them they are not.
“Every time you hear a new story, it’s just as bad as the last one,” Garibay says of the desperate pleas of undocumented students struggling to pay tuition. Lacking U.S. citizenship, they often have to pay the much higher tuition charged to international students.
While much of the evidence is anecdotal, undocumented students across the country have been hampered in their quests for higher learning by the dismal economy and restrictive state legislation targeted at immigrants.
The tide against states’ help for these students has been rising as three states last year established prohibitions against in-state tuition benefits — one state, South Carolina, prohibited college enrollment altogether — and laws friendly to undocumented students in two other states hang in jeopardy.
“Like many other students who are applying for college these days, undocumented students are facing very high tuition rates, but then, because of their immigration status, there’s another hurdle that they have to overcome,” says Olga Medina, an immigration policy associate with the National Council of La Raza. “There are very limited opportunities for them to obtain sources of funding for their education, and then there’s the fact that there are very limited jobs.”
