Juan, a Sunnyside High senior, likes working with engines. The 17-year-old recently became a certified automotive student and was looking forward to interning at a local dealership. There’s only one wrench in the gears. He’s undocumented.
Instead of getting on-the-job experience, he has to hang back and listen to his friends’ excited stories about theirs.
Nearly 2,000 students without legal status graduate from Arizona high schools every year, according to a 2016 report from the Migration Policy Institute. For these students, accessing higher education is a complicated and often dispiriting endeavor.
“I have four main goals, but they all have limitations because of my status,” said Juan, who asked to be identified only by his first name due to fears of deportation.
Juan’s parents moved the family to Tucson from Hermosillo, Sonora, when he was 4 years old, in pursuit of better opportunities for Juan and his siblings.
People are also reading…
He has applied for DACA status, the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that gave some people brought into the country as children the right to live and work in the United States, but a July district court ruling in Texas prevents the program from processing new applications. So all Juan can do is wait.
Besides his dream to work in the automotive industry, he’s also interested in studying business, obtaining a real estate license or joining the military. He scored high on the Navy’s entrance aptitude test but when it came time to fill out the paperwork, the space for his Social Security number put a damper on things, he says. A U.S. citizenship or permanent residency is required to join the U.S. military.
“I’m just like any other student until it comes to that section of the application,” he said.
As for pursuing a business degree, the financial burden may complicate the effort.
Proposition 300, approved by Arizona voters in 2006, puts in-state tuition and state-funded scholarships out of reach for undocumented students, said Carolina Silva, executive director of Scholarships A-Z, an organization that helps immigrant students access higher education. They are also not eligible for federal aid such as Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) because of their undocumented status.
“Even if they grew up in Arizona for most of their lives and they have the GPA and they meet all the requirements, they will not be able to access those resources,” Silva said.
A recent measure that the Arizona Senate referred to the Nov. 8, 2022, ballot puts parts of Proposition 300 up for repeal. If voters approve it, noncitizen residents would be eligible for in-state tuition.
Scholarships A-Z steps in where state and federal support falls short, guiding undocumented students in the search for alternative funds.
The national college enrollment rate for undocumented students is 5%, but Scholarships A-Z boasts a success rate as high as 30% among the students it helps, Silva said. It accomplishes this by providing workshops and information to students and teachers on how to identify and apply for scholarships available to undocumented students.
School counselor Danielle Khambholja, who also works with Scholarships A-Z, helps 10 to 15 undocumented students every year at Sunnyside High navigate their paths to higher education.
Sunnyside Superintendent Steve Holmes estimates that 84% of Sunnyside Unified School District students are Hispanic, and about 20% are from immigrant families. The exact number of undocumented students isn’t known since they aren’t tracked, for safety and privacy reasons, but they’re likely a sizable portion, Holmes said.
About 2% of Arizona’s high school graduates are undocumented, according to a 2016 report by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. As well, as many as 14,000 students ages 3 to 17 in Arizona are undocumented, according to a 2019 report from the same organization.
The biggest concern Khambholja hears from her undocumented students is the financial burden associated with paying out-of-state tuition. Because federal financial aid isn’t available, they depend on scholarships, and facing rejection is particularly upsetting when that’s the only feasible funding option.
Khambholja spends a lot of time researching new scholarships or writing to ones with citizenship requirements to see if they’ll consider accepting undocumented applicants.
Some students she counsels consider leaving Arizona. Western New Mexico University offers more financial-aid options than local universities, she said. In fact, it offers out-of-state waivers for students from Arizona, Colorado and El Paso, which gives them in-state tuition rates, including for DACA students.
She even helps students access legal help when their family members face detention or deportation. Dealing with that stress heavily impacts their academic lives, she said.
Professor Anna Ochoa O’Leary of the University of Arizona is researching the outcomes of some who returned to Mexico.
Mexican universities are public and much more affordable than out-of-state tuition in Arizona, which can easily be three times more expensive than in-state rates, O’Leary said. But students need to adjust to navigating their education in Spanish when they grew up in a country that prioritizes English to the detriment of other languages.
They also face economic constraints. The minimum wage in Mexico is as little as one-tenth of that in the United States, with $5 to $7 earned in a full day’s work, O’Leary said. Education may be more affordable, but that isn’t worth much if your job doesn’t cover it or you can’t understand your textbook.
Carolina Soto’s family moved back to Mexico when she was 16, when the recession put her father out of work. Soto had always expressed a desire to attend college, and her family’s economic straits, coupled with what they saw as the catastrophic costs of sending her to school in the U.S., convinced them to move.
“I felt disoriented in every sense of the word,” Soto said.
She spoke Spanish with her parents but was unprepared for the level of language comprehension expected of her in school. Soto vividly remembers asking a teacher to explain an unfamiliar word, only to be met with laughter from the rest of the classroom. After that, she avoided speaking up or expressing herself in public.
Today, Soto is a professor at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, but she still lacks self-confidence when it comes to writing professionally in Spanish and makes liberal use of autocorrect.
For Juan, from Sunnyside High School, returning to Mexico after a lifetime of being American isn’t an option.
“I’d be lost in Mexico,” he said.
Juan juggles two mariachi band memberships to keep in touch with his culture and does landscaping for his neighbors on the side since he can’t legally work, but he keeps his eye firmly on the future, despite the rejections he’s faced because of his status.
“I won’t give up,” he said. “I’ll keep trying.”