Undocumented kids have the highest high school dropout rate in the country except for Native Americans “because if you’re going to be consigned to a life of working under the table, why not start at 16 rather than 18?” says Karen Willemsen, Ed.M.’94, education director for Define American, a media and cultural campaign to share stories of the immigrant experience. Nationally, 40 percent of undocumented adults ages 18 to 24 did not complete high school, according to Gonzales’ current longitudinal study of about 2,700 undocumented youth, the National UnDACAmented Research Project (NURP), which is investigating how DACA affects this group. It is the largest study ever of any undocumented immigrant population in the world.
Of the estimated 65,000 undocumented youth who do graduate high school every year, what then? Only about 5 to 10 percent move on to higher education, it is estimated, although the number may be higher since that data was compiled before some states began to offer in-state tuition, Gonzales notes. Most attend community college rather than four-year institutions, and little is known about retention rates. Primarily for financial reasons, 45 percent of undocumented students in college “stop out” – leaving with the intention of returning – and many do so multiple times, he’s found. “Many go to school one term at a time, then leave, work for a while, then go back,” Gonzales says. “It takes them six or seven or eight years to graduate.”
Efforts to help them have met strong resistance. In 2001, the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act was introduced in Congress to offer legal residency to undocumented youth – now often referred to as DREAMers – who arrived before the age of 16 and met other requirements. But it has languished due to political pressure, despite widespread bipartisan support.
And DACA is an imperfect Band-Aid, Gonzales adds
DACA is making a difference. In the past three years, about 650,000 youth and young adults have obtained DACA status, Gonzales says, and now have social security numbers, work permits, and drivers’ licenses in states that allow them to drive, which opens up their prospects. “What Roberto says in his research and what many know intuitively is that undocumented youth have terrible prospects if they don’t graduate high school or only graduate high school, and that they have much better prospects if they can get through that transition to college,” Willemsen says. “DACA has really enabled that.”
But only half the eligible population has applied for DACA, Gonzales says. Moreover, an entire generation of these youth was lost before it was enacted; the intended beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, now in their late 20s or early 30s, have aged out of DACA eligibility. Applicants must pay a $465 fee to apply and reapply every two years, a prohibitive cost for many. And with a huge backlog at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of applications and renewals, young people can get caught in a legal limbo, their work permits in question as they await reissuance.
And DACA has very powerful opponents. On May 26, a federal appeals court refused to expand DACA to include the generation that missed out on it, and, as an executive order, DACA could be rescinded by the next U.
“If someone who’s against DACA is elected, we’ll revert back to our previous status, which is kind of a terrifying thought,” says Ilian Meza-Pena, an undocumented Harvard College student from Mexico who’s lived in the San Francisco area since age 3.
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Nor does DACA address financial aid for education. “That’s huge,” says Gonzales, who teaches Contemporary Immigration Policy and Educational Practice at the Ed School while working on his DACA project. “Upwards of 70 percent of American students receive some form of financial aid, and when arguably your most vulnerable students have no or limited access to that, it’s problematic.”
