Terrence Park arrived at the University of California at Berkeley as a transfer student in the fall of 2011 with a keen interest in the sciences. He was, he says, “desperate” for the chance to do research at an institution that is world-famous for it.
But there was one problem. Mr. Park, who came to the United States from South Korea at age 10 with his mother and two younger sisters, lacked immigration papers. That meant he couldn’t hold a paying research job on the campus.
Before long, he learned about a forthcoming program designed to help immigrant students just like him. He met Meng So, director of the new Undocumented Student Program and, at that time, its sole employee. Mr. So, a Berkeley alumnus, was well positioned to understand the perspectives of immigrant students: Now a U.S. citizen, he was born in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border after his family fled Cambodia in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. He was brought to the United States at age 3.
Mr. Park, eager for guidance on campus, began visiting the program director regularly.
At the heart of Berkeley’s program, which began in 2012 and is among the first of its kind in the nation, is academic counseling. But the program also has other components, meant to respond to the spectrum of these students’ needs: Legal support to help them understand shifting state and federal policies on immigration. Information and guidance on how to get scholarships and financial aid. A campus-referral network to connect students with mental-health and other services. Training workshops for faculty and staff members to learn more about immigrant students and become their allies.
More than anything, the center is a place for immigrant students to call home.
“We firmly believe that once the university admits a student,
it’s the responsibility of the university to fully support that student.”
“They’ve been taught to be underground and be invisible,” Mr. So says. “That’s where we intervene. We firmly believe that once the university admits a student, it’s the responsibility of the university to fully support that student.”
The landscape for immigrant students has changed in the relatively short time since Berkeley’s program began. The failure in late 2010 of the federal Dream Act—which would have granted permanent residency to immigrants who are in the country illegally but were brought here as young children—has prompted many states to enact their own legislation. The California Dream Act was passed in 2011, allowing students who are in the United States illegally to apply for state financial aid at public institutions. (State lawmakers had adopted a law in 2001 permitting such students, if they meet certain requirements, to receive in-state tuition rates.) Federal financial aid is still off-limits, though.
And in 2012, the federal government rolled out a new “deferred action” policy, allowing some immigrants who came to the United States as children to obtain federal work permits and temporarily avoid deportation.
Meanwhile, the “Dreamers,” as this generation of immigrants is known, have formed an increasingly energetic grass-roots movement. In many states they are advocating for in-state tuition rates and changes in federal immigration policies, and urging one another to identify themselves publicly as undocumented and “come out of the shadows.”
Berkeley’s program is adapting to those shifts. Where it once helped students identify private scholarships, for instance, now it strives to find internships and jobs for those who two years ago wouldn’t have been eligible for them. Jessica Lopez, a 2012 graduate who helped create the program as an undergraduate, says there is a danger in forgetting that not everyone qualifies for deferred action or in-state rates. “But they still dream of graduating from the No. 1 public university in the world,” she says.
Back in 2010, when Berkeley officials first realized that a special program might be necessary for the campus’s immigrant students, there were two key problems, says Gibor Basri, vice chancellor for equity and inclusion. One was financial, the other cultural.
The students had no real way of getting financial support from the university until the California Dream Act passed, he says. “And on the campus, students were afraid to identify themselves. They couldn’t do certain things other students could do, and the staff didn’t understand or didn’t know about the issues around undocumented students, so they weren’t particularly helpful, either.”
Mr. Basri created a panel responsible for articulating the needs of students who are in the country illegally, and coming up with recommendations to help meet their needs. Among other findings, the group concluded that Berkeley lacked a central clearinghouse of information for immigrant students. Nor did it have a point person who could advise them. The campus climate, meanwhile, was “at times uninformed, ambivalent, or hostile,” toward the students, the panel’s 2011 report said.
In several pages of recommendations, the group suggested, for starters, that the university create a position—eventually filled by Mr. So—to support immigrant students from the time they are admitted until they graduate. And the group directed the university to use its visibility to advocate for legislative changes at the state and federal levels that would improve college access for immigrant students.
Three years later, the program is in full swing and is helping the university to better understand these students. When the panel first met, for instance, its members reported that they had little sense of how many students enrolled at Berkeley were in the country illegally. Today, they know there are about 300 such students, from more than 30 countries, including Mexico, South Korea, the Philippines, and El Salvador.
Mr. So introduced Mr. Park—who enrolled at Berkeley as a junior because he had accumulated credits from attending community college and another university—to a group of alumni who had set up research opportunities specifically for students who are in the country illegally. Mr. Park began working as a research assistant at Asian Health Services, a community-health center in nearby Oakland, exploring such topics as smoking cessation and behavioral health. He also began to think about graduate school.
Berkeley’s approach has drawn national attention. Over the past year or two, dozens of colleges in states across the country—among them Illinois, Michigan, Texas, Washington—have contacted Mr. So wanting to know how they can replicate the program on their own campuses. Closer to home, California State University at Fullerton opened its “Dreamers Resource Center” last month.
But there are continuing challenges. Faculty and staff members aren’t always aware of broader changes like the federal deferred-action policy, and how those developments determine what opportunities are available to students, Mr. So says. “Our students would get stuck in that learning curve that the institution was working its way through,” he says.
Although recent state and federal policy changes are helping to meet many students’ basic financial needs, other challenges have emerged: How does Berkeley tend to students’ mental-health needs? Help “Dreamers” who return to finish their degrees now that financial aid is available? Support graduate students?
When Mr. Park began applying to graduate school, it was Mr. So who helped him decide whether to reveal his immigration status in his applications to graduate school. In the end, he stated it plainly.
“It’s part of my life,” Mr. Park says. “Because of those difficulties, that’s where I am right now.”
The Undocumented Student Program helped him with one more thing, he says. When the deferred-action program took effect, Mr. Park applied, with the help of the university’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, and received an identification card from the federal government. He had always assumed that if he went to graduate school on the East Coast, he’d have to drive there all the way from Berkeley. With no papers, he would never be able to board an airplane.
Instead, for the first time, with his ID card, he flew. He’s now studying for a master’s degree in biostatistics at Harvard University.