Gregorio Montes de Oca’s college career has been bookended by virulent debates over illegal immigration.
As a freshman, he joined other students in marching more than 10 miles from Arizona State University’s campus here to the state Capitol, in Phoenix, to protest Proposition 300, a ballot measure to bar undocumented immigrants from qualifying for in-state tuition or receiving state financial aid. When the measure passed, with 72 percent of the vote, he was “really let down,” but he didn’t stop being an activist.
This spring, just days before he took his final exams as a graduating senior, Mr. Montes de Oca joined eight other students in chaining themselves to the Capitol’s doors. This time they were marking their opposition to a new law that expands the state’s role in immigration enforcement. The “Capitol Nine” were arrested, although the charges were later dropped because they had been incorrectly filed.
Mr. Montes de Oca was born in the United States, but his parents, migrant workers, came to the country from Mexico illegally and received citizenship through a Reagan-era amnesty plan. His fellow students, he says, “shouldn’t have to worry about getting deported on the way to class.”
If Mr. Montes de Oca has spent nearly as much time over the past four years on political action as he has on his double major, in political science and Chicano studies, it is because Arizona has been ground zero in the heated national immigration debate. The latest law, which allows police to check the immigration status of people they suspect are illegal immigrants when they have been stopped for another reason, is set to take effect July 29, barring the success of court challenges—of which there are many. The federal government is among those filing suit.
While the measure, unlike Proposition 300, is not specifically directed at students, the response to it on Arizona campuses is indicative of how colleges, in the state and elsewhere, have become a fulcrum in the dispute over how to tackle the country’s immigration concerns.
A three-decades-old U.S. Supreme Court decision prevents elementary and secondary schools from considering immigration status when students seek to enroll. Because the ruling does not apply to colleges, they have become a flashpoint, both for those who want to extend benefits to undocumented students and for those who want to block them.
In Arizona, the steady stream of controversy could also prove to be a blow to the state’s higher-education brand, undercutting the ambitions of its research universities to position themselves as world-class—as well as diverse and welcoming—institutions.
There is little evidence thus far that the latest measure has affected college recruitment. But it has sparked worries that it could scare off promising minority and international students and scholars, fearful of becoming targets, as one student activist put it, for being “a little bit brown.”
The cumulative effect of the intimidation that some associate with Arizona’s immigration measures could also be a setback for a state that very much needs to build up its economy through education as its Hispanic population explodes. Between 2000 and 2006, the number of Hispanic residents in the state swelled 20 percent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, far faster than the national growth rate of 6 percent.
Negative reactions to Arizona’s anti-immigration measures can frame students’ thinking about the state, says Angel Cabrera, president of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, an international business school located in Glendale, outside Phoenix.
“If I had to buy the amount of positive press to counteract the amount of negative attention that Arizona has attracted because of the law,” Mr. Cabrera says, “it could get very expensive.”
A Fault Line
Mexican migrants have been finding their way north, legally and otherwise, for generations. Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, chairman of the department of transborder Chicano and Latino studies at Arizona State, points to a map of “New Spain” in his office, dating back to the middle of the 18th century. Even the migration routes were the same, he says.
Likewise, says Mr. Vélez-Ibáñez, an anthropologist, episodes of anti-immigrant sentiment are also cyclical, frequently tied to economic hard times. During the 1930s, for example, more than a million people of Mexican descent were deported from the United States, including some who were legal residents or American citizens. Many returned a decade later during the economic boom set off by World War II, Mr. Vélez-Ibáñez says.
Most of the recent crop of immigrants who have crossed the border into Arizona were hired as cheap labor on the construction projects that have transformed Phoenix and its suburbs.
Nor is Arizona alone in engaging in a state-level debate over immigration, a situation that is, people on all sides of the issue agree, in large part the result of inaction by Washington. Some 20 other states are considering measures similar to the new Arizona statute, which is commonly known by its bill number, SB 1070.
A host of states have wrestled specifically with how to deal with undocumented immigrants enrolled in public colleges. The North Carolina community-college system has changed its policy regarding undocumented students five times over the past decade, most recently reversing a ban on admitting such students. In California the Legislature has repeatedly passed a bill to make some undocumented students eligible for the state’s need-based financial-aid program—and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed it again and again.
In fact, measures to either provide or prohibit in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants have been introduced in at least half of all statehouses over the past three legislative sessions.
The latest hot spot is Georgia, where the State Board of Regents appointed a committee to examine its colleges’ methods of verifying students’ immigration status after a Kennesaw State University student, stopped by police for a traffic violation, was discovered to be in the United States illegally. The student had been paying in-state tuition instead of the higher out-of-state rate, as required by Georgia law.
Still, nowhere has the debate been as fierce or as sustained as in Arizona, where a racial and generational fault line has opened between the two groups that have helped make Arizona one of the country’s fastest-growing states: retirees and Hispanic immigrants. Over the last few years, in addition to Proposition 300 and SB 1070, Arizona lawmakers have considered or approved legislation to make English the state’s official language, to bar ethnic studies in public schools, and to penalize employers who hire undocumented workers, among other bills. This fall residents will vote on a ballot measure to outlaw affirmative action in employment and education.
“It’s a big hurt on our kids,” says Mr. Vélez-Ibáñez. “It’s a rise of nastiness.”
He pauses, eyes wet. “Not only do I find it reprehensible,” he says, “I really resent it.”
‘Immeasurable’ Impact
On a triple-digit day near the start of the summer term, Arizona State’s sun-drenched campus here hardly looks like the setting for a political and cultural grudge match. An occasional skateboarder languidly rolls by, while the few pedestrians out and about loiter in the shade or scuttle quickly indoors.
The latest immigration measure was approved during the waning days of spring semester, and, in some ways, the response to it appears to have been blunted by timing, swallowed up by term papers, final exams, and graduation. While students like Mr. Montes de Oca have been among the most vocal protesters at public demonstrations, reaction on college campuses was largely muted.
Indeed, perhaps the most visible campus incident following the bill’s passage was the arrest of two men, one an Arizona State student, for impersonating police officers and demanding that students entering a dormitory produce identification to prove their immigration status.
At Arizona State’s Polytechnic campus, in Mesa, student-government leaders opted not to take a position on the legislation, says Matthew McCoy, a graduate student in aviation safety who was student-body president during the past academic year. “It’s an issue that divides people,” he says.
Even some Hispanic students say they have mixed feelings about the statute. Sarah Simpson is a sophomore from just outside Nogales, a border city where economic and social life on the two sides of the line are intertwined.
“I don’t know what to think about it,” she says of the law. “I can understand both sides, definitely. Everyone’s saying it’s going to be racial profiling, but I haven’t seen it yet.”
Michael M. Crow, Arizona State’s president, publicly opposed the measure. But he says he expects it will have little effect on colleges. Arizona State will train the campus police to be able to properly enforce the law, he says, but he otherwise anticipates “no material difference” to the university.
In fact, applications and enrollments appear to be up across Arizona’s public two- and four-year colleges. At the University of Arizona, Paul Kohn, who was until recently the associate vice president for student affairs and dean of admissions, says he has received a few angry letters from parents who oppose the law, asking him to remove their children from the institution’s mailing list of prospective students. But overall applications increased, and Mr. Kohn estimates nearly 1,500 students out of the 7,000-member freshman class will be Latino, a 12-percent increase over the year before.
By contrast, the earlier Proposition 300 had a direct influence on public colleges’ policy and practice, requiring them to review students’ immigration status to determine their eligibility for financial aid and in-state tuition.
Although just a handful of the University of Arizona’s 37,000 or so students were found to be incorrectly classified as Arizona residents, Mr. Kohn says the proposition’s impact has been “immeasurable” because its very existence may have dissuaded many undocumented students from applying in the first place.
“We can’t count who isn’t here,” the admissions dean says. A legislative report issued shortly after the measure took effect found that about 5,000 students statewide, including those enrolled in adult-education programs, were denied academic benefits. But the number has dropped since then, and by the fall of 2009, just 827 students were refused aid.
In the wake of Proposition 300, Arizona State ran afoul of state officials when the university’s foundation gave out private scholarships to undocumented students. Ever since, any financial aid for these students has come from outside sources.
And that support is limited. Florencio Zaragoza runs Fundación México, based in Tucson. Each year the private foundation gives scholarships to five undocumented students. The awards are worth just $500 a semester, not enough to pay even community-college tuition. The group does not publicize the awards, Mr. Zaragoza says, because it does not have enough money to meet the need.
“Maybe all we do is keep students in college for a little bit more,” he says.
At South Mountain Community College, in the Maricopa County Community College District, advisers have encouraged undocumented students to cut back on their course loads to save money or to take advantage of installment plans to pay tuition over time. The message the college tries to send, says Inez Moreno-Weinert, director of financial aid, is that the students are still welcome at South Mountain, even with the legal changes.
That message, though, hasn’t always gotten through. With at least 60 percent of its students coming from underrepresented minority groups, South Mountain is the most diverse of the Maricopa community colleges. Enrollment in the college’s English-as-a-second-language courses declined by a third after Proposition 300, dipping from 296 in the fall of 2006 to 194 in the fall of 2007.
Undocumented immigrants were not the only ones staying away. Participation in some of the college’s noncredit courses dropped off after residents of the district’s more-affluent communities balked at having to “produce ID to take a Pilates class,” says Raul M. Sandoval, interim vice president for student affairs. “We had folks say, ‘This is ridiculous. This law wasn’t intended for me.’”
A Matter of Perception
Mr. Sandoval says he is concerned about how the latest measure, SB 1070, will be put into practice and whether college employees could ultimately be held responsible for enforcing it or future immigration laws.
“Are we going to become the police?” Mr. Sandoval asks.
South Mountain’s ESL instructors are reaching out to students to reassure them. “I know they’re afraid,” says Steven J. Fountaine, head of the English-language program, who says he hears rumors of whole families planning to leave the state if the law goes into effect. “The truth is, there’s a lot of confusion as to what it means. People are waiting, waiting, waiting to see what will happen.”
Not everyone is willing to wait, though. Already, four Mexican universities have severed official ties with the University of Arizona over the law, and two international conferences slated for Tucson have been moved.
Javier Duran, an associate professor of Spanish and border studies at the university, says he was barraged with questions about SB 1070 during two recent visits to Mexico. Some of his Mexican colleagues, he says, were urging researchers to boycott the state.
The bill’s passage this spring occurred right at the end of the academic hiring cycle, so its impact on faculty recruitment is unclear.
At Arizona State, fewer than a dozen job applicants have withdrawn since the bill passed, out of some 5,000 hopefuls for 80 open positions, says Mark Searle, vice president for academic personnel. More than of a third of the university’s new hires are racial or ethnic minorities, he says.
Mr. Crow, Arizona State’s president, says he believes prospective faculty members and students make the distinction between the state and the university. “Yes, we have to spend a lot more time explaining ourselves,” he says, “but I think they know our commitment to openness and diversity.”
However, one Arizona State job candidate, a second-generation Mexican-American, says she turned down a position in the university’s department of transborder Chicano and Latino studies because of the new law. She asked not to be identified because her colleagues, at another public university in the Southwest, don’t know she has applied for other jobs.
“I never thought something like this would be a factor in my decision,” says the woman, who was in Tempe for her final interview when she learned about the legislation’s passage on television. “I started to think about my two kids. What would life be like for them?
“It’s one thing to deal with the heat physically,” she says. “It’s another to feel the heat because of the color of your skin.”
At the University of Arizona, Robert N. Shelton, the president, says the Hispanic candidates for a senior vice president slot there pulled out after the measure passed.
Mr. Shelton previously worked in the University of California system and says he saw firsthand the impact of a measure banning affirmative action in that state in the 1990s. It took the university system a decade to regain the diversity in its faculty and student body, he says. “Their impact on colleges could be significant,” Mr. Shelton says of the immigration measures, because the success of the university rests on being able to attract the best possible talent. Any action or legislation that scares away talent, he says, undermines the university.
Image matters for institutions like Arizona and Arizona State that have aspirations to be national universities, says David A. Longanecker, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. “It could be perceived to be a black mark,” Mr. Longanecker says.
But perceptions cut both ways, and public-college leaders have also been quick to say they will abide by the immigration law, which is supported by a majority of Arizonans. After all, colleges need the support of those same voters. Less than a month after the governor signed the immigration bill into law, Arizonans went to the polls to approve a sales tax that higher-education officials characterized as critical to stave off devastating budget cuts. The measure passed handily.
A New Arizona?
Dennis Hoffman, a professor of economics at Arizona State, argues that the sales-tax vote and the immigration measures, taken together, could actually augur well for the state’s public colleges. Both, he says, are evidence that Arizona residents are tired of an economy based disproportionately on cheap, often undocumented labor. Illegal immigrants accounted for 10 percent of the state’s work force in 2005, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, an unusually high share.
But making the shift to a more knowledge-based economy will require significant improvements in educational attainment, particularly among the state’s Hispanic population. There’s just a 30-percent chance that a high-school freshman in Arizona will enroll in college by age 19, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, trailing the national average of 42 percent. The hurdles are even greater for Hispanic young adults, only 18 percent of whom attend college; by contrast, 40 percent of white Arizonans age 18 to 24 years old do.
Improving those statistics, Mr. Hoffman says, will require the state to spend more money on, and pay more attention to, its public colleges.
“In the old Arizona, you didn’t need a lot of education,” Mr. Hoffman says. “In the new Arizona, you will.”
But Mr. Montes de Oca, the recent Arizona State graduate, says he has seen friends and classmates leave the university, and the state, because of immigration measures. An exodus of young, educated people, he says, could ultimately hurt Arizona.
“I hear people say, ‘Go back where you came from,’” he says. “But can the state afford that?”
