immigration status anxiety affects latina school performance

Immigration Status: Hispanic students’ anxiety about immigration status of themselves and their parents causes a distraction that can affect schoolwork. In their book Learning a New Land: Immigrant students in American Society, Carola and Marcel

Suarez-Orozcos describe how a good student realized undocumented status made college financially impossible:

I was brought over to the United States when I was seven years old… I did very well in high school and worked incredibly hard. I was on the, lacrosse team, key club member… I was enrolled in honors English, honors science, AP American history and advanced French. I had worked my entire life to accomplish all of that, but when time came for me to apply to college everything changed. I had expected to be able to receive a scholarship to attend college, but found out my junior year of high school that illegal immigrants aren’t eligible for scholarships. So while all of my friends went off to school, I have been stuck in my hometown desperately trying to find a way to live the American dream.

The NWLC/MALDEF study points out that undocumented status alone can’t account for drop-out rates. Ninety-one percent of Latino youth in the US are native-born. But almost 3 million Latino children have undocumented parents. Stress from living in a “mixed status family” can hurt educational achievement. An interviewed school staffer described the gradual disengagement of undocumented students as they gradually understood their predicament:

Sometimes kids don’t always know that they’re undocumented, in middle school they are starting to figure it out, but they don’t really understand. It’s a hard thing to comprehend…[But some kids are] worried about being called by Immigration – they are sometimes not allowed to answer the door and stuff in case it’s a raid. They are living in fear.

Students weigh the value of working hard in high school with the unlikelyhood of being able to afford a college education, and then the lack-of-status that would prevent them from working in a higher paying job:

A lot of kids have a hard time because they feel like, what’s the point, I work in the field now and I’m going to end up working in the field, because they can’t get other, better jobs because they don’t have immigration status. These kids are aware, they know exactly what’s going on – the problem is that the mainstream community does not understand.