Undocumented College Students Research Articles

Critical consciousness among undocumented immigrant college students: Responding to cultural stress and psychological distress.

Cultural stress is experienced by undocumented students when they encounter discrimination in higher education and society. In response, undocumented students engage in critical consciousness, while simultaneously experiencing psychological distress. A conceptual model is introduced to describe the links between cultural stress, critical consciousness development, and psychological distress. One hundred seventy-one undocumented college students were recruited to participate in this study and completed measures of cultural stress (discrimination). They also completed measures of psychological distress, critical consciousness, and social justice self-efficacy and outcome expectations. The proposed model was tested for global fit and path analysis in structural equation modeling. Indirect effects were probed to assess the mediating role of critical consciousness and psychological distress. The model fit the data excellently. Greater discrimination was associated with higher critical consciousness, which in turn was associated with elevated social justice self-efficacy and outcome expectations. Additionally, higher discrimination was also linked to greater psychological distress. The link between cultural stress and critical consciousness was not explained by psychological distress. This research expands theory by articulating the adaptive ways undocumented students respond to the conditions that cause cultural stress and psychological distress. This aligns with a growing literature documenting the psychology of undocumented immigrants' activism and advocacy. Findings may inform interventions by higher education institutional agents and research to offset cultural stress and psychological distress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Advancing advocacy communication theory: a theory grounded in undocumented college students’ motivations and strategies for challenging oppression

ABSTRACT Undocumented college students experience a myriad of stressors (e.g. fear of deportation, limited access to educational resources; Enriquez, Morales Hernandez & Ro. 2018. Deconstructing immigrant illegality: A mixed-methods investigation of stress and health among undocumented college students. Race and Social Problems, 10(3), 193–208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-018-9242-4) because of systemic oppression, and they often engage in various advocacy efforts to challenge those oppressive systems. Although different persuasion (e.g. Reasoned Action Approach, Anger Activism Model; Fishbein & Ajzen. 2010. Predicting and changing behavior: The reasoned action approach. Psychology Press; Turner. 2007. Using emotion in risk communication: The anger activism model. Public Relations Review, 33(2), 114–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2006.11.013) and social movements theories (e.g. Mass Society Theory; Theory of Relative Deprivation; Bernstein & Crosby. 1980. An empirical examination of relative deprivation theory. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16(5), 442–456. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(80)90050-5) can describe why minoritized group members advocate on behalf of their ingroup, these theories primarily focus on traditional advocacy efforts. rather than representing advocacy as multidimensional. Consequently, this paper introduces Advocacy Communication Theory (ACT), which argues that advocacy communication is a complex and multidimentional process consisting of advocacy strategies at the individual, interpersonal, community, organizational, and policy levels. ACT also identifies predictors of advocacy communication by drawing from communication and psychological factors, and it discusses the potential health implications associated with engaging in advocacy communication.

Mental health help-seeking among Latina/o/x undocumented college students.

Informed by a social-ecological framework, this study nested undocumented students' individual mental health needs within micro-level campus factors and the macro-level immigration policy context to examine how these are associated with undocumented Latina/o/x college students' use of on-campus mental health services. A large-scale survey was administered to 1,277 undocumented college students attending 4-year public universities in California. Only Latina/o/x respondents were included in this study (N = 1,181). Fifty percent of students attended a UC system (n = 589). On average, students were 21.84 years old (SE = .15), and most were women (75.3%, n = 890). Greater level of mental health symptoms and perceived mental health need, and greater use of campus-wide resources and undocumented student services predicted greater likelihood of using on-campus mental health services. Greater perceptions of social exclusion due to the immigration policy context predicted lower use of mental health services. Results indicate that a greater use of resources and an inclusive campus environment, as well as efforts to minimize policy-related feelings of social exclusion, may facilitate undocumented students' professional mental health help-seeking. These findings emphasize the need to take multiple and multi-level ecological factors into account when considering mental health service use, particularly in the case of undocumented immigrants and likely other structurally marginalized groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Centering Agency: Examining the Relationship Between Acts of Resistance, Anxiety, and Depression Among Undocumented College Students

Research has established that legal vulnerability has detrimental consequences for the mental health of undocumented individuals. The purpose of our study is to consider how practicing agency is associated with mental health in the face of such structural marginalization. To meet this goal, we conceptualize actions taken to resist structural inequality as acts of resistance to center immigrants’ agency in navigating and contesting their marginalization. Drawing on survey data with California undocumented college students, we examine to what extent engaging in three acts of resistance is associated with depression and anxiety symptomatology. We find that students with higher rates of political engagement and critical consciousness raising report higher depression and anxiety symptomatology. Findings suggest that structural approaches to studying mental health must also consider immigrants’ agency and efforts to navigate, respond to, and challenge their marginalization.

Dismissed, Dormant, and Deep-rooted Immigration Distractions and Undocumented College Students’ Academic Experiences

Evolving or stagnant immigration laws and policies may distinctly shape the experiences of undocumented students by shifting access to rights or opportunities. I draw upon 30 interviews with college students in California to analyze how they encountered legal vulnerability. I argue that legal vulnerability can be dismissed, dormant, or deep-rooted, producing contrasting experiences. Inclusive state and institutional policies set the stage for some students to dismiss legal vulnerability and decouple vulnerability from their academic experiences. However, most encountered dormant legal vulnerability through awakened racist xenophobia following the 2016 presidential election and deep-rooted legal vulnerability via persistent uncertainty about their futures or worries over family. Distracted students lost focus, motivation, and study time, which impacted their classroom participation and overall academic performance. Yet, they attempted to improve their academic engagement with limited effectiveness. Altogether, I theorize the relationship between different types of legal vulnerability and undocumented students’ college experiences.

Where Do I Go from Here? Examining the Transition of Undocumented Students Graduating from College

ABSTRACT In this longitudinal qualitative study, we examined how 23 undocumented college students with and without DACA navigated the college graduation process and transitioned out of higher education. Despite the growing number of undocumented students with and without DACA enrolling and graduating from college over the past 10 years, few studies have been conducted about this significant life event that can involve numerous new challenges and opportunities for them. We used Schlossberg’s (2008) transition theory to design the study and analyze our data. We found that undocumented students with and without DACA perceived their transition out of higher education as an expected change with unanticipated conditions and non-events out of their control. Surprisingly, the data showed that having DACA did not translate into more stability for participants at the time of graduation. The uncertainty connected to participants’ immigration status, coupled with the ambiguous sociopolitical climate and the COVID-19 pandemic, continuously created unpredictable situations that clouded their ability to navigate the changes with confidence. In this article we present our findings through two in-depth participant narratives to bolster humanizing and counterstorytelling practices in higher education scholarship. We offer implication for research, policy, and practice.

Are dreams contagious? Peer effects of undocumented college students

ABSTRACT As a result of systemic barriers, undocumented immigrants are more likely to enroll in community colleges and to enter these institutions with higher prior academic achievement than their peers. I explore the potential spillover benefits of this hyperselection on other students using data from a large community college system and two identification strategies. Fixed effects models show the share of undocumented students in a course is associated with improved outcomes among U.S. citizen students. This peer effect declines after the California DREAM Act policy broadened college access and reduced hyperselection among the undocumented student population.

Testing advocacy communication theory among undocumented college students using latent profile analysis

ABSTRACT Undocumented college students face systemic oppression, which they challenge through advocacy. Often, research focuses on one type of advocacy, but Advocacy Communication Theory (ACT) conceptualizes advocacy as multidimensional – minoritized people can engage in communicative strategies at the interpersonal, mediated, community, organizational, and policy levels to challenge oppression. Here, we used three waves of longitudinal survey data from 366 undocumented students, primarily of Latine origin, and conducted latent profile analyses. We found four advocacy communication profiles: Infrequent, Interpersonal, Organizational, and Frequent Advocators. The more students observed their family engage in undocumented advocacy, and the more students saw negative media depictions of undocumented immigrants, the more likely students were to be frequent advocators than infrequent advocators. Our findings support ACT's propositions.

Institutional agents’ perspectives of institutional support for undocumented and DACA community college students

AbstractGiven that community colleges enroll most of the undocumented and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) students across the nation, there is an economic and moral imperative to understand how the sociopolitical environment has shifted educational opportunities for undocumented and DACA students. This paper unveils how institutional agents use their agency to shape the college community college experiences of undocumented and DACA students. Findings include institutional agents’ perspectives on navigating challenges, resistance, and virtues in the current sociopolitical climate. Recommendations are discussed to enhance humanizing and holistic institutional support for DACA and undocumented college students, as well as a proposed undocuservingness framework.Practical Takeaways It is important for insititutional agents to use legal and racial consciouness to better serve undocumented and DACA students. Hispanic Serving Community Colleges need to unpack servingness within the context of supporting undocumented and DACA students

UndocuCare: Strategies for mental health services that affirm undocumented college students’ psychological needs

AbstractThere are an estimated 427,000 undocumented college students enrolled in higher education. Undocumented college students encounter unique challenges associated with their precarious immigration status that impacts their psychological well‐being. In this article, we contextualize the mental health of undocumented college students and the role of college mental health services and professionals in supporting college students’ psychological well‐being. We end with recommendations and, in some cases, examples for campus mental health services, college counseling professionals, and counseling‐related preparation programs to develop policies and practices that affirm and support the mental health of undocumented college students.Practical Takeaways Undocumented college students face a higher education landscape that is riddled with discriminatory public policies and college environments that largely neglect their specific needs and fail to promote their success. Immigration policies shape the well‐being of immigrant students by way of immigration status. For instance, college students with precarious immigration status (lacking access to permanent legal protections) have been found to have lower psychosocial well‐being compared to groups with more secure or permanent statuses (i.e., naturalized citizens). College mental health services are paramount in developing strategies and efforts that affirm the specific psychological needs of undocumented college students. We provide recommendations for higher education institutions in three areas: campus mental health services, college counseling professionals (developing cultural competency for mental health services with undocumented students, engaging in structural changes to affirm undocumented students’ mental health, holding broader campus initiatives to advocate for immigrant rights), and counseling‐related preparation programs.

Constructing Anthropological Expertise: Community Support and Legal Partnership in Transgender Cases

ABSTRACT Anthropologists working with marginalised populations in need of legal representation have faced challenges spanning epistemological, methodological and ethical questions. In the provision of evidence to legal-administrative processes, how do we overcome some of the obstacles in solving these problems? In this paper, we discuss our experience working through the case of a transgender asylum seeker from Mexico in the United States and the case of socio-cultural and legal concerns of a transgender youth in Los Angeles. The three partners in this paper are a socio-cultural anthropologist (Ngin), an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles (Yeh) and a community professional who works extensively with undocumented college students (Borjon). In Ngin’s preparation of the cultural argument for the asylum case of the transgender person, it was Borjon’s network of community contacts that provided the additional evidence for the case. As the case was delayed in the legal process, Attorney Yeh’s legal insight explains the best course of action for the petitioner. In the second case of the young transgender youth, we discussed the precarity of the youth’s situation and the possibility of socio-legal protection. In our analysis of these two cases, we discussed how we arrived at legally sound concepts with evidence supported by anthropological analytical methods while ensuring transparency of the provenance of evidence to meet ethical principles. Through these consultations in the construction of anthropological expertise, we also hope to decolonise expertise.

Heterogeneous Effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on Undocumented College Students’ Educational Outcomes

We investigate why prior studies examining the effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on undocumented youth's college outcomes in the United States have yielded mixed findings. We draw on unique administrative data from the City University of New York at the time of DACA's implementation and utilize difference-in-difference estimation to examine DACA's effects on undocumented students’ college GPA and interruptions to their college progress. We find that DACA's effects on the educational outcomes of undocumented students enrolled in college were heterogeneous: It had a negative effect on those who, prior to the policy, were academically high performing and taking on a heavy courseload, while it had no significant impact on low academic performers and those maintaining a light courseload. We offer a plausible explanation for this finding: DACA's newfound legal employment opportunities may have incentivized undocumented youth who were previously focused on schooling to seek out employment. In contrast, DACA may have had little impact on low achievers because they were more likely to be already working. While our study is unable to directly identify employment status, our finding that academically achieving students were negatively affected by DACA suggests that the liminal legality experienced by undocumented 1.5-generation youth has a substantive impact on their educational integration and assimilation trajectories. We contend that stopgap programs like DACA that offer contingent rights do not result in unalloyed positive benefits because they do not address undocumented youth's underlying legal precarity.

Enacting resilience at multiple levels during the COVID-19 pandemic: exploring communication theory of resilience for U.S. undocumented college students

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 pandemic, college students faced a number of stressors that threatened their health and well-being. Undocumented college students faced similar stressors and additional ones that were unique to their immigration status. Drawing from communication theory of resilience, we conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with Mexican-origin undocumented college students in California. Our findings extended past research on the communication theory of resilience by identifying triggers that motivated undocumented students to enact resilience at multiple levels. Undocumented students reported (a) individual, interpersonal, institutional, and policy-level constraints that constantly threatened their health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic; (b) how they enacted resilience at those multiple levels; and (c) how their undocumented status was a source of stress but also a source of empowerment.

Latina/o/x undocumented college students’ perceived barriers and motivations for talking to a campus mental health professional: A focus on communication, culture, and structural barriers

ABSTRACT Although undocumented students face numerous stressors that can lead to mental health strain, they often underutilize their campus mental health services. To identify the barriers and motivations for talking to a campus mental health professional (MHP) and to extend the Health Belief Model (HBM), we conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 Latina/o/x undocumented college students. Family communication revealed views that undermined talking to an MHP, but that were deeply rooted in culture and immigration; having to prioritize basic needs; and growing up in an environment where mental health services were unavailable. Our findings reveal important communication, cultural, and structural elements that should be emphasized in the HBM when explicating Latina/o/x undocumented students' beliefs and behaviors about talking to an MHP.

The Influence of the Trump Era on Sustaining Whiteness through Imperialist Reclamation on College Campuses: How Undocumented Students Experience the Normalization of Racist Nativism

On 5 September 2017, the Trump administration decided to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Action (DACA) policy, impacting over 800,000 recipients, and more colleges and universities witnessed a heightened sense of emboldened racism in college environments. This paper draws from focus groups with undocumented college students on how the Trump era influenced campus climate. We found that imperialist reclamation of whiteness acts targeting undocumented students was commonplace on college campuses, ultimately impacting students’ behavior and academic engagement in and outside the classroom.

Exploring an Asset-Based Approach to Aspirational Capital Among Undocumented Latinx College Students

:To inform higher education and student affairs (HESA) professionals who work with college students outside of the classroom, we asked the research question: How do undocumented Latinx college students use aspirational capital to navigate higher education? Aspirational capital is the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future in the face of real and perceived barriers and is one form of community cultural wealth (CCW), which offers an assets-based understanding of how Students of Color in educational settings share knowledge accumulated within their communities (Yosso, 2005). We analyzed data from semi-structured interviews with 16 undocumented Latinx college students from four-year institutions of higher education throughout the US. Participant narratives reflected aspirational capital in their future orientation despite the extreme uncertainty they faced regarding immigration status-related challenges. Participants demonstrated a sense of purpose through perseverance, faith, and helping others, and they exhibited high educational and career aspirations focused on giving back to others. Implications provide insight for HESA educators to proactively serve undocumented students, including building knowledge communities and networks and updating graduate preparation programs. These recommendations can help HESA educators explore ways to support undocumented college students with a focus on their aspirational capital.

Undocufriendly ≠ undocuserving: Undocumented college students’ perceptions of institutional support.

Undocufriendly ≠ undocuserving: Undocumented college students’ perceptions of institutional support.

“They Didn’t Know What to Tell Me”: Supporting Undocumented College Students

Using data from 40 qualitative interviews with undocumented immigrant students, this article explores the experiences of undocumented students in seeking help applying to and navigating college. Participants reported mixed experiences---some received incorrect information about the options available to them or immigration policies, whereas others found robust information about their options and forged connections with organizations for undocumented students. These findings illuminate new structural and interpersonal mechanisms for supporting undocumented students.

A latent profile analysis of U.S. undocumented college students’ advocacy communication strategies and its relationship with health

ABSTRACT Undocumented youth engage in advocacy efforts to improve their social conditions. Deploying an expanded definition of advocacy communication, this study (a) examined the heterogeneity of undocumented collegestudents' advocacy communication by identifying profiles of undocumented college students based on their participation in various advocacy communication strategies and (b) examined how these advocacy profiles are associated with health (i.e. anxiety, depression, and self-rated health). Latent profile analysis of 1277 California undocumented, mostly Latina/o/x, college students identified four profiles. Frequent advocators had lower levels of self-rated health and higher levels of anxiety and depression than infrequent advocators. Media advocators reported higher levels of anxiety and depression than infrequent advocators. Finally, organizational advocators reported lower levels of anxiety than media advocators and frequent advocators. Our study advances research on the relationship between advocacy communication and health. We provide suggestions that university staff and programs can take to support undocumented students' advocacy efforts and health.

Managing Illegality on Campus: Undocumented Mismatch Between Students and Staff

Contributing to the literature on the institutional experiences of undocumented youth, this article by Holly E. Reed, Sofya Aptekar, and Amy Hsin explores undocumented and “DACAmented” students’ experiences managing their illegality on campus and how college staff and faculty manage that illegality while organizing programs and support. Their analysis of in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with more than one hundred undocumented college students and former students and thirty-five faculty and staff members at the City University of New York identifies multiple points of tension. The “undocumented mismatch” between campus management of illegality and student experiences was evident in the exclusion and alienation of non-Latinx undocumented students, stress around legal status disclosure, and challenges around the issue of data confidentiality.