Undocumented Immigrants and Higher Education: Si Se Puede (review)

This volume is one of the dozen or so titles in the New Americans: Recent Immigration and Changes in American Society Series, edited for LFB by Steven J. Gold and Ruben G. Rumbaut, each of which focuses upon either a discrete immigrant group (Somali refugees, Jamaicans, etc.) or upon an immigration-related topic (nativism, educational attainment, etc).

This revised University of Texas dissertation in education by Alejandra Rincon, the National Director for University Alliances for the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, is a useful and broadly interesting work, by an insider/participant observer during the 2000–2001 enactment of the Texas statute. That law accorded undocumented college students in-state, resident tuition, the first state statute signed into law following the 1996 federal statute that allowed states to do so. As of Rincon's 2008 writing, 10 states have done so, while one state (Oklahoma) has rescinded its earlier statute by subsequent legislation.

This study has all the virtues and concomitant vices of insider participant observation: many inside-baseball details, access to fugitive documents and conversations, and rich storytelling—and the self-serving, if understandably human tendency to place oneself more at the center of the story than is accurate. A casual or even informed reader might believe that this issue arose because Rincon and a friendly Houston school counselor played Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney and dreamed up this circus.

Rincon places herself in many meetings and strategy sessions, in much of the correspondence, and in the pictures in this book, eclipsing even the formal legislators in the process (Reps. Rick Noriega and the late Irma Rangel). She seems unaware that the first testimony that Rep. Rangel heard on the topic occurred in April 1985, and that the Kingsville legislator was originally against revising residency laws, as she felt they would harm her Mexican American, citizen constituents.

A thorough search would also have discovered Richard Padilla's 1980s doctoral dissertation on the subject of residency determination in Texas, a careful study that polled Texas registrars on how they would treat undocumented and non-immigrant visa-holders in their admissions process and residency determination.

I am not being snarky when I suggest that Rincon does not recognize the many years of spadework in this Texas garden, although she errs in the other direction by seeing this movement, if I understand her correctly, as having its roots in the 1946 Mendez California desegregation case (p. 210). This history passes over Texas desegregation efforts such as the 1948 Delgado v. Bastrop or the Corpus Christi desegregation cases of the 1950s and 1960s, and also over the many other residency cases, such as those in New York, Arizona, and Illinois. In fairness, this is a very specialized legal history, but by taking these long-ago events into account, she has probably gone back much further than is necessary and farther afield.

In a certain sense, nothing matters before the 1996 federal restrictionist statutes, which have given rise to today's Sections 1621 and 1623. These are where the action is, and she does not always get these detailed issues entirely correct. She says that the Kansas case Day v. Sibelius is the "first legal challenge of in-state tuition laws since [2001]" (p. 146), but this labeling misses the Merten litigation in Virginia which predated Day. She mentions Merten in a footnote (p. 165), but does not fully apprehend its significance, perhaps because she cites a secondary source instead of the actual cases.

Inexplicably, she misspells Kris Kobach as Chris, although she refers to the several cases he has brought to challenge these statutes. She also does not refer to his legal scholarship in this area, although he is surely among the most influential restrictionist scholars and litigators seeking to roll back the clock.

These inconsistencies and takes on legal matters are too numerous to catalogue in this brief review, but they mar an otherwise estimable storytelling of this important and misunderstood subject. There...