Forms of exclusion: Undocumented students navigating financial aid and inclusion in the United States

Abstract

Excluded from public financial aid because of their immigration status, undocumented youth in the United States frequently depend on private schools’ merit‐based financial aid. This aid, which operates according to a neoliberal logic, provides them with a critical pathway to tertiary education and potentially to institutional and national inclusion. Yet this private‐sector inclusion ultimately harms their sense of public belonging, as shown by the experiences of undocumented Latino youth in Nashville, Tennessee. Students who do not meet the schools’ high standards cannot access either institutional or civic inclusion; those who can meet the standards experience inclusion as contingent on continued excellence. Their experiences reveal the critical role that private institutions play in mediating undocumented people's national inclusion and how neoliberal merit restricts the terms of this inclusion. [undocumented migrants, inclusion, exclusion, higher education, neoliberalism, bureaucratic documents, United States]

Mediating Illegality: Federal, State, and Institutional Policies in the Educational Experiences of Undocumented College Students

“…Other California institutions, like the California State University and California Community College systems, have larger numbers of undocumented students but lack the funding to implement such extensive institutional support services. Undocumented students attending selective private institutions have access to substantial institutional resources but have to meet extremely high standards of academic excellence to access these spaces (Anguiano and Guitérrez Nájera 2015;Flores 2016;Montiel 2016). Meritocracy plays a central role in determining which undocumented immigrants are worthy of institutionally mediated illegality and relief from exclusionary federal policies.…”

“…Notably, private universities have more freedom for institutional policymaking. For example, they can use institutional funds to provide financial aid, regardless of state policies (Anguiano and Guitérrez Nájera 2015;Flores 2016;Montiel 2016). However, they are still limited by federal threats to sue and/or suspend funding to sanctuary schools since they distribute federal financial aid.…”

Undocumented Students in Higher Education: A Review of the Literature, 2001 to 2016

“…Complicating matters further, nonprofit advocacy groups and scholarship providers lack consistency and transparency in their services for and engagement with undocumented students (A. Flores, 2016;.…”

Keywords and key words in AE

“…In Ahearn's () data, the word occurs in AE only in 2012 (used five times as a keyword), when it might have still been considered a trendy buzzword rather than the key dimension in anthropological thinking that it has become since. In AE ’s articles of the past four years, neoliberalism indexes a range of subjects, including the technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India (Bornstein and Sharma ), bread‐and‐butter politics in English council estates (I. Koch ), postneoliberal statecraft in Brazil (Biehl ), merit‐based financial aid for undocumented students in the United States (Flores ), audit culture in food production in Italy (Cavanaugh ), anthropology's role in critiquing the neoliberal university (Gusterson ), the racialization of US law schools (Tejani ), affective responses to the ruination of place in Algeria (Goodman ), and citizen science in the governance of radioactive contamination in Japan (Polleri ), among many other fascinating subjects.…”