California cannot abandon undocumented students after UC regents cave to politics | Opinion

The UC Regents voted 10-6 behind closed doors to keep in place a ban on hiring undocumented students for another year, until January 2025.

Adopting this position changes course from the UC Regents’ prior decision to move forward with exploring the possibility in May, with the urging of immigration law professors and legal experts and broad support from student activists who launched a hunger strike to draw attention to the issue. As reported in Politico, the official reasons cited were the legal risks, despite a contrary legal analysis supporting the policy from UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy co-directors Hiroshi Motomura and Ahilan Arulunantham and signed by experts as well as another letter signed by UC faculty willing to hire undocumented students.

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Politics appear to have influenced the vote. Insiders acknowledge pressure from the Biden administration to not pursue this strategy. Why? The timing coincides with an election campaign and a high-profile struggle with conservative states over state-U.S. control of the southern border, with Texas defying federal authority.

Pushing this issue to January of 2025 may be politically expedient, but it’s academically inconvenient — it’s midyear for a university, student leaders will be graduated or near graduation and momentum towards helping our undocumented students will have been lost. That’s no coincidence.

While I don’t have details on the Biden-UC phone calls beyond Politico’s report, I’ve observed immigration politics closely for two decades and recognize a familiar pattern: The UC debacle highlights the ways that politics pose an intractable obstacle to a genuinely complicated, difficult situation and the inadequacy of relying on states to solve the problem.

To be sure, it would be easier if the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program remained in force and continued to provide work permits. Until Congress passes a DREAM Act, which would allow undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to live and work without fear of deportation, it will fall to states like California to fill gaps in opportunity since DACA is winding down and new students can no longer qualify.

The UC previously sought to keep the window open by defending the DACA program in the U.S. Supreme Court. They argued that students had come to rely on their promises and that it would be unfair to renege on them. It was a difficult argument to make then, but they prevailed in court — and the reliance has only increased among students. The alignment of UC leadership and political leadership produced by former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (who previously served as president of the UC system) surely helped at the time of the lawsuit. And it may have created a rare window of opportunity.

But the window need not close. The lesson of the DACA lawsuit is that campus leadership matters to their students. Without it, support for undocumented students will wither away, as it has at The University of Texas at Austin, who invoked the state’s diversity, equity and inclusion curriculum ban and a federal immigration law to eliminate a scholarship for undocumented students the same week the UC Regents changed course.

California must distinguish itself from Texas, holding firm to values of inclusion in its advocacy for undocumented students. The need for the UC to do what is right in the face of political and legal headwinds has not lessened just because there is a different UC and the U.S. president. If anything, the urgency has increased as DACA has withered away.

The UC should continue to lead the way on educational opportunities for undocumented students by thinking creatively and fighting fiercely for its students. This latest episode may mean that the mantle is shifting. If change will not come from the top, then campuses need to identify and implement their own solutions from the bottom up.

What can campuses do on their own? Universities can create meaningful experiences as fellowships with stipends, even if they will not permit salaried campus jobs; they can increase scholarships to reduce need; and reconfigure academic credit for experiential work (which many colleges are embracing as higher education strives to demonstrate its relevance to the world beyond their campuses). At law schools such as UC Law San Francisco, where I teach, the American Bar Association is requiring experiential work for accreditation. More ideas are being explored by the UC Labor Center and student activists as they process the unexpected decision.

I can personally attest that there is interest among myself and other UC faculty to hire students as research assistants and teaching assistants without regard to immigration status if authorized. I have personally seen the talent and work ethic of our undocumented students.

Whether now or next year, the UC must show its commitment to equitable opportunities for undocumented students, especially when political leaders are failing them.

Ming Hsu Chen is a professor of immigration and the U.S. Constitution at UC College of the Law in San Francisco and faculty-director of the Center for Race, Immigration, Citizenship and Equality (RICE ). She is also a PD Soros and Public Voices Fellow of the Op-Ed Project .