DO UNDOCUMENTED STUDENTS PLAY BY THE ...

Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 6(1–2):15--38, 2009 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1542-7587 print/1542-7595 online DOI: 10.1080/15427580802679351

DO UNDOCUMENTED STUDENTS PLAY BY THE RULES?: MERITOCRACY IN THE MEDIA JULIAN JEFFERIES Boston College, Newton, Massachusetts

The way that immigration is talked about in the public sphere has direct bearing on the ways that health, education, legal, and political institutions enact policies to deal with this phenomenon. Looking at the major media output on questions of access to higher education for undocumented immigrant youth in Massachusetts, this study shows the prevalence of a set of frames related to meritocratic ideologies. Meritocracy, as an ideology of inequality, served economically established populations to justify inequalities in society in a Black and White America, and it is now used to justify the segregation of new waves of immigration. Vilifying this population for being ‘illegal’, not having the right ‘moral character’ and integrity, the discourse ultimately brands them as deserving the status of second class citizens. Furthermore, this discourse decontextualizes the global phenomenon of immigration, obscuring its relationship to the conditions of the global capitalist economy, the context of global relations between capital and labor, the international division of labor and its consequences of the movements of people.

Introduction As we begin the 21st century, globalization patterns have changed the direction and composition of the movements of people around the globe. As such, developed countries in Europe, North America, and Oceania are dealing with an increased number of immigrants from the global south crossing their borders, with various resulting themes in debates, policies, and regulations. The way that immigration is talked about in the public sphere has direct bearing on the ways that health, education, legal, and political institutions enact policies to deal with this phenomenon.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Julian Jefferies, 35 Woodman St., Apt. 3, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130. E-mail: [email protected]

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The United States is a country with a long history and folklore around immigration, heavily linked to notions of the American Dream where societies ruled by monarchic and hereditary aristocracies came to America to be ‘free’ and achieve on their own merits (McNamee & Miller, 2004). Through the centuries, debates around the immigration of mostly European peoples could be divided into pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant stances that either exalted the benefits of a multi-ethnic society or foresaw the dilution of an ‘American culture.’ In the last decades and due to new waves of immigration from the global South, the debate surrounding immigration has taken new shapes, determining the kind of resources and civic participation allocated to these newcomers. One particular phenomenon within the varied experiences of immigration is that of young people without proper documentation navigating the educational passageways between secondary schooling and higher education. Nationwide, there are an estimated 360,000 high school graduates between the ages of 18 and 24, and another 715,000 children between the ages of 5 and 17 who are considered undocumented youth (Van Hook et al., 2005). These young people are guaranteed access to a K–12 education, stemming from a Supreme Court decision against a Texas state statute (Plyler v. Doe, 1982) that denied funding for education to children who were unauthorized immigrants. Although this court decision created some assurance of access to K–12 public school education, there is no parallel federal policy that establishes pathways for undocumented immigrant teens’ access to higher education. Furthermore, their documentation status relegates them to manual labor jobs with no benefits, compensation below the minimum wage, and no prospects of mobility. Access to higher education in the current economic context of the United States is of key importance for any individual to obtain access to a professional career and fully participate in society. For teen immigrant students, access to advanced academic practices provides one avenue to obtain the cultural capital necessary to advance beyond routine manual labor. Policy that denies higher education for a certain sector of the population creates an underclass forced to subsist on manual labor and with no avenues for advancement. Within the intermingled fields of

Meritocracy in the Media

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policy, media and practice, language plays a constitutive role in what counts as an issue and the various perspectives available. This paper will examine how the debate of access to higher education for undocumented students is framed in the media outlets of Massachusetts, paying special attention to the relationship between the frames and ideologies used in the debates. In the last decades, immigration in the national sphere has been framed as a problem (Lakoff & Ferguson, 2005), where immigrants are heavily tied to fiscal frames (Benson & Saguy, 2005; Calavita, 1996) concerning taxes and spending on public services. Cultural frames, which cast immigrants’ cultural and religious practices as a threat to the receiving country’s culture (Benson & Saguy, 2005; Padin, 2005), have also been common. The analysis reported here supports evidence of these frames but also finds new frames that are specific to this issue and discusses creation of these new frames in the context of powerful American ideologies.

Undocumented Students in the United States Access to higher education for undocumented students is a highly contested topic, with different overt and covert policy in different states. Eight states (California, Utah, Oklahoma, Washington, Kansas, Illinois, New Mexico, and Nebraska) have passed legislation that allows undocumented students who have graduated from a U.S. high school to access in-state tuition rates. These states allow for access to in-state tuition rates, regardless of immigration status on the condition that students attend an American high school for a certain number of years, obtain a high school diploma, and have the intention of becoming permanent residents. Although providing some avenue for students to afford higher education, research on the effects of this policy in the state of California show a set of institutional barriers that remains problematic. The S.I.N. Collective (2007), a student organization at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reports that while undocumented students can pay in-state tuition, they ‘‘struggle to pay for their college education without access to financial aid or loans’’ (p. 78). While some private scholarships are open to students regardless of legal status, they are few and the need

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is so great that they are not enough to cover the demand. In addition to financial problems, however, ‘‘the ever-present fear of possible legal repercussions, as well as the social stigma associated with their status as undocumented immigrants’’ (p. 78), added to the lack of support, discourages students from pursuing higher education opportunities. The most important factor contributing to the lack of educational equality reported, however, is the lack of information for both faculty and staff at the university, high school counselors, who are unable to inform college-bound students about their rights under this law. Thus, although the granting of in-state tuition rates to undocumented students provides a step towards educational equality, it is far from rendering a comprehensive solution for access to higher education and civic participation for this population.

The In-state Tuition Bill in Massachusetts The state of Massachusetts has experienced a particularly sharp concentration of undocumented immigrants, with present estimates reaching 200,000 (Urban Institute for Social Policy, 2007), more than 20% of the immigrant population. Many of these undocumented immigrants are children who have been raised and schooled within the borders of the United States, with approximately 500–600 graduating from high school every year in Massachusetts (Lewis, 2005a). These students have to pay an additional $14,000 per year for full time enrollment in a state university, a difference that would impact any student but especially derail an immigrant student with low resources. Similar to the case of California, undocumented students are not eligible for federal financial aid and can only apply to private scholarships, which do not ask for documentation status. In response to this situation, two initiatives were launched in Massachusetts to allow these students access to in-state tuition rates and a path to citizenship. Drafted by an immigrants advocacy group, the In-state tuition bill planned to provide in-state tuition rates to undocumented immigrants who have lived in Massachusetts for three years, graduated from a state high school, and filed an affidavit saying they were beginning the process of becoming citizens. However, neither of these obtained enough


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votes in the state legislature in 2004 and 2006, which sparked a local debate about undocumented immigrants’ participation in society. By analyzing media reporting in the newspapers of Massachusetts, this study will examine what frames and ideologies were used in debates about access to higher education for undocumented students.

Frame Analyses of Media The public conception of a social problem does not inherently appear from the conditions surrounding a problem but results from a variety of cultural, political, and social factors. Through a social constructivist approach (Blumer, 1971; Becker, 1963; Spector & Kitsuse, 1977; Gusfeld, 1981), sociologists have focused not only on the problems themselves but also on how these are perceived by the public: whether they rise or decline in importance and how they are characterized. As Conrad (1997) notes, ‘‘[i]n the context of specific social activities, problems may emerge, transmute, descend, disappear, or reappear, independent of any change in actual conditions. Public conceptions of social problems have histories and shift over time and place’’ (p. 139). The definitions of social problems are constructed, as Gamson and Modigliani (1989) affirm, by media practices and cultural themes or resonances. Within these factions, activists, officials, and experts attempt to frame a dominant definition of a social problem. Most important, though, the national culture and the media industry of a nation state limit which definition will prevail in the public sphere. Social problems move from a professional field and into the public eye through the media, understood in this study as the images and information available in news, television, periodicals, film, documentaries, fiction, and the Internet. The public eye also includes public opinion, as Gamson and Modigliani (1989, p. 2) distinguish, not assuming simplistically that media discourse causes public opinion but that ‘‘[e]ach system interacts with the other: media discourse is part of the process by which individuals construct meaning, and public opinion is part of the process by which journalists and other cultural entrepreneurs develop and crystallize meaning in the public discourse’’ (p. 2). Particularly

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relevant to the social phenomenon of immigration is the role that common ideologies play in this interplay between public opinion and the media: how media venues both reproduce common ideologies in the public sphere, while also influencing the public sphere’s notions of this phenomenon.

Frame Analysis The news media are understood, in this study, as a social construction and a social resource, as well as a significant force in the construction of public ideology (Gitlin, 1980). Sociologists have looked at the social construction of news, examining how social factors influence the shaping, selection, and presentation of the news (e.g., Conrad, 1997; Gamson, 1992; Gans, 1979; Molotch & Lester, 1974; Schudson, 1995; Tuchman, 1978). In the same way that social problems are constructed, ‘‘what becomes news is not inherent in an event or piece of information but is defined by interested parties’’ (Conrad, 1997). In this way, journalist do not report ‘facts’ or ‘the truth’ but rather present the news in the context of a ‘frame.’ These ‘frames’ allow journalist to process, report, and present large amounts of information in a quick and routine fashion. Taken from Goffman’s (1974) sociological work on classical frame theory and adapted to American media studies by Tuchman (1978) and Gitlin (1980), a frame calls attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements. More recently, in the field of communications studies, Entman (1993) argues that ‘‘to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’’ (p. 52). In this way, media frames become the central organizing ideas to selectively represent certain aspects of the stories (Binder, 1993; Gamson & Modigliani, 1989). Sociologists have called attention to frames such as ‘rap music incites violence’ (Binder, 1993), or ‘genes cause alcoholism’ (Conrad & Weinberg, 1996), pointing out that such frames become central themes for constructing news items.


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The Role of Ideologies Historically, the concept of ‘ideology’ has taken on a host of different meanings, sometimes directly opposed to each other, from the pejorative connotation of the ‘class-motivated deceptions of the bourgeoisie’ coined by Marx and Engels, to its use as distinguishing coherent and well-structured belief systems (Converse, 1964). Ideology, in this context, refers to the set of attitudes, values, and perceptions through which we come to see the world (Gramsci, 1971). Gramsci also called referred to them as a ‘‘perceived reality’’ or ‘‘false consciousness,’’ paying special attention to common beliefs that benefited certain sectors of society. What is important to note about ideologies is that people do not act on the world as it is but as they perceive and make sense of it. So ideologies do not have to be objectively ‘true’: as long as people believe an ideology to be true, then it has true material consequences for them (McNamee & Miller, 2004). As Oliver and Johnston (2000) warn us, ideology and frame have not been well distinguished in the past, so some clarifications are pertinent to this discussion. As these authors make clear, ‘‘[i]deologies can function as frames, the can embrace frames, but there is more to ideology than framing’’ (p. 37). Framing more specifically refers to how different actors have self-consciously positioned an issue over time, which is different from the underlying ideologies extrapolated in a certain social problem. In this way, frames are too shallow of a concept to describe what is involved in the creation of a theory of society, values, norms, and a consistent understanding of the world: ‘‘[i]deologies are complex and deeply held. People learn them or a socialized into them. While a framing effort may successfully persuade someone that a particular issue can be explained by an ideology, framing processes do not persuade people to adopt whole new ideologies. At best, they may initiate the journey.’’ (p. 47).

This study, then, will distinguish between the frames used to report about undocumented students’ access to higher education, as well as discuss the relationships between these frames to the underlying ideologies present in the arguments.

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Framing of Immigration in the United States Regarding the framing of immigration in the news, Benson and Saguy’s (2005) study of cross-national American and French news reporting over time found the employment of multiple frames. First distinguishing between the various problems that immigration either posed for immigrants, or by immigrants, several subframes included social problems (e.g., poor living conditions, poor education, work conflicts), cultural problems (e.g., threats to immigrants cultures, religious practices as threats to receiving country’s culture), racial/ethnic discrimination, and fiscal problems (e.g., costs posed by immigrants to social services and other government programs). In the United States, the researcher found that fiscal frames were more common, while the French press focus on social and cultural problems. With a focus on the incorporation of Latinos into the symbolic cultural grid of racial distinction of the United States, Padin’s (2005) 14-year study of daily newspapers in the state of Oregon found an ambivalent picture. Latinos were seen, overall, in equal shares as liabilities or assets to society, a view consistent with a ‘conditional whitening’ hypothesis. Conditional whitening is theorized as ‘‘a mode of incorporation available to populations that are at once racially suspect and in a position to redeem their suspect status’’ (Padin, p. 66), portraying Latinos ‘as White’ in some ways: enterprising, industrious, autonomous, while representing them ‘like Blacks’ in other ways: bound by particularistic ethnic attachments, wont to abuse the public trust and alien to conventional norms of public morality (p. 67). While other studies of have looked at how immigrants are portrayed in the media (Santa Ana, 2002; Benson, 2005), no research has looked at the ideological assumptions informing the reporting of undocumented immigrants in the press.

Methodology With key aspects of the ideologies and frames shaping the discourse around immigrant students’ access to higher education played out in the media, I conducted a content analysis of rel-


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evant media sources. The data for this study came from all the major newspaper sources in Massachusetts: printed daily newspapers, including the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, and local district newspapers, including The North Adams Transcript, The Sentinel & Enterprise, The Telegram & Gazette, The Berkshire Eagle, The Patriot Ledger and The Sun. The data were collected from September 2002 to September 2008, the time during which the issue had been debated publicly in the state and where it still remains in debate. These news sources were chosen not only because of their wide circulation in the state but also because they serve as sources for other media in the state, including television news broadcasts, private television, and electronic news sources. A search with the terms ‘undocumented immigrant,’ ‘illegal immigrant,’ ‘higher education,’ and ‘college’ was performed, resulting in a total of 113 news items. Across and within each news item, a content analysis was conducted to categorize and analyze the headlines for stories, the characters involved and how they are named in the narratives, and the language used to depict struggles or tensions in the stories. This approach is similar to that used by both frame analysts (e.g., Benson & Saguy, 2005; Johnson, 2007) and discourse analysts (e.g., Gee, 1996). My focus in the analysis was how the linguistic choices around the characters, events, and tensions in the articles framed the access issue in particular ways.

Frames in the Massachusetts Access to Education Debate Broadly speaking, the debate over undocumented students’ access to higher education in Massachusetts is discussed in a binary way, with a clear-cut division between adherents and opponents along conservative and liberal lines. Similar to prior literature on the subject, fiscal frames (Benson & Saguy, 2005) were prominent; however, this study will focus on the incipient use of an ‘American Dream’ frame and a ‘legal’ frame, not accounted for in the literature. The next section will detail some examples of these frames, while the analysis will focus on the dominant ideologies that underlie and shape these frames.

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Fiscal Frames ‘‘Immigrant Tuition Break Called a Net Gain; Undocumented Would Lift Economy (Lewis, 2005) ‘‘Price is too high for Tuition Bill’’ (Boston Herald, 2006)

Positioning the issue of undocumented students’ access to higher education in terms of the tax gain or loss incurred by the state, fiscal frames were a common way to address the topic. The bill is either referenced as improving the economy by generating tax revenue, adding future taxpayers and improving the workforce, or being an ‘expensive’ bill for the state. The premise for most of the arguments is based on the fact that an undocumented student attending, for example, one of the state university locations, would have to pay $18,000 a year, while a resident of the state would pay $9,000. Arguments about the economic impact of the measure focus on various studies and reports. The first study is one commissioned by Boston’s mayor and conducted by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which concluded that providing in-state tuition rates to undocumented immigrants would constitute an economic boom to the state, as college graduates will pay more in income taxes than high school graduates. Also, according to the study, ‘‘[t]he additional investment represented by in-state tuition discounts for public higher education is more than offset by the state taxes paid by a college-educated worker’’ (Lewis, 2005b). Another report released by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a nonpartisan and nonprofit group, takes a different angle, arguing that as undocumented students cannot access financial aid or obtain lower in-state tuition, and so ‘‘are priced out’’ and don’t enter the higher education system. This foundation estimates that if these students were allowed to pay in-state tuition, more of them would access higher education institutions and therefore the state would generate ‘‘up to $5.7 million in new revenues’’ (Lewis, 2006b) in four years. Proponents of this measure, furthermore, use language that equates these students with an ‘investment,’ aligning themselves with the business community that favors ‘‘a more educated workforce’’ (Rodriguez, 2002).


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An editorial written by the former Lieutenant Governor of the state and candidate for governor in the 2006 election, however, paints a different picture of the situation. Calculating the difference between out-of-state and in-state tuition to be $9,000, and taking into consideration that approximately 400 undocumented students graduate high school every year in the state, Healey claims that the ‘‘cost to the taxpayers would be $14.4 million over four years’’ (Healey, 2005). Along these lines, a representative of the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform argues the passing of this bill would encourage more undocumented immigrants into the state, which would increase the costs ‘‘both at institutions of higher education and in general’’ (Lewis, 2006b). Either by assuming that all undocumented students will attend higher education at out-of-state costs, and focusing strictly on how much the state would lose, or calculating how many more immigrants will be attracted to higher education and thus pay more tuition and generate more income tax, both these positions talk about the social value of a measure in terms of its economic impact, echoing neoliberal ideologies on policy1 . The American Dream Frame ‘‘It’s time to renew the American Dream’’ (Beal, 2005) ‘‘Illegal Dreams’’ (Vennochi, 2005)

To differing effects, the newspaper articles invoked the frame of the American dream. Within various cultural contexts, this folkloric idea paints the United States as the ‘land of opportunity,’ where all people are created, seen, and treated as equals. Within the frame, the resounding belief is that everyone has equal opportunity to be upwardly social mobile, garner the benefits of this society, and for immigrants, forge new beginnings in a new land. Proponents of the bill engaged this frame when trying to position students favorably in order to gain acceptance for the bill. With varying justificatory reasons, they ultimately argue that 1 A growing body of literature has addressed use of neoliberal economic ideology for policy in education: Giroux, 2008; MacLaren & Farahmandpur, 2004; Stone, 2001.

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these students should not be restricted from accessing the American dream. This kind of frame presents undocumented students as believers in the American dream only to be disqualified from higher education and from their subsequent mobility by an unjust law. It is worth noting that opponents of the measure also use this frame arguing that giving undocumented students access to in-state tuition will take away funds from regular citizens, therefore disqualifying them from their own ‘dream.’

The Legal Frame ‘‘A dandy fight over illegals’’ (Boston Herald, 2005) ‘‘It’s actually pretty fun being an illegal alien’’ (Boston Herald, 2004)

Some articles prioritized the issue of legality by alluding to these immigrants as ‘illegals,’ ‘illegal aliens,’ or ‘illegal immigrants,’ immediately assigning an identity of criminality and denying membership into American society. The use of this frame has a specific history in the framing of debates about immigration in the last years, widely used by conservative political organizers in the 2006 U.S. election as a hot-button issue to drive voters to the polls. A document advocating for this language was drafted by four organizations that have mobilized toward restricting the rights of undocumented immigrants-the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Numbers USA, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF). The frame has had wide repercussions, changing the language of the debate from a pro-immigration or anti-immigration one, to the immediate assignment of negative characteristics to this population, helping sway traditional adherents of a pro-immigration stance. In this case, opponents to the measure have used this frame to cast the population of undocumented youth in a negative light, thus garner opposition to the passing of the bill. Proponents of the measures have countered the ‘‘legal’’ frame by finding alternative names for this population, such as ‘‘immigrants,’’ ‘‘undocumented students,’’ ‘‘noncitizens,’’ ‘‘newcomers,’’ and ‘‘teens.’’ Other proponents counter this frame


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by placing blame not on the students but on the parents who brought them illegally into the country, thus positioning the students more favorably, but still within the realm of this constructed notion of legality.

Underlying Ideology of Meritocracy The content analysis conducted yielded these three frames, but more fundamental to this analysis are the ideologies tapped and perpetuated through the frames. In this sense, the frames can be understood as vehicles for larger systems of beliefs that, in this case, both work to situate people differentially in society and to provide explanations for these positions. Within the three frames found in these media accounts, two ideologies emerge in the construction of these frames: the use of a fiscal frame, connected to a neo-liberal economic perspective on society. I will focus, however, on the second ideology found across the frames, that of meritocracy in the United States. The American Dream and the legal frames are shaped by notions of membership and the justification of success in society, linked to the historical discourse of meritocracy in the United States. Meritocracy is a powerful and common ideology surrounding discussions of the kind of participation immigrants should be allowed to have in the United States society. From the perspective of this ideology, everybody in the United States is able to ‘succeed’ in society, with success defined as having access to a profession and accumulating goods. McNamee and Miller’s (2004) description of this ideology will be used in order to tease apart its different components. Defined by them as ‘getting ahead in society,’ meritocracy focuses on the individual, and sees advancing in society as based on individual merit. Individual merit, it is important to note, ‘‘is generally viewed as a combination of factors including innate abilities, working hard, having the right attitude, and having high moral character and integrity’’ (McNamee & Miller, 2004). The resulting justification for an individual not attaining success in society, within meritocracy, is attributed to some innate characteristic, lack of hard work, or lack of high moral character and integrity.

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Many newspaper articles draw from the notion of meritocracy and access to the American Dream to make their arguments. Within them, different aspects of this ideology were tapped into, whether it was a general notion of the American Dream, or some of it characteristics. The American Dream and its Components ‘‘When I went to school the first day, it was my dream’’ (Rodriguez, 2002) ‘‘Without the bill, we have 400 students working low wage jobs and watching their dreams slip away’’ (Beal, 2005)

By far the most common argument framed in the articles addresses a general hopefulness for the future, in which advocates or opponents of the measure use a general notion of the ‘Dream,’ the ‘American Dream,’ or the ‘American Ideal’ to position themselves in the argument. A common narrative used by proponents of the initiatives centers around the individual struggles of an undocumented student, such as Juliano, a Brazilian immigrant who was brought to the United States by his parents at age 13. A newspaper article (Woolhouse, 2005) tells the story of how Juliano overcame a total lack of proficiency in English while sharing a one-bedroom apartment with his brother and parents. After three years, Juliano graduated from vocational high school as one of the valedictorians. His hard work, humility, and gift for computer programming are highlighted in his success story. The narrative ends as the family decides to return to Brazil, hinting that they cannot afford out-of-state tuition fees for this undocumented student in Massachusetts. In the example of the undocumented student portrayed above, Juliano is described as having all the attributes to qualify for access to the benefits of the American dream: he has a gift for computer programming (innate abilities), he worked hard, he is a humble person (having the right attitude), and has a high moral character and integrity. Thus, the newspaper article tapped into the powerful ideology of meritocracy to highlight the injustice of Juliano’s disqualification for participation in society.


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Legality and ‘Playing by the Rules’ ‘‘They didn’t come here illegally, their parents brought them here illegally’’ ( Jarret Barrios, in Schweitzer, 2005) ‘‘It’s hard to justify giving a college to a student who is not even legally in the country while denying it to a student who has played by the rules their entire life’’ (Ordonez, 2003)

A considerable number of arguments used the meritocratic notion of playing by the rules in order to position themselves in this debate. As McNamee and Miller (2004) argue, heavily embedded in the notion of the American Dream is the idea of ‘‘having a high moral character.’’ In the media coverage of these two newspapers, this idea is heavily used by the opponents of the measure in order to disqualify undocumented students or their parents from access to the institutions of society. These arguments are constructed in a number of ways, the first one by alluding to the fact that they would not want to reward illegal activity by extending benefits, incentives, privileges or ‘breaks’ to those who are outside the law. Another argument compares undocumented students to legal citizens, reasoning that citizens who played by the rules would be denied benefits. Other arguments call attention to the fact that supporting this bill would encourage more illegal behavior, using metaphors such as ‘‘opening the door for illegal entry’’ (Rutherford, 2006). Some arguments in favor of the bill also use this notion of ‘having a high moral character’ and playing by the rules, and yet have a different interpretation of what these mean. Focusing on the fact that it was the students’ parents who brought them to the country, advocates of the measure argue that they did not act outside of the law: ‘‘Children should not be held hostage from their parents’ sins’’ (Vennochi, 2005). In this way, they distance the young students’ characteristics from that of the parents in order to position them more favorably within notions of the American Dream. It is interesting to note, however, that opponents of the measure may also try to disqualify students by implicating them with the behavior of their parents: ‘‘Illegal parents have a responsibility; they knew they wouldn’t be eligible for these things’’ (Lorrie Hall, in Silva, 2006)

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J. Jefferies ‘‘A student whose parents crossed the border illegally would get a better deal at UMass [public university] than a native of Rhode Island? That’s wrong’’ (Boston Herald, 2005)

By equating the parents’ attitudes with their children, opponents seek to place them outside the confines of the meritocratic ideals. It is clear that while advocates and opponents of the measure want to highlight the importance of ‘having a high moral character,’ they both have narrow interpretations of what this means. Opponents equate legality with moral character, adhering to a strict definition of the law and making use of the term ‘illegal’ to immediately disqualify students or their parents’ integrity. Advocates of the measure attribute the lack of moral character to the parents, therefore liberating their children from this burden. Working Hard ‘‘For the good of Massachusetts and the nation, we should honor the hard work of immigrants : : : (Beal, 2005) ‘‘From first grade to high school the message was clear: work hard and you will go to college’’ (Oliveira, in Le Blanc, 2006)

Working hard is a prominent characteristic in order to qualify for the American Dream and is frequently used by advocates in order to enlist undocumented students’ into the benefits of American society. As the example of the narrative of the Brazilian immigrant above shows, all similar narratives use hard work as an attribute of these students. In contrast, opponents of the measure accentuate the hard work of taxpayers and legal citizens. Having the Right Attitude ‘‘He’s polite, he’s charming, and just one of the greatest kids you’d ever met’’ (Woolhouse, 2005) ‘‘I work, I pay taxes, and I contribute to my community’’ (undocumented student) (Oliveira, in Le Blanc 2006)

In the United States, and as McNamee and Miller (2004) suggest, ‘having the right attitude’ means being ‘‘ambitious, energetic,


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motivated and trustworthy’’ (p. 29). Advocates for the bill describe undocumented students as having these characteristics in a variety of ways. They are always described as having a very clear plan for the future that involves college and an already chosen career path, which qualifies them as being ambitious and motivated. These articles also feature undocumented students’ own voices, where they portray themselves as ‘having the right attitude’ by saying that they want to ‘contribute to their community,’ ‘give back’ to the people that helped them, contribute to the economy, while making clear that they do in fact pay taxes. All these characteristics align them closer with this powerful ideology. Innate Talents and Abilities ‘‘Romney says tough luck if you’re smart, hardworking, and the child of illegal immigrants’’ (Vennochi, 2005) ‘‘His brother was mystified by the way he seemed to understand English from the time the family arrived: ‘He must be smarter than anybody’ ’’ (Woolhouse, 2005)

Another gatekeeper to allow entrance to the American Dream is the notion of innate talent or ability, usually vaguely referred to as ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent.’ Advocates for the measure rely on this feature frequently, either by describing undocumented students with these two words or alluding to some activity they can perform without difficulty. This argument is especially used in students’ individual narratives, paying attention to the fact that they graduated from their high schools as valedictorians or that they have high grades. It is also used when describing a talent that a students has for a profession (i.e., computer engineer) or how quickly he learned the English language, as the above example shows. Discussion Proponents and opponents adhere to the ideology of meritocracy because it is a powerful narrative that defines social relations at a national level, but it is my argument that it also limits the

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construction of a positive debate on the issue of immigration and education. The most important finding of this research reflects the use the ideology of meritocracy and the American Dream as a framework to debate whether they should have access to the institutions in society. Both parties recognize the value of this powerful ideology and so ally themselves with these notions. It is my argument, however, that only by recognizing the limitations of this ideology can a better-informed discussion on immigration occur. Undocumented students face a host of barriers that sit outside notions of the amount of hard work they perform, their innate abilities or their attitude. Indeed, a much better understanding of the history of this ideology is needed to comprehend the limiting aspects of this consciousness. Historically, the meritocratic ideology arose in the 1950s (Young, 1994) as a consequence and explanation of racial inequities after the era of Jim Crow racism in the United States. During the Jim Crow era, the consciousness around inequality between White and Black populations was one of White supremacy, where justifications of inequality were attributed to genetic and moral superiority (Barlow, 2003) as Blacks were not considered human and therefore not capable of owning property. This ideology around race began to change in the 1950s as a smaller percentage of Whites expressed this consciousness. However, the end of legal segregation did not mean the end of racism, for the development of the new middle-class social order made possible a new system of structured racism. During the development of the new middle-class social order, most of the newly created institutions (corporate, educational, residential, and cultural) developed in conditions of complete segregation with consciously developed standards intended to keep out women and people of color. As a result, White male privileges were ‘structured’ into the so-called ‘normal’ operations of day-to-day interactions of mass society as a whole (Barlow, 2003). For example, one of the key gate-keeping institutions was the school, an institution committed to the perpetuation of Anglo values and canons (Barlow, 2003), a middle class and White dialect of English, as well as White middle class ways of knowing. However, the new middle class claimed educational sites as ‘objective and neutral sites’ where rational knowledge is taught to the ‘best and the brightest.’ During this age, racial


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consciousness was fundamentally altered from White supremacy to the requirement that race cannot be used as a basis for privilege. ‘‘Color-blind racism’’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2001) allowed White people to maintain racial privileges without explicitly claiming racial superiority, as racial privileges are more ‘embedded’ in the social structure and the institutional patterns of everyday life. The ideology of inequality that began to take shape in this era was not one of White supremacy but one of meritocracy. Notions of inequality where not justified anymore in terms of the lack of humanity or competency in other races but rather by reasoning that society is a fair and equal playing ground, and people succeed or fail due to their own merits. As Young (1994) describes it, meritocracy is ‘‘the selection of the new professional and managerial elite on the basis of competence alone,’’ while no consideration is given to the fact that whites enjoyed enormous advantages that came from the highly unequal inheritance of wealth from the past, greater access to good schools, housing, and jobs, ‘‘as well as virtually complete control over the gateways to institutional power, wealth, and prestige’’ (Barlow, 2003, p. 48). In this sense, competence is the deciding factor to enable access to work, education, and other important institutions. Thus, only the most talented, hard-working and virtuous get ahead, and people’s lack of success is attributed to individual characteristics such as laziness, indolence, and lack of appropriate values. Echoed almost unchangingly in the frames used in the debate over access to higher education for undocumented students in Massachusetts, these ideological tenets set up a conditional belonging that will blame their lack of success on individual characteristics and resonate with Padin’s (2005) notions of ‘conditional whitening’ where if immigrants succeed they will be seen as White: industrious, autonomous and enterprising, while if they do not succeed they will be associated as limited by particularistic ethnic attachments, likely to abuse the public trust and alien to conventional norms of public morality (p. 67). Meritocracy, thus, is an ideology that places the burden of succeeding on the individual, while obscuring structural and institutional barriers that people face. A discussion of the structural and institutional barriers is completely absent from the debate. Meritocracy, in the American context, provides a socially acceptable explanation for the kind and extent of inequality within

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society, while it also provides guidelines for behavior within a system of inequality (McNamee & Miller, 2004). In the case of immigration defined broadly, and the specific case of undocumented students in the state of Massachusetts, we see that different actors in the debates are introducing the notion of meritocracy and the American Dream in order to align themselves for and against policy. This conception is flawed, since, especially for undocumented students, society is not a ‘fair and equal playing ground.’ In meritocratic terms, this population will never ‘succeed’ since systematic barriers that block their access to higher education institutions and professional advancement will not let them do so. Meritocracy as an ideology, however, will help the majority of society to justify their lack of success by pointing out individual flaws, claiming that they ‘do not work hard enough,’ ‘don’t have the right attitude,’ and lack the necessary innate talents. Actors in immigration debates who want to align themselves with the causes of immigrant populations, especially, should be wary of engaging in debates that reproduce ideological tenets that ultimately distort societal perceptions of equality. More work needs to be done to question this ideology and the work that it performs. Historically, as an ideology of inequality, it served economically established populations to justify inequalities in society in a Black and White America, and it is now used to justify the segregation of new waves of immigration. Internalized by all parts of society, it obliterates the fact that nonmerit factors such as inheritance, social and cultural advantages, unequal educational opportunity, luck, and discrimination in all of its forms are barriers to this success (McNamee & Miller, 2005). Thus, it is an ideology that works hegemonically to establish secure relations between historically advantaged and disadvantaged groups, placing the burden for not succeeding in society on the individual for the disadvantaged and obscuring nonmerit factors for the advantaged.

What’s Not Talked about in the Debate The construction of the debate over undocumented students’ access to higher education in Massachusetts places neoliberal and meritocratic ideologies at the forefront of the arguments


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and decontextualizes the global phenomenon of immigration. Immigration, in these debates, is seen from an assimilationist perspective, where the sole purpose of immigrants is to incorporate into the American mainstream. Obscured from the arguments, however, is a view of immigration that is heavily linked to the conditions of the global capitalist economy, the context of global relations between capital and labor, the international division of labor, and its consequences of the movements of people. The globalization of production and consumption and the heightened mobility of goods, ideas, people, and capital create a permanent demand for highly skilled and professional workers, as well as unskilled laborers willing to work for low wages (Massey, 1999; Piore, 1979). The direction of the migration of labor has been from South to North, as the de-industrialization of developed countries in the North has occurred alongside the disruptions of economies in the global South (Sassen, 1988, 1998). In this way, many migrants now work in the countries that once colonized them and have maintained them within the sphere of economic and political influence since decolonization (Levitt, 2001). In the case of the United States, the economic and political influence that it has exercised over most of Central America and the Caribbean, acting as an imperial power since the 1800s, as well as the penetration of multinational capital in the form of U.S. companies, has encouraged immigration into the country. The absence of this historical context helps reproduce the view that immigrants come to the United States only to reap the rewards of a developed nation, when there is a movement of peoples around the world that obeys historical and political histories of nation states. None of these sides comment on the history of documentation laws in the United States in terms of how the emergence of immigration quotas in the last half the 20th century has made it possible for people to enter the country and work in a double economy. By not granting proper documentation to these workers, the United States is ensured of a cheap labor force with no benefits and guarantees that the population will stay in undesirable jobs that citizens do not want to perform. Instead, by framing immigration with meritocratic tenets, this population is vilified for being ‘illegal,’ not having the right ‘moral character’ and integrity, and ultimately deserving the status of second class citizens.

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Meritocratic discourse has a historical salience in the national consciousness. Beginning with its rise in the post-Jim Crow era and continuing to the present day, it deftly explains both inequities in society and why those inequities exist. It has used by the mainstream of society to justify unequal social relations between White and nonmainstream populations and recast immigration as an issue of access, determining to whether undocumented immigrants should participate in society. As most Americans believe that equality of opportunity has been achieved in the post-Civil rights era, the failure of some populations to succeed must lie in some lack of attributes. For undocumented immigrants, an a-historical and decontextualized view of legality serves to attribute them a lack of ‘‘high moral character’’ and perpetuate a subclass of workers.

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