When Felecia Russell was a high school student growing up near Los Angeles, she got good grades and a lot of encouragement to go to college.
But when it came time to do the paperwork to apply to a campus and get financial aid, Russell asked his mom for her social security number.
“My mom told me, 'Yeah, you don't have one,'” he remembers.
Russell did not have a social security number because she had no permanent legal status in the U.S. She was “undocumented.” She had moved to the US from Jamaica when she was about 12 years old. But until that moment she hadn't fully understood, as she Googled for more details, how her immigration status could ruin her dreams.
“Everything I saw online was 'illegal, illegal, illegal,'” he recalls. And everything on the Internet seemed to tell him “that means you can't go to college.”
On this week's EdSurge podcast, we tell the story of Russell's fight to earn her college degree and how she has become an advocate for other undocumented students. She (she then earned her Ph.D. and is now an associate professor at California Lutheran University).
Their most important message is that even when universities work to help students who lack permanent legal status, they often fail to pay attention to undocumented Black students, because most services in this space are designed for Latino students.
“Part of this makes sense,” he says, “because the Latino population makes up two-thirds of the undocumented population, so it makes sense that everything focuses on their experience.”
However, the undocumented population in the United States is 6 percent black, he says, and a sizable proportion of the 408,000 undocumented students at universities are black. Data of the Higher Education Immigration Portal from the Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, which Russell directs, shows that in 2023, 46 percent of undocumented students in college were Hispanic, while 27 percent were Asian, 14 percent were black and 10 percent were white. Some people identify as black and Latino and commonly describe themselves as afro latin.
“And that's why it's very dangerous, because now we're forcing these people back into the shadows,” says Russell, who became a DACA recipient but as a student often felt unwelcome in support groups for undocumented students. “Now they don't have a space to belong.”
Russell shares his story in a new book coming out this month, called “Amplifying the voices of undocumented Black students in higher education.“
The book also includes in-depth research on the topic, based on extensive interviews he conducted with 15 undocumented black college students. And it has recommendations for school and university leaders on how to best support the full spectrum of students facing immigration issues.
Hear the full story in this week's episode. Listen Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify, Seamstress or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page.
