Momentum building for removing another barrier for immigrants

The legislature last year approved a new law giving immigrants without legal status the ability to apply for state-issued driver’s licenses. The bill had been kicking around Beacon Hill for nearly two decades, and it finally passed with enough support to override a gubernatorial veto, driven by a coalition of supporters who pressed hard for the legislation for humanitarian and practical public safety reasons.

The same momentum is starting to build this year behind legislation that would allow undocumented immigrant students to pay in-state tuition at state colleges and universities. The legislation has also been swirling around Beacon Hill for nearly two decades, but now it’s gaining support from those who see it as the right thing to do and those with practical concerns about the growing number of job vacancies and the shrinking number of college graduates in the state.

Massachusetts’ university system draws more international students than all but two other states, and it is among the 15 states with the highest share of student populations made up of undocumented students. But there is growing concern that these “assets” are not being utilized properly, putting the state at a competitive disadvantage.

“Things are shifting,” said Esther Benjamin, CEO and executive director of World Education Services, a nonprofit focused on measuring and encouraging professional credentials for  immigrants and international students. She says talented immigrants have been leaving the country because of its immigration system in droves since 2017. “In five years, 45,000 people who graduated from US institutions went to Canada,” she said. “We educated them, many of them with STEM degrees, and Canada offered Express Entry – a pathway to permanent residency. We’re losing that talent.” 

Institutions in the Global South, a broad way of referring to countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceana, “are building up their infrastructure and capacity to retain students from their country and to attract international students in the region. We’re losing out,”  Benjamin said.

At a forum last week called “Higher Ed Pathways to Immigration: Why it Matters” at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, panelists encouraged policymakers to ease access to higher education for immigrants, regardless of their legal status. 

Bills filed this term by Sens. Brendan Crighton of Lynn and Liz Miranda of Boston and Reps. Michael Moran and Adrian Madaro of Boston would allow in-state tuition rates for undocumented students who attended a Massachusetts high school for at least three years, graduated high school or attained the equivalent credential, and submitted proof they have filed or will presently file for US citizenship.

Crighton recalls efforts to make this change to tuition rates since he started working on Beacon Hill some 18 years ago. The bills made it out of committee only once, in 2006, before being voted down in the House 57-97.

Picking up the torch this year was not only “the right thing morally to do, it was the right thing for the economy of Massachusetts,” Crighton said in an interview. “It made a lot of sense economically, when we’re looking at labor and workforce shortages across all industries.”

Jim Rooney, president and CEO of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, said the law as proposed makes sense because the students that would benefit would have a connection to the state after living here for years. “It’s a fair idea,” he said. “If the discount is applied to residents, should their immigration status be an impediment?” 

Objections to earlier bills, which were nearly identical to the ones now before the Legislature’s Higher Education Committee, centered on their potential for “encouraging” illegal immigration by offering the same benefits to those who have and haven’t gone through the immigration system.

“Not only does this bill serve to encourage illegal immigration, but it’s also very unfair to those who’ve gone through or are waiting to go through the process of immigrating into the US legally,” Newton resident Henry Barbaro testified in 2021 when the last iteration of the bill was put forth by then-Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz of Jamaica Plain. “Why would anyone go through the bother of legally immigrating to Massachusetts when they can sidestep the process and gain the same benefits?” 

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, chancellor of UMass Boston, who left his native Argentina at age 17, has backed the last several iterations of the bill. It is a crushing lift, he says, to ask young immigrants to pay out-of-state rates at an increasingly precarious time.

“I think we’re entering a new phase now. We’re entering a phase where immigration is increasingly driven by really catastrophic forces,” he said while moderating a panel at the Kennedy institute. Suárez-Orozco said global migration patterns are being impacted by climate change, terror groups, and political instability in states with “weak institutions.” 

“It’s a landscape that is changing in our own country, of course,” he said. “We’re struggling with connecting with and easing the transition of such significant numbers of young people who grew up in our country, who are part of the family of the nation, who are part of the narrative of the American story, but they don’t have a paper.” 

Ongoing immigration barriers are a “self-inflicted wound that we’re creating,” said Mary Waters, a sociology professor at Harvard University, at the recent forum. Encouraging better immigration pathways and supporting immigrant students is not just a matter of human compassion, said Waters. 

“Decades of social science work has found that immigrants themselves are highly selected and work extremely hard, have very high labor force participation rates and have very high goals for their children,” she said. “And their children are exceptional.”

In-state tuition offered to undocumented students is, perhaps surprisingly, common in red and blue states alike with large immigrant populations.

Massachusetts, one of the 15 states with the largest share of undocumented students, is an outlier among its peer states when it comes to offering in-state tuition to those students. 

According to a recent report from The Education Trust, a national advocacy organization, a dozen of these, including Texas, California, Florida, and Illinois, offer access to in-state tuition for any undocumented students. 

The Bay State only permits the students who are Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients to access in-state tuition for higher education. 

DACA is an Obama-era policy that allows people born after June 1981 who were children when they entered the country illegally to apply for a driver’s license, Social Security number, and work permit. The program’s status, impacting 600,000 young people nationally, has been in a state of flux for years, with immigration officials currently accepting but not processing applications while the Biden administration fights a federal district court ruling declaring the program unlawful.

Carola Suárez-Orozco, director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard, which she co-founded with her husband Marcelo, the UMass Boston chancellor, said the age cap on the program means immigration-focused policy only considering DACA is missing a massive slice of the undocumented population. 

“Now we’re increasingly seeing in higher ed that most are undocumented, fully undocumented and de eso no se habla – of this we cannot speak – but it is very much a reality in higher education,” she said. 

International students are another resource. Massachusetts, at least, seems to be rallying from a pandemic-era slump of international college students, though enrollments are down across the board in higher education. 

After feeling the drop like everywhere else in the country, losing about 10,000 international students in 2020, the state has gained almost all of the pre-pandemic students back, according to the annual federally funded Open Doors report on international student enrollment. With 71,000 international students in 2022, just shy of the 74,000 here in 2019, Massachusetts is now the state with the third highest number of international students, up from fourth pre-pandemic.

The “most obvious” benefit to attracting immigrant students is the amount of money they bring with them, according to the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, which advocates on behalf of private higher education institutions. 

In 2022, as in 2018, that international student expenditure in the Bay State was about $3 billion. In 2018, China and India made up 34.2 percent and 16.7 percent of international students in Massachusetts schools. While China now makes up 32 percent of the state’s international students –  a bounce back from the cratering numbers of Chinese students coming to American schools over the past two years – India now makes up over a fifth of the international student body, according to the latest Open Door data.

Advocacy and government groups are also working to get their arms around the number of immigrants with foreign degrees who are still struggling to find work in the United States despite their credentials.

The “Bridging the Gap for New Americans Act,” passed in September 2022, was the first time the US Congress has looked at barriers that immigrants with academic credentials face, said Benjamin of World Education Services. 

The bipartisan law requires the US Secretary of Labor to conduct a study on barriers affecting employment opportunities for immigrants and refugees with professional credentials obtained in other countries. The Labor Department has 18 months from the law’s passage to complete the study and present a report with recommendations to Congress.

Delays in transitioning foreign educational and professional credentials to their US equivalents is one of many factors contributing to a serious shortage of workers across sectors, said Rooney of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. Immigrants underpin almost every job market in the state, he said, from nursing to IT to Massachusetts’ third largest employee sector – hospitality, where one-third of employees are immigrant workers.

“One of our priorities is making sure that our businesses throughout the Commonwealth have a pipeline of workers and talent to sustain the needs of today’s economy and the future economy,” Rooney said. “If you look at the story of workforce demographics in Massachusetts, immigrants have played a key role in providing that workforce for 400 years. Immigration reform and policy is a key dimension of dealing with the issue around the talent needs of the Commonwealth.”

Almost 25 years ago, a MassINC research report found that the growth in Massachusetts’ foreign-born population “played a key role in offsetting a major part of our state’s population losses due to domestic out-migration” as people move to other states and a declining birth rate. 

The local business community generally backs reforms such as expanding the limits on H-1B and H-2B visas that let foreign nationals work in the US. Rooney echoes Benjamin’s worry about students coming to the country, getting educated, and then leaving for friendlier immigration systems in other countries.

“I would be in favor of stapling a work visa to every diploma that’s issued in Massachusetts so people can stay and work,” he said.