Issues of immigration aren't just found in legislatures of the Southwest. They've found their way into Indiana politics, and students from Ball State have said they're disappointed with laws that restrict undocumented students from paying in-state tuition.
Alejandra Lagunas was there when five students sat with arms locked together outside Gov. Mitch Daniel's office in May, refusing to leave and chanting, "Education not deportation."
These students, who were demanding to speak to Daniels, were protesting several immigration bills being considered in the Indiana legislature, one of which would require all illegal immigrants at Indiana's public universities to pay out-of-state tuition.
The bill, which was signed by Gov. Daniels shortly after the protests, is now affecting hundreds of undocumented college students across Indiana, including some at Ball State.
Lagunas, senior landscape architecture major, said the new laws have forced her undocumented friends attending Indiana universities to drop their class loads down to one or two courses per semester in order to continue paying for their education.
"They are pretty sad, and they are in a state of shock because they don't know what they're going to do now," Lagunas said. "A lot of opportunities and a lot of doors have closed for them, so it's a pretty bad situation for them right now."
AT BALL STATE
Tom Taylor, vice president for enrollment, marketing and communications at Ball State, said although he doesn't know the exact figure, he would guess the number of undocumented Ball State students would be very low.
Before House Bill 1402 was passed, Indiana institutions were left to make their own policy on whether to charge undocumented students in-state or out-of-state tuition. Ball State had already made the decision to restrict the students from receiving in-state pricing.
Taylor said this decision was made by Ball State based on the idea that the school wouldn't give subsidized tuition to a student who isn't a legal resident of Indiana whether their legal residence was in Illinois or anywhere else.
DEALING WITH UNDOCUMENTED STUDENTS
According to an Indianapolis Star report, Indiana's seven public colleges have about 300 undocumented students who acknowledge they are not legal citizens of the Unites States.
For Chin-Sook Pak, Ball State associate professor of Spanish who has collaborated with the Latino Student Union, it is an ethical question whether or not undocumented students graduating from high school should be allowed to receive in-state tuition.
The number of undocumented high school graduates in the U.S. is estimated by the American Immigration Council to be about 65,000 each year.
Pak said most of the students who are affected by the new law are being penalized for the decision their parents made — the decision to come to a new country without proper documentation.
"Although they may look like they are from Latin America, for a lot of them, this is the primary culture that they know beyond the culture of their parents at home," Pak said. "So the question is then, do all children deserve equal opportunities of education regardless of the status of their parents?"
HB 1402, sponsored by Rep. Mike Karickhoff, R-Kokomo, states that illegal immigrants are required to pay out-of-state tuition at Indiana's public institutions.
The representative said he believes this is the fairest course of action for taxpayers. He has had to answer questions such as, "What happens if a student came to the United States when they were a baby and attended school here, but the student still doesn't have legal resident status?"
"I would say, ‘In 15 years, you don't have time to get your citizenship status straightened out? You value your education, but you don't value your citizenship?'" Karickhoff said.
FEAR AND CONFUSION
Gloria Pavlik is a Ball State retention and graduation specialist. She worked last year as an academic adviser at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and was a part of the Latino faculty and staff council there. She said the reaction from the undocumented students she worked with was a mixture of fear and confusion.
Pavlik said IUPUI students were subject to Indiana University policies for handling enforcement of the law, which required students to complete a questionnaire about their citizenship status before doing things like registering for classes or making payments.
"I had a lot of students coming to me asking, ‘Should I answer?', ‘Should I answer truthfully or not?' Because this was new and we didn't really know what the implications would be if someone lied," Pavlik said.
Students had to consider if they had enough money to finish a degree, given the cost of out-of-state tuition.
"There was a lot of stress from students who were trying to figure it out," she said.
Pavlik said she told students to answer these types of questions truthfully because if they lied and their citizenship status was ever revealed to school officials, the situation might turn into a case of fraud.
THE POLITICS INVOLVED
Graciela Roman, president of LSU, said from what she has observed, one of the biggest struggles for undocumented students seeking higher education is that many of them don't come from high-income households.
"Back home in Anderson, there are kids I know who were wanting to apply for college, but there are lots of them who don't even want to bother or they're scared to because their afraid of being discovered," Roman said. "So they don't even want to bother with it, so they're just going to work right out of high school."
Karickhoff said ideally, he'd like to see issues of immigration be taken care of at the federal level and left out of state politics altogether.
"You're going to see more things like this because our federal government has failed us," Karickhoff said. "Let's get every illegal status resolved either through legal immigration, through an amnesty program, I don't know what the answer is, but I know we can't continue down the path were going."
Lagunas said she is worried about what HB 1402 means for the future of undocumented students' ability to pursue higher education at all.
"It's making things worse," Lagunas said. "It is not fixing anything. Now that they have nothing, what are they going to do? They're going to become uneducated and you're not going to have good educated people in your community."
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