Rivka Comrov, “Crossing Borders to Connect Routes: Higher Education, Immigration, and the Pandemic in the Midwest Project”
Mentor: Dante Salto, Administrative Leadership, Education (School of)
Poster #19
This research aims to understand how immigrant populations were affected post the Covid-19 pandemic in higher education. The focus specifically surrounds students in higher education who are undocumented or who are a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient (DACA). This is a qualitative study that includes primary and secondary studies. The primary studies include interviews with higher education administration. The secondary studies include archival texts and legislation regarding undocumented and DACAmented students, as well as the COVID-19 Pandemic. The most important findings thus far have been in connection to the primary data collected. These findings have demonstrated that undocumented and DACAmented students during the COVID-19 Pandemic were confronted with financial stress and a mental health decline due to federal immigration policies changing in a way that causes potential risk for deportation, thereby negatively impacting their educational opportunities. Higher education institutions during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic have created legal support centers and a variety of economic opportunities (in regards to tuition and program required fieldwork) on campus for DACAmented and undocumented students in order to encourage enrollment and retention in higher education. The findings additionally noted how institutions and students within this population were able to navigate the changing political climate via discretion. An annotated bibliography has been built and categorized regarding the archival texts in connection to DACAmented and undocumented students in higher education, before, during and after the Covid-19 Pandemic. This study will continue to analyze the primary source data in a theoretical framework in regards to street-level bureaucrats. (Lipsky, 2010) This study intends to further impact higher education institutional policies by creating a toolkit that could potentially support undocumented and DACAmented students in higher education based on the data gathered.