Dreaming of an education: the immigrant rights movement gears up to pass legalization for undocumented students this year, but the bill has its pitfalls.(Action)

Unnoh, an undocumented student who did not want to give her last name, reached senior year of high school before she realized her predicament. She had immigrated legally with her parents from Sierra Leone at age six, but their family's visas expired and they never naturalized. Unnoh grew up as American as the next kid, she thought, until the day her illegal status began to matter.

"I realized I can't work, I can't drive. What can you do if you can't work? If you have no transportation? That limits where you can go, literally and figuratively," she said.

She had been accepted to several four-year colleges, but her family could not afford the $28,000 a year fee for international students. Tuition for in-state students was less than half of that, but Unnoh was not eligible without documentation, nor could she accept state scholarships. Watching her friends go off to college while her future stalled "was beyond depressing, beyond sad."

Unnoh was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown at age 18. Now 21, she has managed to finish two years of community college and transfer to a four-year university in New Jersey, where she studies public policy. Still suffering from health problems, she hesitates to think about what she'll do when school, with its student health insurance, ends and she has to find work without papers.

"Just the fact that I'm becoming educated is enough in itself," she sighed, adding, "These students like me have been raised as Americans, all they lack is the legal documents. I hope people will understand the pain I feel being rejected by a country I've been raised in, by people that I consider myself a part of."

Under current immigration laws, undocumented students have little means to adjust their own legal status and no access to the state and federal higher education benefits offered to their native-born peers. Without financial aid or in-state tuition, financing a college education is almost impossible for these students. In 2002 California and Texas passed in-state tuition bills, and similar efforts are now underway in more than 20 other states.

Meanwhile, a national campaign is mobilizing for the federal DREAM Act, introduced in July 2003 and expected to make its way through Congress this summer. Along with its counterpart in the House (the Student Adjustment Act), DREAM would pave a road to legalization for undocumented students who meet certain requirements as well as allowing them to pay in-state tuition.