Undocumented Youth Reaching for Higher Education - Higher Education: Carlos Rao waited four years after graduating from high school before going to college because he mistakenly believed undocumented immigrants like him were barred from attending. He’s been waiting even longer for Congress to adopt one of the many on-again, off-again proposals for immigration reform it has debated but never adopted. That legislation might grant him and millions of other immigrants legal resident status.
Each time a proposal failed, Rao, who had been working for below minimum wages in dead-end jobs, lost hope that his life would ever change.
“It was a really depressing time period,” he said. “That’s not what I wanted for my life.”
Rao is now completing his studies toward an associate degree in architecture at Miami Dade College and is planning to graduate this spring. He’s still waiting for the immigration laws to change, but these days he’s brimming with hope. He’s one of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants, many of them college students, who have applied for permission to legally stay and work in the U.S. for two years without the threat of deportation under a new program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
