Cecilia, 17, is a popular student at her South
Arkansas
high school. She’s been on the Homecoming court, captain
of the flag line, a student council officer, an usher at prom.

She plays the flute in the school band, which was important
enough to her that she quit the school softball team to give it more attention.

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Cecilia works hard out of school as well, putting in 20
hours a week at a grocery store. She volunteers with a youth service group in
town.

Importantly,
she’s a good student. She was inducted into the
National Honor Society this year.

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Cecilia would like to become a radiologist and has had her
heart set on going to the University
of Central Arkansas
in Conway.

Cecilia is a credit to her school, her family and her
community. But she stands out in another way. She may be the only student at
her school to cross the Rio Grande
on an inner tube, in the dark, dodging the border patrol.

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She’s not a legal resident of Arkansas,
though she has lived here with her family since she was 4 years old. To go to
UCA, she’d have to pay out-of-state tuition, which is double the charge to
residents. “I really want to go to college,” she said. But she is seeing her
dream evaporate.

Anti-immigrant groups — most notably Secure Arkansas, the
group behind a proposed ballot initiative that would make sure undocumented
Arkansans don’t get any public benefits — suggest that students like Cecilia
are a plague on state coffers. In fact, her situation is rare. Her counselor
said she’s the first undocumented student at her school who’s been aiming for
college.

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According to the University
of Arkansas
and other state-funded
schools, recent checks on Social Security numbers have called just a tiny
number into question. Only 15 students out of 19,000 at the University
of Arkansas
at Fayetteville
have submitted Social Security numbers that don’t check out, new provost Bob
McMath said recently. Only 25 students at UCA, which has an enrollment of
12,600 students, were questioned by higher ed because they either failed to
provide a Social Security number or the number was incorrect. The admissions
office expects most of those students will be found legal.

If there’s a problem, it’s Cecilia’s. “She’s one of us,” her
school counselor said. The situation, she said, is “sickening. … She’s really
worried about the future.”

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As a graduate of an Arkansas
high school, Cecilia might have been eligible for in-state tuition at the UA
and UCA until recently. The state high school diploma signaled residency; state
schools are not required to gather information on citizenship from applicants.
UCA president Lu Hardin said in 2006 that the school was offering in-state
tuition to undocumented Arkansas
high school graduates because it was “the right thing to do.” 

Then, after an Associated Press article reported that
undocumented students might be enrolled as residents, Gov. Mike Beebe directed
the state Department of Higher Education to make sure colleges had stopped the
practice. Director Jim Purcell sent out a letter to all state-funded schools
requesting them to include questions of residency, citizenship and the
provision of a valid Social Security number on their application forms.

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Federal law says schools may not offer postsecondary school
benefits to non-citizens unless it offers the same benefits to all students,
regardless of residency.

The governor acted hastily after the AP story was published,
since it came on the heels of his own declaration that Secure Arkansas’s ballot
initiative was unnecessary because it duplicated laws already in place.

Cecilia and her mother and brothers joined her father in Arkansas
when she was in kindergarten, traveling on passports and tourist visas. Her
father had come to the United States
earlier to work on a farm and got a legal Social Security number. He has not
been able to secure U.S.
citizenship, but he has paid federal and state taxes since he began work here.

When Cecilia was 10 years old, the family decided to visit
relations in Mexico
over Christmas. On their return, they were stopped at the border and denied
passage.

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Three weeks later, Cecilia was in an inner tube with the man
they’d paid dearly to get the family across the river. They landed, crawled up
a high bank and ran a couple of miles across the desert to a waiting car.

Cecilia was eager to return. “We were in school. We didn’t
want to miss it,” she explained. Then she smiled. “Our vacation turned out to
be longer than we thought.”

Going to UCA will be as neat a trick as getting into the
U.S. Out-of-state tuition tags nearly $7,000 on to the nearly $22,000 cost of
tuition, room, board and books.

Cecilia knows how to work hard — she makes the family’s car
payments, pays for her phone and helps pay family bills. But a college bill of
nearly $120,000 is too much debt to bear.

Cecilia speaks with a South Arkansas
accent, with lots of diphthongs and pronouncing “I” as “ah.” She’s popular, she
said, because she’s chatty and is “easy to get along with.” “I think if I
worked hard and kept my grades up I [should] be eligible like any other
person,” she said. “We came for a better living. We know two languages and we
work as hard as everybody else,” she said. Why is she treated differently?

Recently, Cecilia talked to an Army recruiter about ROTC and
the college benefits a commitment to the armed services would bring. The Army
recruiter, she said, didn’t ask whether she was a U.S.
citizen.

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