UC San Diego

Recently, researchers studying the immigrant context of reception have tapped into a new environment that influences the immigrant experience: universities. Presently, the scholarship focuses on how different types of immigrant students adjust to the higher education environment, but it has not focused on how the universities themselves can serve as institutions of immigrant integration. My dissertation seeks to address this gulf in multiple ways. First, I shift the focus to include an immigrant group not typically found in the immigration scholarship: international students, and specifically, those who want to stay in the US after graduating. Second, I analyze how universities serve as sites of integration for undocumented/DACA students, despite the students’ lack of legal status. Finally, I offer top-down and bottom-up perspectives to analyze the university’s role in immigrant adjustment.Based on 83 interviews with international students, undocumented/DACA students, and staff members at a California public university, I argue that the university can serve as both a venue and actor of immigrant integration. In the context of the university as a venue, I highlight the differing strategies immigrant students pursue in higher education. Due to their 60-day post-graduation deadline to secure a job or further education, international students who wish to stay in the US try to integrate as quickly as possible and thus approach their undergraduate studies through a strategic lens of professionalization. Undocumented students have a bimodal integration approach. They view their higher education degree as an important marker of success for themselves and their communities. They also rely heavily on university staff support to establish creative professional pathways within the boundaries of their legal status. In the context of the university as an actor, I illustrate how staff members (as street-level bureaucrats) are doubly constrained at the institutional and federal levels. I show how they creatively navigate these constraints to assist students with their post-baccalaureate prospects. The findings in this dissertation contribute rich empirical data on immigrant integration, street-level bureaucrats, and strategic assimilation, all of which are essential to understanding how universities can assist immigrants in adjusting to life in a host society.