Earlier this year, Hector Vega learned from the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation that he was one of 250 winners of a merit scholarship that had drawn applications from 50,000 high-school seniors across the country. “I was so excited,” recalls the straight-A student from San Jose, Calif. Vega was co-valedictorian of the senior class at James Lick High School and had spent months scrambling to raise funds for college.
But his joy turned to tears in February, when he received an e-mail from the foundation. It said “they couldn’t give me any money because of my immigration status,” recalls Vega, an illegal immigrant.
U.S. companies and their affiliated foundations are facing a new challenge: whether to award scholarships to students who are in the United States illegally. Coke’s foundation eventually decided to give Vega the scholarship after he proved he is pursuing legal residency.
Currently, most U.S. corporations award scholarships only to students who can prove they are legal residents, typically by filling in the boxes provided for a Social Security number. But the question of whether to reward scholarships to illegal-immigrant students with stellar academic records has increasingly come to the fore.
Few companies are willing to speak openly about their policy regarding scholarship applicants who are in the U.S. illegally. “Most corporate foundations simply want to give scholarships to kids who deserve them,” says David Rattray, vice president of education and work-force development at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which awards college money to undocumented students. However, he says, “pragmatic corporate America” is coming face to face with hard-line public discourse on illegal immigration.
Just two corporate foundations stepped forward when the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, which is supported by big-name companies like Anheuser-Busch, approached donors a few years ago about offering scholarships on a limited basis to students here illegally, says fund president Sara Martinez Tucker. This year, amid the immigration debate in the U.S. Congress, the fund’s attorneys reviewed federal law and decided it was too risky to continue the practice. HSF, which disburses about $25 million in scholarships annually to Hispanic students, “can’t jeopardize that for the sake” of a minority of undocumented students, says Martinez Tucker.
Some companies have a policy that amounts to “don’t ask, don’t tell.” For example, Microsoft Corp. simply doesn’t request proof of legal residency. “I don’t know that we are intentionally accommodating these students,” says a Microsoft spokesman. “What is relevant to us is the fact that someone is a student in good standing whose potential we can help realize.”
