There is something deeply unsettling about asking a young person to spend 13 years in our classrooms, graduate from one of our high schools, and then telling them they are no longer welcome to pursue higher education.
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That is precisely what Florida’s new policy barring undocumented students from attending the state’s public colleges and universities does.
As a pastor, I see these students not first as a political category, but as young people with names, faces, churches, families and dreams. They are the student who stayed after class for extra help in algebra. The teenager who balanced homework with a part-time job. The first-chair violinist. The engineering student who wants to build bridges in the very state that educated them.
Most did not choose where they were born. They certainly did not choose the immigration decisions made when they were children.
But they did choose to study. They did choose to graduate. They did choose to believe that if they worked hard enough, Florida would reward diligence rather than close the door just as opportunity came within reach.
That is why this policy is so difficult to understand.
For years, governors and legislators from both parties have recognized that a growing state requires more teachers, more nurses, more skilled tradespeople, more entrepreneurs and more college graduates — not fewer.
Yet this policy moves in precisely the opposite direction.
It tells students educated in Florida’s own public schools that the investment already made in them ends at high school graduation. It transforms years of taxpayer investment into a dead end instead of a college degree, a career and a lifetime of economic contribution.
That is difficult economics. It is even more difficult morality.
Scripture consistently teaches that God measures societies by how they treat the vulnerable and whether they cultivate justice alongside responsibility. Throughout the Old Testament, God’s people are reminded that they themselves were once strangers. Jesus’ ministry repeatedly elevated those society considered outsiders — not because laws no longer mattered, but because human dignity always does.
Some will object that this debate is about immigration law, not education. I respectfully disagree.
Florida has every right to debate immigration enforcement, but this policy asks a different question: Once a child has grown up in our neighborhoods, worshipped in our churches and graduated from our high schools, what interest is served by preventing that young person from becoming a college graduate? How do our communities become healthier by making it harder for talented young people to contribute?
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Those are not rhetorical questions. They deserve honest answers.
The church has long taught that education is more than economic mobility. It is an investment in human flourishing. It develops character and enables individuals to contribute more fully to the common good.
That is why Christian colleges, universities, and schools have existed for centuries. Education is not merely about earning a living; it is about becoming the kind of person capable of serving one’s neighbor.
This debate is also personal for Latino evangelicals. Our churches are filled with young people who have grown up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, volunteering in food pantries, serving on worship teams, mentoring younger children and dreaming about becoming the first in their families to earn a college degree.
When we tell those students they no longer belong in our classrooms, we communicate something far more damaging than a policy preference. We communicate that hard work has limits. That character has conditions. That opportunity depends less on what they have done than on circumstances they never chose.
Florida is better than that.
We can uphold the rule of law while expanding opportunity. We can have secure borders while investing in students who have grown up in our communities. We can insist on accountability without extinguishing hope.
Those are not competing values. They are the very qualities that have long made Florida a place where families come to build a better future.
Our colleges should remain places where talent is cultivated, dreams are refined, and future leaders are prepared — not places where doors are closed on students who have already spent most of their lives calling Florida home.
The measure of a state is not simply how well it enforces its laws. It is whether it leaves the next generation better prepared to build the future.
Florida should choose to keep that door open.
Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero is president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition (NaLEC) and pastor of The Gathering in Orlando.
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