Around New England

First-Ever Illegal Alien Rhodes Scholar To Study ‘Migration Studies’ at Oxford

November 21, 2018

Jin K. Park, a Harvard College senior, has become the first ever illegal immigrant to win a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford.

Park is a beneficiary of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program instituted by President Barack Obama designed to give illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children a protected status that prevents them from being deported.

Park is the founder of Higher Dreams, a nonprofit organization that tries to help students who are in the United States illegally with the college admissions process, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) founded the scholarship that bears his name as a way to encourage closer relations between England and the United States so that Americans would one day want to rejoin the British Empire as a British colony.

Until this year, illegal immigrants were not eligible to receive a Rhodes Scholarship.

Park plans to pursue master’s degrees migration studies, as well as in global health and epidemiology, according to The Harvard Crimson.