518 Harvard Educational Review Vol. 85 No. 3 Fall 2015 Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Afterword Imagined Futures: Thoughts on the State of Policy and Research Concerning Undocumented Immigrant Youth and Young Adults ROBERTO G. GONZALES Harvard University Several years ago, while visiting Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, I came across a beautiful twelve-foot bronze statue of a young Abraham Lincoln read- ing William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. On the base of the statue were several quotations attributed to Lincoln, and one in particular caught my eye: “I will study and be ready; then maybe the chance will come.” That evening I was to give a lecture on the plight of undocumented immi- grant students, and the parallels of this Lincoln quotation to the lives of young people living in the United States without legal residency status were not lost on me. A few months later, in Seattle, I gave a workshop on the same topic to a group of high school teachers eager to ind best practices in their work with their undocumented immigrant students. During the question-and-answer period, a young second-year teacher described a heartbreaking experience she had with a student who had been accepted to several universities but could not afford tuition. The student did not attend college in the fall but, instead, began working in her family’s cleaning business. The teacher expressed that she felt as though she had failed the student and that the educational and legal systems had conspired to lift the students’ expectations for the future only to drop and crush them. She asked, with the seriousness of one intimately connected, whether educators like her should be encouraging their undocu- mented students to dream when their options after graduation were, in real- ity, so limited and limiting. I thought of the Lincoln quotation and of all the undocumented immigrant students I have met over the years whose hopes for the future have been the very motivation that has allowed them to keep moving forward. I have met many who have achieved much success despite