We utilize asset-based frameworks to examine how college-aspiring multilingual, mainly Latina/o and African American, adolescent students from immigrant backgrounds negotiate college-related pressures and constraints and employ college knowledge when mentoring emerging bilingual immigrant peers. Using interviews, post-mentoring reflections, and critical qualitative inquiry, we highlight the mentors’ agency, constraints, and lack of institutional support as they navigated college and financial-aid processes for themselves and their immigrant peers. We discuss policy implications and the need for future research on peers in supporting tailored college guidance and in empowering students from immigrant, low-income backgrounds given their institutional constraints.

This chapter puts forth an argument for the use of appreciative advising (Bloom et al., 2008) as a means of building vital relationships with students of immigrant origin and a potential framework to increase retention of this student population. This versatile framework is relationally oriented to foster micro-climates in which students can identify their goals and ambitions while also envisioning the path to achieve these goals. To successfully employ appreciative advising, it is critical to shift focus toward privileging these students’ experiences and diverse knowledges. Anderson et al. (2019) referred to this as exercising cultural curiosity and cultural humility, actions which disrupt power while creating openness and investment in students (particularly those on the margins). By combining these concepts with a funds of knowledge approach, which builds on immigrant students’ communal resources, knowledges, and experiences, collaboration between advisers and immigrant students can lead to developing dialogic spaces where appreciative advising can be actualized (Anderson et al., 2019; Witenstein et al., 2022).

In this chapter, I claim that the central question of global justice in education is which – if any – educational inequalities between citizens and non-citizens in a democratic state are morally legitimate, and which inequalities between them contradict the normative foundations of democratic education. By trying to find a convincing answer to this question, I first briefly recapitulate the controversy between the cosmopolitan and the state-nationalist approaches to it. Then I elaborate on the question, whether special obligations to a privileged treatment of cocitizens over noncitizens apply to institutionalized education. I make the claim that the answer to that question depends on how we understand education – whether we spell it out as a traditionalist-authoritarian, or as democratic social practice. I argue that democratic education necessarily implies moral universalism. It requires not only the recognition of the equal moral status of all students, but also the inclusion of their individual experiences, worldviews, and ideals, regardless of their nationalities, or ethnic or cultural backgrounds, in an open and “diversity-friendly” ethical discourse that should be established in every classroom. I conclude that since democratic education is necessarily cosmopolitan in its essence, democratic educational institutions should be supranationally orientated.