The way that immigration is talked about in the public sphere has direct bearing on the ways that health, education, legal, and political institutions enact policies to deal with this phenomenon. Looking at the major media output on questions of access to higher education for undocumented immigrant youth in Massachusetts, this study shows the prevalence of a set of frames related to meritocratic ideologies. Meritocracy, as an ideology of inequality, served economically established populations to justify inequalities in society in a Black and White America, and it is now used to justify the segregation of new waves of immigration. Vilifying this population for being "illegal", not having the right "moral character" and integrity, the discourse ultimately brands them as deserving the status of second class citizens. Furthermore, this discourse decontextualizes the global phenomenon of immigration, obscuring its relationship to the conditions of the global capitalist economy, the context of global relations between capital and labor, the international division of labor and its consequences of the movements of people. (Contains 1 footnote.)