Why Amnesty Remains America’s Best Immigration Policy

As Ronald Reagan Knew, a Country That Doesn’t Forgive Will Turn Against Itself

One afternoon in July 1985, President Ronald Reagan met with his domestic policy council in the White House cabinet room. The question: should he keep pushing legislation to offer amnesty to undocumented migrants?

Some Reagan aides wanted him to drop his support for amnesty, the term for granting legal status to people in the country illegally. Reagan’s pollsters had told him that the public opposed amnesty. And the president’s championing of amnesty had produced defeats. Reagan’s first bill to legalize immigrants failed in Congress in 1982. In 1984, Reagan had convinced …

by Joe Mathews | October 29, 2018

Let’s Make a Deal to Keep Immigrant Families Together

California Should Have the Right to Grant Legal Residency to the Undocumented

By Joe Mathews | September 11, 2017

MEMO
To: Acting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke and Attorney General Jeff Sessions
From: The Golden (and Still Sovereign!) State
Re: An alternative to your mass deportation of …

I Survived the Gangs and the Border Crossing—but Trump Has Put New Obstacles in My Path

A Young Undocumented Salvadoran Immigrant Won't Quit His Dream of Becoming an American

By Roberto Flores | August 9, 2017

If you quit today, everything you did yesterday will be wasted.

That is the phrase I grew up living in my native El Salvador.

I emigrated to Los Angeles in 2014, a …

Why an Undocumented College Student Left California for Indiana

The Golden State Values Dreamers Like Me, but the Hoosier State Put Graduation Within Reach

By Miguel Molina-Ventura | August 8, 2017

I’m one of the young people covered by President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows people who immigrated with their parents before they were 16 to live …

undocumented immigrants