Immigration

To be honest, it didn't look like racial segregation. I was standing among long rows of metal bunk beds in a room where 36 men of different races -- black, white, Latino -- live together more or less peaceably. But the setting was a dormitory for minimum-security inmates at the Sierra Conservation Center, a prison in Tuolumne County near Yosemite, and in such places, unwritten rules apply. One of the rules is that each bunk must be shared by two men of the… more

...However there is one difference, said Gregory Rodriguez, author of "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America." As of 2004, 67 percent of those we identify as Latinos were of Mexican origin. But unlike the Irish who came here to flee famine or Jews fleeing prosecution, the Mexican experience in America is not a linear one....

"Previous immigrants have had a beginning, middle and an end," Rodriguez said. "The continuous nature of Mexican migration has caused major confusion both of what… more

Tomás Jiménez , New America Foundation: [on employment for undocumented workers] "When those economic opportunities decline, the number of immigrants that come here are also likely to decline..." LINK to video

In the 20th century, the color line was the primary challenge. In the 21st century, the problem is the border line. Today, there are more people living outside their countries of birth than at any time in history, and international migrants now make up the equivalent of the world's fifth most-populous country -- just after China, India, the United States and Indonesia.

As a result, migrant-receiving nations, particularly those in the First World, are scrambling to devise strategies to incorporate and… more

...Tomás Jiménez, a fellow at the New America Foundation, says that the vast majority of municipalities around the country haven't enacted any anti-immigration laws or seen any raids. So it's unlikely that most workers are leaving out of fear. "This happens a lot," he says. "DHS and border patrol taking credit for things that are actually driven by other forces."

Jiménez worries that the government will just pour more recession dollars into immigration raids and border enforcement at a time… more

Hillary Rodham Clinton is right. She has the broader and whiter political coalition, so she should, by all rights, be the Democratic presidential nominee.

After all, in other realms of the political process, we routinely refer to "black districts" or "Latino districts" and speak of the necessity of those jurisdictions to be represented by black or Latino elected officials. Well, then, because the American population is 66% white, maybe the United States is a de facto white district that should be… more

Amid all the national debate over immigration, at least one firm consensus has emerged: Newcomers to the United States should learn English because it remains the lingua franca of our civic life. All three remaining presidential contenders say that the ability to speak English should be a requirement of U.S. citizenship. And last year, the immigrant governor of California told a convention of Latino journalists that immigrants should watch only English-language TV so they can understand the language and news… more

If I didn't already prefer Ketel One vodka in my martinis, I might very well call for my own boycott against Absolut.

Not because I agree with the knuckleheads who fear that the Swedish company's advertisement featuring a map of the American Southwest as Mexican territory is fueling ethnic secessionism, but because, in its attempt to lure upper-middle-class consumers in Mexico, the company played on an age-old canard that has historically been used to justify discrimination against Mexican immigrants and… more

Ending birthright citizenship is a placebo, not a solution to illegal immigration.

The debate over immigration is fundamentally about who we are as a nation,who we are not, and who we want to be.

It is thus no surprise that those most afraid of who we are becoming have moved to redraw the rules of inclusion by proposing to do away with birthright citizenship. Such a move is not only legally dubious, it is a threat to American prosperity.

Opponents of birthright citizenship… more

Last February, I found myself in the difficult position of explaining American insecurity to a group of Mexican undergraduates at a college in Matamoros, Mexico, just south of the border at Brownsville, Texas. I was taking questions after delivering a lecture on the long-term prospects of Mexican immigrants being accepted into U.S. society. A neatly dressed young man in the back stood up to ask a pointed question. "How," he said politely in Spanish, "could such a rich and powerful… more