I Survived the Gangs and the Border Crossing—but Trump Has Put New Obstacles...
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 long trip by land that took me two...
View ArticleAs Trump’s Policies Harm Immigrants, How Can Local Efforts Best Help?
Even by the tumultuous measure of Donald Trump’s first months in the White House, none of the new president’s policies or rhetorical outbursts has been more bitterly divisive than his stand on...
View ArticleLet’s Make a Deal to Keep Immigrant Families Together
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...
View ArticleAll I Want For Christmas Is More Immigrants
Kris Kringle Santa Claus Lane Carpinteria, CA 93013Dear Kris,I hope you don’t mind me writing you at the California beach house address you slipped me when we met at that Mattel corporate event. I...
View ArticleWhy “Brexpat” Brits Like Me Are on the Road to Germany
I’m standing in front of my car: a white, British-built Nissan. I have to put stickers on it.In an epic act of self-harm, Britain has voted to leave the European Union. The British people have voted to...
View ArticleWill Los Angeles Tear Down the Walls That Keep It Apart From Latin America?
Los Angeles is a great many things, but it is not Latin America.Such a statement should be as uncontroversial as a map of the Western hemisphere. But today, elite conventional wisdom runs the other...
View ArticleO Canada, Please Colonize the Coachella Valley
Let’s give the Coachella Valley to Canada.After all, Canadians already run the place in winter.Over the past 40 years, snowbirds from the True North have grown into a winter fixture in greater Palm...
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The German-American Family Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge was truly an American project embodying a certain American ideal. And people celebrated that fact from the start. On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge—after 14 years of...
View ArticleOrange County Still Acts Like Mayberry R.F.D. It Needs to Get Real About...
Why does a place as big and beautiful as Orange County so often behave in ways that are both small and ugly? That’s the question that occurs after the county government made two recent decisions so...
View ArticleWhat Quinceañeras Can Teach Adults—as Well as Young Girls—About Values
I became interested in the quinceañera a few years ago when a publisher commissioned me to write a book for a series focusing on cultural phenomenon within different ethnic and racial communities. For...
View ArticleHome Away from Home
In his photo series Home Away from Home, the Gaza-born Franco-Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji explores and documents the daily lives of people dwelling in intermediate states—between the land of...
View ArticleWhy the U.S. Is So Unfair to Central American Refugees
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement on April 6, 2018 that all unauthorized border crossers will be federally prosecuted might sound like a reversal of U.S. policy. So might his June 11,...
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How the Know Nothing Party Turned Nativism into a Political Strategy
Though the United States is a nation built by immigrants, nativism—the fear of immigrants and the desire to restrict their entry into the country or curtail their rights (or both)—has been a central...
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The 41-Volume Government Report That Turned Immigration Into a Problem
The Dillingham Commission is today little known. But a century ago, it stood at the center of a transformation in immigration policy, exemplifying Americans’ simultaneous feelings of fascination and...
View ArticleCould California’s Population Actually Shrink?
This should be the summer when the population of California finally surpasses 40 million. We should celebrate by reflecting on just how small we are. Of course, we won’t. California, like an insecure...
View ArticleWhen Racist Language Spreads, Immigrants Suffer—and the Social Fabric Frays
If immigrant children are exposed to racist hate speech, how will it affect their mental and physical health? If elected officials indulge in immigrant-bashing rhetoric, could they embolden white...
View ArticleHow Mail-Order Spouses Helped Settle America
The history of government-sponsored matchmaking in the United States is a long one, with roots in the very founding of the colonies. In his account of life in the early Virginia colony, John Smith...
View ArticleWhy Amnesty Remains America’s Best Immigration Policy
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...
View ArticleWhy the ‘New Nationalism’ Can Only Flourish in Conflict
Nationalism as we know it today—a global movement of states led by strongmen decrying globalization—is a recent invention. But a brief and broad history of nationalism reveals its important paradoxes...
View ArticleThe 1929 Law That Turned Undocumented Entry Into a Crime
Too often, discussions of modern immigration policy are ahistorical, focusing on recent events while ignoring the past policies that led us, as a country, to where we are today. That’s especially true...
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