Immigration 101

The U.S. immigration system is complex and can be difficult to understand. These resources provide key data points, historical information, and background on hot topics in immigration. Learn the basics about immigration.

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December 18, 2017

During its first ten months in office, the Trump administration has made aggressive immigration enforcement a priority. One of the areas in which this approach was crystalized was around so-called...

December 13, 2017

Doug Jones, a former Democratic prosecutor once considered a longshot in Republican-majority Alabama, narrowly won the state’s Senate race Tuesday evening in what may ultimately prove to be a...

November 21, 2017

Each year at Thanksgiving, Immigration Impact publishes a post about how to “talk turkey” on immigration. We’ve done it for several years to provide our readers with tips on how to talk about...

November 9, 2017

The United States Armed Forces has long valued the contributions of immigrants—from the War of 1812 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, U.S.-born and immigrant soldiers have fought...

November 6, 2017

It has been well established for decades that the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, immigrants who have committed no violent offense are often...

November 1, 2017

Americans value diversity and family. That is why our immigration system generally reflects those values. The U.S. diversity visa lottery, which was enshrined into law in 1990, was created to...

October 23, 2017

The United States has been created by successive waves of immigration over the course of centuries. Each wave of immigrants from different parts of the world has helped to build the U.S. economy...

October 19, 2017

The Nobel Prizes, awarded annually in recognition of extraordinary achievement in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace, have once again been won by Americans who came...

October 2, 2017

The White House announced late last week that for Fiscal Year (FY) 2018, beginning Oct. 1, 2017, the United States will only admit a maximum number of 45,000 refugees. This represents the lowest...

September 22, 2017

While undocumented immigration remains a concern among two-thirds of the American public, most Americans, including Republicans, support proposals which provide law-abiding immigrants a chance to...

May 8, 2019

Each new generation of immigrants to the United States has, in time, achieved a high degree of integration into U.S. society. Whether it was immigrants from southern and eastern Europe a century...

April 26, 2019

The U.S. population is aging quickly. Baby boomers are retiring en masse and Americans are having far fewer children, on average, than any other time in our history. The median age in this country...

April 25, 2019

The White House issued a memo on Monday directing the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to provide recommendations to reduce visa overstays. The recommendations, which are expected within...

April 18, 2019

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ international field offices provide critical services to Americans living abroad, as well as refugees and other immigrants. But in a supposed effort to...

April 1, 2019

For years, politicians, the media, and social scientists have predicted a declining white-majority population in the United States and a not-too-distant future where minorities assume political...

March 27, 2019

When the U.S. government orders that an immigrant in its custody must be deported, the person isn’t supposed to remain incarcerated for long. Yet the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) often...

March 25, 2019

Over the past few months, a new trend has emerged at the U.S.-Mexico border: more families are crossing and presenting themselves to U.S. officials to ask for asylum. But even though the number of...

March 15, 2019

Many of the country’s top immigration agencies operate in secret. This lack of transparency in how immigration laws are implemented, administered, and enforced has the potential to devastate the...

March 1, 2019

  Contrary to President Trump’s claim that “large-scale unlawful migration” across the southern border constitutes a “national emergency” that requires building a wall, research suggests that...

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