How immigration should work in the United States has been a source of public debate and political discord since the country’s founding. In recent decades, the “immigration debate” has engaged successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat. A conviction that the US immigration system is “broken” is now frequently taken for granted in the national media. The status of immigrants also often becomes entangled with other vexing social, economic, and political topics of concern, ranging from national security and election cycles to perceived impacts of economic globalization, among many others. Bipartisan bills and legislative proposals around comprehensive immigration reform and even more modest reform efforts such as the Dream Act have failed to become law.

Constructively managing immigration presents a unique challenge for US politicians and policy makers. This year-long program draws upon American University faculty’s wide-ranging expertise addressing diverse aspects of immigration in dialogue with prominent voices and innovators from business, the nonprofit, and policy worlds. Through public-facing conversations, multimedia outreach, and engagement with policy makers, it seeks to move beyond the current intransigence characterizing immigration policy discussions by identifying underappreciated shared or overlapping concerns around this issue, opening up new opportunities for productive discussion, and building out promising approaches to the pursuit of common ground and policy innovations, across present social and political divides with respect to this issue.

This program hopes to contribute to a necessary reframing of immigration as a topic of national concern and policy making. This includes:

• Attention to evolving perceptions of immigrants in the US public sphere and to the ways immigration is changing on the ground. It also includes

• How best to depoliticize this topic, beginning with strategies for updating media narratives that privilege often divisive conflict-driven accounts. As cities become increasingly important sites for immigration action, we will

• Consider the question of scale and explore the benefits of shifting the policy focus from a “national” arena of relative inaction to more “local” engagements with immigrant- related social services around health, education, addressing homelessness, and other concerns, that help to humanize recently arrived populations as neighbors.

• Finally, we will take up immigration as a humanitarian question of hemispheric foreign policy and international relations with a goal of exploring how best to decouple it from national security, as an exclusive policy priority.