Why the Republican Party Will Come to Regret Rolling Back DACA

I’ve followed the politics and reality of immigration for a long time. In the mid-1980s, I traveled around the country for several months on a big reporting project for The Atlantic about that era’s new migrants. I went and learned about the Haitians and Cubans of South Florida, the Vietnamese of Arkansas and the Gulf Coast, the Central Americans of Houston, the Hmong of Fresno, the Mexicans of the greater Southwest, the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans of greater New York, the Lebanese of Detroit—and the native-born members of the communities they were changing.

What I found and argued then was that the process of short-term disruption and longer-term adaptation through which the U.S. opened itself to immigration still prevailed.

That is, , from the time of the Germans and Irish in the mid-1800s to the groups I was seeing a