Gordon Whitman's Blog

It wasn't until I saw the picture of Pope Francis through the window of his plane, preparing to depart, that it sunk in how hard the man had worked during his brief trip to the United States.

We are at a watershed moment in the battle against racial profiling. We have much to do to achieve racial equity and healing in America - a long agenda of changes in our economy, schools and political system - but we have the power now to end the epidemic of police killings of people of color.

The way forward on Ferguson are negotiations that bring about fundamental changes in policing, governance and the economy in the St. Louis region, changes that dismantle structures that exclude African-Americans in St. Louis from economic opportunity and entangle in them in a broken criminal justice system.

The way forward on Ferguson are negotiations that bring about fundamental changes in policing, governance and the economy in the St. Louis region, changes that dismantle structures that exclude African-Americans in St. Louis from economic opportunity and entangle in them in a broken criminal justice system.

One of the great tragedies in America today is the mistaken belief that racial inequality is a sad but inevitable condition of our society.

It is still the case that less than 15 percent of immigration detentions are of people who pose a threat to public safety, the people ICE says it is prioritizing. The consequence for American families is devastating

Congressman Denham represents a District that is about one-third Latino, and he's married to a first-generation Mexican-American. Still, it took a lot of organizing in his district to get him to buck his party. Along the way, it's been abundantly clear that the benefits of embracing immigrants vastly outweigh the costs.

Last year the Federal Government deported 409,849 people, including 83,846 parents of U.S. citizen children. With the government breaking apart families at a rate unseen in American history, many parents and children are in a day-to-day struggle to hold their families together.

Immigration reform is a big plus for the economy: The reason why immigration reform lowers the deficit by so much is that immigrants who no longer have to work under the table will earn more money and pay hundreds of billions of dollars more in federal taxes.

One of the big challenges for senators, in particular, will be to bridge the chasm between their own economic circumstances and the lives of lower-income immigrants.