ABOUT THE EVENT
The Common Good presents Immigration within the United States with with Mayor Jim Darling is a lifelong public servant and now mayor of McAllen, Texas, located right on the border, he offers us his straight shooting insights. Miriam Jordan, national correspondent covering immigration for The New York Times, Andrew Selee, President of the highly regarded Migration Policy Institute (MPI), and our moderator, Dara Lind, one of the nation's leading immigration reporters.
Thursday, May 13th, 2021
5:00pm-6:00pm EST
Andrew Selee is the President of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan institution that seeks to improve immigration and integration policies through fact-based research, opportunities for learning and dialogue, and the development of new ideas to address complex policy questions, since August 2017. He also chairs MPI Europe's administrative council.
Prior to joining MPI, Selee spent 17 years at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he founded the Center’s Mexico Institute and later served as Vice President for Programs and Executive Vice President. He has also worked as staff in the U.S. Congress and on development and migration programs in Tijuana, Mexico.
Dr. Selee’s research focuses on migration globally, with a special emphasis on immigration policies in Latin America and in the United States. He is the author of several books, and coauthor of a number of MPI policy reports, as well as, opinion articles writer in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union Tribune, CNN.com, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and he writes a regular column in Mexico’s largest newspaper, El Universal. He has been an Adjunct Professor at both Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University, and was a visiting scholar at El Colegio de México.
James Darling is the Mayor of the City of McAllen and spent 28 years as a city attorney with the city of McAllen and other governmental entities. Prior to Mayor he served as City Commissioner for District 6. Mayor Darling is also the Chairman for the Lower Rio Grande River Water Authority, Hidalgo-McAllen International Bridge Board, and Anzalduas International Bridge Board and a board member for Region M Water Planning Group, McAllen Economic Development Corp., McAllen Foreign Trade Zone, Inc., and Amigos Del Valle. Mayor Darling is the President of Texas Municipal League Region 12, and Vice Chairman of the International Good Neighbor Committee (Appointed by Secretary of State Carlos Cascos).
Mayor Darling was the President of the South Texas Aggregation Project (STAP) – predecessor to TCAP from 2001-2009. He was also a member of the McAllen Public Utilities Board of Trustees.
After serving two tours of duty in Viet Nam with the US Air Force as a SSGT, Mayor Darling went on to be a 2nd class Petty Officer for the US Navy reserve. He has been very active in the community serving on the McAllen Boys and Girls Club board, Communities in schools, McAllen Crime Stoppers, Chamber of Commerce including being Chair of the Chamber’s Legislative Committee.
Miriam Jordan is a national correspondent covering immigration. Her reporting pulls back the curtain on the complexities and paradoxes of immigration policies and their impact on the lives of immigrants, society and the economy.Whether writing about skilled professionals in Silicon Valley or farm workers, Ms. Jordan's stories have influenced the national discourse on immigration. She broke the news that former President Trump employed undocumented immigrants at his properties, and her coverage of an unannounced policy to deport children with life-threatening health conditions prompted hearings in Congress and, ultimately, an end to the administration's plan. Ms. Jordan travels widely to report from a grassroots level. She rode a Greyhound bus from Arizona to Tennessee to tell the story of the mass movement of migrant families who crossed the southern border.
Before joining The Times in 2017, Ms. Jordan worked at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. At the WSJ, she was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist for beat reporting, with an entry of stories about "the moral, legal and economic dilemmas of illegal immigration." She has been a reporter in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.Ms. Jordan earned an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University. She grew up in Brazil and the U.S, and speaks Portuguese, Spanish, French and Hebrew.
Dara Lind covers immigration policy for ProPublica in Washington, DC.
Before coming to ProPublica, she spent five years as Vox's immigration reporter; she remains a regular cohost of the Vox podcast "The Weeds." She's been covering immigration in some form since the end of the George W. Bush administration.
