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Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum in Washington, D.C., an advocacy organization promoting the value of immigrants and immigration, sheds new light on our nation’s brewing immigration debate in his timely book, There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. Although U.S. politics are more polarizing than ever, Noorani argues that our issues of immigration are more about culture and values than politics and policy. In his book, Noorani follows the personal stories of Americans from across the political spectrum, including conservative faith, business, and law enforcement leaders, who are grappling with the question: "Do we, as Americans, value immigrants and immigration anymore?" Exploring how immigration is affecting the changing nature of American identity, Noorani talks with Pilar Marrero, a journalist and author of Killing the American Dream, a chronicle of U.S. immigration policy mishaps.
Ali Noorani is the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization promoting the value of immigrants and immigration. Growing up in California as the son of Pakistani immigrants, Ali learned how to forge alliances among people of wide-ranging backgrounds, a skill that has served him well as one of the nation’s most innovative coalition builders. In 2015, Ali was named a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a Master’s in Public Health from Boston University and is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Ali lives in Washington, D.C.
Pilar Marrero is a journalist and author with long experience in covering social and political issues of the Latino community in the US. She is the author of Killing the American Dream, which chronicles the last 25 years of US immigration policy mishaps and was published in Spanish with the title El Despertar del Sueño Americano. Marrero is currently covering the impact of President Donald Trump’s policies on the immigrant community for Impremedia, a company with media outlets in 15 markets across the US, including the flagship La Opinion Newspaper in Los Angeles.
