Dreams for enacting comprehensive immigration reform were alive until this past summer, when Congress refused to pass legislation that would have offered a tentative but real path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million undocumented people who live and work in the United States. Early in 2007, the president himself tried to move toward reform that would bring these people out of the shadows and into the public eye. But again and again, restrictionists sounded the cry of “amnesty for lawbreakers.” They generated millions of angry e-mail messages and letters to their representatives in Congress, who, heeding the anti-immigrant rhetoric, failed to act positively on one of the major issues of our time. In the meantime, raids on workplaces and homes continue to separate citizen-children from their parents.

Among the casualties of proposed immigration reform was the bipartisan This article appears in November 26 2007.