U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske, who assumed his duties in 2014, lays out his vision and discusses his priorities for the agency as part of the Migration Policy Institute's (MPI) Leadership Visions series. The discussion is moderated by Doris Meissner, Director of MPI's U.S. Immigration Policy Program.

With postsecondary degrees proving to be beyond the reach of many low-income immigrant youth, and a vastly under-resourced adult education system the weakest link in the U.S. educational pipeline, a lack of educational attainment and opportunities stands to block hundreds of thousands of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) youth from obtaining immigration protections for which they would otherwise qualify. This Migration Policy Institute (MPI) webinar discusses the findings of the report Diploma, Please: Promoting Educational Attainment for DACA- and Potential DREAM Act-Eligible Youth, from MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy. The discussion covers the education challenges facing DACA youth, targeted programs designed to address them, and recommendations for overcoming the education-success obstacles that key subgroups of DACA-DREAM youth face. The report highlights some of the promising programs, emerging models, and policy contexts in states such as California, Texas, New York, Illinois, Georgia, and Washington State.

This briefing marks the launch of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) brief, Executive Action for Unauthorized Immigrants: Estimates of the Populations that Could Receive Relief. With the Obama administration contemplating executive action in the immigration arena, immigrant-rights leaders, members of Congress, and others have proposed a number of options for actions that President Obama could take to provide relief to more of the nation’s estimated 11.7 million unauthorized immigrants. Among the options are extending deferred action to populations beyond those eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and further refining the enforcement priorities that guide deportations. In this briefing, MPI experts Randy Capps, Marc Rosenblum, and Michael Fix unveil the findings of new research that provides estimates of the numbers who may benefit from potential approaches to administrative relief.