As the immigration reform debate heats up, an important argument has been surprisingly missing. By granting legal status to immigrants and ordering future flows, the government could save billions of dollars. A shift to focus border security on real crime, both local and cross-border, would increase public safety and render...

President Obama's moving speech to unveil his gun control plan opens up the possibility of devising -- finally -- more sane and healthy policies on limiting the destructive capacity of dangerous individuals. That's good news for U.S. communities.

Another consequence of fixing gun laws has hardly been mentioned though --...

His name was José Antonio Elena Rodriguez. At 16, he was just finishing junior high and living with his grandmother on the Mexican side of the border city of Nogales.

On October 13, 2012, José Antonio was hit by a hail of bullets coming from the U.S. side...

Juventina Villa knew her days were numbered. A leader of an environmental organization in the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, she and other activists have been in the crosshairs of organized crime and government forces for years. Her husband and two nephews were murdered this year.

On Nov. 28, one day...

With a more than comfortable margin of 332 to 206 electoral votes, President Barack Obama held onto office on Election Day. Now the big question for foreign policy is whether Legacy Obama will be a bolder advocate for peace than the disappointing Campaign Obama.

The president will need to recast...

Margarita Lopez begins to speak about the horrible events that marked the end of her daughter's life in a low, even tone. Some 40 women in a plush Washington, D.C. meeting room listen silently as tears roll down their cheeks.

Lopez narrates how her 19-year-old daughter, Jahaira Guadalupe...

It potentially affects half the U.S. population, men and women whose lives could be disrupted forever from one day to the next. It costs billions of dollars, at a time when schools are closing down and essential public services disappearing. It deepens the nation's racial divide and tears families apart....

"We are the children of the ideals you couldn't kill."

A young woman carried the hand-lettered sign as she marched with tens of thousands of people in Mexico City last July 22. Twenty-something, with long black hair and jeans, her message captures the spirit and sense of history...

Hilda Lezama was taking passengers back upriver to the township of Ahuas after a fishing expedition in a remote area of the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. In the pre-dawn darkness, she could hear the helicopters buzzing overhead, but she thought nothing of it at first.

Suddenly, bullets shot from

What's 50 percent of 99 percent?

Hint: This isn't a math quiz. To put the question in non-numerical terms: Where are women in the global economic crisis?

The movement of the 99 percent that began in the United States made visible the human beings who suffer the brutal inequality and...

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Honduras on March 6 with a double mission: to quell talk of drug legalization and reinforce the U.S.-sponsored drug war in Central America, and to bolster the presidency of Porfirio Lobo.

The Honduran government issued a statement that during the one-hour closed-door conversation...

Vice President Joe Biden landed in Mexico City Sunday night for a two-day trip to that country and Honduras. He's left little doubt about his mission: to lock in the regional drug war. Biden's visit comes amid mounting calls to end prohibitionist laws and move away from the...

There are many kinds of war. The classic image of a uniformed soldier kissing mom good-bye to risk his life on the battlefield has changed dramatically. In today's wars, it's more likely that mom will be the one killed.

The UN Development Program states that by...

The image of Nero fiddling as Rome burned -- albeit apocryphal -- has stuck as the metaphor for willfully irresponsible government. Government representatives, gathered at climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, have been fiddling for the past week. Of the hundreds of closed-door sessions, official meetings and informational seminars,...

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became the law of the land, millions of Mexicans have joined the ranks of the hungry. Malnutrition is highest among the country's farm families, who used to produce enough food to feed the nation.

As the blood-spattered violence of the drug war...

After curving through miles of Quebec's countryside, the road to Montebello arrives at an enormous log cabin along the Ottawa River. Busloads of women pull up, from Rwanda, Colombia, the Congo, Mexico, Bosnia, Burma -- women who think they can change the world.

The plan isn't to change the whole...

A secret operation to run guns across the border to Mexican drug cartels -- overseen by U.S. government agents -- threatens to become a major scandal for the Obama administration.

The operation, called "Fast and Furious," was run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives...

Mexico's Felipe Calderon and Barack Obama met this week to do damage control following a series of blows to the binational relationship. But while most analysts emphasized the tensions between the neighboring countries going into the meeting, the real crisis behind the visit was the failure of what the two...

The UN Climate Conference (COP16) in Cancun is turning out to be both anti-climactic and anti-climatic.

There will be no major agreement to stop global warming this week, despite the timed release of a number of reports that show that the phenomenon is advancing more rapidly than expected, with...

Following the failure of world leaders to arrive at any binding agreements during the last climate talks at Copenhagen, there appears to be little hope for meaningful action at the November/December climate change talks in Cancun, Mexico. In place of climate change skepticism, debunked by overwhelming scientific evidence, leaders are...