Immigration

As the U.S. prepares for the 2020 census, news outlets nationwide will be working to help the public understand the importance and impact of the once-every-10-years population count.

To help journalists bolster their coverage, we reached out to two experts — a research professor at George Washington University and a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau — to ask them to point out weaknesses in and ways newsrooms can improve their census coverage. They offered great feedback.

Dozens of studies over the years have found that immigration has little or no effect on crime in the U.S., on average. But research forthcoming in Criminology shows those studies offer an incomplete picture.

As American lawmakers argue over whether to fund a wall along the United States’ southwestern border, the federal government has moved ahead with plans to replace some of the fencing it built there years ago with a 30-foot-tall steel bollard wall. Meanwhile, a growing number of countries worldwide have built border walls and other barriers to try to control the flow of people and goods.

Journalists often make mistakes when reporting on data such as opinion poll results, federal jobs reports and census surveys because they don’t quite understand — or they ignore — the data’s margin of error.

Reminding parents how many days of school their kids have missed and the importance of regular attendance may be a simple, low-cost way to help curb absenteeism in elementary schools, a new study suggests.

Hispanic student enrollment fell in counties where local law enforcement agencies partnered with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify and remove people not authorized to be in the United States, according to a new paper from researchers at Stanford University.