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All of us at times become dispirited.  

As I've viewed immigration over the last 40 years, passionate advocates have come and gone, fortunate foreign citizens have been granted green cards and then naturalized; but the harshness and hard-heartedness of immigration law as a reflection of American cultural norms hasn't really diminished.

For example, back in the 1980s I set a personal goal (to help end consular absolutism and introduce a measure of fairness into the visa process). In this, I have utterly failed, and have at times trended toward despondency.

Although some of the State Department's power has shifted to Homeland Security, State's Bureau of Consular Affairs has defended the prerogatives of consular officers like a hyper-vigilant Tiger Mom. Despite many articles, blog posts, ABA and AILA resolutions, and open-mike challenges at State Department public forums, visa refusals based on the decisions of consular officers on questions of fact remain virtually unassailable, as a March 28, 2013 decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals painfully affirmed.

But occasional discouragement is not  surrender.  As Martin Luther King, Jr., reminds and emboldens us, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Developments this past week in American immigration have proved him right.

On Friday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agreed to pay $1 million in settlement to a group of plaintiffs for early-morning home raids that terrorized their children. Adriana Aguilar, a U.S. citizen and the lead plaintiff, described the pain that jack-booted action by federal officers caused:

My son, who was just four years old, was crying in fear of gunmen in his home at four in the morning . . . We asked them to show a warrant or any other authority they had for being inside our home. They ignored us.

Earlier in the week, the Associated Press announced that it would no longer include the term, "illegal immigrant," in its authoritative Stylebook -- the journalist's bible. According to its Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, the move is part of an ongoing effort by the AP to rid the Stylebook of labels (thus, schizophrenic is replaced by person afflicted with schizophrenia).   As she explained:

It’s kind of a lazy device that those of us who type for a living can become overly reliant on as a shortcut,” she said. “It ends up pigeonholing people or creating long descriptive titles where you use some main event in someone’s life to become the modifier before their name.

Unpacking the AP move, MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry and a panel of thoughtful analysts offered ...