January 2015
BRIEF BIO OF MARGARET (PEGGY) SANDS ORCHOWSKI Ph.D.
Peggy (Dr. Margaret) Sands Orchowski Ph.D. is the credentialed Congressional Correspondent for the
Hispanic Outlook on Higher Education magazine in Washington DC; she writes several feature stories a
month plus a monthly column UNCENSORED covering higher education and immigration issues. She was
BillAnalysis Editor at CQ in DC; a reporter for AP in Peru, an InterAmerican Press Assn. fellow in
Argentina, a Press Officer for the UN in Switzerland, and a staff reporter and feature writer for her
hometown newspapers in Santa Barbara, CA among other journalism positions. In 2013, she received a
grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism to pursue a story on the challenge American/Hispanic
engineering students face from the foreign student industry to get into graduate school; her article was
published April 9, 2014 in the Hispanic Outlook magazine.
Peggys’s book “IMMIGRATION AND THE AMERICAN DREAM: Battling the Political Hype and
Hysteria” (Rowman & Littlefield, June 2008) was recommended by Gov’r Bill Richardson as a ‘must read
for everyone in Congress and in every DC think tank”. She has given over 60 book presentations at foreign
affairs and public policy organizations and book stores (including Politics and Prose in Washington DC)
and has appeared on television and public radio talk shows in 18 states. She was featured in C-SPAN’s
Washington Journal on Sept. 29, 2010 and her op eds on immigration have appeared in USNews&World
Report Opinion, AOL.com, the Indianapolis Star and the Atlantic Journal Constitution among others.
Her new book “The Law That Changed the Face of America” about the historic Immigration and
Naturalization Act of 1965, will be launched in October, fifty years after it was passed by the most liberal
Congress in history, the 89th, and signed by President Johnson at the Statue of Liberty. A legacy of Senator
Ted Kennedy, the now much maligned law did away with national quotas and opened immigration to every
race, nationality and creed. Peggy intends to give perspective to one of the least recognized of LBJ’S Great
Society laws that still endure.
Peggy lived and worked for over ten years abroad, speaks and works in four languages easily and raised her
two children in three languages. She earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. at the University of CA at Santa Barbara,
another M.A. at Occidental College as a CORO Fellow and a B.A. in journalism and Latin American
studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a Director of the Los Angeles Olympic Games in
1983-84, organizing, recruiting and managing 125 multilingual staff of the NOC (National Olympic
Committee) Department at the UCSB village. She is just past Chairperson of the National Press Club's
Freelance Committee and a Board member of JAWS, a national woman’s journalism organization. She is
also an avid swimmer, tennis player and chamber music violinist.
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CONTACT Info:
Peggy Sands Orchowski
porchowski@hotmail.com