Peggy (Margaret) Sands Orchowski Ph.D.  

 Peggy (Margaret) Sands Orchowski has been a journalist for over 25 years in DC, California, South America and Switzerland. In DC she was Bill Analysis Editor for the Congressional Quarterly and since 2007 has been the Congressional Correspondent for the Hispanic Outlook magazine covering higher education and immigration.  In 2016 she became the Senior Correspondent for her “hood’s” newspaper the Georgetowner writing 10-15 news, features and editorials a month as Peggy Sands.  

Orchowski’s books “Immigration and the American Dream: Battling the Political Hype and Hysteria” and “The Law That Changed The Face of America; the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965” were published in 2008 and 2015. She was featured on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, NPR’s the Diane Ream and the Kojo Nnamdi Shows and at Politics and Prose Bookstore and was a featured speaker on immigration in 20 states. In 2015, her investigative report on the foreign student industry’s impact on Hispanic engineering students was published, supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. In 2020 she was granted a Journalist in Aging Fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America.  

Peggy speaks and has worked in four languages. She began her journalism career in Peru with the Associated Press after graduating from CAL Berkeley in journalism/Latin American affairs and was a Fellow for the Inter-American Press Association in Argentina, where she met her husband a German national. For five years they lived in Geneva Switzerland where Peggy was a United Nations Press Officer and also a freelance translator. Peggy earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. at the University of CA at Santa Barbara and an M.A. at Occidental College as a CORO Fellow.  She was a Director of the Los Angeles Olympic Games NOC (National Olympic Committee) Department and Executive Director of several non-profits in California. She is past Chairperson of the National Press Club’s Freelance Committee.