immigration

This Week's Show •

Our Borderline Disorder

The shock of migrant kids-in-cages on our border with Mexico is surfacing tough questions if you’re willing to look back at our history and ahead to an emerging world disorder. The issues run deep: why ...

The shock of migrant kids-in-cages on our border with Mexico is surfacing tough questions if you’re willing to look back at our history and ahead to an emerging world disorder. The issues run deep: why borders in the first place?  Borders that our investment money and military power fly over anyway, often to extract the resources of poor countries and make sure the poor people stay put? Why is citizenship in country X an inherited privilege that can’t be distributed, in the country a burden that can’t be escaped?  When finance and Facebook, food, trade, disease and the weather are all global systems, who’s ready to say: I’m a citizen, first and last, of the world? Who manufactured the immigration crisis.

East Boston, on the rim of Boston Harbor, is where we take the temperature, check the flavor, of the melting pot: the point where the first Kennedy’s came ashore from Ireland, then Italians from Abruzzo who made Eastie their own, then Central Americans from Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras in the present day. In Trump time, the scare words in East Boston are ‘gentrification’ – meaning displacement by wealth, and ‘immigration,’ meaning: how did you get here, let’s see your papers. 

Patricia Montes – herself from Honduras a decade ago – welcomes the vulnerable at the Centro Presente office on Central Square.  First thing you’d notice: The poster villain on the wall of her office is not Donald Trump. It’s Barack Obama, in a mocking retake of his vintage HOPE image.  The new caption says: 1 million, 600 thousand deportations. Then, all caps: Obama, stop tearing our families apart. What bothers Patricia Montes as much as anything is fact-free sort of fake-innocent ignorance among many of us Americans.

Matthew Cameron, an immigration lawyer who practices on the dock in East Boston, helps us understand the larger political picture. We first learned about his work and his perspective in an essay he wrote for The Baffler last March:

The immigration system I keep hearing about from pundits and politicians (all of whom should know better) is almost entirely unmoored from actual fact. It seems to be a chimerical pastiche of the one we had before Ellis Island closed, the one we had just before the moon landing, and some sort of rosy Tomorrowland fantasy in which visas would be awarded to the undocumented if only they would do it the right way. This is not the system I work with every day.

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Our other guests—Atossa Araxia Abrahamian and Rana Dasgupta—both have books in progress on the strange ways the world works to serve capital that goes everywhere and people who are supposed to stay home.

Abrahamian is a model of modern mobility: Russian and Armenian family roots, she had addresses growing up in Canada, Iran, Switzerland and now New York.  Her first book, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen, examined the twin themes of cosmopolitanism and inequality in our global system.

Rana Dasgupta is another widely traveled writer, admired for his novels, like Solo, and his non-fiction anatomy of India’s modern capital, New Delhi. His latest take on our global system–as laid out in his Guardian essay on the “the demise of the nation state”—counters conventional wisdom. Dasgupta believes the nation state’s real power, its tax base and responsiveness have been undone over recent decades by the supremacy of international money which makes its own rules and turns its back on the results, including the migration “crisis” at our Texas border with Mexico.

 

 

Podcast • March 2, 2017

‘Deportation Nation’

The ICE age: ICE for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Federal agents that will swoop down if they think your citizenship is irregular. Suspense, surprise, and a certain arbitrary striking power are essentials in the ...

The ICE age: ICE for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Federal agents that will swoop down if they think your citizenship is irregular. Suspense, surprise, and a certain arbitrary striking power are essentials in the ICE process. It’s the hallmark of the early Trump Era in police work, though it’s not exactly new. 

President Obama deported more migrants than all the presidents before him: locking many thousands of people up for nothing worse than lacking ‘papers.’ But in the Trump era, there’s now a special emphasis on the fear of “crimmigration”: the supposed overlap between illegal acts and an illegal status in the U.S.

Why put that criminal brand on mostly hard-working, tax-paying family people who get in much less trouble, in fact, than U.S..-born citizens? And why now, when the tide of migration is mostly going out?

We’re joined this week by Daniel Kanstroom, author of Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History, tracks the story of how a supposed nation of immigrants decides who stays and who’s gotta go. He says we’ve reached a crisis point under Trump, but the crisis has been building for thirty years.

Mary Waters, sociologist at Harvard, is increasingly concerned by the parallels between mass deportation and mass incarceration. She termed the phenomenon “crimmigration.” In order to resist this system, she writes, “we need a model of a social movement that is not based in civil rights, because we have defined millions of people living in this country as being outside of civil society.“

Roberto Gonzales spent 12 years following the lives of undocumented teenagers in Los Angeles. His heart-breaking account in Lives in Limbo paints a tragic portrait of squandered potential and unrealized dreams. For undocumented teenagers, adulthood marks a transition to illegality — a period of ever-narrowing opportunities. One teenager named Esperanza lamented to  Roberto: “I would have been the walking truth instead of a walking shadow.”

We also spent sometime digging into the stories of undocumented immigrants here in Boston. You can here some their voices in our Soundcloud playlist list below

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You can also read the transcript of our conversation with “Amber”—a longtime WBUR caller and undocumented immigrant—here on our Medium page.

[lead illustration by Susan Coyne]

Podcast • February 2, 2017

The Great Trump Debate: Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader

On Super Bowl weekend, we’ve lined up a couple of hall of fame political players who run outside Establishment lines to help us watch the game that’s unfolding so far in the Trump White House.  Pat ...

On Super Bowl weekend, we’ve lined up a couple of hall of fame political players who run outside Establishment lines to help us watch the game that’s unfolding so far in the Trump White House.  Pat Buchanan was the pit-bull strategist in Richard Nixon’s White House; he’s a Latin-Mass Catholic, a cultural conservative and America First nationalist who’s turned sharply anti-Empire, calmly post-Cold War with Russia and flat-out anti-war in the Middle East.  Ralph Nader was Mr. Citizen as auto-safety crusader, then first among the relentless Raiders against corporate power, and a prickly third-party candidate in three presidential campaigns.

It was this left-right pair that practically called the game for Trump way back in August 2015. Both said that a man backed by his own billionaire funds and showbiz glam could run the ball all the way to the White House.

After the election, though, both men are turning their eyes to the man who may be quarterbacking the presidency: Steve Bannon.

Buchanan—a “paleoconservative” who coined the term “America First,” essentially drafting the Bannon playbook—now hopes that Trump doesn’t drop the ball after his executive order blitz. “Republicans have waited a long time for this,” Buchanan says. “[Trump] ought to keep moving on ahead, take the hits he’s gonna take.” If he keeps it up, Bannon might bring the political right “very close to a political revolution.”

Nader, as a green-tinted independent on the left, understands the enthusiasm that his longtime sparring partner has for Trumpism. Yet he also sees the contradictions and challenges Trump presents, not only for Buchanan’s vision of America, but also for Nader’s own: Both men share a strong, anti-corporate stance and are worried about the  Goldman Sachs and Wall Street executives Trumped has packed his cabinet with. What Buchanan and Nader fear most is that a thin-skinned president, egged on by his hawkish advisors, could spark a war with Iran if provoked.

Strategically, Nader thinks the Republican team does have the chemistry they need to pull of their so-called political revolution: “You’re gonna get very very serious early-year conflicts here that are going to be very, very destabilizing,” he says. “Republicans on the hill they don’t know what the hell is coming.”

And everyone on the sidelines worries – if the Trump’s team fumbles, who will be there to pick up the ball?

December 3, 2015

The New Nativism

It’s been a half century since John F. Kennedy declared this “a nation of immigrants,” since his successor Lyndon Johnson threw open the doors to a broad parade of people from all over the world ...

It’s been a half century since John F. Kennedy declared this “a nation of immigrants,” since his successor Lyndon Johnson threw open the doors to a broad parade of people from all over the world with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

That bill did away with a hundred-year history of ‘national origins’ exclusions — a long, legal attempt to keep American society mostly white and European. But it did not do away with a twisted feature of the American identity. This “nation of immigrants” has the homegrown double-standard of a nation of settlers, says our guest Aziz Rana, historian of The Two Faces of American Freedom. We have built exclusivity, and racial and nativist preference, into our idea of what’s American — even if we don’t recognize it.

First it was Protestants in, Catholics out; then it became white men in, people of color out. The first “illegal immigrants” weren’t Mexican, who were once allowed to pass seamlessly into the United States — they were Chinese first, then Jewish. Even LBJ’s liberal coup ended up cutting the legal limit for Latin American immigration by more than 90%.

The tide seemed to have turned: more people have left the U.S. for Mexico since 2009 than have entered the country. Pollsters believed that immigration wouldn’t be a big issue for voters in the 2016 election. They weren’t counting on Donald Trump whipping up a whirlwind of old-fashioned anxiety and anger at newcomers and outsiders, real and imaginary.

So as the nation of immigrants grows bigger, browner and in many ways more inclusive, the part of it that obsesses over the real America never quite goes away.

Then we’ll close out the show with a look at the special case of Mexico. Our guests Helen Marrow and Claudio Lomnitz look sympathetically at our younger, poorer neighbor to the south: at its people, who work hard, assimilate well, and seem sometimes to be victims of their own success in the United States, and at its culture — saturated with death, precariousness, and new kinds of freedom unknown north of the border.

Lange,-Mexican-immigrants

Mexican women entering the United States, photo by: Dorothea Lange, June 1938 http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa2000001731/PP/

Podcast • March 5, 2010

This "Year of India" (4): The NY Times’ Man in Bombay

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anand Giridharadas (45 min, 27 mb mp3) We’re getting a personal take on the New India that we haven’t heard before from New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas. ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anand Giridharadas (45 min, 27 mb mp3)

We’re getting a personal take on the New India that we haven’t heard before from New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas. When he went “home” after college, from Cleveland to the land of his ancestors, the feeling he confronted was, in effect, hey, your party in America is over, and you may be too late for the party underway in Bombay.

Born in Ohio and educated in Michigan, Anand is a child of that wave of immigration that brought India’s best and brightest out of a bad time back home in the 1970s to the land of milk, honey, high tech and opportunity in America. When Anand returned to do his bit for the mother country, as a McKinsey consultant in the mid-90s, he found not his parent’s stifled old India but rather a swarming entrepreneurial frontier more modern, more gung-ho in many ways than the American Mid-West he grew up in, but also a nation growing less “westernized” and more indigenous on a surging wave of growth.

He carried with him the story of India that his parents had given him, an image of a great civilization trapped in a box; a place where, in his words “No one questioned. No one dreamed. Nothing moved.” He begins this account of that quarter-century transformation through the eyes of his father:

AG: One of the reasons my father left — none of us leaves countries for massive geopolitical reasons, we ultimate leave for personal reasons. His personal situation was working in the 1970s for a company called Tata Motors, selling their trucks and buses in Africa. All he could do to make a judgment about whether he wanted to be in India long term was look around him at work. I will never forget the simple way in which describes why he decided to leave. He said he looked at his bosses twenty years ahead of him in line and concluded he didn’t want to spend his life becoming them.

Now fast forward a quarter century, Tata Motors is today, that same stagnant dead company that in some ways pushed my father out of the country as a whole, is today one of the most admired car companies in the world. Why? Because it no longer only sells rickety trucks and buses in Africa. It has now also made the world’s cheapest car, for about $2,000, in an engineering feat that has wowed every major auto maker.

CL: How did they do it?

AG: There are two ways to think about it. One is to say that they had consultants and advisors who had certainly come back form the West. But here’s another interpretation of what was different. the constraints were in some ways the same. They still had essentially 1 billion poor people around them; they still had engineering constraints; they still had a government that’s not particularly helpful to what business does. But in my father’s day most Indians would have interpreted that context as essentially hindering progress and being an excuse for producing sub optimal stuff. The new language is “we have unique hardships which gives us a unique opportunity to create globally competitive products that are better than anyone else’s products. Because our roads are bumpier, our suspension systems have to be even better than the Americans’ suspension systems. Because people are poor in this country, we have to work twice as hard to bring the price point of a car down to $2000.” It’s the same context, just a different way of looking at it.

Anand Giridharadas in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, March 4, 2010.

Podcast • September 9, 2009

Patrick Keefe’s Snakehead: to the US, through Hell

In Patrick Keefe’s saga of The Snakehead, it’s the migrants and refugees scoffing at our immigration rules, and breaking them at risk of their lives, who pose the moral challenge to those of us who ...

In Patrick Keefe’s saga of The Snakehead, it’s the migrants and refugees scoffing at our immigration rules, and breaking them at risk of their lives, who pose the moral challenge to those of us who got here the easy way – that is, were born here. How many of us would take the route they’ve chosen, through Hell, to call ourselves Americans? Are we missing something about the allure of our country?

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Patrick Keefe. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3)

“What is it about this place?” as painter-storyteller Maira Kalman put it in her New York Times blog the other day, about this adopted country of hers that welcomes nearly a million new citizens every year. “Whose home is this?”

Patrick Radden Keefe: to be an American

Patrick Radden Keefe, reporter at large for the New Yorker, recounts the story of a single human brokerage in The Snakehead. “An epic tale of the Chinatown underworld and the American dream,” in Keefe’s subtitle, it is a great summer read that wakes you screaming from the buried immigration nightmare. It begins in a sort of shipwreck of a tramp steamer, Golden Venture, and mass drownings off the Rockaway Peninsula on New York’s Long Island in June, 1993. It ends in long prison sentences and deportations for the survivors. But the insistent theme music under all of it is the unconquerable drive that thousands, maybe millions, feel to get to America.

“Snakehead” means people-trafficker. Sister Peng in her Chinatown variety shop and bank was the mother of all snakeheads. The FBI and immigration cops hounded her for a decade before Judge Michael Mukasey in 2006 put her away for 35 years. Today, her standing in China’s Fujian province and on the fringes of Chinatown, Patrick Keefe suggests, is something like Harriet Tubman‘s of Underground Railroad fame in African-America. Justice and morality have all been double-reversed and trashed before the tale is all told, but something in the glowing torch of Miss Liberty in New York harbor has won the day.

There is no question that there is a kind of magic out there… What we want to be is this beacon of liberty and opportunity. We boast about it, and I think we all, to some extent, congratulate ourselves for it. And then we’re puzzled that we have 12 million illegal immigrants and more coming every year. Which seems rather bizarre to me: I mean, of course we do.

For me the really striking thing, and the question, the sort of humbling and troubling question was: what does it mean to be a citizen, really? Is it a piece of paper? Is it that you own property here, that you pay taxes, that you fight for your country? I wonder if there is not a way of thinking about it, to some extent, as: what kind of sacrifices did you make to be here?

And this, for me, was the issue with the Golden Venture passengers, for people like Sean Chen. Sean is still not a legal immigrant in the United States; he is still not a permanent resident. He works as a bartender outside of Philadelphia today. He doesn’t take planes anywhere, because he’d rather drive across the country than have to be confronted by officials at airports who want to see his documents. And I think about what he’s gone through. And it’s something that I know, without a shadow of a doubt, I couldn’t go through. And it does seem cruel and unusual, and also kind of perverse, that this guy, who to my mind has earned it, and is American, is not allowed to be, doesn’t have that piece of paper.

Patrick Radden Keefe in conversation with Chris Lydon, New York and Providence, September 4, 2009.

Podcast • December 6, 2007

A Free Life: Ha Jin’s Immigration Story

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ha Jin here (25 minutes, 11 MB MP3) What if the meticulous realism of Ha Jin‘s first “American” novel, A Free Life, could be slipped into the fearful ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ha Jin here (25 minutes, 11 MB MP3)

What if the meticulous realism of Ha Jin‘s first “American” novel, A Free Life, could be slipped into the fearful immigration debate we’re not quite having in the US?

Ha Jin: the long arc to America

I can imagine two reactions.

First, the generous sigh of sympathy — “give them a break!” — on being reminded just how humbling it is to hit the American beach running, to grasp our idioms (“in the doghouse,” “shooting the breeze,” “getting laid,” and “getting laid off”) — how just plain hard it is to confront the routine suspicions and exclusion, to cover the rent, to keep a family clothed, to see a way forward.

Second, there’s the more complicated, maybe off-putting realization under Ha Jin’s endless documentation that getting started here is not exactly an American experience. For a Chinese immigrant it’s a Chinese experience. Ha Jin reminds me of my daughter Sarah’s discovery: “When you’re pregnant, everybody’s pregnant.” Everybody in Ha Jin’s American saga is Chinese, and the divisions (between Taiwan and the mainland), the strongest feelings (“I spit at China…”), the intimate language, the brave hearts and weaklings, are all Chinese.

In the Americanization process that Ha Jin writes about there is no baseball, no Abraham Lincoln or FDR, no Paul Bunyan or American camp-fire songs, no Grand Canyon, no interest in our local or national politics… and no outward sentiment about a golden path toward the citizenship moment and pledge of allegiance. John Updike’s New Yorker review of Ha Jin notes that his characters “strive less to let America in than to squeeze China out — ‘squeeze every bit of it out of themselves.'” Is this part of what upsets us about immigration — that these strangers are so wrapped up in old languages, and their own damned dramas?

To me the slow-release beauty of A Free Life is its very long arc of acculturation and assimilation, over about 15 years. Between 1985 and 2000, the protagonist Nan Wu, with his wife and son, follow Ha Jin‘s own path from Boston to Georgia and back. Nan is first a graduate student in political science at Brandeis, then a translator and cook in Manhattan, then a successful-enough strip-mall restaurateur in suburban Atlanta, reading Robert Frost, Walt Whitman and W. H. Auden in his private hours. But by the time he is forty his poetic muse is in control; he is determined to be an artist and to run the risks of an expressive life. He is sounding like no one so much as the arch-American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Self-Reliance.”

“He didn’t want to die a successful businessman,” Nan realizes, summoning up his real credo: “Do something moneyed people cannot do… Why hadn’t he devoted himself to writing poetry?”

In Nan’s Chinese circle, he has taken a lonely and provocative position.

“You never cease to amaze me.” Mei Hong stood up. “A madman is what you are. Let me tell you, you’re also a banana [yellow on the outside, white on the inside]!” She jabbed her finger at Nan. “You always despise China and our language. That’s why you’ve been writing in English and dreaming of becoming another Conrad or Nabokov. Let me tell you, you’re just making a buffoon of yourself! Get real — stop fancying yourself a great poet.”

Flustered, Nan felt his chest constricting. But he scrambled to answer, “To write in English is my personal choice. Unlike you, I prefer to be a real individual.”

“Yeah, to be a lone wolf,” scoffed Mei Hong.

“Exactly!” …

He preferred to stand alone.

Ha Jin, A Free Life, Pantheon, 2007. Pages 496-7.

Tom Tancredo, or Lou Dobbs for that matter: say hello to Ha Jin. Can Ha Jin point us to the core of this campaign frenzy about immigration, and immigrants?

Podcast • September 26, 2007

At Home and "Global" in the US: Edwidge Danticat

Like her friend from the Dominican east side of Hispaniola Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat is writing "global" literature in our midst, for our mainstream, documenting the "permanent floating" migration games and the fascinating creolization of identities in our time.

Edwidge Danticat — loyal child of Port au Prince and Brooklyn — says in conversation: “I always feel like I bring some of there to here, and some of here to there.”

edwidgeLike her friend from the Dominican east side of Hispaniola Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat is writing “global” literature in our midst, for our mainstream, documenting the “permanent floating” migration games and the fascinating creolization of identities in our time.

The definitions of identity are so fluid. Sometimes people in Haiti will say, “well, you’re Haitian if you live here.” That’s one definition. There’s global youth culture. It would be hard to tell a kid from Johannesburg from a kid from Sao Paulo or Rio or Port au Prince if you put three of them together and they didn’t speak.

There are kids in Port au Prince who don’t even speak English but can recite to you an entire 50 Cent song, who can “do” Kanye West with the same accent and tonality…

If you concentrate on young black men of a certain age in all these places I’ve mentioned in the African diaspora, if you think of them as a particular element of the diaspora, and the disuniting of them throughout time and our history — you know, the slave trade and so forth — then I think these things, whether you like them or not, like hip-hop might be the only common culture there is. If might be the one thing in which all these young men from all these different places can see themselves as one.

All this is part of a cosmopolitan culture, which is usually an urban experience of living in crowded places in a kind of outsider status. These are people who are trying to redefine their outsider status and make something that others find appealing, as they young men and women did in the Bronx with Rap, when that began. You see it in the Paris suburbs — young people who know they’re not part of the main culture: they’re lucky if someone thinks they’re French, or unlucky! They know they have this outsider status. A lot of them, taking their cue from Rap, are trying to create a culture of their own. That interests me a great deal! Young immigrant people who are struggling to become part of a culture, or if that doesn’t happen trying to create a culture of their own that they can belong to and that others end up emulating. That’s their inclusion. That’s where they belong. They create their own belonging.

Edwidge Danticat, in conversation with Chris Lydon, Watson Institute, Brown University, September 18, 2007

Edwidge Danticat has just been through her own “year of magical thinking,” encompassing the deaths of the father and uncle who brought her up, and the birth of her own daughter in Miami, all in the space of a few months. Her new non-fiction book, Brother, I’m Dying is a cool, meticulous chronicle of family history, of sudden shock and turmoil, and of her heart, breaking and surging.

The first part of our conversation tells one of those “refugee stories” that could seem someday to typify this era of mass displacement. Danticat’s 81-year-old uncle Joseph was a Baptist minister in Port au Prince. In the autumn of 2004, in fear for his life in a neighborhood beset by gangs, he fled to Miami, en route to his brother’s place in New York. Though he had visited the States many times and had a current tourist visa, he was detained, then shackled by Homeland Security officers who saw him as “another black man trying to get in.” In his “credible fear” asylum interview, Joseph Dantica vomited violently in an apparent seizure, but humanitarian parole was not to be considered, nor the process interrupted. “I think he’s faking,” said the medic on duty. Then suddenly Joseph failed. “His eyes are open and he’s not unconscious,” the medic commented. “I still think he’s faking, but we’ll take him to the clinic.” Then suddenly, at Jackson Memorial Hospital, Joseph Dantica was dead. When Edwidge saw his body, she was struck by the look of anger on her gentle uncle’s face — a look described in Haitian Creole by a word meaning “you were choked by your own blood.”

Podcast • September 26, 2007

Edwidge Danticat (Part 2)

In the second part of our conversation, Edwidge Danticat takes a "transnational" view of the "cosmic mobility" in a globalizing economy and culture. She says: "Even before people get here, they're working for you, making your baseballs and denims." About Iraq, she says, Haitian memory begins with the US invasion by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and the occupation of Haiti until 1934 .

DanticatIn the second part of our conversation, Edwidge Danticat takes a “transnational” view of the “cosmic mobility” in a globalizing economy and culture. She says: “Even before people get here, they’re working for you, making your baseballs and denims.” About Iraq, she says, Haitian memory begins with the US invasion by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and the occupation of Haiti until 1934 — “one of the most scarring things that ever happened to us… The Haitian in me sees the circularity in these things… It takes a long time to recover from these interventions and occupations.” I ask her, as I did Junot Diaz, to write us an immigration bill that corresponds with real demography and her own heart’s experience.