Who Gets to be American?

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Immigration is one of the biggest points of fracture in American politics, and now it's back on the top of the nation's legislative agenda.

Yet, despite the fact that the U.S.

has a major debate about the issue every couple of decades, much of America's history of immigration has been easily forgotten.

What lessons does that history contain?

And what's in store for the future?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

And over in New York, I am joined by my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner, contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Hello, Alex.

Hello, Matt.

Jeffrey Goldberg, our co-host, is off gallivanting today.

However, in his place, we are joined by our colleague Priscilla Alvarez, who is one of our politics and policy editors.

Welcome to the table, Priscilla.

And we trade it up.

Yeah.

Agreed.

We are talking today about immigration and immigrants.

And we three, all three of us, are the children of immigrants to the U.S.

We have kicked all the Mayflower Americans out the room.

And it's just we immigrants talking today, Radio Atlantic.

Immigrants get the job done.

Get the job done.

Now, immigration might have been the biggest issue that propelled Donald Trump into the presidency.

And now the question of who gets to come into the United States and who gets to stay here is the single biggest legislative sticking point in front of Congress.

That question gave us one of the most shocking phrases to reportedly emerge from the mouth of the president so far.

Mom, please excuse my language.

Shithole countries.

The question also was one of the biggest factors in a weekend-long federal government shutdown after Senate Democrats tried, some would say half-heartedly, to force Republicans to resolve the long-term status of the group called the DREAMers.

These, of course, are the unauthorized immigrants who came to the country as children and have been in limbo ever since the fall when President Trump overturned the status that let them live and work here temporarily without fear of deportation.

Priscilla, back in September, we talked all about DACA, which was that temporary status that had gotten granted to the DREAMers under President Obama and then yanked away by President Trump.

And listeners, I'm going to encourage you to go back and listen to that episode if you haven't, because we talked at length about what some of what the Dreamers are going through at this moment.

But Priscilla, what's changed since September?

So when the Trump administration ended the DACA program in September, they did so on a six-month delay, providing a window of time for lawmakers to pass a legislative fix to this, to DACA.

So essentially to extend the protections on these undocumented immigrants for them to continue to live in the U.S.

without fear of deportation and to continue to work in the U.S.

legally.

Now, what we've seen since then is an attempt to tack this on to must-pass legislation.

Hence, what we saw with the shutdown only a few days ago with Democrats saying that they were not going to budge and they were not going to vote for a stop-gap spending bill without any agreement on DACA.

And the reason that ended is because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that he would debate, allow debate on a DACA bill in the coming weeks before that February 8th deadline.

And that's just, to be clear, a lot of this is hinging on people's good word, right?

It is.

And that is where some DACA recipients that I spoke to are really disappointed because they say, you know, we wanted Democrats to fight.

And this brings us right back to square one, as one put it.

So Congress is deciding on their fate.

What could they decide?

What are the possibilities of the laws in front of them?

This is where it gets really complicated.

So there are several factions that want different things.

There is passing this bill, the DREAM Act,

which would enshrine these protections into law.

To do that clean, so that's it, is what some want.

It's unlikely.

There needs to be some sort of trade-in with a Republican administration.

So there's doing that and also having a border security package.

But there are also more hardline conservatives that want more than that.

They want to end the diversity visa program,

which is one way of coming to the U.S.

legally.

And they also want to curtail a family reunification, actually end it altogether.

So these are changes to the legal immigration laws in this country, sort of a way they say, where they look at it as offsetting providing some sort of legal status for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants.

It seems virtually impossible to imagine a clean passage of the DREAM Act at this point, given how fractious the debate has been on, I mean, even the right-hand side of the aisle about immigration.

I guess I wonder,

you know, the conventional wisdom says some amount of blood will be extracted by Republicans from Democrats to keep dreamers in this country.

We know that Chuck Schumer in the famous cheeseburger summit with Donald Trump last week offered a lot of money towards border security in exchange for

keeping dreamers in the country and that that was ultimately rejected.

Priscilla,

how likely is it that Donald Trump and his base end up actually dictating the terms of this agreement as opposed to any moderate factions of the Republican Party?

So what's interesting here, right, about the Dreamers is that it is a bipartisan issue in the sense that Republicans and Democrats generally agree that this segment of the undocumented population should stay in the country.

In fact, a majority of Americans support that.

The issue and the issue that has been longstanding for several years, because this isn't the first iteration of this bill, is that lots of different things need to want to be tacked on on to it.

So

whether that be border security, whether that be changes to illegal immigration, what we have against this right now is the time.

Right now we're looking at February 8th as the next deadline and it's very hard to imagine that any immigration bill will be passed and that they will come to an agreement on something before that day.

Is it so that we're going to have a shutdown again?

It's headed in a very

difficult direction.

I mean, it depends on who's going to give way, right?

Who's going to say, this is enough enough, or we're going to give this up.

I mean, it's a tug of war between Democrats and Republicans.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: This is the subtext of what you have just said, Priscilla.

The DREAMers are part of this much, much larger group of people in America who aren't authorized to be here, and an even larger group of people who are here from elsewhere altogether, including many, many who are authorized to be here.

Dreamers are the group that Americans all agree about.

Like three-quarters of Americans in a remarkably consistent skein of polling agree that these folks should be allowed to live here legally, but that leaves the rest of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country overall.

Why do we focus so much on the Dreamers?

Well, again, you sort of get to this here.

You allude to this in the fact that yes, it is a subset that most people can agree on.

They did not come to the U.S.

of their own volition.

They came here at a very young age.

They were brought to the U.S.

But it gets sticky because of the much broader questions, the more complex questions that come with passing any sort of immigration legislation.

And remember that a lot of these recipients lived in mixed status homes.

So their parents may be undocumented, or another relative may be undocumented.

So they're all interconnected, and it gets really sticky when you start looking at it this way.

So let's talk to the big question, to the meaty, real sticky question in front of us.

Who gets to come?

Who gets to stay?

Alex, you have written for us about the long history.

I mean, we talked, when we sat down in September, we talked about the fact that these questions, this question, who gets to come and who gets to stay, recurs generationally.

And you have written for us about America's long forgotten history of kicking folks out illegally.

Tell us a little bit about what you learned in looking into that history.

Yeah, what's so interesting about the debate around immigration and fundamentally who belongs here is that it's cyclical and it tends to be tied to the economy in a lot of respects.

And as part of my research for my forthcoming book and just generally as someone who's fascinated by immigration and the politics surrounding it, I discovered this sort of little-known chapter in American history when we were actually deporting people, in many cases illegally, as a bid to sort of stabilize the American economy for American workers.

It was a very make America great again moment, but it occurred under President Hoover and not President Trump.

And effectively, in the 1920s, as the economy was crashing, President Hoover was under a lot of pressure to come up with a jobs plan for America.

And one of the ways in which he did that was by slashing immigration by nearly 90% and effectively kicking out what is estimated to be over a million, maybe as high as 1.8 million residents here, some of whom were Americans.

Wow.

And the way he did that basically was targeting people with Mexican-sounding last names, which is as arbitrary a standard as you could have.

And if you read more about this chapter of American history, unfortunately, there's not a ton of documentation around it, and there hasn't been much in the way of chronicling other than a great book by author Francisco Balderama.

Effectively what happened was Mexican-Americans were targeted at hospitals, at jobs, in their neighborhoods, at parks where they congregated, and they were thrown out by either local or state law enforcement and put on, shepherded onto trains and buses, and basically driven back across the border with no explanation and dropped off many times far away from the border as far as central Mexico to prevent them from easily getting back into America.

I mean, you can imagine that this was incredibly traumatic for the people who were deported.

Some of them were children who were born in America and had every right to stay in America.

And it effectively changed the course of history history for a number of people who were Americans.

And

eventually, as the economy recovered and the wartime effort needed more sort of Mexican laborers, laborers, and in many cases, Mexican laborers to build the machines of war, we allowed Mexicans back into the country.

And

a lot of folks got back in who had been taken out.

But the chapter itself is so violent.

I mean, you have stories of men and women who were in hospitals and seen, therefore, as sucking off the social safety net with Mexican-sounding last names taken in gurneys and effectively thrown out of the country.

It's staggering that

this happened and that there's been almost nothing in the way of public apology save for the lone efforts of one California congressman in particular, or starting state representative, has worked on an official apology from the state of California, but nothing has been done at the federal level.

And these deportations took place across the country, in Detroit, in the heartland, on the coasts.

No one was really safe

from what was a totally brutalizing chapter in American history.

But the language around the deportations, the language around what we needed to do in the name of sort of body purification.

is very frighteningly reminiscent of some of the rhetoric that we're hearing today.

I mean, I think this is one of the things that's so striking about that history is that

among the people rounded up were folks who were straight up bona fide Americans,

American native-born citizens.

And so I think that's where this intersects with this question of who do we consider American, this much more fungible question of not just who's here, who gets to come here, who gets to stay here, but like who really though?

But like really though?

Well, and also it brings

american we i think it goes to this question and i noticed this we always say we say mexican americans or african americans or burmese americans or filipino american we we never call

people

just americans which fundamentally

people from those places just americans right and and it brings to the fore this separation between american americans who are presumably white european americans and other Americans who somehow deserve a hyphenation.

That is a great transition forward a few decades in history to

a really surprising fact that Priscilla that you brought to the attention of Atlantic readers.

So to turn to this question of legal immigration, who gets to come here?

Right.

So one of the pieces of our immigration policy that is currently at issue is the diversity visa program.

Tell us what that program is and where it came from.

Diversity visa program allows folks from around the world to come to the U.S., but it is countries and regions where they don't typically migrate to the U.S.

So there is a quota in place for them to come here in certain numbers.

So these illegal immigrants, and tell us where that came from.

Well, it was originally intended to help Irish immigrants.

So in 1965, there was a law that was passed that began the family reunification program.

And if you had a close relative that lived abroad and you were a U.S.

citizen or a lawful permanent resident, then you could sponsor them to come to the U.S.

But it turned out that not a lot of Irish immigrants had close relatives in the United States.

So in order for them to come to the U.S., there would have to be some other program.

And so in 1990,

this program was put together.

One of the key players, by the way, was Senator Chuck Schumer.

You've probably heard his name quite a bit in the last few days.

And so that program started, but it was intentional to bring Irish immigrants here.

So the diversity visa was created for Irish immigrants.

That is fascinating.

I mean, these were, Alex, to your point about hyphenated Americans.

These were the folks who used to be the hyphens.

Irish immigrants, Italian Americans.

I think one way of framing that conversation about who has a hyphen and who doesn't is to take a generational lens, that the question of which Americans require qualification of some sort has shifted over time.

A century ago, that hyphen might have been applied to an Irish immigrant, depending on the generation that you're looking at.

It might have gone to German immigrants or Scandinavian immigrants or Chinese immigrants or Polish ones.

Well, the interesting thing about the diversity visa program, too, and what I think is an underlying theme in U.S.

immigration policy is that there is some intention and purpose behind it to bring a certain immigrant to the United States, to encourage a certain immigrant to come to the United States.

And that was the idea of the diversity visa program.

But in fact, the percentage of those who actually came changed.

So it wasn't just that bringing in tons of Irish immigrants, but in the end, what happened here was that African countries really benefit from this.

And the Congressional Black Caucus is actually one of the factions in this whole immigration debate that is pushing really hard to keep this visa program in place.

So there's always some sort of underlying intention here, but the unintended consequences always follow suit.

I think one of the things we have in this country is a remarkably short memory and or a thin, a weak grasp on history, to your point, Priscilla, in terms of how the makeup of incoming waves of migration have changed.

I was listening this morning to a debate on public radio about the RAISE Act, which is what the Senate is considering.

And an advocate for the Republican Party's sort of hard line on immigration was saying that most of these immigrants that come here today aren't integrating into American society.

And they stay in their own enclaves and they don't speak English.

And I thought, have you ever been to Little Italy?

Because that's an enclave of immigrants who came here and spoke their own language and didn't, quote unquote, integrate.

It's really shocking how we forget that it was the Irish and the Italians, and now it may be the Hondurans and the Guatemalans and the Ghanaians.

But

the sort of

the more xenophobic impulses that lie at the root of some of these arguments really don't hold water once you start looking at how

the waves of migration have been the same and different throughout time.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, and I think the other part of this too, right, is that policy, some of these policy changes were intended to bring immigrants that would closely resemble the demographic profile of existing American citizens.

I mean, this was something, one of the underlying reasons with diversity visa program.

And it was also the case in 1965 when we saw reforms that would open up the doors to more immigrants.

One of the things that was said by a group back in 1965 was that they thought it would be a

natural operating national origin system.

So that's going back to when we had a system in place that only allowed folks of certain national origin to come in

a certain number.

So essentially, I think what you're alluding to, and I think something that's interesting in U.S.

immigration policy generally is that it's typically the underlying reason there is to create a demographic profile.

It's a social engineering of a sort.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Yeah, to the point about America having and us having a short attention span around these issues, we as an institution, we actually have a notable little history that sort of ties into this conversation.

Nearly 25 years ago, in April 1994, The Atlantic published this story called The Ordeal of Immigration in Wausau, Wisconsin.

And the story looked at what happened after this little Midwestern town in Wisconsin, Wausau, which had been one of the whitest cities in the nation, welcomed a wave of Hmong refugees who had been displaced by conflicts in Southeast Asia.

A lot of the folks locally who sponsored that resettlement were these religious organizations and local congregations and whatnot.

And the story that we told, the ordeal of immigration in the piece's headline, painted a grim picture of like over-taxed social services and unassimilated immigrants and this town really struggling to grapple with this influx of Hmong immigrants.

It drew, that story drew a ton of attention across the nation, and the author of the story was a fellow by the name of Roy Beck, who ended up founding in no small part thanks to the story, Numbers USA, which is now one of the biggest outlets advocating for reduced immigration to the U.S.

A couple years ago, we actually asked a reporter, Duali Zaikautao, to go back to Wassa and see how the town was faring almost a quarter century later.

And what she found was a pretty different picture from the one that Roy Beck saw.

Hmong immigrants and their children by that point were a pretty well-integrated minority in Wausau.

There's still some racial tension, of course, and there's still some Hmong residents who would tell you that they felt unwelcome there.

But by measures of like educational attainment and crime and violence and socioeconomic success, they've actually done pretty well for themselves.

Oh, isn't it funny how that works?

Did the reporter ascribe the integration to any sort of factors in particular?

Part of it was just time, I think.

Time and the dedication among the immigrants and some of the locals to really thread these newcomers into the fabric of this community.

A writer for the Wausau Daily Herald also talked to Roy Beck a couple decades after the story ran about that sense, that the city had actually integrated pretty nicely.

And Beck said that it was great that it mostly worked out for Wausa.

Quote, the fact that Wausa overcame it or adjusted, that's great, Beck said.

But why should any community be forced to have to work so hard?

And Beck acknowledged to the writer himself that a lot of the pressures of immigration can ease with time.

He just argues that the rate of immigration needs to be better controlled so that those stresses aren't placed on communities.

And so the fact that Wausa is doing more or less okay, at least from what these reports say, is mostly because of this same thing that we're talking about, of time, of generations passing.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And I would say, you know, Matt, you bring up evangelical groups or Christian groups and business leaders, both of whom, when it concerns the question of immigration, have actually cited traditionally

with more moderate voices and sometimes even democratic voices.

Evangelicals and Christians have been really concerned about welcoming migrants into this country as is the Christian way.

And there have been a number of articles detailing the efforts they've made in border states to make sure that those coming across the border or those being pushed back over it are getting the adequate help they need.

And business interests are very much aligned with having a robust and

relatively progressive immigration policy.

But it's weird because in this present moment, I feel like we haven't heard that much from either one of those factions.

And both of them carry some sway with the Republican Party.

Yeah, absolutely, especially when it comes to the conversation about refugees, too.

Well, and I think they also, I mean, a lot of these migrants make up So much of these of their communities.

I think that was our colleague Emma Green wrote a story about the U.S.

Catholic Church and how they're pushing back against the Trump administration ending temporary protected status for Salvadorans.

And a big part of that is because these Salvadorans make up a large part of that community.

And so they sort of service that and are pushing back against some of the administration's moves on immigration.

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Some of the biggest political disagreements, and I think some of the most deeply felt attitudes driving President Trump's success in attaining the presidency and the continued dialogue that we see about immigration today is not about illegal immigration necessarily.

It's about who we get to call Americans.

It's about precisely about legal immigrants in many cases, about folks like the Hmong and Wasa who were welcomed here, brought here, and made lives here.

So I wanted to turn in our conversation towards those legal immigrants, towards folks like us,

none of whom would have been in this country had our parents not started somewhere else and wanted to become Americans.

Priscilla, is this a unique quality of America that we have this kind of cyclical divide every generation about who gets to call themselves really fundamentally American?

Yeah, Alex pointed out earlier, I mean,

this whole debate is so cyclical on the fact that we, in 1995, were sort of touching on some of these issues that we touch on today on legal immigration, on do we curtail it?

Do we only allow people that are considered high-skilled immigrants to come to the country?

So all of these questions that we had then under a Democratic administration actually are sort of resurfacing now, particularly this idea of of the merit immigration system and judging who comes here based on their merit.

Are they qualified?

Do they have a high education?

Are they working in high-skilled jobs?

And this is important because I think it sort of nods to the idea of policy deciding who is allowed to come to the United States, who is who is worthy of coming to the U.S.

And it's a question that I think has come up over and over again in these immigration debates

and one that we're sort of tackling now

and some argue is not helpful because in fact it would hurt the economy to only bring in high-skilled immigrants.

Others that say that it's just not,

doesn't align with American values to decide who is worthy and who is not.

So these questions, they keep coming up and they're coming up through these sort of policies that are not unique to this time that have been brought up before, but create a whole list of complicated questions.

Can I just add one thing, though?

Because as cyclical as I think we all agree this debate is, there are a couple of factors right now that I think make the debate much more heated, much more pitched.

And among them, I'd say, you know, we're having a much bigger debate right now in America about the future of the social safety net.

And as such, the question of who gets to be, who gets to partake of that social safety net is more fraught than I think it has been at other times.

I would also say, you know, the sort of advances in culture that we've made that have particularly sort of revolved around

attitudes towards minorities, especially young brown minorities, that then I think has left some people feeling shut out of the conversation culturally, which I think is probably being a bit euphemistic, but nonetheless, it is what it is.

And then the other piece is the parties themselves.

I mean, there's almost racial partisanship, which is to say, you know, you look at the the last presidential vote, I mean, people of color overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

And that divide is sharper and deeper than it has been in a very, very long time, if not ever.

And so all of those factors, and they are by no means, you know, all of them, but they are particular to this moment.

And I think they've conspired to make the immigration debate, though, those cyclicals, particularly poisonous and particularly angry in a way that we necessarily maybe seen in a while,

you know, in other cycles.

What's interesting about what you say, Alex, I mean, this question of the shifts, the evolution of America's social safety net and the evolution of America's immigration policy are very intertwined.

We recently published an adaptation from David Frum's book, Trumpocracy, the Corruption of the American Republic.

But what does David really think?

One of the things that he's argued is that, in fact, America's policy evolutions on both of these issues, on the social safety net and on immigration, point in different directions.

One of the realities that Frum has been a minority voice within conservative thought on for a while has been about immigration.

There had been sort of over the past

decade plus, something of a conservative consensus about legal immigration, that

legal immigration from the quote-unquote right places was a good thing, that it was helpful to America's bottom line, that corporate leaders are out saying, yes, we need strong immigration of the right types of quote-unquote high-skilled workers from the right places.

And

from,

I'll quote here from his story,

in which he talks about what he thinks needs to happen to restore stability to American society.

He says, quote, that means accepting that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay and to work to reform it so that it costs less and protects middle-class families more.

It means slowing the pace of immigration so that the existing population of the country does not feel it is being displaced and replaced.

Economists will argue that a country with a slow-growing population needs more immigrants to sustain the growth of its labor force.

But a population is a citizenry as well as a labor force, and when it grows slowly, it can less easily assimilate newcomers.

Immigration is to natural population increase as wine is to food, a good complement, a bad substitute.

What do you all think of that argument?

The argument that he's making is saying that

you need to grow your citizenry,

right, first and foremost before you accept other immigrants is what he's saying.

Right.

Or that there's like maybe a magical ratio.

I shouldn't argue in our colleague's voice too extensively because we are going to have him here on Radio Atlantic in the near future to make the argument himself and to tell us a little bit more about his book.

Can't argue in his voice too much, especially since we immigrants are running the shop.

Aaron Powell, this is the interesting thing that I find with the U.S.

is that we are consistently, well not consistently, but over the decades we've changed U.S.

immigration policy, whether to limit who comes in or to open the door to who comes in.

And we consistently have this conversation about who gets to come and when do they get to come.

And what I find interesting about the U.S.

in particular in having these discussions is the way that it's viewed from outside, from the world.

I think the U.S.

is in this really interesting position where the way that we shape our immigration policy

is

the U.S.

is sort of seen as this nation of immigrants, right?

And it's sort of seen as this beacon of hope for so many immigrants around the world.

And I don't get the sense that every country is like that.

I think the U.S.

finds itself in a very precarious situation in this case in the way that we craft and think about welcoming immigrants.

Yeah.

There's an argument that across the globe, in democracies of many stripes in different places, including Western democracies such as Germany and France,

but also in places like Singapore, that a country needs a certain degree of ethnic homogeneity in order to support

a robust safety net, that countries that are more ethnically homogeneous, where people by and large

feel like parts of a common us,

are more generous with their benefits.

And that it is because America has found itself

such a beacon and bastion of a multi-ethnic democracy.

It's precisely that that has been in tension with Americans' desire for a social safety net.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I feel like that assumes that there's no assimilation among immigrants, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sorry, now I'm just like, oh my gosh.

Yeah.

I need to spend more time with argument, I think.

Yeah,

I think this is one of the interesting questions.

Is there a tension between

the robustness of

America's foundation that it offers to all of its citizens for making a life and

the generosity with which the country welcomes newcomers.

My own family's history on this front and the history of

our group of immigrants, my parents and grandparents and their grandparents and what have you, is pretty interesting for what it says about assimilation in particular.

In the 90s, so my family is Guyanese.

We consider ourselves West Indian.

West Indian immigrants were pretty unusual, and they were of note to a band of American sociologists in the 90s because

we had seemed to defy what had been a truism of thought about immigrant assimilation for decades.

The best story that I've read about this was a 1996 story by Malcolm Gladwell called Black Like Them in The New Yorker, in which he wrote, quote, In American history, immigrants have always profited from assimilation.

As they have adopted the language and customs of this country, they have sped their passage into the mainstream.

West Indians are the first group of people for whom that has not been true.

Their advantage depends on their remaining outsiders, on remaining unfamiliar, on being distinct by custom, culture, and language.

So this was the interesting finding that, you know, it was once thought of that, you know, the more you assimilated, the more your children sounded American and dressed American, if you were an immigrant, the better off your children would be.

And then these West Indian immigrants started coming in waves to the U.S., and this did not hold true.

Their children would assimilate, and their socioeconomic performance was suffering as a result of that assimilation.

And so sociologists started to wonder what was happening.

And there's a complex mix of factors here, but the evidence suggested and now suggests that what was happening is that, was racism, basically, in short.

That as long as they were distinct, as long as we were linguistically and

sartorially distinct from American blacks, from African Americans, folks could look on us highly.

They're like, oh, these folks are proof.

These West Indian immigrants are proof that

if you just come here and you're hardworking and also you talk a little bit like this, you can succeed.

So

West Indians were held up by employers, for example,

as examples that just of American meritocracy, that if you just did hard work, unlike these folks who were born here, that you could thrive, that America was still that up-from-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger story

American dream.

And when we assimilated, we assimilated into that same cluster of stereotypes and stereotype and discrimination that held back African Americans.

That the more we spoke black, the more we

dressed black, the more we were perceived as black, and therefore the more we suffered from the same socioeconomic disadvantages that black Americans came to face.

Part of what was most interesting about this story is that you go just a few miles away, you just cross the border into Canada, and the situation is the reverse.

Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote the story, black like them, he grew up in Canada.

I was born in Canada also.

But in Canada, in Toronto, where he was from, stereotypes about West Indians were rampant.

People thought that West Indians were

lazy or crime-ridden, etc.

Quote, the West Indians were the first significant brush with blackness that white, smug comfortable torrentonians had ever had they had no bad blacks to contrast with the newcomers no african americans to serve as a safety valve for their prejudices no way to perform america's crude racial triage

so depending on which side of the border you're on the story of my folks the west indians tells you something different

you know it's interesting matt i wrote a piece actually for the atlantic um about the myth of sort of asian americans being, you know, the model minority as they are sometimes dubbed.

My mother and grandmother are from Burma.

And that stereotype of the Horatio Alger bootstrapping immigrant that is frequently used in conjunction with the Asian American immigrant has actually resulted in a papering over of many of the very real struggles that America's Asian Americans

contend with.

I mean, I think people don't realize that the fastest growing community of undocumented immigrants is actually Asian American, 1.

I think 3 or 4 million and counting.

And yet the applications to DACA, for example, on the part of Asian Americans are much, much lower than they are for

folks from Latin American countries and South American countries.

And part of that is Asian Americans themselves feeling a great deal of shame when it comes to their undocumented status.

And part of it is also there's no outreach into certain communities.

The language barrier is part of it, but there's not a perceived need in the same way.

And there are a host of other factors where Asian Americans actually aren't excelling, counter to popular belief.

For example, I think Thai Americans have some of the lowest per capita income.

There are questions relating to educational education attainment among Vietnamese Americans,

the Hmong community that you mentioned in the United States.

But because they've been sort of lumped together as kind of the minority that's doing so well in America and is thriving, there isn't the same concern and outreach and coordination on the problems and the issues that they do face.

So it's kind of, it's interesting once you dig deeper into each of these communities, because of course there is no

broad bucket into which all immigrants should be placed.

They all face different struggles.

The more you get into the sort of various

ethnic groups that have come here and the challenges they face, the more you realize that there is, you know,

there is no blanket sort of

refrain that applies to any or all of them.

Yeah, absolutely.

And also, the more it reveals that the attitudes that we hold towards our immigrants and ourselves are so determined by the context of the moment.

I had a friend point out

once in response to there was a, you know, the Outrage of the Day

was an ad that traded on the stereotype of Mexican Americans as being lazy.

My friend said, you know, you got to choose your racist stereotype.

Like, either Mexican immigrants are taking your jobs or they can't work.

Like, both can't be true at once.

With that.

Immigrants, immigrants, let's turn to keepers.

What have you heard, seen, watched, read, listened to recently that you do not want to forget?

Alex, can we start with you?

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here.

I never do this, but I feel like I should, given how heated this debate is and how much interest there is in American immigration and maybe some history behind it.

So everyone should go find a copy of

the book that I mentioned, A Decade of Betrayal, mexican repatriation in the 1930s and that's by francisco baldrama it's a it's kind of a lesser known title but it chronicles this incredible chapter and by incredible i mean particularly awful chapter uh in america in the 1920s that i think is incredibly salient right now and i should note that when i say deportations they were being called repatriations at the time which is an odd which is a misnomer given the fact that many of these people were born in america and to suggest that they were getting repatriated to mexico was nothing short of um entirely and utterly fabricated yeah sort of like if they tried to repatriate me to guyana a country that exactly or me to burma right yeah so so anyway i think in these moments it really bears um

remembering

what we've done before and where we've been before as a country yeah

Wow.

Priscilla?

On a much lighter note.

Mykeeper is completely completely unintentional.

I recently watched Stranger Things.

I'm very behind on the shows I should be watching on the books.

But I have, so I finally watched the two seasons, and now anytime a light flickers or I hear a drip drip from a sink or whatever it is, I immediately am taken back to every scene of Stranger Things.

So

maybe we're in the upside down.

Maybe.

I mean, maybe.

I'm not, you know, I'm seeing those lights flicker in my home every once in a a while, and I'm ready to communicate with the upside down.

Awesome.

11, is that you?

So my keeper is very topical this week.

I served on a jury yesterday.

Well, I went to, I went to serve my civic duty yesterday.

I was not ultimately, you know, I was not ultimately picked for the jury.

However, I went through voidir.

I was, I spent the day at a courthouse being all civic.

And, you know, it was basically my, my first time

having that rush of, oh, American civic duty.

I mean, besides voting is one thing, of course.

Like being in the ballot booth often, you know, it has that little surge, that sense of, oh, I'm exercising my privileges as an American citizen.

But

it's hard for me to be in a courthouse to be, you know, talk.

At the beginning of the day, yesterday, of course, they play the cheesy video that's like, you know, what does it mean to be a juror and why do you sacrifice this day or several days potentially of your time

to try to help this machinery of American justice move forward?

And there are a few contexts in which we get such lectures.

One of them was the naturalization ceremony where I stood and forswore and abjured any foreign prince or potentate, state, or sovereign.

There is that.

I almost wish.

I mean, jury duty is an approximation of this, I think, for a lot of Americans, an approximation of this moment where your sort of constitutional responsibilities are made visible to you and tangible to you in this very real way.

You have to sacrifice days of your life

to participate in the legal system.

Naturalization is one that I almost wish that all Americans could participate in.

That

actually having to stand, to raise your right hand, to swear, those words, the saying of those words, was one of the most surprisingly meaningful things that I've ever had to do.

So jury duty.

It is always

an inconvenience,

but it was my first time actually.

going to do the thing.

And

good on you.

Thank you.

I don't want to forget it.

it.

Even if you're Canadian, I really like the fact that you're buying into this whole thing.

You're really assimilating wealth.

You know, I try.

I try.

Still part of me.

Still part of me watches the crown and is like, you know,

we're missing out, aren't we?

Alex, Priscilla, it is a pleasure as always.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you, Matt.

Thank you, Priscilla.

And that'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau and Diana Douglas.

Thanks to my co-host, Alex Wagner, and to our esteemed co-host, Jeff, who you'll hear from again next week.

Thank you to Priscilla Alvarez for joining us.

And thanks, as always, to the one and only John Batiste for stirring our soul every week with the battle hymn.

Leave us a voicemail with your contact information and your thoughts on the episode at 202-266-7600.

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But most importantly, thank you for listening.

If you have a home that you are proud of, may you also be its pride.

We'll see you next week.