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Millions of immigrants have come to America in pursuit of the American dream.

Is there hope in store for the dreamers?

Or a rude wake-up call?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hello.

I'm Matt Thompson, the Atlantic's executive editor.

With me here in in DC is Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Hello, Jeff.

Hi, Matt.

And also in our third chair today, we have Jeremy Rath, decorated Atlantic video journalist.

Hello, Jeremy.

What's he decorated with?

Hey, Matt.

With many awards and alcoholics.

Decorations.

He's so decorated looking.

Yes.

Alex Wagner, our co-host, is out this week and she'll be back with us.

What is she doing, Matt?

Is she gallivanting?

She is galavanting in a galavant.

Yes.

Thank you for cueing me on that.

I didn't want that to go into waste.

Thank you very much.

Alex will be back with us next week.

But now, Jeremy, we brought you to the table because you have been reporting on immigration for a while now.

Immigration has been much on our minds recently.

It was one of the biggest issues in the 2016 U.S.

election, and President Trump's supporters have been carefully watching whether and how he's going to follow through on the many immigration-related promises that he made during the campaign.

Building the infamous wall, for example, and ending President Obama's policy that allowed a select group of unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S.

as children to work and study without the imminent threat of deportation.

We all know this policy by its nickname, DACA.

And now, DACA is no more.

The Trump administration has announced a wind down of the program and called on Congress to make a permanent decision on the fate of its hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries.

Jeremy, you've spoken to a number of folks who applied for and received DACA protections.

What do you think will be the effects of the latest turn in DACA policy?

Just after President Trump's inauguration, I reported out a short film about DACA recipients, and I wanted to find people who were able to set down deeper roots because of the program.

So as part of that effort I started talking to medical students because they've committed to a decade of training and taken out huge student loans even though they only had these temporary two-year permits that could be revoked at any moment.

So I talked to a number of medical students, but I also met a practicing physician living here on DACA named Marina DiBartolo.

My name is Marina, and I'm a first-year intern here at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital.

I went to medical school at Yale, and I'm here as part of the primary care track training in internal medicine.

Marina's parents brought her to the U.S.

when she was seven from Venezuela, and she grew up in New York.

My mother is a babysitter and housekeeper in Manhattan.

My father does odd jobs, worked construction,

is self-employed, and does whatever he can to sort of keep the family family going.

And I saw it as my job to become educated, to do whatever I could to

fulfill the purpose for which they'd brought me here.

I went to college and I went to medical school knowing that I was undocumented, knowing that whatever it was that I studied

could just be an academic exercise.

but hoping that it wasn't and hoping that there would be a solution and that there would be a way for me to practice the things that I was learning.

So when did she find out, Jeremy, that she was an undocumented alien rather than the American that she thought she was?

Well, like a lot of people who are here without legal status, Marina didn't really find out that she was undocumented until she went to try to apply for college.

I mean, there were some signs growing up.

She told me that when she was in elementary school, she won a spelling B and her parents were too afraid to let her go pick up the check.

I think, in part, just because they didn't have a bank account to deposit the check into.

Of course, having a bank account is something that you need documentation in order to open, typically.

So, Marina studied Aristotle at Princeton, and she sailed through Yale Med School on full scholarship.

She sounds like a completely typical American kid.

Right, yeah, really typical.

She, you know, she's sort of a poster child for these 800,000 immigrants who came here without status, who came to be known as dreamers.

And even though students like Marina, who are sort of at the top of their class, may not be representative of the majority of this larger group of DACA recipients,

there's evidence that the rest of the recipients have also set down roots.

There's a recent survey out that said that 65% of DACA recipients have bought their first car since getting the status, and that 16% of them are now homeowners.

And so the way that I see these med students,

because their commitment to this career path is so long and the student loans that they're taking out are so large, it's sort of a particularly clear example of what's at stake for the wider group.

I loved your documentary.

Watched it several times.

Amazing group of people.

But the question that arises constantly

is that sometimes the dreamers are almost portrayed as these plaster saints.

Now, you obviously found extremely high performing people by any standards, right?

People who are working their way through medical school and residency.

Are all of the people involved in this program really these exemplars of great American citizenship?

Or was that a really self-selected group or a group that you selected to sort of highlight how great these people are?

Yeah, I think that's a great question.

I mean, Marina with, you know, her white coat and her Ivy League education is extraordinary.

But now the dock has been rescinded, she's in the same boat as the 11 million other undocumented immigrants around the country.

And even before that, though, she made a point to emphasize that it's actually artificial to draw a bright line between the so-called dreamers like her and other immigrants like her parents.

Framing so-called dreamers as being different from the rest.

I don't think we are different.

We're just a part of the larger group of immigrants in this country.

I don't think that separating us from that group is a viable solution to the problem because all immigrants are dreamers.

We all came here because of the promise of the American dream.

The line between Marina, an undocumented person who is now a doctor,

and Marina,

the housekeeper or the line cook, is not as wide of a gulf as you think.

I mean, she told me that without DACA, she's not really sure what she's going to do.

And the only clear path is to do what her parents do.

I would like to believe that there are options.

I can't think of any that are realistic other than,

you know,

doing what my parents do, which is,

you know, honorable and good, but just not what I

what what I really thought I would do for myself.

You know, like take a job at a restaurant or,

you know, at various catering jobs that I could do or

online cooking or something.

And I don't know.

I don't know what I would do.

But I think about it for about five seconds.

I find it a little

unbearable to think about.

And then I just forget about it because it just doesn't fit in my my brain

to be honest

that's the honest answer I think

what have the last few years been like for Marina and some of the other docker recipients that you've spoken to and what are their circumstances now I think the last few years for the docker recipients that I spent time with what they described is a kind of blossoming.

It's like opening up.

For the first time, they were able to,

you know, get a driver's license and and drive around freely and not and not worry about being stopped without a license and the ones who were in college and hoping to go to med school but with no idea how they were gonna get there and then in their senior year DACA was announced and all of a sudden they had a clear path to legal status and they could apply no problem just like any other student what they described as a was a massive relief that lasted five years even as they knew in the back of their mind that it was always intended to be temporary and it could go away at any moment.

People sort of relaxed into participating in American life for the first time, really.

Can you talk about that a little bit more?

I'm fascinated by their emotional state because on the surface, they're leading these successful American lives, right?

Lives of striving, economic betterment, educational betterment.

But you say that they've been relaxed, but I have to imagine in this last period, it feels like a bird on a wire.

I don't know what it feels like.

Can you describe what you heard from them?

Well, in the documentary, I speak with a med student in Chicago named Nellie Gonzalez, and she says that it's like living a double life.

I mean, on the outside, she's seeing patients.

She has her white coat.

She's saying, how are you?

She's studying for the board exams.

And on the inside, particularly after the election, walking around with the knowledge that this could all go away at any moment.

So I think, especially since the election, they've been in a period of incredible tension and sort of dissonance between their inner life and what they look like on the outside, which is put together professionals.

Do they ever let their minds wander all the way toward the possibility that they're going to be physically deported from this country?

I asked that and every single person said, no, not really.

That what they do is focus on

the next thing.

Focus on the patient in front of them.

Focus on studying for the boards.

Uncertainty for even for DACA recipients who at the moment have this legal status, uncertainty has been the greatest constant in their lives.

This isn't their first rodeo not knowing what's going to happen with their immigration status.

So a lot of them describe a state of mind of not knowing exactly what's going to come next, but taking full advantage of what they have in front of them right now.

I think this is what's so sort of challenging about immigration policy is that kind of in front of us, we've got 800,000 Marina DiBartolos.

It is individuals and really the questions that politicians, both Republican and Democratic, are asking themselves right now is where do we want Marina DiBartolo?

Here in Philadelphia practicing medicine or somewhere else on the line.

Well, we know that a majority of Americans want her practicing medicine in Philadelphia.

It's a fascinating moment in American politics because it's pretty clear even a large number of Republicans want her to be in Philadelphia practicing medicine.

Yeah.

What's next for these folks?

Now that DACA's no more, what are they waiting for?

Well, in one sense, they're waiting for the thing that all Americans are waiting for, which is the next act of an improvisational presidency, right?

I mean, there's no stability in policy right now, and Donald Trump has signaled a lot of different things about where this program is going.

So

on the one hand, you sort of feel sorry for DACA recipients because they have no idea what the personality of Donald Trump is going to lead to.

On the other hand, they know that everything is possible because he's said that he'll revisit the issue if Congress doesn't grapple with it in some way.

So it sounds like they're living just

on a volcano of uncertainty rather than the sure knowledge that they're about to be deported.

And this is one of the things about DACA, one of the reasons that its critics assailed it as being unconstitutional, and one of the reasons that the president has such freedom to move in any direction on the policy is that it is an executive action.

It's completely the president's prerogative.

And the great thing about this presidency is that it moves in all directions at once.

So it makes it very exciting to watch, except if you're a DACA recipient and want to have a little bit of stability in your life.

The Trump presidency can go anywhere, yes.

The students that I spoke to in the last week following up with them, they're trying to, in the midst of such uncertainty, just take the next step, be that their next board exam, or get one step closer to whatever their goal is that they have in mind.

Because I think the general feeling is that whatever education or credentialing that you're able to get for the time being, that's something that can't be taken away once it's in your background.

What about politicians that you've spoken to?

What are they thinking of as next moves?

Well, the law before Congress that seems to have the most momentum is the Bridge Act from Durbin and Graham.

Of course, Senator Durbin is, he introduced the original DREAM Act in 2001, and that's where we get this term DREAMers.

The Bridge Act is just a law that would extend DACA-like protections to the same group of people for three years.

But it would be a law, not an executive action.

Right.

Jeremy, DACA was a little bit of a weird policy in that it was an executive action.

Of course, it had direct effects on a number of people.

But

what did it mean to apply for DACA?

And what does it mean now that it's taken away?

Applying for DACA in the first place was a huge shift for a lot of the people who enrolled in the program.

I mean, there are two med students that I spoke to in Chicago.

I visited a school that has about 30 undocumented med students.

Two of them both told me stories about growing up in the southeast U.S., in Georgia and in South Carolina.

And they both had a sort of talk with their parents at a very young age.

You know, anybody in any official capacity asks you too many questions about where you live, how you got here, what your parents do for work.

You know, you stay quiet.

And that's from a very young age, just knowing generally,

not about that, you know, not about their status in particular, but just that you don't reveal a lot about where your family's from.

So to go from a lifetime of staying quiet about your family's origins to filling out an official US government document about you know, your name, your address, when you came into the country illegally, essentially building a dossier that could be used to deport you and sending that into the government.

I think it's difficult to overstate how big of a change that was for all of the people who enrolled in DACA, not just the med students.

It sounds like an ambush.

I mean, it sounds like a government-sponsored ambush in a kind of way.

At this point, it does.

I think at the time, it felt like an empowering sort of coming out and a legitimizing of, you know, for a group of people who went to U.S.

schools and, you know, were in Girl Scouts and played basketball and everything, they felt like, yeah, sure, I'll send in my stuff.

This is a key point that can be easy to miss about DACA.

Applying for DACA in the first place was a kind of extraordinary act of trust in the U.S.

government.

To deport these folks, the government would have had to build a case against them.

And by applying for DACA, part of what these DACA recipients were doing was basically building a case for the government, for their deportation.

You're handing over proof that you're deportable.

You know, ICE can have access to these DACA files.

That's the government agency that enacts deportations.

So if the original application was a massive act of trust, I think right now people are feeling the effects of an act of betrayal.

Jeremy Raff, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

In the next part of our conversation, we'll be joined by Atlantic Assistant Editor Priscilla Alvarez, who will help us figure out why American immigration policy has been in seemingly permanent purgatory for decades.

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And we're back with Priscilla Alvarez, who edits our politics and policy coverage.

Welcome, Priscilla.

Thanks for having me, Matt.

Reading back on some of our coverage on immigration over the years, I'm surprised by how many turns it takes.

No, it's

the most amazing thing I've seen this week, and there have been a lot of amazing things to see this week on the subject of immigration, obviously, is a clip from a 1980 Republican primary debate between Ronald Reagan and George H.W.

Bush, in which the two candidates, in response to a question about immigration, compete with each other to be more sympathetic to immigrants.

I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem that would be so sensitive and so understanding about labor needs and human needs that that problem wouldn't come up.

But today, if those people are here,

I would reluctantly say I think

they would get whatever it is that they're, you know, what the society is giving to their neighbors.

But the problem has to be solved.

The problem has to be solved.

Because

as we have kind of made illegal some kinds of labor that I'd like to see legal, we're doing two things.

We're creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law, and secondly, we're exacerbating relations with Mexico.

The answer to your question is much more fundamental than whether they attend Houston schools, it seems to me.

I don't want to see a whole, if they're living here, I don't want to see a whole thing of six and eight year old kids being made, you know, one, totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living with outside the law.

let's address ourselves to the fundamentals.

These are good people, strong people.

Part of my family is a Mexican.

Can I add to that?

I think the time has come that the United States and our neighbors, particularly our neighbor to the south, should have a better understanding and a better relationship than we've ever had.

And I think, but we haven't been sensitive enough to our size and our power.

Rather than making them or talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here.

And when they go on to go back, they can go back and they can cross and open the border both ways.

So Priscilla, what you hear in this is obviously something that you do not hear in Republican circles anymore.

An attempt, first of all, an overt statement against walls.

You don't hear that level of sympathy from most Republican office holders these days.

What's also interesting, and I want you to talk about this, what's also interesting is that the Democrats have become a little bit of a caricature of themselves on the subject of immigration.

If you recall years ago, obviously, one of the reasons we have all these makeshift policies is because the Democrats couldn't agree on a policy in part because there was a restrictionist movement within the Democratic Party, mostly surrounding the labor movement.

Bernie Sanders, of course, was a leader in this movement.

There were a lot of people who wanted to place pretty serious restrictions on immigration.

Now, the Democrats have become pretty much an open immigration party and the Republicans have become almost an entirely closed immigration party.

So can you talk about why the parties have retreated to their respective corners?

Yeah, so the Republican Party and the

Democratic Party have sort of ebbed and flow in the way that they view immigration over the years.

And in fact, in the last 20 years, we have seen this with the debate with Reagan and Bush.

And also under the Clinton administration, it was a totally different debate about immigration.

Remind us what what the Clinton administration thought about immigration.

Under the Clinton administration, there was the Jordan Commission, which was set up to look at the U.S.

immigration system.

And they recommended in 1995 to cut legal immigration to the United States.

And this is under a Democrat president talking about cutting this flow, which is something that we see now under a Republican administration.

And the fear was hurting the labor market in the U.S.

Exactly.

So this is where we sort of see the Democratic Party in a bind, right?

They're largely seen as pro-immigration, but they're also pro-labor.

And the labor movement at the time was opposed to immigration because they saw it as hurting the native worker.

Meanwhile, you see corporations who are embracing immigration because they had immigrants that were high-skilled and were doing well in their companies.

So there's this push and pull in the Democratic Party of what was Clinton going to do with all these competing demands.

Well, it was a push and pull, but it seems like the labor movement has lost, given where the Democrats are now.

exactly.

And that is sort of the diminishing influence of sorts with the labor movement.

It started, the Democratic Party went the pro-immigration route.

They found a consensus in embracing immigration.

And I think a thing that we need to think about here is the demographic change.

We were also seeing a growing Asian vote.

We were seeing a growing Latino vote.

And they were thinking about their party base as well.

And they were seeing immigrant advocates sort of step up against the administration.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So that explains the Democrat shift.

What happened in the Republican Party between 1980 or the 80s and now, where it's become unacceptable on the part of most Republican office holders to speak sympathetically about liberal immigration policies?

So I posed this question to Alan Pratt, a professor of immigration at American University, and something that he shared with me is September 11th was really a turning point in the way that we thought about immigration, not only through the economic lens, but through national security, is are they threatening public safety?

One of the things that's so incredibly important in the change in tone between 1986 and the present is the events of 9-11.

Immigration as a national security threat.

One of the many interesting issues this raises is why in response to 9-11, which of course was an attack carried out by a group of Arab terrorists, why did so many people react to that by worrying about Hispanic immigration?

Right?

I mean, the terrorists are from Saudi Arabia.

They weren't from Honduras.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I think to the voter's mind, they're just thinking immigrant, and they're thinking someone that's not like them.

I don't think that there's that distinction there.

So, if you're going to come together on a position on immigration, then you're going to take that stance as that's a pretty amazing data point to miss, though, I think, when you're thinking about where are threats coming from.

I'm curious why immigration policy seems to be so calcified when we've come to this point where it seems like there's a lot of ambient agreement on

what a

well-supported, popular immigration policy might be.

Aaron Ross Powell, so I think what's interesting here is that the Republican Party has sort of moved in a direction where immigration as a whole is a problem.

So we're thinking about illegal immigration as a problem and legal immigration.

And that's the last thing.

And they've redefined the entirety of the issue as a problem, not as an opportunity or even as a neutral challenge.

Aaron Ross Powell, right.

When you think back to Reagan in 1986, he used the word that nobody wants to use today, which is amnesty.

He wanted to give millions of undocumented immigrants this path to legal status

while also tightening border security and thinking about penalizing employers, et cetera.

And today, we are talking about immigration as a whole being bad for the country.

And Trump stood next to two senators this year who are are proposing legislation that would drastically reduce legal immigration.

So it kind of thrusts that into the mainstream.

So we're seeing that happen while simultaneously we're seeing a Democratic Party sort of embrace immigration as a whole and fighting their own is it the Democrats' fault in one sense for not taking the idea of border security seriously, not taking the idea of sovereignty and national security seriously?

I mean, a definition,

the definition of a sovereign state is that it controls who comes in and goes out, right?

And it speaks to your earlier point because in 2006, we saw Democrats sign on to Bush's Border Defense Act.

So, this is something that I think, especially in today's environment and the way that we're thinking about immigration and the rhetoric that's used around immigration, it's not only a stance toward border security, but a stance against the administration as a whole.

And that is something that they could easily run into problems with because it is a question of what do we do about people that poor over the border.

The next question, I think, is interior enforcement, which we have 11 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country.

So it's not only who's coming in, which is less than is perceived to be, and more so, what do we do about the people that are here?

My only point on that is that many Americans, liberal-minded Americans, would not have a problem with people being stopped at a border and saying, you can't come into America, you don't have a visa.

They do have a problem of people being snatched out of the workplace once they're in America or out of a school and being deported.

So I don't understand why the Democrats can't revert back to a position of saying we should have strong border enforcement and we should have a liberal and forgiving policy to people who are already here.

We've had two successive presidents, President Obama and President Trump, tell Congress, in effect, this is now on you.

President Obama said that implicitly, announcing a policy that would for the moment answer the question of the status of the DACA recipients.

President Trump took that status away, but said at the same time to Congress, this is now on you.

Why hasn't Congress taken that invitation to act?

I think this goes back again to the factions within the party in each party.

So among Republicans, you do have the more moderate Republicans, and you actually see them today, like Lindsey Graham, pushing for some sort of legislative solution.

But you also have those that are very opposed to it.

Senator Jeff Sessions, who is now the Attorney General, he was very opposed to

certain parts of this sort of immigration package.

And it's something that Trump is now asking for.

He is asking for some sort of solution.

But in fighting within parties and amongst each other in a highly partisan time and in partisan times in the past, it just makes it very difficult.

And the other part of immigration policy, and this is something we've talked about before, Matt, it's not like healthcare, right?

It's not this abstract policy.

It's something that'll take effect.

People understand it.

It's clear.

You're either legal one moment and then illegal the next.

And that's something that I think voters are also in tune with.

Yeah, President Trump announced the policy and instantly 800,000 people have their statuses thrown into question.

And it calls into question now, can they work?

Are they allowed to study here?

Even every day, basics like IDs become an issue and a matter of question.

And I think, too, there's these competing interests, right?

There's when we're thinking about the economy and we're thinking about are immigrants harming the economy, are they benefiting the economy?

This is something that economists are constantly thinking about and studying.

And so, you know, a lower wage worker is going to be more concerned about some announcement that's going to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants who they may be competing with at

a lower wage job.

Perhaps we would have a different conversation in a different

higher skilled job,

for lack of better words.

But yeah, this is something we're always grappling with.

Speaking of people in high-skilled jobs, Matt, you're an immigrant yourself.

You've came over the border like then that Ted Cruz.

Like one of those reporters that Ted Cruz commercial.

I crawled over the border at the age of five with a knife in my teeth saying, back off people in the middle of the job.

Right to Harvard Yard.

It's incredible.

Right to Harvard Yard.

No, but I'm very curious.

You are actually an immigrant.

How are you interpreting not just this issue, but how are you seeing America through the lens of this trauma?

Yeah, I'm something of a childhood arrival.

My family's story is a pretty typical immigrant story.

They left Guyana and settled in Canada where I was born and moved here when I was five.

My partner Brian, who was born and raised in Minnesota, often jokes that he's more Canadian than I am at this point.

And I think you might be right.

Like pretty much every immigrant family that's ever come to America by choice, we came here for the dream.

It's the land of opportunity.

But to me, this tortured fight over the dreamers is a consequence in part of the fact that for a lot of Americans, it doesn't feel like the land of opportunity.

For those folks that want to close the door or at least narrow it a lot, I think a lot of them feel like their own options and their families' options are limited.

I have actually lived the dream.

For me, it's real.

But for a lot of Americans, I think it's not.

So pop quiz for Priscilla.

How many Guyanese Canadian American editors at major magazines?

Wait, no, let me rephrase it.

Because I definitely know the answer.

How many Guyanese Canadians work at the top level of the magazine industry, Priscilla?

Just a pop quiz.

There's only one and only great editor.

That's what I think.

There's a great executive editor.

There come a dime a dozen these Guyanese Canadian magazine editors.

Oh man, who is that person?

I want to bump them out.

Yeah.

At the end of every episode of Radio Atlantic, we share our keepers.

What have we encountered in recent days?

A song you've heard, a clip you've watched, anything that you want to hold on to for the rest of your days?

What do you not want to forget?

So, I'm going to be a total nerd here, and I'm going to stick to the theme of the story.

Awesome, very unatlantic.

Awesome.

Unless you want to hear about my wedding planning, which is like a whole other topic.

Yeah, actually, those are always good stuff.

Well, so when I was talking to Alan Kraut, he reminded me of this quote that used to be said a lot by immigrants back in the early 20th century, late 19th century.

And it was, America beckons, Americans repel.

And I think it was, it's an interesting quote and something that I want to think about because it is,

it's also important how the world views U.S.

immigration policy.

country was built on immigrants.

I think that's something this country grapples with every day is the compassion part of immigration as far and as well as the policy and reconciling those two.

And it's something that was said decades ago and I think is something that we will continue to grapple with in this moment and going forward.

Awesome.

Jeff, who do you want to keep?

That was Ernest.

I know this is going to come a surprise to people, but we are not the only podcast in existence.

And there is an organization called Gimlet Media, which makes some outstanding podcasts.

And I listened to last week.

Am I allowed to be generous?

You are definitely allowed to be generous.

I don't know if I'm allowed to be generous.

They've been doing some some great things.

There's an episode of Reply All This Gimlet show called Ship to Timbuck 2.

Don't give it away.

You know it.

I know it.

It is brilliant.

You should listen to it.

Then you should listen to the Atlantics podcasts, obviously.

But you should listen to this.

It's one of the smartest, most interesting, and most surprising podcasts or any storytelling

that I've ever heard.

I will absolutely second that keeper.

It is a great

piece of audio.

So one of the

Jane Austen?

No.

All right.

I'm a language nerd.

It is one of the many varieties of nerd that I am.

Join the nerds.

I never left.

This is like humble brag nerd central.

Oh, I'm so nerdy.

Freaking nerdy.

No, I am merely reclaiming.

You don't have to reclaim

that.

You don't have to reclaim nerd.

No.

You ever watched The Breakfast Club, Jeff?

Yes, I have watched The Breakfast Club.

I'm old like that.

I recently encountered this sentence,

which is extraordinary and works as English, even though you may not have expected it to work.

The sentence is, this is a legitimate English sentence.

I never want to forget.

James, while John had had, had had, had, had, had, had, had, had, had a better effect on the teacher.

That's the sentence.

English is so flexible that that sentence, okay, let me give you the context.

So it's about two students, picture two students, James and John.

Their teacher says,

describe a man who suffered from a cold sometime previously.

And John wrote, the man had a cold.

James wrote, the man had had a cold.

Thus the sentence.

James, while John had had had,

had had, had had,

had had, had had a better effect on the teacher.

It requires punctuation to be parsed.

Nonetheless, it is a delightful feature of English that James, while John had had, had, had, had, had, had, had, had, had, had, had, had, had a better effect on the teacher, is a legit English sentence.

Priscilla, Matt's on drugs today.

She should have always.

I should have had that.

Always.

The best drugs.

I invite you guys to my stash.

Thank you, Priscilla.

Thank you, all.

Thank you, Jeff, for listening to this episode of Matt's Hats.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Katie Green and Kim Lau.

Thanks again to Jeremy Raph and Priscilla Alvarez for joining us, and to my co-hosts.

I promise soon we'll bring the band back together.

Our theme music was recorded by the inimitable John Baptiste, whose fantastic rendition of the battle hymn will play in full once I'm done jabbering.

As always, you'll find us at theatlantic.com slash radio or facebook.com slash radioatlantic.

And if you like what you're hearing and you tell the folks in the iTunes store about it, you are the absolute best.

But thank you, most of all, for listening.

Don't ever stop dreaming, and we'll see you next week.

Oh

glory

My eyes are

coming up and law.

He is trapped and defended where the red and rattlesnake

had lost the faithful lighting of the terrible Swiss war.

his truth is marching on.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Hallelujah.