Immigration with Alejandra Oliva

I was lied to by an Andy McDowell movie. Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and this week we are talking about the last few decades of immigration policy in the United States with Alejandra Oliva whose book Rivermouth, A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration is out this month in paperback and I really hope that you read it.

I loved having this conversation partly because I always love learning about how the world as people want us to believe it has always been has often been made that way in the past few decades by a finite number of people for some pretty obvious reasons and once you understand how that works it becomes easier to think about how it could change. You did have some technical difficulties in this episode.

It was such a riveting conversation that I ran out of room on my recorder and so the last few minutes of my end of the conversation you can hear on my backup.

If you like these episodes, if you're looking for more episodes to listen to, especially if you're about to start a long road trip, we have bonus episodes up on Patreon and Apple Plus and as of this episode coming out we have just finished our four part Brittany Saga, Brittany Quartet, Brittany Odyssey with Evelyn Lee and I'm so excited to get to share that final episode with you and I hope you have a good time listening. We had an amazing time making it so check it out if you can.

And that's it. Thank you so much for being here. Here's your episode. Welcome to your roundabout, the podcast where somewhere but only grudgingly we will admit that it is an election year. My name is Sarah Marshall and with me today is Alejandra Aliva, author of Rivermouth. That's not part of your name but I'm saying it like it is. Yeah, hi, I'm so excited to be here. I'm so excited to have you here and I wonder if we could start by you telling us a little bit about Rivermouth.

Yeah, so basically it came out of my work as a translator, interpreter, language worker for folks who were going through the US immigration system whether they were trying to fill out asylum applications or figuring out how to cross the border or stuck in detention centers and trying to figure out what that meant for them. So the book came out of those experiences which started when I was 24, pretty fresh out of college, working a job and publishing.

A friend was like, hey, you speak two languages. Can you come do translation for these folks? And I was like, I have never done this before but like sure, why not? And kind of through that, I got involved in this world of immigration and immigration and advocacy the longer that you're in it, the more you end up learning and the more history kind of comes into it.

And so the book is sort of about that history and about those politics and about all these big conversations that we have around immigration when we're not actually talking about immigration itself or people who are immigrating. And also what I'm here to talk about today. I don't know. I guess that's one of my big questions today is what is the world we are in now with regards to the way we have been trained to see immigration in American 2024 and what is possible?

I first really started getting involved in this work in the Trump administration kind of at the beginning of it. And one of Trump's first acts in office, just to kind of start with very much more recent history. But one of the first acts in office was the Muslim ban. And at the time, along with so many other things, people were like, oh my god, this is unprecedented, this is on American, this is unconstitutional.

And yes, and also no. And you know, our very first immigration law in this country was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. So at the same time, all of our immigration laws kind of circle back and loop back on each other and have so much to do with the imagined other and imagined enemies and these questions of like, what an American is and looks like and what are their characteristics and what can we keep out?

And at the same time, people keep coming and people have always kept coming and moving from one place to another is something that people do all the time for a variety of different reasons and have always done. And so I think we have these two parallel tracks of like what immigration reality is and the reality is the immigration policy sort of thinks that it's responding to. Right.

And that's such an interesting part of our political life where, you know, in order to get an office and stay in office, what you often have to address is not an actual need, but a perceived need. Perhaps if you're a Republican one that you invented three weeks ago. Yes. So yeah, I thought that a fun place to start today would be with Ronald Reagan. He's always fun. Reagan's never not fun.

It's, you know, when we lose things on such a massive scale and on such a scale of civil rights and human rights, it feels like it's also important to sometimes take a moment and just talk about like if we weren't fighting for just the basics, what the world could look like and have for example, if abortion wasn't so politicized in America, which, you know, Megan Burbank recently did a great job on our show explaining how suddenly that happened and who made it happen.

Like abortion could not just be a non-life threatening experience in terms of the fear of, you know, being identified, being harassed, being in a clinic that gets bombed, but it could be nice. And people getting abortions deserve to be taken care of and pampered a little bit, you know, and how, what if what if you had a nice robe?

And I think this also means that our communities look different than they might, if immigration was something that was easy or natural or even like you said, like having a nice experience of abortion, what if we provided a nice experience of immigration that didn't involve like being constantly threatened with deportation and miles and miles of paperwork?

What if instead you could like show up at a community center and have English classes taught by somebody who lived near you and have somebody be like, hey, don't go to that grocery store. That's the bad grocery store in the neighborhood. Come with me and we'll do our shopping at the good one. I'll show you, like they have good deals on Tuesday. So that's when I go and just kind of have community and local welcoming and have richer, more interesting, more nuanced communities for all of us.

Oh my God. And so we're beginning with Reagan. I mean, I'm not surprised, but I am intrigued. Yeah. During the Reagan administration, Congress passed and then Reagan signed into law a huge, huge undocumented person amnesty that would allow hundreds of thousands of undocumented people to get on the path to citizenship, which if you look at that from today's politics, if you think about what it would take for not just a Republican president, but like the

U.S. Republican president to pass that kind of legislation today, like it feels unimaginable. What do you make of that? Like how does, when did you learn that and what was your, what were the stages of grief you went through? So I can't remember like exactly when I did, but it felt like a window into a different world. Like what could have happened?

What could have changed so much that now the Republican baseline argument is we should have a completely sealed border with no passage of people, just capital that I want to take Nancy to Tijuana for claims. Exactly. Sorry. Reagan also, he had the amnesty, but I think on a lot of other immigration issues or like foreign policy that creates immigration issues was a much, much more complicated figure than just like he said that people could be on a path to citizenship.

So I think we should start by setting the stage, especially because so much of this like foreign policy that was going on during Reagan's time is like what is leading to, for example, the tremendous amount of Central American immigration that we have coming to the U.S. today. And how much of that is Reagan's fault actually, I bet? So much of it. We as a country had kind of been involved in Central America since the 1960s when we decided that communism was the thing that was happening there.

But Reagan really like doubled down and a lot of those civil wars got notably worse in the 80s, I would say. The Civil War in Guatemala began sort of including this wide scale genocide of indigenous Mayan people who lived in the country. Thousands and thousands of people died at the hands of CIA trained military Reagan's support for the Contra's and Nicaragua.

I think was one of his most direct interventions into the politics of one of these countries that didn't, wasn't just like we're going to support people. But basically he armed and funded and trained a group of separatists who unseed and elected socialist government. The Salvadoran Civil War was going on at that time. Why were we so upset about communism that we were sending that much money and that much support and why was this such a huge, huge deal as we were funding all of this?

It just seems wild. As babies sister explained in dirty dancing, the idea of the domino effect and that if one country goes communist, all the others will fall in eventually America and the world. And that's why we have to fund this horrible war. Yeah, these stories that forgive the sins that we commit in order to fight an imagined enemy never seem like enough. Wars are very good at several things. But one of them is creating displaced people and refugees.

And so kind of from the 1960s to the 1980s, we start seeing increasing numbers of people from the countries in which we are waging the sort of shadow wars through funding, through weapons, coming to the US and becoming visible presences in and around the country. So a lot of Central American people, a lot of Vietnamese people are coming. I read some statistic at some point that before the Vietnam War started, there were like less than 100 Vietnamese people in the entire United States.

And by the time it ended, there were a lot more than that. Setting aside all the bigger questions about the idea of borders and the idea of countries and not to hand it to John Lennon. Because in a more finite sense, if you destroy someone's home, then I don't know, shouldn't you give them a new one? Isn't that your job at that point? Yeah, it's people that are coming to the US because it's kind of seen as the last safe haven, the last line of safety.

And we are in some cases giving people asylum or in some cases sort of giving them other kinds of protected statuses that don't put them on a path to citizenship, but do ensure that they're not being deported or we're just deporting people immediately. So we have an increasing number of immigrants coming to the US.

There's this kind of growing awareness also kind of dating from the 60s of Latinos particularly in California as a voting block as one that is both disposed against Republicans, but also kind of seen as like, they're Catholic. Why aren't they Republican? We like all the same things. And so... How rude to be unpredictable. They were like, we don't understand why they don't like us.

Yeah. I think thanks to a desire to court these immigrants and this realization that the more undocumented people in this country we have, the more there's like kind of an unpredictable population or one that doesn't neatly fit into our economy or isn't really like well integrated, that passing an amnesty bill might be an interesting way to bring people into the country and help the Latino community kind of see the light about voting Republican.

I mean, yeah, if it's politics, of course it's strategic. I guess it's also so funny to think of the Republican Party trying to use the carrot and not the stick. Oh, it's both. Well, it's always both. Of course. All right. So, how does this go down? So we have the IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Control is a word you need really around any kind of human stuff. It's more of a razzar type of a word.

There's a razzar in New York City and it's not a rat with a crown on like you might hope, but it's still pretty cool that someone has that title. I believe I've seen an interview with this woman and she's kind of spectacular. She is like a former principal or something where you're just like, you know what, if the rats are going to listen to anyone, it is probably an elementary school principal and I respect her. Exactly. Yeah. So like she gets to have control bills, but nobody else.

That's my role. And even then, I don't know that she's like legislating the rats. She's probably just like encouraging different behavior from them, much like you would with elementary schoolers. The bill has, like you said, a carrot and stick shape that I feel like all kind of contemporary immigration bills have until quite recently, but that's a separate question. And so the stick, as in most cases with immigration bills, is like, why don't we fund the border more enforcement militarization?

Let's send all our cool Vietnam toys down there as far as like surveillance goes. And the other part of the stick is increased workplace rates and if you're undocumented, you are not allowed to work and we're going to do more to ensure that no undocumented people are working.

So for example, if you've ever started a new job and you have to bring in like your passport or your drive to silence on the first day and they're going to like run it through a system, I think e-verify, which is the system they run it through is a little newer, but that's sort of first day of job checking of your of your papers is something that started during the Reagan administration.

It is like when you hear your parents tell stories about where they got their first job, you're like, what world were you living in? Were you just showed up one day, you know? It's like, because I think millennials can see those differences even if we don't know where they came from because we watch movies.

And so we kind of see here this like first step in surveillance and kind of passive enforcement, like you're not necessarily going to be deported for working with bad papers or for trying to get a job with bad papers.

You still might, but like it's not the first step, but it's suddenly a lot harder to just be an undocumented person that's existing in this country because you need a work permit and a social security number in order to work at a lot of over the table jobs and a lot of under the table jobs are going to be kind of exploitative and weird. Now we are creating two different classes of workers.

And this was always kind of the case where you were supposed to have a social security card and you were supposed to have a work permit, but it was also just there weren't really penalties for it. It was a lot more lax.

One of the things that I think is really important about the ways that I want to talk about immigration is to focus on individual people because very often we get like number of stories in journalism or we get like demographic shift stories and even like some of the framing that I'm giving here is like very demographic shift.

And it's very easy to talk about things that way when you're talking about something as big as immigration, but at the same time, the amnesty, which was included in this bill, applied to three million people. And that's like a mid-size U.S. city worth of people who suddenly were able to stop worrying about deportation. It's Portland, Oregon basically.

Yeah. And those are three million people who are now less worried that they're going to be separated from their families or at least the families that the amnesty applied to. They're three million people that can feel secure in starting jobs. There are three million people who can say, you know what? Like I can apply for financial aid at college, like that is huge.

I actually, I found an article from the New York Times from 1989 that describes the surge of people at Christmas time, newly naturalized, who were getting on planes and going home for the first time in decades sometimes. And this is something that I see a lot with folks who have just gotten kind of papers for the first time. One of their first moves is to be like, I haven't been able to leave the country in years and years because I've been scared that I won't be able to get back in.

But now that I have my papers, I can go home and see my mom. I can go home and see my cousins. I can go back to this place that I'm from, that it was really, really hard to leave. But now I'm able to be back. I think when we think about like family reunification or family togetherness that comes with immigration, we think about like, oh, you don't have to worry about your mom getting deported. But also it very often means like you can meet your grandma for the first time. And that's so good.

I read some quotes from Reagan from around the time and even he was talking about this in very, like this is the right thing to do from a humanitarian perspective. This is the right move for us, not from a political perspective, but just from like a human one. And again, how absolutely far we have come from those conversations. Right. So much of our energy today is focused on on questions completely alien from the basic idea of what is the right thing to do, right?

It feels like everything is antagonistic and it feels like when everything is antagonistic, you have to think defensively. What is the right thing to do for people? Because that is actually what a government is supposed to be thinking about. Yeah. Like how can we make the lives of the people that live within this country?

How can we make the lives of our citizens even because the vast majority of undocumented people live in mixed status families where some people are fully undocumented, some people will have some kind of a temporary visa or what is it permanent residency. And some people will be documented and be citizens. And usually those people that are citizens are the kids because they were born here.

And so even if you're thinking of this from a purely nationalistic level, like, is it not a service to our citizens to ensure that their parents don't get deported away from them? Right. Like, I mean, when you put it that way, yes. And the thing about this bill, it had a door open to the future, basically.

So the way that they passed it was like, if you entered before this date in 1982 and you file your application before this date in 1988, and you do all these other things, and you make these qualifications, then congrats. You can become a naturalized citizen. And they sort of left the door open to keep moving that date forward as time went on. And I think that they did do that at least once, but then never again. And how did that happen?

So the bill was widely considered a failure by the right because the first election after this happens, California extremely decisively flipped from a red state to a blue state. And everyone was like, it was those damn immigrants. Because they've created a bunch of new voters who are going to vote Democrat, is that why?

Yeah. And like, I really think that that is why, for example, a lot of like the stuff that Obama tried to get passed and work because they were all like, well, remember the amnesty in the 80s and how that went for us. And so. And so then they were like never again. Yeah. It like really poisoned it. It is interesting that like the most you ever hear politicians saying anything about anyone Latino is the Latino vote. What about the vote? Is the vote okay? Is the vote ailing? How's the vote?

Is he sick? Is he well? Is he struggling? Are we taking care of the vote? How's the vote doing? Does the vote need help? It's like, what about the people making the vote? So that is Reagan's amnesty. All right. They tried to do something. They decided they would never try it again like me going to a Zoom class in 2012. Beautiful. Oh God. Yeah. So then up next, I kind of want to lump in Bush, senior and Clinton into one little lump. Clinton's going to get his own section later.

But I want to talk about NAFTA. So NAFTA is the North American free trade alliance. And it is a trade partnership between us and Mexico and Canada. And Reagan came up with it and Bush, senior sort of negotiated all the fine points and then Clinton got all the credit because he signed it into law. Classic case. I don't want to spend a ton of time on this. It's not explicitly immigration policy, but I think it does.

It did so much to change the way that we think about immigration in this country and especially like immigration and labor stuff. And it also changed a lot of extremely basic things about how people lived in Mexico and the US. At the very basic level, if you are an economist, please don't email me. This is very, very basic. At the very basic level, NAFTA made it easier for money to flow back and forth across the border. So it made it easier for US companies to set up the shop in Mexico.

It made importing things like corn or pork or whatever for Mexico or doing the growing of the corn and the pork in Mexico and bringing it to the US a lot cheaper. And it made it much, much harder for small farmers and landowners to keep doing the work that they had been doing because they were getting priced out of the economy anyways. Was fuck farmers, am I right? Fuck farmers. Fuck little farmers. According to the American government, yeah.

Fuck farmers who aren't forced to use copyrighted seeds. We hate that. The interesting thing is that this affected farmers on both sides of the border. So as big farmers are able or big farm like conglommerts are able to start doing this work in the US and in Mexico, US corn prices rise. It's great if you are growing like a million billion acres of corn a year. It is less cool if you are a small, diverse farmer in the US who is trying to make a living.

And so you have this kind of two part shift. A lot of US jobs are going to Mexico and it's this very, very public, very visible. We are closing down this plant in Ohio. We are reopening it in like Reynosat or Matamoros or like a border city. What a great way to create a sense of unity between two nations. Exactly. And so I think you start seeing this feeling of like, oh, Mexicans are sealing our jobs.

If someone stole my TV from me and sold it to someone else, I would not call the new owner of it the thief. I would call them lucky. And I would call the person who took it from me responsible. If I see it as a family, it makes sense to me, right?

Where if you see your employer, the company you work for, maybe that your parents work for, as a parent figure, then it's like, it's harder to imagine a world where they're not in charge than it is to just blame someone who maybe feels more like a sibling. It's like where I don't know. It feels like, yeah, the way that we are trying to see companies as caretakers. It's like we were so perfectly set up for this to be the next move.

You think about like a mid-sized town in Ohio where the company is kind of the only game in town. You work there, your dad worked there, all your neighbors work there. Most of the people who are working a job are working in the same place. And then suddenly they close up shop and it feels a little like a divorced dad starting a new family. Yeah. And it's always the hot wife who gets blamed. But also, fuck those new kids.

Yeah. And also, there are so many towns that exist because a company decided to build a factory there, right? It's so much a part of our history that we call them company towns. And it used to be so normal. It isn't anymore.

And that again, by the same token, if you destroy someone's home because of a war that you created where they lived, then you're responsible for them in the same way, I think that if your company created a plant in a town that then perhaps even sprang up around it where there was nothing before because suddenly you would create a jobs, you would create it a world, maybe an entire intentional community meant for these workers, then you can't just leave.

And a stockholder would say you can just leave. But human ethics don't say that. Human ethics sadly don't very much come into the movements of these mega corporations. But I just really think they should. I realize that's not going to get us anywhere. Thank you.

But it's like, I don't know, maybe pointing out the distance between the kind of treatment that we learn to accept or again, learn as kind of a law of the universe, like something that we have been abused into thinking is something that must be.

I feel like this whole conversation that we're having to go back to your abortions, by example, is like, what if we lived in a world where corporate responsibility was not just an Instagram post on Earth date from shell corporation being like, we love polar bears. Yeah. And instead was a real thing and really involved and invested in making their employees at the very least healthier and happier and like at the very least, that is how far your corporate responsibility should go. I don't know.

And it's also something that it makes sense for a company to be able to do more easily. The bigger it is because at that point, it can feel like nobody's fault. Yeah. And you know, we do things as part of a collective that we would not do all by ourselves. But okay. So NAFTA, the only thing I know about NAFTA is that it's the reason Titanic. It was filmed in Mexico because it was a way to avoid labor unions. I guess no American history is a relates to Titanic. It served me pretty well.

Yeah. That's like, honestly, the reason why a lot of things are happening in Mexico suddenly that we're not happening in Mexico before because there are not as many labor unions.

And so you have these companies moving at the same time, small landowners and farmers in Mexico are starting to lose their land either directly because it used to be that there was this very common form of communal land ownership in Mexico called a heath of swear like a town or a community or a group of people would own a piece of land together. This was like a very indigenous model that somehow got like passed along through time.

As the 90s hit, the Mexican government is like, this is some peasant nonsense and we hate it. We need to modernize our country, individual ownership only. We are going to dissolve these sustainability. Obviously, you know, terrible for optics. Yes, exactly.

So they would kind of force them into private ownership or they would sell people these like nearly, they would like kind of split up the ahe those into these like nearly worthless little parcels of land that were not really enough to grow to sustain yourself or your family before they were too expensive for individual families to afford or the other thing that happened. And I read this example in this book called the right to stay home by a man called David Bacon.

He describes a family of pig farmers and beckos who had been living in the same place, working the land for generations. And then suddenly this huge subsidiary of Smithfield, which is a huge pork manufacturer here and in Mexico moves in down the road. And suddenly their well water starts making them sick because Smithfield isn't moved to Mexico. It's like cool, we do not have to listen to environmental regulations anymore. We can let all of the pig waste water infiltrate the ground water.

And so these pig farmers who had been doing the same thing that Smithfield's doing, but on a human individual level are suddenly forced off their land because their land becomes absolutely uninhabitable because of environmental degradation. This is a story that happens over and over again with mines and wahaka, with farms and velegros.

These like mega corporations show up, they don't employ very many people because there's like this like factory farming that takes over that doesn't need as much individual labor as human farm does. And they have lacks environmental regulations or they aren't held accountable for breaking them. So people are forced off their land for in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. And they start coming up to the city's first and then the border.

And trying to cross the border because they've heard that there are jobs in the United States. Oh my gosh, is everything our fault? I think it might be. It might be. It might be. Whoops. Why should we pay for a crime that someone else noticed? The whole history of like immigration law in the last like 20 years is us fucking around internationally.

And then when it comes time for us to find out by like, yeah, receiving immigrants who can no longer live in the places where they would like to stay or like, um, excuse me, this is not our responsibility. Get out of here. Right. And then there's a ton of protesting also that was happening around NAFTA and questions of globalism. People saw this coming and now things like NAFTA, things like international trade deals are just so much a part of our reality. Right.

That we just kind of are like, well, yeah, that's just how it works. Of course we have, you know, extortion at trade deals with other countries that also overwhelmingly harm Americans, but help corporations. Right. And it's also a question of how many simultaneous emergencies. Yeah. We can deal with it once. It's really, yeah. I feel like as an activist, also, that's one of the most disheartening things are the worst feelings when you're like, I know, I know exactly what this is going to do.

I know exactly where this piece of legislation or this action from a politician is going to lead. Like I can see it clear as day. I may be voted for that politician or didn't I strongly disagree with it. I'm calling them every other week. I'm doing everything I can to show that like I am not consenting to this thing being done in my name. And yet it gets done. It sometimes feels like there's not a lot you can do about it.

And I don't want to have that be a bummer note that exists here, but just feels like such a reality when we're talking about these huge, huge issues of like government policy. Yeah. I'm completely within that camp of struggling to know how to sort of swim in the currents. It's a struggle to stay engaged.

The fact that that is hard for all of us because we're living, you know, just in an age of population and technology and our ability to know and see things as things are unfolding across the entire world, including atrocities, including genocide. You know, that it's okay that we weren't built for this and that we are trying to figure out what works for us. You can take breaks, but you can't ever stop. It's not on you to finish the work, but you do have to keep going.

Yeah. And not all the time, not constantly. There are times when like it's just too much, but you do have to keep going. It's like it's like doing a long hike, you know? Like a lot of people are hiking too fast. You're not trying to get to a meeting. You're on a hike. You walk a little, you stop. Yeah. You take a breather. Anything you have to keep doing for a long time. Yeah. The journey will change.

And so into this super great stew of like resentment and anger and disaffectation, we have the 1996 Clintons Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, another extremely ominously named piece of legislation. Love to see the word responsibility. I feel like this whole conversation too is about like, what if the government took responsibility? What if corporations took responsibility?

And in their infinite cleverness, they're like, what if you, the individual who made $19,000 last year takes responsibility? What about that? Yeah. So yeah, this one's not good. I think that you can think of it as kind of in partnership with the 94 crime bill, which was also very bad for specifically, I believe, black people in this country. It's one of the bills that is largely held responsible for increasing mass incarceration. And this bill did really, really similar things for immigration.

It's, you know, when you look at Clinton, it's really like, it was so great he got caught having an unethically power differentialed affair with an intern because otherwise we would remember him for his policies and that wouldn't be good. No, it's kind of wild that he's been able to like whitewash so much of that with like the Clinton Foundation and being married to his wife and stuff.

So basically, as the name suggests, this bill, which is called Ira Ira for short, which sorry to men named Ira, I'm sure most of you are very great. This bill is not very great. Oh, terrible. Ira Ira in short makes it harder to get your papers and easier to get deported. So it closed them back door options around being able to prove undue hardship if you were ordered deported.

So it used to be that if a judge signed a deportation order for you, you could say, hey, listen, I have really small children or I have a disabled spouse or I have some other thing that would make it an undue family for an undue hardship for my family if I were to get deported. And there would be some judicial discretion. The judge could sign off on it and you would get to stay.

There's still some kinds of lines around that, particularly if you are, if you have a family member that's really, really sick or disabled and you are the primary caretaker for them, you can still kind of say claim undue hardship. But I think it used to also just be like, it would be really hard on my husband if I got deported. Please don't. And the judge might be like, yeah, okay. Which again is like the law functioning on a human level, which it just seems like we're so beyond now.

And also that if you're a judge, you do potentially have a very interesting job in terms of, you know, if you're really thinking about what does a society require? Like is it undue hardship to unnecessarily alter or destroy a marriage and being like, yes, based on my view of humanism, that would be wrong. It would be nice to be able to think about things like that, I think.

Being a marriage the other way that it made it harder to get papers is one of the most common ways to become a citizen before is that if you were undocumented and you married a citizen, you used to just be able to like, you would get a green card. And I actually think that most people still think that that's how it works. That's how we learned from all those sitcoms. Exactly.

But actually if you have been living in the states for a certain amount of time and you marry a US citizen, if you have been here for at least six months when this happens, then you need to leave the country for three years before you become eligible for a green card. If you have been here for over a year, then you need to leave the country for 10 years. That's terrible. I was lied to by an Andy McDowell movie. You just have to do this now.

And I think that you can get waivers for these bars and you can get exemptions now, but it's still like, in general, this is just going to be what happens. It takes this moment of love and excitement and getting to get married to someone and then is like, poisons it.

Like it almost goes without saying that this is, you know, then as now, this is kind of actually one of the rare consistent things, a period when not, you know, conservatives, but also kind of everybody is freaking out about family values and our family is having dinner together. And are they spending time together? And it's like, well, it's not fucking harder to have dinner together if your kids are in another country, isn't it?

Yeah. And your family counts less if you're not white or if you're not documented. Yeah. I think like one of the unspoken things in sort of Christian white Christian family values is like, there are no other families. Yeah. Yeah. Only families that follow this model and only families that look like us and act like us and have our exact same structures and more. And I haven't even gotten to the ways in which it's easier to get deported. Great.

One of the ways that they made it a lot easier to deport people was that they classified a whole new set of crimes as immediately deportable, which meant like if you are convicted of this, like, do not see an immigration judge, you do not get to plead your case, you do not pass go, you just are immediately on a plane after your conviction. What, Jesus. It also applies retroactively.

So if you are an undocumented person and you have committed one of these crimes a couple years ago, you like when you served your time, whatever, you could still, you're suddenly now again under danger of being deported if you have that conviction on your record and you like come into contact with an ice agent. And I'm sure that most people listening know how this works, but someone somewhere is like, boy, she willikers. Those must be serious crimes. Are they?

No, there is a whole class of these crimes called crimes of moral turptitude. I love it when we bust out the Victorian language. And the way that I would kind of characterize crimes of moral turptitude is that they have bad vibes. Like truly, there is not much more of a concrete definition for them, even in like the law. It's just like, it couldn't be things like big time felonies and stuff, but I also know a woman who she had shoplifting charges. She left the country. She came back in.

She'd run into the US and she was a kid, went through customs. The customs agent saw these charges like on her record, I guess, when they scanned her passport or whatever. And they were like, oh, we're going to deport you. And this one was a legal permanent resident. She had a green card. Oh my God. And she had kids.

It was really, I think, thanks to like a huge community response that that didn't end up happening, but it can be nothing burger crimes to get deported to a place that you may not remember ever having been. I mean, I want to take a moment to just imagine like coming back from vacation, you've got your duty free stuff and your bag, like you're ready to get home and watch your shows. And then it's like step aside, man, you have to go live in another country now.

It's like I was not planning for there to be traffic on the way home, let alone for my life to change at this instant. This also kind of gets into questions of like incarceration and the dehumanization of like incarcerated people as a whole or I've been in the immigration detention center. I visited one as part of like a fact finding mission along with a couple of other immigration orgs. We were just sort of like going in and interviewing people.

We were looking at the places where they were sleeping. And like it's a jail. And I feel like we kind of maybe like we watched orange is the new black. We sort of think we know what a jail is. It's so bad. It's so bad. The things that make a situation or a setting kind of horrific often go beyond these huge plot points and they're often just like kind of in the texture of a place and the sort of details.

Well, and then there are so many realities that you can't sculpt into the kind of story that makes it onto mainstream TV, right? Because it feels like so much of lived reality is just day to day. Everyone is shoved into a room. The size of like a high school basketball gym. You can see from wall to wall, including the bathrooms that were in there. Like I could see guys showering and going to the bathroom like from where I was standing by the guard station. And that's very much on purpose.

The lights were on. And it's like that horrible like high school gym fluorescent lighting. And it goes on from like four in the morning until 10 at night. You have no privacy. You have no sense of like quiet or being able to be away from other people or or anything. And prison and prison is really bad. I don't know if you remember hearing about like the Border Patrol Facebook groups. Oh God. I, yes, but under so many other horrible things that I've forgotten. I'm sure a lot of it.

Yeah. So a reporter found these like private Facebook groups that was primarily inhabited by customs and Border Patrol or Border Protection and Border Patrol agents who were actively resentful and angry that their jobs were not like shooting people and like chasing drug lords through the desert. And then instead a ton of their work involved like humanitarian caring for people who they found on the border.

And so many of like the jokes and the the anger and the resentment there was just so like I want to be shooting people and instead I have to help them. And I hate helping these people because they don't deserve my help. They're breaking the law. They're illegal. And I mean, you're talking about like dehydrated families crossing the desert on foot who like surely do not want to be doing this.

And you have these Border Patrol agents who are like, I just thought I was going to shoot get to shoot a narco by now. And instead I had to save this entire family's life. And that just feels like such a poison. It's like, well, I don't know. I think that you could look at this differently. And then it gets into the whole question of what kinds of jobs are we advertising and how much of this, how much do you blame on?

I mean, I do blame a lot on these individuals because you have to come in with the knowledge that you're a person who's working with people like that part is fairly self evident. Yeah. And the thing about being a Border Patrol agent, it's one of those government slash law enforcement agencies where the culture, as you might be able to tell, is like deeply, deeply, deeply poisoned and fucked at like a very basic level.

But you have a ton of discretion as a Border Patrol agency on what you want to enforce, how you want to enforce it, how you treat people, what kind of accommodations you make for people who are in different situations, like how you actually want to provide that care.

And I think even people who go into it with the best of intentions end up just like realizing how absolutely impossible it is to do under not necessarily like the like mandate that the organization has, but definitely the culture that it has. I mean, this also makes me think about, you know, the idea of selling people on the idea of being cops because a whole other conversation. And then of course, we get into. That's not unrelated. Yeah, not unrelated.

And, you know, the first mandate of the police historically in America has been to protect property and to return and slave to people to those who believe they own them. And that everything else has been sort of built on top of it. But it's, you know, I can also take the viewpoint that sure there's a place for cops. If you think of it in terms of like the Andy Griffith role of, I am here to maintain the peace, not to cause trouble, right?

And that towns need any community, but if you're doing the Andy Griffith approach, if you're this kind of border patrol person who's upset that you don't get to have shootouts, it's like things aren't going well if you need to be having shootouts all the time. Like either you're working in a TV show or that role should be, you know, maintaining the peace, helping people, you know, maybe chasing down a purse, Snatcher from time to time, right? These classic Superman and Metropolis roles.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like if you, if you have a great need for action in your life and you're making the defenseless people who's carrying your in charge of pay for it, then it's hard. I don't know. It's hard for me at this moment to think of anything worse. Yeah. And I mean, the thing about border patrol, the thing about cops, I think, is that the space that they have or that they should be occupying is theoretically one of care, one of caring for the peace, one of caring for communities.

But that's not the mandate that they have in any case. And so the people that join, the people that are invested in, I don't know, seeing the police be the police and seeing border patrol, be border patrol are invested in, in violence because that's what they've been told the job is and that's what the job is constantly reinforced as being. And so there's no other way to do it other than to, to be in an act violence. Yeah. So, okay.

So we know what kind of world we're in and we know what's going on. We have the Facebook groups to prove it. So yeah, that's Iraira. And then 9-11 happens. Oh God. And you know, and God knows that brought out our best behavior, you know? There was a lot of stuff that I would not characterize as like policy, but would characterize as vibes that was extremely rancid during that time period.

Just in terms of like generalizing a phobia, unfortunately, four of the 9-11 hijackers were in the United States on expired visas. And so that was kind of one of the impetus, I think, for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the housing of kind of our entire immigration apparatus within the Department of Homeland Security. Was our homeland insecure before 9-11? We guess weren't worried about it.

Presumably. Yeah. So like immigration stuff used to be kind of spread across the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor and like sort of, you know, our immigrants involved with like the immigration justice system. Are they looking for jobs? Like what are they up to? And depending on that, we will put them in a specific department.

And now it is, it all sort of gets grouped up and put into the Department of Homeland Security and also given a ton more like enforcement responsibilities and funding. And so suddenly we get the existence of ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. And ICE was created to quote, prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities, particularly as they were sort of like moving across borders.

So like money laundering, terrorists moving across borders, things like that. All these terrorists that suddenly were around. Yeah. And so when ICE was funded, a lot of people were like, wait, what exactly are you doing? What's the point of this? To the point that in 2004, a year after the Heritage Foundation, which is well known for its supportive organizations like ICE, where like, why does this exist? And it's like, main mission is covered by other organizations and other agencies.

Let's just fold it into CBP Customs and Border Protection. Like they're not really doing anything unique. But instead, we were like, oh, we'll just give them more money than they'll figure out what to do with it. And that is how we have the ICE of today. Federal agencies always do better when they have a bigger sandbox to play in. Yeah. And everybody is so thrilled with how that's gone. Yeah. No, it's been really, really successful. If someone is like, I am a time traveler, what is ICE?

It's an enforcement agency, which basically just means that they're like immigration cops. They have this really loose mandate, which means that they run the detention centers where people are kept while they are sort of in the immigration process. They also do workplace raids. They also have been known to go onto Greyhound buses and demand to see people's papers.

They will serve out warrants to arrest people like they're very in public life and in public spaces kind of trying to catch out undocumented people, arrest them and deport them. Every new precedent that has come in and kind of been like, oh, I guess I like run this organization has tried to give them different kinds of parameters to operate under. Like Obama was like, we're going to stop ICE from going after families. We're just going to make them go after people with criminal records.

And then Trump was like, ICE gets to get deployed in sanctuary cities and liberal cities and they get to do whatever they want there. They get to arrest everyone. They get to do racial profiling. I don't care or like I do care and I want them to do more of it. And the way this happened relates to this funding question. So in 2009, Congress gives them funding that says you have to maintain a certain number of beds in immigration detention at all times.

It doesn't matter if there's anyone in those beds, you just have to like, we're paying for them. You should think about filling them. And suddenly ICE goes, oh, okay. And those beds are partially in private detention centers, but they also contract with local like state and county jails.

So the freedom for immigrants has this really great like interactive map where you can see whether your local county jail has an ICE contract and holds ICE detainees and where your closest ICE detention center is because there is one in just about every state. So all of a sudden they're responsible for all of these beds in jail and they start filling them. Because one might imagine they would.

It's, there's actually this really interesting relatively recent report from detention watch network called if you build it, ICE will fill it. And it shows that whenever ICE opens up a new contract or gets like a new detention center in an area, the number of ICE arrests will go up in that area. If there's a new ICE detention center in your town, suddenly more people from your town will be going to fill that detention center.

Yeah, this is why we will never truly be able to learn about the world through narrative alone. Because not just the kind of stories that make it into like Netflix shows or biopics or you know, pieces of fiction that everybody is telling you to watch or based on a true story, but like even the kind of journalism that makes it to you, right? Because newspapers run on circulation or you know, at this point they run on clicks. Like yeah, nonfiction narrative is affected by this as well.

The fact that the stories that really tell us I think the true depth of the problem are often infrastructural and it comes down to stuff like this stuff like, you know, prison contractors, right? The question of like who is providing the meals for the people in the prisons and jails where you live?

Probably somebody who put in a very low bid and was there for selected by the government because they promised to do it for a very low price because nobody cares what inmates are eating because they don't vote and the people who care about them don't matter as far as voting is concerned. And so obviously the best way to save money is to treat them as if they're not human and potentially endanger their lives. And that's not going to work as a 2020 segment, right? It's not thrilling enough.

There isn't an easy to pick out hero or villain. It's just another wheel. Well, it's just business. Right around the family separations, the furniture company Wayfair had either just started or like the employees suddenly realized that they were contributing to an ice contract. They were like a company that provided furniture for immigration detentions or like ice offices or something.

And the employees held a walk out because they were so mad about this and the very same employees who were complacent about the whole child trafficking thing joke. For those of you who don't remember 2020, there is a conspiracy theory that Wayfair was selling literal children. They weren't of course, but they were walking out, which I find and I didn't hear about that and that really happened.

It's one of those like you don't expect to undergo moral harm when you are doing like a graphic design job for a furniture company that sells a bajillion units a year or whatever. And yet whenever we do an episode, I think there's a stated theme and then maybe the invisible theme emerges over time and maybe the invisible theme for us here is that it's not our fault that we were born and meshed in a system that does harm in so many directions.

And being overwhelmed by the guilt that you can cultivate because of that isn't the answer. It's just sort of staying alive within it. Yeah. And reading boring news stories and assigning boring stories if you're capable of it. Yes. More of those. We need to highlight the drama and the like importance of shuffling papers around and finding the secrets that are locked in the spreadsheets. It is not glamorous work, but it is the work that justice is built on in my opinion. Yeah. All right.

I think we're ready to bring it home with the Obama administration. I'm kind of deciding to end it here because I feel like Trump administration is one a lot of people started paying attention. It's true. So Obama has a really complicated legacy when it comes to immigration. And I think that the main thing that I want to talk about is DACA because it provides a really interesting counterpoint to the Reagan amnesty, which is where we started the show.

But I do want to acknowledge that there was a lot of other things that happened during his administration, many of which were really bad. Deportations under his administration swelled to record highs. The funding that I Scott in 2009 was under his administration. He also began the practice again because of this funding of detaining a lot of recent arrivals, including asylum seekers, used to just be kind of released on your own recognizance. And it happens to a lot of people still today.

He also dealt with what was then called the child migrant crisis, which actually just meant that there was a sort of huge number of unaccompanied children without adult family members who were coming to the border and seeking asylum. In order to deal with that influx, which I think is one of the most horrifying and immediately sympathetic versions of quote unquote immigration surges that we have gotten in the last 20 years.

Instead of dealing with it in any kind of like compassionate way, he created what was called the rocket docket, which basically meant that unaccompanied children would be placed on an expedited court process. So they had less time to find attorneys and less time to gather proof and present their asylum cases. Again, these are children under the age of 18, usually between the ages of like, these weren't toddlers because they had made this trip on their own, but like children.

You are also whether children or adult not guaranteed representation in immigration court because for some reason it is civil court and not criminal court. And so you do not get the right to representation that is guaranteed in criminal court in the constitution. What?

There are a lot of ways including this one of like the expedited removals, the expedited court cases that I feel like the Obama administration created a lot of the infrastructure and precedent that when the Trump administration came in, he was like, Oh, okay, cool. We can do this, let's take it a couple steps further. But he also did DACA. Yeah. And for those of us who can't remember because it's been 84 years, what was DACA?

So DACA sprung from the Dream Act, which was a legislative proposal that started in 2001 that promised a bunch of really highly conditional steps to a permanent pathway to citizenship for undocumented children. This bill was a zombie like it kept getting killed and then it would get stuck on the next immigration thing or it would get stuck onto a budget bill and it just kept getting killed over and over again.

So in 2012, 11 years after the introduction of the first version of the Dream Act, Obama says, you know what, we're just going to do an executive order work around. And as the president, he doesn't have, I think, the capacity to give people citizenship, but he can protect them from deportation.

So he creates this sort of like half system for people who have been brought to the US as children by undocumented parents or who sort of like came to this country before they were able to consent to it and are now here as undocumented people. There were really, really strict rules as to who was eligible. There was a specific entry window. So like years between which you had to arrive, there were age limits. You had to prove continuous presidency that you hadn't left the country.

And there were some qualifications, especially around like your education level, you had to have a high school or equivalent diploma or be enrolled in high school because it was open to I think 15 plus or you had to be in the armed forces or have been honorably discharged as well as no felonies on your record. And so what it provided was protection from deportation and a work permit.

So you could work legally in the country, but it did not provide a path through citizenship, except through other means, including marriage and other kinds of visas and things like that. You can get a visa if you are like the victim of a crime that was perpetrated by a US citizen or permanent resident and things like that.

And you can still be deported if you break the rules if you end up with a felony on your record or if you let your visa, which you have to renew every two years and cost something like $550 a pop if you let it expire. You also can't legally leave the country with it. And so you have this sort of like every two year renewal half limbo program that has since thanks to a ton of pushback from the Trump presidency and from specific states, Texas. Come into question.

So most DACA recipients now like 98% of them are between the ages of 20 and 40 years old. I think with the vast majority of them being between I want to say like 30 and 40. I feel like we have this idea of DACA as being four children and it's really not at this point. No new children have been able to apply since 2017. I just want to like contrast this for a minute with the Reagan amnesty just because I think it's so interesting.

The Reagan amnesty bill was also an incredibly difficult bill to get passed. But like in the end, it provided permanent relief to three million people. This is a program that at its peak covered between 70 and 800,000 individuals excludes them from things like welfare, financial aid for college, like does not provide the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Like they can't vote. They can't fill out a FAFSA form.

And there has been so much resistance to allowing these 700,000 people, any kind of permanent solution to this issue. They get threatened all the time. Every time the political winds shift, it becomes increasingly possible that this protection meager as it is is going to end. It feels like such a half-hearted compromise and such a like weak version of that amnesty. Yeah. And I mean, not to give too much credit to Reagan. But what does that difference say to you?

This has shown to me that like immigrants even at their most basic level are not no longer worth fighting for in any way. And we are just completely content to absolutely discard their humanity. I cannot think of a single reason why that wouldn't be the situation as a whole, you know. If that's where we are, then it's time to acknowledge it and figure out what to do next. I also want to be really, really clear. Obama technically was the one who like signed the executive order that passed DACA.

But so much of like the contents of that policy, the everything of that policy is down to undocumented activists who would come out and say, you know, like, I am undocumented. This is what it means for like their material reality of my life. This is what it means for me and my family. This is what it's preventing me from doing. These were my dreams that I am now no longer able to access because there is simply no way for me to afford college in this country.

And I feel like I take some strength from that and some like feeling of at least someone is still out there fighting for this. But it shouldn't just be them. We shouldn't leave it just to the people that are directly affected by this to do that work. They had to win, you know, 12 years ago now. It doesn't mean that they're all set now and doesn't mean that they don't need permanent protection.

And I mean, to really bring it up to current day, I've been really disappointed in the Biden administration's treatment of basically everything to do with the border. And I feel like DACA is kind of part of that in a lot of ways. I think something that this makes me think about that I think to me was an important thing to realize in terms of how I saw myself as a citizen and kind of the duties of a citizen in this country.

And that's the idea that the law is not intrinsically better, good, right or wrong. It's just kind of an accretion of what we could get away with. Or what was necessary to whoever had the power to decree that they should get a larger profit share or whatever the case may be, and that, you know, we have this very reasonable longing to be able to hold up the legal system is sort of better than humanity in some way and kind of stronger than us because it is righter than us.

And, you know, the constitution and the laws we haven't shined are the best of ourselves. And sometimes they are like there's really good laws. There's some cool amendments that I dig. Yeah. But a lot of it is just kind of what we could get away with at the time. Or, you know, at its most kind of in the middle, what was necessary. But the law is not... It's not the same as justice. Right. The law is not justice.

It may at its best be able to help uphold and bring about justice, but by its definition, it does not have a greater right to exist than any human being. Yeah. We get to change it. We get to make it better. We are here. We are all figuring out our own ways to exist in this world we're in right now and make it better for each other. But I mean, what do you want people to know, you know, as we kind of metabolize the reality of where we are right now?

Yeah. I think that we think of immigration as a really geographically bounded issue. We think about borders. We think about the borderlands. We think about places like Texas and Arizona and California. But the reality, I talked a little bit about like the freedom for immigrants map of all the detention centers across the country. And the reality is like that is where immigrants are. That is also where immigration enforcement is. That is places and situations in which people need help.

You can also, especially if it is your county or a more local sort of place that is under government control, you can start campaigning to shut down a detention center in your area. Works County in Pennsylvania had for a very long time a detention center that held families. So parents and children and activists in small town PA got that place shut down. And that's one less place that can hold children in jail, which is always good.

And like there are people coming to your community all the time who need resources and need help getting around and need help figuring out what it is you do there. And so I think just talk to people figure out who in your community is doing the work already. I live in Chicago.

And so the mutual aid organizations in the city that have sprung up to sort of meet the needs of folks that were bused here by the Texas governor has been incredibly heartening and beautiful to see even as governmental organizations are kind of shit in the bed. There is so much power in our communities and you can tap into that and welcome new people into them. And that is very, very cool.

And so I think if you do that while you keep an eye on the big policy stuff, call your congressman every once in a while, vote in ways that are kind to your neighbors, then there might be a chance for a better country. We can start making your community better while we work for that. You know, like we said at the beginning, it doesn't have to be this way. We just a few people made it this way not that long ago and we can unmake it. Thank you so much for taking us on this horrible journey.

It was so wonderful to take it with you. And where else can we find? Where else can people find your work or where else can people find anything else that you think they should find? Yeah, so my book, River Mouth, is available now in hardcover, but it is coming out in paperback in June. So if you would like to pre-order that, which is slightly cheaper and give yourself a little gift in the month of June, it comes out on June 18th.

I just, this was such a great conversation about all of these things that I've been thinking and working on for such a long time. And I'm really glad I got to have it with you. Thank you for it all. What a gift. And that was our episode. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Alejandra Oliva for being our guest for writing River Mouth, Out Now and Paperback. Check it out. It's an amazing book. And Alejandra is an amazing writer.

Thank you for editing help from Corinne Ruff. And thank you this week and every week to Carolyn Kendrick for producing. We'll see you in two weeks.