Factually! with Adam Conover - Why No One Understands Immigration, and Why We Need To with Jason De León

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

UCLA Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, Jason De León, joins Adam to uncover the truth about immigration across our southern border, how border militarization has been counterproductive and why it’s so critical to develop a full understanding who the people crossing the border truly are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code FACTUALLY for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code FACTUALLY for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. two-part episode for you today. First up, we have a regular episode of Factually, an awesome interview with an amazing expert who you're going to love. But stick around after that interview to hear my conversation with Dr. John Cohen. Dr. John Cohen is the head of BioReference, a laboratory that is working to manufacture more coronavirus tests as quickly as possible. So you'll want to hear that one. Very timely, very topical, I think. And with that, on with the show. Hello, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover, and let's talk facts. Over the past decades, millions of people have crossed or have tried to cross America's southern border to establish lives in the United States. And again, that's just a fact. It's a phenomenon that exists without respect to your

political or policy viewpoint on it. It is true. But despite this massive movement, rarely do people like myself, a white, bespectacled Long Islander with limited and non-existent Spanish skills, actually come into contact with a migrant during their journey. And as a result, many of us don't have firsthand knowledge of who these folks are and what their lives are like as a result, many of us don't have firsthand knowledge of who these folks are and what their lives are like. You know, about a decade ago, my girlfriend Lisa and I were on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York. And in Arizona, we had some car issues. Her Ford Ranger just straight up broke down for a week in the middle of our trip. And we ended up staying a couple extra nights with some of Lisa's

family friends, an older couple who lived in a retirement community pretty close to the southern border. Now, what I didn't realize, what Lisa didn't realize until we were staying with them, is that her friends were also involved with a movement of folks who provide humanitarian aid to migrants. They were not quite an underground railroad, but they weren't too far off. They would go out into the desert and put out jugs of water, for instance, so that migrants wouldn't die of thirst. And they would occasionally offer even more aid than that. On our third night there, we came back to their house from a day at a nearby national park, there, we came back to their house from a day at a nearby national park, and they told us that we were going to have a visitor for dinner. He was a young man about my age who had migrated north

from Central America and had crossed the border in search of work. He only spoke Spanish, but they helped translate for him, and we learned it was his second time making the trip, that he knew exactly the farm that he was headed for, and that he sent money back to support his family. After dinner, our friends drove him to a local church the next stage on his journey. And obviously, I never saw him again. And now, look, I'm not going to do that thing where I say, oh, this one chance encounter with a person unlike me changed my view of the issue forever, right? I mean, that's a cliche, and it's frankly an insulting cliche, because how much could I really learn from such a brief experience? No, what it did do, though, was remind me of how little

I actually knew. You know, I read articles, I listened to podcasts, I thought I knew something about immigration in America. But what I didn't know was who the folks migrating actually were, what their stories were, what their lives were like. It made me aware of my own utter ignorance on the issue. And that's an ignorance that I think a lot of Americans share, quite frankly. We've had so much conversation in this country about whether or not migration should be happening. But let's put that aside for a second.

Let's acknowledge that it is happening and ask, since that's the case, shouldn't we at least try to understand it? Shouldn't we understand how people cross, why they choose to make the journey, who they are, how their movement affects their local economy as well as ours, how their families cope if they die along the way. There are so many dimensions to this. There's so much to learn about what this massive migration actually means, and there's so little being studied, and especially so very little of this information being shared with us. Well, our guest today has made it his life's work to do just that investigation and share just that information with the public. Jason DeLeon

leads the Undocumented Migration Project, which is a long-term anthropological analysis of clandestine border crossings between northern Mexico and southern Arizona. He's a professor of anthropology at UCLA, and he is the winner of a MacArthur, quote, genius grant. So we are very, very lucky and very, very honored to have him on the show. Please welcome Jason DeLeon. Jason, thanks so much for coming on the show and for being our first podcast we're recording over a video conference from my house. Yeah. From your house to mine. My pleasure. How are you? How are you holding up right now in these uncertain times? Pretty good. You know, it's always interesting having a three-year-old and a six-year-old

locked up in the house. And so they've been locked up since we're on day five or six now. Man, and with uncertain how many more days are to come. Well, let's talk about your work. I mean, it almost seems strange to think about our own work at a time like this, but I really am interested in it. Tell me about the Undocumented Migration Project. So the Undocumented Migration Project is a, how do I describe it these days? It's a non-profit arts research and education collective that is focused on documenting and understanding the social process of clandestine movement between Latin America and the United States. And it's a project that has evolved over the last decade to include a whole range of things.

I mean, it really, it began in 2009 as my attempt to sort of understand border crossings between Northern Mexico and Arizona using really the lenses of archaeology and ethnography. So talking to living people and also seeing what the things they left behind could tell us about this process. And over the years, the project has really grown in a lot of different ways to include a lot of forensic science. So trying to understand what happens to the bodies of people who die while crossing places like the Arizona desert, photography, documentary film, and then increasingly trying to translate

this work for public audiences through a whole range of venues, and most recently, you know, through exhibition work. And so it's this kind of eclectic mix of things that I've been sort of pulling on to try to understand these issues. It strikes me as really valuable because for all the, you know, breath spent on undocumented migration, it strikes me that most of us understand it pretty poorly. Like, and the idea that, yeah, we need to know what's going on, what's happening to folks who are crossing. We need to actually understand the issue is like, seems very obvious yet somehow neglected. Well, I think one of the issues that we have is that we're bombarded with information

about it through media cycles, but it tends to be pretty, pretty simplistic in the narrative that we are, that we are, are shown. And so for me, it's like, it's not this black and white issue that a lot of people want to make it. And the deeper that I've got into it over the years and the more ways I've tried to look at it, it's just really highlighted how complex this issue is. And, you know, I'm constantly feel like I'm learning something new about this process that I've been studying for over 10 years. And so for me, that just signals the fact that if I'm learning new stuff every day and becoming confused at different points of this research, what does that then mean for the general public who might think they already kind of understand this issue?

then mean for the general public who might think they already kind of understand this issue? Yeah. So for me, I mean, that's really why anthropology and sort of trying to draw on this wide range of approaches for me is really important for telling different kinds of stories about this issue that people think they already understand. So what do you think the public most misunderstands? What do people get wrong the most? the most? I think that they don't understand that it's not this simple thing where they imagine, like, okay, undocumented migration means someone hops a fence in downtown Nogales, Arizona, and then runs into the United States. I think what they don't understand is that the crossing of an international boundary without paperwork is just one part of this much larger sequence of events.

And then undocumented migration doesn't happen in this kind of political or economic vacuum. I mean, especially a lot of Americans. I think when people ask me about, you know, what would comprehensive immigration reform look like? And I say, well, we've got to start dealing with political corruption in Latin America. We've got to start dealing with these trade relationships with Mexico and Central America that are completely one-sided, benefit us, and disproportionately impact those countries in negative ways. People will say things like, well, isn't corruption and a poor economy in those countries, that's those countries' fault, right? But even though we know that everything that's happening in these places is deeply connected to what's going on through U these other kinds of issues. And even though it seems like an issue that could be easily solved by a border wall,

that's like a childish understanding of how this whole thing actually works out. And so, of course, people have a skewed understanding of it because I think it's complex, but also you have a lot of politicians who want to give people very simple answers to say, okay, well, a border wall is going to fix all of our economic woes in the United States, which clearly, you know, that's a fallacy. And so what is it about a border wall to you that's so misguided? Like, what bigger picture is that missing? Well, I think that what people don't really understand is that the bulk of the U.S.-Mexico

border has no border wall. It's never had a border wall, and that's because the geopolitical boundary cuts across this wide landscape that is incredibly inhospitable, that's remote, depopulated, and it would be impossible to maintain a border wall in these places. It'd be prohibitively expensive, and you've got the natural environment, which doesn't want to be cordoned off. And so even if we could put up a border wall, it would cost us a whole shit ton of money to maintain. And it's been shown to be completely ineffective because if you have a border, let's say you put up a border wall along the entire U S Mexico border, almost 2000 miles, you don't have enough people to be down there monitoring it.

And so, you know, you put a border wall in, in parts of the Sonoran desert, you can just hop that fence and there's literally no one there to stop you. You still have to walk 60 or 70 miles. And that's really the border wall. And that's really by design. I mean, what people don't understand about the U.S.-Mexico border is that since the 1990s, we have had this policy in place called prevention through deterrence. And it's a pretty simplistic idea. It was recognized early on that southern Arizona, parts of Texas, New Mexico were so remote that you didn't need a border wall because if you funnel required now to walk for three to five to seven days across some of the most remote landscapes in the Western Hemisphere. And the idea is that if you have to walk for seven days through scorching deserts where you can be bit by a rattlesnake, you can die of dehydration or hypothermia, that that in itself isn't enough of enough of a, of a, of a wall that that's the

deterrence is the natural landscape. And that's our paradigm. I mean, that's been in place since the nineties. That's, that's currently in place now. You don't hear Donald Trump ever talk about this phrase prevention through deterrence. It's been kind of whitewashed, I think from a lot of policy documents over the last 10 years, but it's very much how we are maintaining our border security at the moment. And I think what a lot of people just don't understand that. What about from a policy perspective, this idea of, let's say, okay, the wall's not literal, it's metaphorical, right? We're going to have maximum security along the border. That's what, you know, he was actually campaigning on. And so let's call it that. What is your view on that policy? What is, what have you learned that

throws that policy into a different light? Well, we spend billions of dollars on border security, most of which has been shown to be ineffective or ambiguous at best. And there's this huge industry that benefits from throwing money at border security that is impossible to evaluate whether it works or not. And we know that the most effective way to stop people from migrating oftentimes is by not hiring them. And so when, you know, if people, if people were really concerned about border security and who's coming across, they would be policing the workforce in the United States because we know that that's, that's what stops people from coming. I mean, in 2008, Obama comes out and he says, you know,

undocumented migration is at the lowest rate that it's been in decades. We've really secured the border, et cetera, et cetera. That wasn't the case at all. We hadn't changed anything at the U.S.-Mexico border. The economy was in the toilet. And so now suddenly there aren't these jobs. People aren't able to come. And we know that when our economy is bad and when there are no jobs, people are not coming.

our economy is bad and when, when there are no jobs, people are not coming. And if we started to police the workforce in a real, I mean, and even with the policing of the workforce now, all we do, you know, we do these, these public raids where they, they raid a chicken factory or, or a pork plant, they arrest a bunch of undocumented people and they slap the wrist of these employers. And then business goes back to back to back as usual after, after a few months, if we actually police those places that would slow down undocumented migration overnight. But of course that's what we don't want to do because nobody makes money off of that. But the border security industrial complex that, that puts a lot of money in a lot of people's pockets. And so I think that that there's a heavy investment in arguing for more border security, even if we know it doesn't work because it's a huge, huge moneymaker.

Because then everybody gets paid. The chicken plant gets paid because it gets to keep having its migrant workers and the border security companies, the security contractors get paid as well. The people building the wall get paid. Absolutely. I mean, it is an enormous moneymaker. And as the war on drugs has become increasingly less popular, you now have this war on undocumented immigrants happening and undocumented migrants. And, you know, the construction of new detention centers, I mean, that's a huge moneymaker now for folks. So instead of incarcerating, you know, American citizens, incarcerating undocumented people is this huge, huge way now to make money. And, you know,

and also with this whole border security thing, we haven't, it's kind of gone away lately. I mean, we have been so focused on kind of demonizing migrants. And that's partly because of this, you know, this current president and all of his cronies. But also, you know, typically during these political cycles, and when we're looking for a boogeyman, the immigrants are kind of number one target. But much of the ramping up of border security, people don't really understand, happened post 9-11. And so after 9-11, you have the federal government conflating border security, immigration security with terrorism. And so suddenly now it's like the next Osama bin Laden is going to come across the Arizona desert. So we need to invest in drones and remote sensing,

even though we've never had a documented terrorist come through the desert. But it was a really savvy way to convince the American public that we needed to throw more money at this border security issue. Um, and if you talk to border patrol agents who signed up post nine 11, a lot of guys, my sort of generation, they will tell you that, look, post nine 11, I wanted to fight terrorism. The border patrol started this campaign saying that if you sign up for this agency, you will be fighting terrorism. And so you can, all these guys who started, who started signing up and then they realized like, you know, I was trying to catch Osama bin Laden and instead I'm chasing these peasant farmers

from, from Oaxaca. But, but that's part of this whole, this whole history of why this stuff has really ramped up. And now we just assume that, that that's what we should be doing is, is beefing up security because that's what we've always done. Well, let's talk about the folks who are actually crossing the border, right? Because that's who you're studying. That's who you're seeking to understand. You just said peasant farmers from Oaxaca, right? Tell me about who are the folks who cross, who try to cross, why, and what happens to them.

But let's start with who. Well, I think historically, when people hear the word like border crosser, undocumented migrant, illegal alien, whatever term that they're using, I think if you hear screaming in the background, that's just my kids doing God knows what downstairs. So don um, don't worry about it. Uh, you know, I think that, um, you know, historically people who were migrating tended to be young Mexican, uh, males, people who were, who were migrating because they couldn't make a living in, um, in Mexico. Um, you know, in, in recent decades, you know, post NAFTA, once the Mexican economy crashes because of NAFTA, you've got this outpouring of folks who could no longer make a living farming and competing with subsidized American subsidies that were flooding the Mexican market.

That went on for a while. Post-9-11, the border security starts to harden. People were moving back and forth into the late 90s. Post-9-11 nine security ramps up. Now, suddenly we started to create this permanent undocumented population here because it now becomes too costly to, to go back and forth. People would come here for a season. They would go home for Christmas.

They would come back. But post nine 11, the borders sort of hardens and now it's too expensive and too dangerous to try to try multiple trips. So people start bringing their families. So that's when you start seeing spouses with children migrating to reunite with husbands, but still at this point, largely Mexican. And within the last probably five years, we've really had this uptick in folks who are coming from Central America and beyond. But really,

right now, we went from having like 10% of people who are non-Mexican nationals migrating through places like the Sonora Desert, and now it's more like 50% of people who are coming up are coming from Central America. So that's kind of a demographic. But, but then, you know, you also then have people who are crossing the border through places like either Southern Arizona, South Texas, or increasingly now the, the, the deserts of, of Southern New Mexico, where, you know, in the, in the eighties, you could hop the fence in downtown San Diego, you would run from the border patrol, and then you would hop in a truck and someone would drive you up into L.A. But now it's like, I mean, you hop you. There isn't even no fence in most parts of southern Arizona. You walk into the into the United States and now you've got to walk for six, seven days across this brutal, brutal terrain to get to a place like Tucson or or Phoenix and then and then be picked up and then driven someplace else.

then be picked up and then driven someplace else. Well, so I just want to say this idea that heightened border security caused a change in migration patterns is something that we talked about in an episode of Adam Ruins Everything, where there was this, I want to make sure I understand it right. There's like this circular flow of migrants. You had folks coming for a season to pick crops or whatever it is they were doing, and then they would head back and it was like a way to bring money back. But then once it became prohibitively difficult to go back and forth, people brought families and set down roots like they they went from being, you know, migrant workers to permanent residents, which if you are a xenophobe, right, who doesn't like these people, that's counterproductive by your own standards because you've turned what was a migrant workforce into a permanent population. But it seemed like that happened under the noses of most Americans that, you know, I think we dated that increase in enforcement from Reagan or thereabouts. And that's not what any of those folks or Clinton had in mind.

Yeah. I mean, that's the rub for a lot of these folks is that, you know, they're pushing for a wall. They don't understand that there are upwards of 12 million, 13 million undocumented people here who have been here for a long time in the shadows working in our domestic economy. And the more that we push for this border security, those folks who did not want to be here permanently now are here permanently. And those folks who did not want to be here permanently now are here permanently. And many of them would prefer to have this fluidity and basically say, look, I'll come here. They're already paying taxes, right? They're already paying taxes on sales tax. A lot of times they're working under fake papers that are paying into some Social Security card that goes to who knows where. You know, these are folks who are willing to pay into the system and they would love

to pay in the system and be able to move freely back and forth. But what we have done is we have made them now Americans through this kind of heightened border security, which is really, you know, as you put it, it's not what these folks, people who are xenophobes want or even really understand. And I think, you know, you sort of see that tragedy the most when people get deported. And then you hear the backstory about how long they've been here, you know, how they've raised kids here, you know, all of the families that they've built, the lives that they've built in the United States because they've not been able to go home.

Yeah. Well, and let's just talk about the migrant work a little bit because, well, sorry, the work isn't migrant. The people are migrants. But the work that the folks are doing, you said earlier, if we were to police these workplaces, you know, that would change everything. But my understanding is that this type of work is something that the United States has wanted and welcomed at times for decades and decades, that there's been this class of work that, you know, maybe back during the Dust Bowl, you had impoverished white farmers, you know, picking crops. But basically since then, that work has been done by folks coming over the border. And that for decades, we had that, hey, migrants would come and then they would go back.

That was just how we produced that food supply and did all those other jobs. And then we essentially criminalized what was a part of the United States economy that had been chugging along for decades. And now that part of the economy is still going. We're still relying on those folks, except now they're like brutally criminalized. And we've, you know, forced them to rather than go back and forth, spend a lot of time in the United States because the border security is so high. Is that that's what I've gathered. Am I right on with that or am I off? I mean, we had a guest worker program, you know, into the 1960s that allowed people from Mexico and other places to move back and forth. We paid them kind of shit wages.

They worked dangerous, difficult jobs. But there were jobs that Americans didn't want to do. And what ended up happening was there had been a kind of expose about the brutality of those people's lives, the living conditions in these work camps, the low wages, the exploitation that was happening in different ways. An expose was published. The American public saw it and was shocked by it and decided that this guest worker program needed to be completely canceled. And so we canceled the Bracero program. By the time it's canceled, though, this labor force is too integrated into these industries. And so instead of just saying, okay, we're going to give up and go home now, people were like, well, we're here. We'll work illegally. We'll keep these jobs, except now we no longer have the minimal protections that we had previously. And, you know, you can't

eat food today that has not gone through the hands of undocumented people, whether it's fruits or vegetables or meat products. But they're working in the shadows and they're working in incredibly dangerous jobs. And, you know, all of these Americans who say, well, if these people weren't stealing my jobs, you know, there'd be, I would, there'd be more people employed, but nobody wants to work in a, in a pork plant, you know, killing animals all day. Nobody wants to, um, to be, to be picking fruit or vegetables, um, at the, um, at the, at the wages that are, um, profitable for, for these, these, these owners. And so, um, you know, these are jobs that Americans don't want. And if we were to pay people an American wage, like one that would make it attractive to people,

we'd all be buying like $10 oranges. I mean, it's not something that's sustainable, at least in this particular kind of economic system. that's sustainable, at least for this particular kind of economic system. Well, so let's talk about the folks who are choosing to make that six or seven day trip across the desert. Like, what is that? What is that trip like? Let's put a more of a human face on it. You know, you, you start in Northern Mexico. You probably, if you're coming through Arizona, I mean, right now there's sort of three places to come through. There's either Arizona, South Texas, or New Mexico. And most of my work has been in Arizona. I mean, that's where the bulk of people were coming from many, many years.

Things have shifted towards Texas in recent years. But the Arizona experience is brutal. I mean, it's killed thousands of people since the late 1990s. And that's because you head up to northern Mexico. You meet up with a smuggler. You buy some supplies, so a couple of gallons of water. You get a backpack. You stick some high-salt content foods in there, a few first aid things.

in there, a few first aid things. And then you walk out into the desert and you try to make this trek that can be 60 or 70 miles in 110 degree weather through this mountainous terrain with no compass, no map. And you're hiking probably in crappy shoes. You're not carrying enough water to survive. I mean, in the middle of the summer, if you're hiking out there, you need to be drinking, you know, something like, like, like two gallons of water a day. You can really, you can really only carry the most you can carry is four gallons of water for the trip. And I've tried to lift a gallon of milk. I know how heavy it is. And, you know, so you already start this trip without enough water. There's, there are very few water, natural water sources that you're going to encounter.

And then of course, you know, you're sweating, you're, you're, you're, you're losing water at a high rate. You're being exposed to intense heat and sunlight. I think it's something like there are 14 species of rattlesnakes in the Sonoran desert. There's more rattlesnakes there than any place in the Western hemisphere. Um, wow. You can, you know, you can break an ankle cause you're hiking at night. You can fall down a cliff. You can drown during a monsoon rain in the, in the late summer. You can freeze to death in the winter. Uh, it's one of these places where you, you have to push your body to the extreme in order to make it. And typically

if you have a preexisting medical condition that extreme in order to make it. And typically, if you have a pre-existing medical condition that you don't know about, it's usually a time that you find out about it, unfortunately. And so this extreme exposure is what kills people. And the Border Patrol knows this. I mean, if you look at the policy documents that I've written about extensively, prevention through deterrence, when it was designed, it was recognized that if you've forced people over what the border patrol characterized as hostile terrain, that people would be deterred by these extreme environmental conditions. And the thinking was in the mid-90s that if people died, if enough people died in the mid-90s, word would get around that this was a dangerous thing and you shouldn't try it.

Of course, what ended up happening was you went from having maybe 10 to 30 deaths along the entire U.S.-Mexico border during the course of a year to now you're getting like 200 or 300 deaths just in Arizona alone annually. So hundreds of people start dying per year, and that's a low number. I mean, the work I've done on the forensics suggests that a lot more people die out there and decompose rapidly. You never find them where they die in remote locations. And so those bodies will never be recovered. But you have the spike in migrant death and it still doesn't deter people. And even as migration has slowed over the years, it's gotten more dangerous because people are going into more remote locations.

So the deaths have gone up even as the numbers have gone down. So that's really part of this policy design. But people are dying every day out there. And I think for me, having worked with families of the dead, of the disappeared, having encountered human remains myself, I mean, it's a really horrible thing to see that we have this federal policy in place that knowingly puts people in harm's way. It literally kills people. It's recognized as something that's doing that, and yet there's no uproar. It's not considered a humanitarian crisis. And as far as the federal government's concerned, this is business as usual.

This is part of the design of this program is to kill people. And it, of course, has. I mean, so from the government's perspective, you could hear them say, hey, we're not telling people to cross. We're just saying, hey, the spots that are easy we're gonna wall off and hey they're taking their own lives into their own hands that's you know let me wash my hands clean of that but I don't know it strikes me that if the need is so great that people you end up funneling people anyway into this other path that does kill them, you do bear a little responsibility for that to some degree. But why is it that folks are willing to make this trek? I mean, when someone is standing there in Mexico

with a couple of gallons of water on their back and they're about to walk for six days across a trackless desert where they could likely die? Why, why do they, what is, what is the thing that is pushing that person across the border? Why do so many people make the trip? Well, you know, I think the first part of your question, it's in terms of like accountability, using the desert is a really savvy way to say like, not us, man, that's on you kind of thing. Right. And if you look at some of the documents, I mean, there's a document that I've written about called Appendix 5, where the government accountability office was trying to figure

out whether or not this program was working or not. And the border patrol couldn't, they didn't have any good metrics about how to measure the effectiveness. But one of the things they came up with was this document that was like, okay, what are some possible metrics showing that this is effective? And one of them was a rise in migrant death. And so recognizing that if deaths go up, it means that this policy is having an impact. And, you know, so this is actually in a document that you can, I mean, someone put this in a spreadsheet and we're trying to find ways to measure this. Hey, we did a good job. More people are dead.

Yeah. And of course, of course, nobody wants to own up to that now. Although I'm surprised this administration doesn't own up to that now and be like, you know, in this current era of anti-immigrant kind of rhetoric and all the stuff that people are you know we put them in cages we put babies in cages we might as well also own them to the fact that we kill thousands of people with this policy um but you know of course we we haven't but there's been other stuff that they've done that hints at that they that they know that the desert can be uh that they can use it to their advantage so we used to catch people in like Texas or California and send them, we would deport them back to Northern Sonora, Mexico, which is right on the border with the Sonoran Desert, knowing that, well, if you've been separated from your

smuggler in California or Texas, the path of least resistance now is going to this desert. And so the policy, which was called the alien transfer and exit program was really saying, okay, we're going to, we're going to move you to this new place because we want to separate you from your smuggler who is going to put you in harm's way. But in fact, they want to separate them from smugglers and force them to try something even harder. I mean, people work really hard to, to connect with a good smuggler. And so if you separate them, it makes it a lot more difficult. So you've got people now who suddenly were like, well, I was going to try and cross to California, but shit, now I'm in Sonora with no smuggler.

And this seems to be the easiest kind of way through now. But then the Border Patrol can just say, well, if the desert kills you, it's not our fault. our fault, even though we keep saying the desert can be an ally in this whole process and we can create infrastructure that then forces people's hand to then run this kind of this gauntlet. We've done it with other ways. I mean, this whole wait in Mexico for asylum that we've been doing now. Yeah. Tell me about that. I was curious about that policy and what you thought of it. I mean, we are putting them in Mexico because we know that if you deport someone from Central America to northern Mexico, put them in a foreign location and say, you can apply for asylum, but you have to wait for three months. They have no money. They don't know anybody.

They're highly exploitable. They're going to be mistreated in all kinds of ways, if not kidnapped, murdered, sexually assaulted. assaulted. And all of those brutal things that we know are going to happen to them in Mexico will then probably deter them from waiting it out to apply for asylum. But the US can just say, well, we don't have capacity. So we sent you to Mexico to wait it out. It's not our fault if someone killed you or raped you there. That's on Mexico. But I would say, well, we sure as hell have a lot of space to put people in detention centers. We have enough space to arrest them and incarcerate them if we can get money off of them. But these other folks, you know, and Obama did that. He had a program called Plan Frontera Sur, basically Border South, which we recently did a documentary about. which we recently did a documentary about, it was Obama trying to slow down the movement of Central American folks that was happening around 2014. So they start putting all this political and economic pressure on Mexico to say, look, we can't stop them at the U.S.-Mexico border.

It's kind of unsightly when like a thousand kids show up asking for asylum. So what we're asking you, Mexico, our friend, is to stop these folks before they can even get there. So Mexico starts cracking down on the movement of folks through their country who they had no interest in stopping before. But now suddenly when the U.S. says, stop them, arrest them, and deport them, we'll pay you, we'll help train you. We start doing that, and then there's a spike in human rights abuses that are happening in Mexico against these Central American migrants. But the U.S. can say, well, if you get murdered in southern Mexico or exploited, kidnapped, whatever, that's on Mexico, right? That's not on us, you know? And so there's all these kind of degrees of separation that the U.S. tries to employ so that we don't look like we're doing,

you know, doing something bad. We're making Mexico do our dirty work. We're making the desert do our dirty work. And let's be clear, what you're talking about there with the wait in Mexico policy, those aren't illegal border crossers. Those are folks who are seeking asylum, who are coming from Central America, maybe South America, who are seeking – like asylum is a legitimate program that we have. People can come and say, I seek asylum. And then there's a process that's not illegal. That's not nefarious for them to do that. That's like, we have a legal system. We're supposed to have a legal system.

We do have one it's poorly managed, but we have a legal system for, Hey, that's something that you can do. The American government invites you to some extent to do that. But then when they get here, we're saying, okay, well, while we process your claim, you have to wait in Mexico, a country that, you know, you are not, it's not hospitable to you. You don't know people there, as you said. So that's, that is perverse, I would have to say, because those are folks who by definition sort of need help, right? And they're coming to us in a way of like,

please, I need help. And we're saying, okay, but wait in this very hospitable other city where you don't know anybody, where you can be abused. We're beginning by treating them in a very inhumane way with that move. Oh yeah, I mean, those are people

who are following the rule of law. You know, that's essentially like you're tired masses yearning to be free. And we should change the Statue of Liberty to be like, wait in Mexico. We'll call you back in a little bit. Let you know what's going on. Right. Yeah. I mean, so people don't understand it. They're like, these are folks who are doing everything. This is Fievel from an American tale here. Yeah. Right.

This is Fievel from an American tale here, who were, right? That's going to be part three. It's going to be Fievel in Tijuana, you know, just like trying to figure it out. Just like cats everywhere. Yeah, it's, you know, but to get to your other question about, well, why? Yeah. You know, for a long time, the why was really about economics. People could not feed their families in Mexico. There was just no way to live. Or you could live, but you could live a very

terrible, impoverished life where you watch your kids starve. No way to improve your livelihood in that country. And of course, poverty is still driving a lot of this from all these different countries. But increasingly with Central America, you've got kids, you've got people who are leaving Central America, a lot of them young people, who are fleeing not just poverty, but fleeing government corruption and then organized or semi-organized crime and violence that puts their lives at great risk. And so, you know, since 2015, I've been working with Central American migrants who are crossing from Honduras up to Northern Mexico, but I've been mostly working with smugglers. So Honduran smugglers who are charged with, you know, escorting people

through Mexico. And these folks will all tell you that like, I am risking my life to cross Mexico. I'm risking my life to go into the snore desert of Arizona, because if I stay in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, I'm going to be murdered. You know, I refuse to join a gang or my family's being exploited by local gangs. My life has been threatened. They've killed my, you've killed my relatives. They're going to kill me next. And so people will say things to me like, I would rather die in the Sonoran Desert trying to improve my circumstances than be shot in the back of the head on a street corner in San Pedro Sula by a stranger. Because at least in the Sonoran Desert, there's a chance of something better. And I've also taken my life into my own hands in some,

in some way. But you, you literally have people who are saying like, send me anywhere except, except back home because you, to send me back home is an absolute death sentence. And, you know, that's when you, people, when I think people don't need to, people don't understand that in the U S when they're, when they say things like, I can't believe this, you know, this, this person would take their kid out into the desert. Like why would someone do that? And my response would be like, yeah, you can't believe that because you can't understand the horror, the difficulty that one must be in where the best option that you have is to risk your life and the life of your children out in the desert. That is like you taking, you know, control of your destiny. So I think it's really hard for people to imagine just how brutal it

must be to try to exist in a place like Honduras right now. Yeah. Now, why do those folks come to the United States, right? Like, you know, there's east, south, and west as well, right? So why is the United States the place that they risk so much to come to? Well, you know, we've always employed them. There's more employment here than anyplace else. I mean, Mexico historically has been very unfriendly to Central Americans, although they're increasingly creating their own undocumented population of Central Americans. As people aren't able to get in the US, you're starting to see people working under the table and kind of in the shadows in Mexico. But you also have people who are coming here because this is the place that we sell ourselves as, you know, this is where the American dream happens. This is where you can actually make something of yourself.

This is America's myth. This is our legend. You know, people are coming to reunite with them. You've got, you know, different pockets of ethnic enclaves that are attractive to folks. So, like, Hondurans are basically, you know, the folks I work with, they're oftentimes trying to get to, like, Houston, New Orleans, or New York, where they have these huge, you know, Honduran populations. And so they've already got family there. They've got a family support network that they can rely on. Those places like New Orleans, post-Katrina, people that were rebuilding that city were Honduran. You've got this long history of these places that have really encouraged the influx of these folks. And so, you know, going south, I mean, if you're in Central America, you're not, I mean, Guatemala, Belize, or El Salvador, I mean, those are not friendly kinds of options. Mexico is also still dangerous, but maybe a little bit better if you can kind of

make it work. But for a lot of like, like Afro Hondurans, you know, Garifuna speakers from Honduras who to, to, to, to Mexicans, to Americans, you know, phenotypically, we look at them and say, Oh, African-American, you can't really hide out if you're black in Mexico. I mean, there's a lot of racism against, against dark skin people in Mexico. And being black in Mexico is not a pleasant thing. And they speak a different, is it a different language that you mentioned? Yeah. So they, a lot of those folks will speak Garifuna, but also Spanish. But I mean, you know,

there are some Hondurans who can pass for Mexican and sort of stay under the radar. Although even that's hard. I mean, phenotypically Hondurans tend to be, you know, either more admixture with Africans or, um, or fair skin. Um, they speak differently. It's really hard for people to hide accents. Um, so there's all these things that like, that signal someone as, or, or they're indigenous, which also, you know, being indigenous in Mexico is, um, is, is as bad or worse than being black in Mexico. Um, so there's many things that make it impossible for folks to want to stay there, but, but coming to the U S they can hide out their populations of people that look like them where, where, you know, once you're here,

life is a lot easier than in a place like Mexico. And this is why understanding why people are migrating is so important and understanding the people who are coming across because, you know, we have this tendency in the United States to see everyone who's migrating as a monolith. I'd say, oh, they're Mexicans, but also to say, okay, they're Hondurans. And to understand those distinctions between folks. And those really matter as much as distinctions between Americans do. Well, I want to learn more about the folks that you've met in your work and hear some

of those stories, but we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Jason DeLeon. So Jason, you said that you're employing, you know, anthropology, ethnology, archaeology in the undocumented migration project. What does that look like? How do you actually go about doing the work and and finding out about these folks? So depending on the depending on the day, you know, the work can look very different. So some aspects of it involve like lots of hiking in the Arizona deserts, collecting the things that migrants have left behind, documenting, you know, campsites where migrants are sleeping, changing clothes, resting for a little bit and leaving things behind. That's the kind of archaeological element of it. So mapping, photographing, collecting. We've got an archive of about 9,000 objects that live at UCLA that are in my lab that are, you know, artifacts that migrants have left behind.

They're in archival boxes. They're catalogued. They're in a big database that we use to study this stuff. On a different day, it could be spending time in a migrant shelter interviewing folks who are about to cross the desert or who have just been deported. interviewing folks who are about to cross the desert or who have just been deported. It could be working with families of the dead or the disappeared in Latin America or in the U.S., interviewing them about their family members and documenting their experiences. It could be the forensic work. So for many years, we had been doing decomposition experiments to understand what it would look like if a person

dies out in the desert. And we'd been using pigs, like many forensic scientists who use pigs as proxies for human bodies. And so we've used pigs in different contexts, you know, deceased pigs who are then dressed in clothes that migrants would be wearing. Yeah, it's a weird, I mean, it is. Sounds cute. I mean, I put a cute image in my head. I know it's not cute on a number of levels, but it did, I did like the picture that came into my head.

That's all I'll say. Well, I'll tell you what, the first time- It was a pig wearing clothes and a hat. Oh, no. I mean, the first time we did this, you this, we ordered these animals from a meat science laboratory. And so this guy comes out with live animals. And of course, it's a brutal thing. Here I am, I'm working on this project, I'm trying to end violence, and then I'm buying these animals that are going to be killed on site. violence and then I'm buying these animals that are going to be killed on sites. You know, so I'm perpetuating this violence against these animals kind of in the name of science. So I have this complicated relationship with, you know, with this issue, but, you know,

but the pigs have been really important for us. But I'll tell you the first time that we did this, this guy comes out, he brings these animals out and he's like, okay, where do you want these things euthanized? And I said, okay, we're going to do one here. And then I want to do one in broad daylight. I want to do one under this tree over here. And so, and I've written about this a lot in my first book about the ethics of this. And then also the brutality of what it's like to watch an animal be killed. But this guy, he kills this animal. And then I say to him, okay, can you just give us a few minutes here? I've got to, I'm going to put some clothes on this animal. And the guy is like,

he's like, what do you mean? And I was like, well, I got, I'm going to, and so he's like, okay, I guess. And so we, you know, and we had been really interested in what happens to women in this context. So, so we put on like bra panties, happens to women in this context so so we put on like bra panties um pants a shirt shoes and this guy looks at me and he goes man i've seen a lot of weird stuff in this job he's like but i don't know what kind of twisted shit that you fucking guys are on like what the fuck and i didn't know anthropologists and archaeologists were such perverts. He was just like,

like, holy shit. And, and so I kind of explained to this guy, it's like, look, you know, people die out in the desert.

We don't really know what happens to them. There's a lot of speculation and these animals, we're going to monitor them. You know, we're going to monitor these, these animals with, with trail cameras to see you know how fast they decompose who are the scavengers that are kind of coming out here um and once i sort of explained

it to that guy um then he was like oh you know that makes sense and then it was funny he goes well he goes you know you know i had a cousin who crossed the border and and disappeared we have no idea what happened to him and i said well you know this project is really is trying to understand what could have happened to him um but he was like, you know, can I take some pictures of this back to show my boss? And, you know, everybody's like, what the, you know, these perverts, I mean, people just, I mean, it's a weird, it is a weird thing. I love that image of him going like, yeah. Oh, I get it. Yeah. That's serious. That happened to a fan member of mine. Anyway, let me get some shots of this. This is some weird shit.

You know, but but but, you know, that stuff has been really important over the years for being able to say people die and they disappear. I mean, we had animals that were went from fully fleshed and fully clothed to completely disarticulated, defleshed with the personal effects, you know, the wallet, all that stuff spread far and wide, disappeared in the matter of like 36 hours. Wow. So this stuff really, I mean, and I can send you guys, you know, some videos, you know, if that would be helpful for people to see this. Sure. You know, and we did this a couple of years ago, a set of experiments.

And there was someone from like usa today who was doing a story on the the experiments and he came out to see one of the pigs and all it was was two pairs it was a pair of shoes kind of laid out where like in position and then the head the skull um and that was it everything is just a big stain and the guy was like oh man you guys didn't have to have to stage this for me before I got here to take pictures. And I was like, stage? Like, we don't touch this stuff. This is what it actually ends up looking like. I mean, it is this shocking that you can go from like a 200 pound animal fully clothed to just a pair of shoes and a head. We don't know where the rest of that stuff went because vultures come in, they pick stuff up and they fly away with it. that stuff because vultures come in, they pick stuff up and they fly away with it. Yeah. So that, and that's why you're saying there's so many, there might be so many deaths we don't know about because people are going out there, they're dying of exposure out in the desert and then their bodies are just gone within 36 hours?

In some instances, yeah. I mean, and we had things, you know, people had been telling me that, you know, if someone in our group dies, oftentimes we'll cover them with rocks to protect them from scavengers and from the elements. When we did that on an animal, that was like the fastest decomp rate that we saw because everybody sort of forgot that, you know, rocks conduct heat. need a body to be at a certain stage of decomp before they'll start scavenging. It takes several days and a lot of heat for the flesh to get to a certain kind of state for them to kind of come in. When we covered these animals in rocks, vultures were in there and just super, super quick ripping stuff out and completely eating these bodies. ripping stuff out and completely, you know, eating these bodies. And, you know, when we began these experiments,

two weeks after we started doing these experiments, we came across the body of a 31-year-old woman from Ecuador, a woman named Maricela Zagwipuya, who she'd only been dead like three or four days, was still fully fleshed. But, you know, we encounter her body. It's this really shocking thing. And vultures are already there just kind of waiting, you know, just circling and waiting to, you know, to start ravaging her body. And so the first year we did this, you know, it really kind of drove home the fact that why we were doing it and kind of the importance of it.

You know, we knew that she was about to be consumed by these vultures. And, you know, who knows what would have been left of her. And unfortunately, you know, so we started doing those experiments in 2012. We encounter her body during that summer. I ended up the story of of her life back in ecuador her family in new york um and then a year later she has a 15 year old relative who disappears on the same trail um and we haven't we haven't found him since we've been we've been looking for him for seven years and you know these experiments suggest experiments suggest that he's probably never going to be found. I mean, it doesn't, if it takes just, you know, 36 to 72 hours for animals to rip a body apart, what is the likelihood of finding him after seven years now? Wow, that's, man, why did you go into this work? What, what's, what's important about it to you?

Um, I didn't expect to be doing this kind of work. Um, you know, I went, I went to college because I wanted to be Indiana Jones. Um, and I figured out that job was taken. Um, and that's really not how archeology works. Um, so, but I still wanted to be into archaeology. So, you know, I went to school, my undergrad, to do archaeology. I started working in California and I started working in Mexico. But, you know, was looking at very ancient kinds of things. And I went to graduate school to pursue a PhD in ancient archaeology. So I started working in Mexico.

My dissertation was on stone tools, ancient stone tools at this site called San Lorenzo in Lolan, Veracruz, Mexico. And that's really what I thought I was going to go on to work on for the rest of my career. But during the course of these excavations that I was working on in these rural communities, you end up working alongside working class folks who are getting paid to dig ditches. And, you know, these are people who are coming from these rural communities. A lot of them are getting ready to migrate or maybe they've previously migrated. And so I got to know a lot of women and men who had either tried to cross the Sonoran Desert and had almost died,

people who had spent time in the U.S. as migrants and been deported or returned home, or folks who were getting ready to migrate themselves. And, you know, you spend a lot of time in these excavation units with those folks talking about, you know, all kinds of stuff. And it was sort of through those stories that I was hearing that I became more and more interested in those experiences and those stories than the stuff that was actually coming out of the ground. those experiences and those stories been the stuff that was actually coming out of the ground. You know, and part of this was shaped by the fact that I, you know, my parents were, you know, are from, I've come from two immigrant families. I partly grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas. You know, I had grown up around immigrants my entire life. I'd had many family

members who were undocumented. And so I kind of felt like I knew something about undocumented migration prior to that point, but I really didn't know anything. And once I started hearing these stories, I was like, oh my God, this is so shocking. I can't believe that this stuff is going on. And why is there not a lot of anthropology kind of happening around this stuff? And so I just, you know, I decided around 2007, 2008, that I wanted to, I was going to finish the dissertation on ancient stone tools and completely jump ship and do something related to migration. And what's so important about using anthropology and archaeology? I mean, are there other people doing this? And if not, you know, why do you feel it's important to do? And if not, you know, why do you feel it's important to do?

Well, in the beginning, the archaeology was a way for me to think about this process in a different kind of way. And if I could show people artifacts and use even that language, like what happens if I start talking about border crossings as cultural heritage, as American history, as something that produces artifacts that should be revered, that should be conserved and understood as, you know, as part of this great American story. You know, the Sonora Desert as like this new kind of Ellis Island, you know, archaeology became an important tool to generate new kinds of conversations about this issue, but also to give a kind give a different type of insight. People had been working on issues of migration before me, talking to folks about their experiences. But the archaeological spin, I think, was something relatively new. And then suddenly people were like, oh, here's this old story I thought i knew about but now i'm confronted with it through these materials um yeah i'm thinking about it in different kinds of ways um and so that for me that

you know i tell my students and the best part of anthropology for me is that we can make anything fucking weird i mean truly like i spend my day walking around looking at stuff and going like huh what why do we do it that way you know where the hell did that come from and you know why are people doing that you know and so for me that's what anthropology brings to the table is like yeah these different kinds of perspectives that then suddenly this thing that you took for granted all of a sudden now is completely weird i mean i teach a class called the anthropology of rock and roll, which a big chunk of it is about how records are made. So these students are like, why do I need to know what an SM57 microphone is? And why do I need to know about like how to pan something into a left or right speaker and how to

mix like, you know, five parts of a drum? I'm like, well, because those are all cultural processes. We make these cultural constructs. We put them through the speakers. You consume them and you don't even think about them. But if I start asking you like, okay, where's the bass drum in the mix? Where's the snare? Where's the hi-hat? Does it look like, does it sound like the drummer's facing you or that you're standing, you're standing behind the drummer? And then they're like, oh my God, you've just ruined music for me. I can't put on a set of headphones now without thinking about, you know, how the drums are mixed. for me i'm like that's anthropology like that's my my whole day is spent like going how can i make this weird what you know and and so with

undocumented migration i mean i i think it's such an important issue and the lens of anthropology i think can help force a different way of thinking about it, which then I hope can generate new kinds of conversations. Well, and anthropology is correct me if I'm wrong. I didn't study anthropology and I wish I had, frankly, now, maybe I can, maybe I can find a community college course once I'm allowed to leave my house again. Everything's online now, right?

Yeah. Okay. I'll take a, I'll take a one of those massively online courses, whatever about it i'll go on to i don't know website and and download some lectures but anthropology is the study of humanity right of of of human things things people do yep and uh we we have this image of okay that's uh you know, the old National Geographic, white folks going out and looking at, that's the stereotype of what the field is. But in this broader way, just studying humanity, it does seem like, yeah, that's what we need to be doing if we want to understand this issue. This is like a thing that humans are doing that we need to know more about and that we

poorly understand. So, like, what I like about your work is confronting it makes me realize that, that this is something that, oh yeah, we need to actually study. I mean, the human condition is so fascinating. I mean, anthropology is relevant to every aspect of our lives. And I guarantee you right now, there are anthropologists who are starting to think about projects on how the coronavirus is shaping sociality, right? Yeah. How Zoom has now become this crucial part of our lives. I mean, the fact that I'm having virtual happy hours with a bunch of anthropologists in all these different parts of the world.

Yeah. There's someone right now thinking about, okay, well, how do I make this weird? How do I take this situation and think about it kind of anthropologically? And for me, it's just important because it'll improve our understanding of ourselves, how we interact with each other. And we are at such a moment of crisis as a species, whether it's global warming, this pandemic, the impending kind of economic crash. And we need anthropologists to help us understand how we're going to get through all this stuff. You know, what's been our historical responses to similar events?

What are the things that are happening now that we can think about kind of culturally? You know, why don't boomers want to stay home and believe that this is a real thing? Why is Gen X kind of like saying, like, I got this? You know, there's all, you know, kind of cultural differences. I mean, so for me, anthropology is so crucial. We should be the experts giving advice about all this stuff when people are asking for information. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of times, you know, the academy is structured in a way

that many of my colleagues either aren't very good at translating their work or don't necessarily see value in it. But as far as I'm concerned, we should have anthropology at every table for every conversation we're having about our species. And I really try to teach my students. I say, look, I grew up in an era where, you know, anthropology for me was Indiana Jones or, yeah, some like old white dude who goes up to like the South Pacific to look at a bunch of like half naked brown people and then report back. And for me, the most interesting anthropology is the stuff that I can see in my everyday lives. And I, so I tell my students, I mean, like when I teach undergrads, like how to think about anthropology and where to do field work, you know, I start with things like, there's a movie called American

Juggalo that's about, you know, the gathering of the juggalos that happens, you know, every summer. And it's the most kind of beautiful, freaky, culturally kind of interesting sort of phenomenon. I tell my students like, that's where you should be doing ethnography. You don't need to go far away. I mean, there's all kinds of weird shit happening in your backyard. I remember when juggalos broke big when, you know, when America, the America became aware of them and, and it was mostly just making fun of it, right? Like, oh, look at this, look at this silly thing. Look at these silly people. And I remember seeing videos of it, of, of, you know, how, how positive people feel there and how it's a family and then realizing that this is a whole part of the country.

These are folks who I don't share the same experience with, who are living in a completely different America from me and are coming together in this way I don't understand. I remember having that feeling of, my question was like, what is this? I want to understand this phenomenon more and I still don't feel I understand it that well. So I think that's a perfect example. I mean, I look at those guys and I'm like, they're so happy,

you know, they're living the dream. And I'm, I mean, you know, and I tell my students, I'm like, we're not here to watch it. I'm not showing this because I want to make fun of this. I'm showing this because I'm jealous of this. And I want to understand how someone, how someone can be in a world and be in a group where you feel, you know, you had this feeling. I mean, I feel alienated all the time from folks and I'm like, and these folks are just like, come join us. Let's get down. Let's all be one. And it's like, for me, you know, putting anthropology into those spaces, it's both really, I think, enlightening to understand people who are different from you, but also at the same time, I think, to just show how similar that we all are once we start kind of

looking at stuff more closely and trying to be open-minded about people who, on the surface, seemingly have nothing to do with our own experience. Yeah. I mean, understanding other people, actually understanding an issue and getting down into it is so critical and to me should always be the first step before forming an opinion on it. Right. Before I talk about, hey, here's what I think about migration, I need to understand migration first. I need to understand the people who are crossing, what their experiences are like, what happens to them, the broader sociopolitical forces at play, the economics of it. There's so much richness there that you can and need to dive into before you start spouting off or coming out with policies or anything like that. And the gap between how deep your analysis is and all the ideas you're turning up and all the facts you're revealing and the shallowness of the policies and media understanding we have of the issue is so stark to me.

And, you know, I don't really want to write, you know, I say like, I'm not trying to write immigration stories. I'm not trying to write migration stories. I'm trying to write human stories so that someone can read it and go and not see a migrant or an immigrant, but maybe see themselves through these stories about people. And then they just happen to be people who are migrating. But, you know, I want someone to pick up a book and go, you know, oh, this woman, Maricela, she leaves Ecuador because she's struggling at home. You know, she didn't have, you know, access to these things and is trying to improve the lives of her kids. I want someone to go, well, that's me too. What would I do in that situation? You know, and it just so happens that this person, their only option is to migrate. And I think that, you know, that's the sort of

anthropology that I want to do is how can I increase our understanding of other people's experiences? And can I tell a story that's relatable to a reader? Because I think at the end of the day, I really want people to look at the work and read these stories. And I want them to feel like I do about these people that I've become connected to, you know, just through my human desire to understand someone else's experience and cannot translate for other folks. I mean, that's for me what anthropology should be doing. And I think when it's at its best is when people can read something or see some translated anthropological work and go, some translated anthropological work and go, huh, that's just like me.

You know, that's not so foreign. And it's, you know, I, it might be hard that they're wearing face paint and they're huffing glue. You know, that's a more difficult kind of thing, but, but I'm working on that one too. But, you know, I think, I think with it, at least with the immigration stuff, you know, working class folks can can understand that it this is a global phenomenon and many people are suffering and just trying to make ends meet. Yeah. Well, where can people go to find out more about your work and to learn more about, you know, what you've uncovered? And what do you hope folks listening from this will take away from them and their understanding of migration?

from this will take away from them and their understanding of migration? Well, you know, they can go to our website, undocumentedmigrationproject.org, and that's kind of the portal for all the different projects that we've been doing. My first book, The Land of Open Graves, you can get that on Amazon. There's also, I think, an audio version book of it. Radiolab did a three-part series based on the book called The Border Trilogy. People can kind of get the Cliff Note version of that. stuff, migrant kinds of death. But, you know, I would encourage people just to go and kind of explore and they can learn more about these issues through those different platforms. And then also, you know, while we were getting ready to launch this global exhibition in May called Hostile Terrain 94, we've been delayed with the opening. So just a little bit. Most of our shows are going to happen in the fall. But it is a global participatory exhibition that involves the construction of a giant wall map of the U.S.-Mexico border that has handwritten toe tags for over 3,200 people who have lost their lives since the late 1990s. Wow. And this exhibition is launching in approximately 150 locations on six continents,

probably not starting in May, but we hope at least by the end of the summer, many of these shows will start to happen. But we partner with folks around the globe, and we invite people to come to this exhibition and to fill out toe tags for the dead, to write out the names, the age, the location where they were found, the condition of the bodies, and then to mount these toe tags in the exact location of where those bodies were found. We're anticipating between 60 and 100,000 participants who are going to help build these exhibitions all across the United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia. People will come together through these different community

organizations to build the exhibition and then also to learn more about the issue through other, we've got an augmented reality component that people can scan with their phone, they can hear migrant stories, they can virtually tour the deserts, but they can also learn about how immigration is impacting those local communities through these partnerships. And so if people are interested in that, they can get involved. They can go to our website, hostileterrain94.org, or if they go to the Undocumented Immigration Project, it'll take you there as well. But they can get involved. It's open to the public. We have multiple shows in LA. We've got a bunch of cool shows in Latin America, in Germany, in Italy, all these places that we probably can't go to until the fall. Everybody's in a holding pattern, but we do hope that when

it launches, it'll be a way to create this kind of global witnessing of migrants suffering, but then also a way to kind of stand in solidarity with migrants around the globe. Yeah. Well, when we're able to leave our houses again, I hope people go check out those shows and go to the undocumentedmigrationproject.org. Jason, I can't thank you enough for being here to talk to us and for your work. Thank you. Adam, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. to talk to us and for your work. Thank you. Adam, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure.

So thank you once again to Jason DeLeon for coming on the show. And as promised, here is the second part of today's episode. This is a conversation with Dr. John Cohen, the head of BioReference, a lab that is working to make more coronavirus tests and to test as many Americans as possible. Just to give you another view of an interesting American who is on the ground working to fight coronavirus today. Let's go straight to the interview. Dr. Cohen, thank you for being with us. Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to talk to your audience. Where am I talking to you from? I'm in my very makeshift home studio right now. Where are you at? I am actually in my office in Elmwood Park, New Jersey, which is about 10 miles from the GW Bridge. So you have a company called BioReference. You've met with the White House about the coronavirus pandemic.

What is your company's role in our fight against it? And how are you thinking about coronavirus? So first off, we're BioReference Laboratories. Our holding company is called Opco, which is publicly traded. BioReference Laboratories is one of the largest commercial laboratories in the country. We serve 10 million people a year. We do about 40,000 laboratory testing every single night. We do about 140,000 pickups every month.

We have laboratories in California, Texas, New Jersey, Maryland, and Florida, but we serve all 50 states. So our role in the coronavirus is one of actually doing the specific testing for the virus. As a national laboratory with a couple of other national laboratories, we have the ability to add the infrastructure to actually pick up specimens, bring them to the lab, and report back the results through our IT systems. The reason I say that is most university laboratories and certainly most state laboratories do not have that ability and that kind of logistics network. We actually conserve most of the country as opposed to being in specific

areas of specific locations. I see. So you have a crucial role to play in this. But there's been a lot of talk about these tests. Do we have enough of them? It seems as though we don't. First, tell me, what is the test and how does it work? Great question. So the way this works is the patient has to be identified as someone who should get tested. That's the way it's currently working. So whatever mechanism, there are three actually. One is the state or county may take your intake information and say, yes, you have the symptoms and you should get tested. The second is you may go to your physician and your physician says, yes, you need to get tested and actually would test you.

Not test you, but would actually do the swab. I'll talk about that in a second. And the third is you may be in the hospital and the hospital may send us the test. So what happens is that we have these three different sources that are occurring right now. So the way it works is you need to have a swab, and the swab is what's called a nasopharyngeal swab. And all that means is that you put a Q-tip it's a very small q-tip very thin but it actually goes into your nose to the back of your throat to to uh to actually swab the back of your throat that swab

is then cut off essentially and put into a little vial that has some fluid in it that fluid put a cap on that and then the fluid is sent to the laboratory with a requisition. And then that requisition has, of course, all of your necessary information. We then run the test. I'll talk about that. And we send the result back to the ordering entity. The whole issue around testing is we stood up what was called the CDC test originally. And that was a very slow manual test.

Imagine it is we bring this little tube in. We actually have to pipette off the fluid into a bunch of plates. We then extracted the actual RNA, which is what the virus is made of. And then we have to put that on another platform. It was a very manual process. Yeah, that's a lot of steps. You're like working with a little eyedropper there. Yeah, that's a pipetter.

It is a lot of steps, which is why it was relatively slow. When we brought up the CDC test, you could only run a couple of hundred a day. At the same time, we made the decision to bring it up on what's called automated platform. We have platforms where you take that same little vial, you put it right onto the machine, it analyzes, I'm sorry, it extracts the virus, and then it puts right in for analysis. It's all automated. It's also not only automated, which runs quicker, but, in addition, we can run more samples on the larger automated machines.

That's the way it works. What we've done is we've brought up several different of these analyzers. I tell people, Tom, imagine you're in a car or different kinds of cars. Certain cars get around faster than others and they run on certain different types of gasoline. That's eventually what we have to do. We have to decide which of the recipes that the vendors provide us that each of these different types of machines actually run on. We did that on four other platforms so that we could bring up as much

testing capacity as possible, which is why we've got to 10,000 a day, 15,000 a day soon. And by next week, we should be able to do 20,000 tests a day. That's fantastic because, obviously, we need as much testing capacity as possible. And so thanks for speeding that up. But yeah, I need to ask, why has there been a slow start in getting this process sped up, especially in the earliest days when we were getting our first cases popping up here and there was when, you know, you immediately started hearing the news about we don't have enough tests, etc. Why, in your view, was there that sort of systemic failure to be able to test on a wider scale? Well, I'll just comment on what happened. What happened was that the CDC and the FDA lifted the regulatory restrictions back about two weeks ago,

somewhere around February 28th, when we essentially received, we knew what the sequence was, the RNA sequence, to begin to do the analysis to bring the test up. But they significantly changed the regulatory environment at that time to give us the ability as a commercial laboratory to actually develop the test. Like I said, we first had to go in and take their recipe and figure out how to do it. At the same time, like I said, the platform manufacturers, those people that are building

these machines, had to first figure out how they were going to reconfigure their machines to run for COVID-19 testing. That took them some time to develop what I call their recipe. Once they developed that, then they gave it to us, and then we then still have to validate the test. And that means that our test is a very high-quality test with very high sensitivity and specificity. But we had to make sure that we provided that kind of testing, that kind of ability on each one of these different platforms. So it just took time for us to get up to speed once the restrictions were lifted. So the CDC restrictions played a pretty crucial part in the pipeline issue before two weeks ago.

Yeah, the CDC and the FDA regulatory environment, correct. go? Yeah, the CDC and the FDA regulatory environment, correct. How do you feel about our testing system going forward? Are you concerned? The number of cases that we have are going up dramatically day by day. You're in charge of this national laboratory, are you feeling good about our national ability to maintain our testing capacity? Or are you concerned that we're going to still be falling behind as the pandemic becomes more widespread? So several different pieces of that. So let's look at current capacity. Current capacity is really hard to get wrapped your arms around because I don't know, sitting here today, how many other laboratories have the – I know that there's a couple of national labs, including ourselves. But beyond that, I don't know who else has the platforms in place to bring up what kind of capacity I'm talking about. I can tell you what the current demand is. The demand right now is extraordinary.

The number of phone calls and requests we're getting is almost nonstop from hospitals, cities, states, frontline emergency workers, hospital workers, large employers, everybody has a desire right now to figure out how they're going to get tested. The demand is almost sensational at this point. I don't know what the demand number is, but it's very, very high right now. Our ability to meet that demand is very, very low, unfortunately. That's the dilemma we're in. So I tell people the current people that are getting prioritized, they're number one is people in the hospital. After that,

it's people with symptoms. And then we believe that the next category should be first responders and medical workers who are exposed. So when I mean by first responders, I'm meaning police, fire, EMTs, et cetera. Now, after that, we get through that tranche, and then the question is going to be how often should they be tested, which is another interesting debate. After that, the next tranche, of course, is going to be people themselves that say, listen, I want to get tested. I think I may have it. I think that I was exposed. So sitting here today, I have no idea how many millions of people could need to

be tested. Well, I mean, I know there's probably people sitting at home listening to this thinking, hey, it would just give me peace of mind if I could be tested. I got a tickle in my nose or I shook a lot of hands last Thursday. And, you know, I'd like to know. So I know if I can go visit my grandmother, right, or something else like that, it would it would help me out to know that. And the prospects that it'll be such a long time, if any, before those people are eligible for a test is that's tough's tough to take. That's exactly right. So I think we'll get there at some point. I would tell you that one of the biggest gating issues is the actual swap.

So right now, I'm sure you've heard about all of the drive-thrus. And the reason that the drive-thrus work, so we're the company that partnered with New York State. We partnered with New York City Health and Hospital Corporation. We've partnered with several cities. We have multiple drive-thrus that we're supporting around the country. So the reason that drive-thrus is essentially an elegant solution right now is you drive up, of course, you roll down your window, somebody has protective gear on, they swab you, and then you drive off.

What that does is it protects the hospitals, emergency rooms, urgent cares, physicians' offices, et cetera. So that's the solution now. The problem is that's a lot to do to get a test. Plus, getting the test itself, as I said, is actually no fun. is, as I said, is actually no fun. So the question is going to be, is there a better way for people to actually either test themselves or an easier way to get tested?

Those developments are in process, but I can't tell you when that's going to happen yet. Are those developments that you're working on or is that work that you know of that's being done elsewhere? It's work that I know of that's going to happen yet. Are those developments that you're working on or is that work that you know of that's being done elsewhere? It's work that I know of that's being done elsewhere. Got it. Well, looking at it from your vantage point, and you can feel free not to comment on this if you like, but do you think there's anything about the way the American medical system is organized, about how we, you know, our government agencies have

handled this, or, you know, where power is invested in different parts of the system that led to the slow response that we're all feeling? Do you, is there, you know, as compared to, say, other nations, you know, do you have any feeling about it from your point of view? nations. Do you have any feeling about it from your point of view? No. Sorry. No, that's fine. No, I don't mean to be embarrassing. I actually spent almost no time looking backwards. We are very internally focused. My people, my folks, meaning the people who work here, I'm just the guy that talks about it. The people who work here are honestly working 24-7 to deliver these tests, to develop the technology, to do what needs to be

done. So we are totally internally focused on delivering a product to as many people as possible. So I only look forward. I don't look back. Well, talking about those folks, I'm just curious, how do you keep a workplace like yours where you're, you know, you're dealing with infectious materials and, you know, everyone else is staying home, right? Even my, in television comedy, we're all working from home, right? Now, you folks don't have that luxury, but how do you go about, you know, keeping your workers safe? Well, first off, we run what's called a highly complex lab. We do viral testing. We bring up viral tests for the flu. We do HIV testing. We do high-end genetic testing. As a highly complex lab, it's actually something we do every single day. The people who work in

the lab are used to it. They're used to the procedures. We are moving people around, quite honestly. So we have other workers and other people, you know, who are doing other jobs. So we've reshifted our personnel to make sure that we can accommodate the volumes that are coming in relative to this. So that's the way we're handling it right now. Do you have any thoughts, you know, for folks listening at home who are obviously a little bit nervous about the pandemic, wondering again, should I get tested, are looking for good sources of information? Is there any advice you give to people in those situations about how to think about testing for this disease? Well, first off, I'm a physician. So I strongly believe you need to listen to what people say. If you can try and stay at home and limit your exposure to other people.

I mean, I believe you. You can go out into a park and take a walk. You should do what's necessary to wash your hands, keep your exposure down to a minimum, if not zero, and listen to what people are saying. The more people do that, the quicker this thing is going to get over with. So it's really important that you listen to what people are saying because it really does make a difference. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. I'll let you get back to your very important work. Please get back to it and keep expanding our testing capacity as much as you can. Well, thank you very much. It's really fun and a privilege to do this. So keep up the good work

that you're doing in keeping the American public actually up to speed and informed of what's going on. We're doing our best, and that's really all any of us can do in this situation is do what we can with what we can. So I'll take it. And thanks again to you. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you very much. Thank you again to Dr. John Cohen for coming on the show and to Jason DeLeon for doing his interview as well. That is it for us this week on Factually.

I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineer, Brett Morris, our researcher, Sam Roudman, Andrew WK for our theme song. You can find me at AdamConover.net or on social media at Adam Conover, wherever you like. Until next week, we'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.