You're Wrong About - Immigration with Alejandra Oliva
Episode Date: June 12, 2024Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth, came by to catch us up on the last few decades of American immigration policy--and to talk about how the world as we know it is not the world as it must be.Aleja...ndra's website: olivalejandra.comRead Rivermouth, out now in paperback:https://bookshop.org/a/10832/9781662602672Further Reading:Greg Grandin The End of the Myth (2020)Jonathan Blitzer Everyone Who is Gone is Here (2024) David Bacon The Right to Stay Home (2014) Dara Lind, "The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today's immigration problem." Vox, April 2016. Heather Timmons. "No one really knows what ICE is supposed to do. Politicians Love that." Quartz, July 2018. Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks:http://olivalejandra.com/https://bookshop.org/a/10832/9781662602672https://bookshop.org/a/10832/9781250214850https://bookshop.org/p/books/everyone-who-is-gone-is-here-the-united-states-central-america-and-the-lives-in-between-jonathan-blitzerhttps://bookshop.org/a/10832/9780807061213https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11515132/iirira-clinton-immigrationhttps://qz.com/1316098/what-is-ice-supposed-to-do-the-strange-history-of-us-immigration-and-customs-enforcementhttps://www.patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodSupport the Show.
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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 River Mouth, 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
We 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 Britney
Saga, Britney Quartet, Britney Odyssey with Eve Lindley. 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 You're Wrong About, 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 Oliva, author of River Mouth.
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, you know, trying
to fill out asylum applications or figuring out how to cross the border or stuck in detention centers
and kind of trying to figure out what that meant for them. So the book kind of
came out of those experiences which started when I was 24, like pretty fresh
out of college, working a job in 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 but like, sure, why not? And kind of through that,
I got involved in this world of immigration and immigration 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 un-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 realities that immigration policy
sort of thinks that it's responding to.
Right.
And that's like 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.
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 how, 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 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 they have good deals on Tuesdays, so that's when I go.
Just 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 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 like
baseline argument is we should have a completely sealed border with no passage of people, just
capital. But I want to take Nancy to Tijuana for clams. Exactly.
But I want to take Nancy to Tijuana for clams. 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 US today.
And how much of that is Reagan's fault, actually,
I bet?
Lauren Henry So much of it.
Nicole Sade Oh, God.
Lauren Henry We had, as a country, had kind of been involved
in Central America since the 1960s when we decided that communism was a 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 Contras in 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 to unseat an 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 Baby's sister explained in Dirty Dancing, the idea of the domino effect and that if
one country goes communist, all the others will fall and 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
these sort of shadow wars through funding, through weapons,
coming to the U.S. 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 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,
we just, 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 bloc, 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. 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 isn't a word you
need really around any kind of human stuff. It's more of a rat czar type of a word. There's a rat
czar 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 rule.
And even then I don't know that that she's legislating the rats.
She's probably just 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 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 surveillance goes.
And the other part of the stick is increased workplace raids.
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 driver's license 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 sort of first day of job checking 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 where 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 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're 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 numbers stories 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 US 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.
There are three million people that can feel secure
in starting jobs.
There are three million people who can say,
you know what, I can apply for financial aid at college.
That is huge.
I actually, I found an article from the New York Times
from 1989 that describes this 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 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 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 meet 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, who's
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 past didn't work because they were all like, well, remember
the amnesty in the 80s and how that went for us.
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 Zumba
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.
Because 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.
STACEY The interesting thing is that this affected
farmers on both sides of the border. So as big farmers are able or big farm conglomerates
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, like,
we are closing down this plant in Ohio. We are reopening it's this very, very public, very visible, like we are closing
down this plant in Ohio. We are reopening it in like Reynosa 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 stealing
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 we're, I don't know, it feels like the way that we are trained to see companies as
caretakers, it's like we were so perfectly set up for this to be
the next move.
You know, 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.
And it's always the hot wife who gets blamed.
But also fuck those new kids.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also like there are so many towns that exist because a company decided to build a
factory there, right?
Like it's so much a part of our history that we just call
them company towns and it used to be so normal. It isn't anymore. And that again, kind of by the
same token, like 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,
you know, in a town that then perhaps even
sprang up around it where there was nothing before because suddenly you would create a
jobs and created a world and you know, maybe an entire intentional community meant for
these workers, then you can't just leave, you know, and a stockholder would say you
can just leave but yeah, 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 gonna get us anywhere
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
like, abortion spa example is like, what if we lived in a world where corporate responsibility was not just
like an Instagram post on Earth Day from like Shell Corporation being like, we love polar
bears. Yeah. And instead was like a real thing and really involved and invested in making
their 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
was filmed in Mexico, because it was a way to avoid labor unions, I guess no American history as it 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 were 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 ejidos, where
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.
Nicole Zick-Alden Sustainability, obviously, you know, terrible
for optics.
Aeysha Siddarish 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 aji those into these like nearly worthless little parcels of land that were not really enough to grow to sustain yourself or your family
or 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 in Veracruz 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, as it moves
to Mexico, is like, cool, we do not have to listen to environmental regulations anymore.
We can let all of the pig wastewater infiltrate the groundwater.
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 in Oaxaca, with farms in Veracruz.
These mega corporations show up, they don't employ very many people because there's this factory farming that
takes over that doesn't need as much individual labor as human farm does. And they have lax
environmental regulations or they aren't held accountable for breaking them. So people are
forced off their land in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons and they start coming up to the cities 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 immigration law in the last 20 years is us fucking around internationally.
And then when it comes time for us to find out by receiving immigrants who can no longer
live in the places where they would like to stay are like, um,
excuse me, this is not our responsibility, get out of here.
There was 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 that we just kind of are like, well, yeah, that's just how it works.
Of course, we have extortionate 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 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 the currents. It's a struggle to stay engaged. The fact that that
It's a struggle to stay engaged. The fact that that is hard for all of us
because we're living 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,
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 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 resentment and anger and disaffectation, we have the
1996, Clinton's 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, 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.
Mm-hmm.
It's one of the bills that is largely held responsible for increasing mass incarceration
in this country, and this bill did really, really similar things for immigration.
You know, when you look at Clinton, it's really like, it was so great he got caught having
an unethically power differential 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 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 in short makes it harder to get your papers and easier to get
deported. So it closed some
backdoor 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 a disabled spouse, or I have some other thing that would make it 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 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.
LESLIE KENDRICK Which again, is like the law functioning on a human level, which it just seems like we're
so beyond now the idea of and also that, you know, 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 undo 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.
Speaking of 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. 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 like moment of love and excitement and like 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 families 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 one of the unspoken things in white Christian family values is 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 mores. 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.
Like, Jesus.
That also applies retroactively. So if you are an undocumented person and you have committed
one of these crimes a couple years ago, you like went, 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, gee, will occurs. Those must be serious crimes. Are they?
No, there is a whole class of these crimes called crimes of moral turpitude.
I love it when we bust out the Victorian language.
And the way that I would kind of characterize crimes of moral turpitude 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 can 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 been in the US since she was a kid, went through
customs.
The customs agent saw these charges on her record,
I guess, when they scanned her passport or whatever.
They were like, oh, we're going to deport you.
This one was a legal permanent resident.
She had a green card.
My God.
She had kids. It was really,
I think, thanks to 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.
Nicole I mean, I want to take a moment to just imagine like coming back from vacation,
you've got your duty free stuff in your bag, like, you're ready to get home and watch your shows.
And then it's like, step aside, ma' 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 an 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 anything. Like, it's 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 that 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, 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 deeply, deeply,
deeply poisoned and fucked at 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 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, which is a whole other conversation. And then of course, we get into it's not unrelated.
Yeah, not unrelated. And, and, you know, and that the first mandate of the police historically
in America has been to protect property and to return enslaved 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 we'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 piece,
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 have a great need
for action in your life and you're making the defenseless people whose carry you're 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.
Yeah.
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 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 be and enact 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 Ira Ira.
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 generalized xenophobia, unfortunately, four of the 9-11 hijackers
were in the United States on expired visas. And so that was kind of one of the impetuses,
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 just 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, are 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 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, were 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.
They're not really doing anything unique.
But instead, we were like, oh, we'll just give them more money
and 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's so thrilled with 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, you know, sort of in the immigration process.
They also do workplace raids. They also have been known to like 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 run this organization has tried to give them different kinds of parameters to operate under. 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.
Oh, God.
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's 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.
As 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 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 at this point they run on clicks.
Like non-fiction 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 prison contractors, right?
The question of like, who is providing the meals
for the people in the prisons and jails where you live?
It's probably somebody who put in a very low bid
and was therefore 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, that's not gonna 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
the employees suddenly realized that they were contributing to an ICE contract. They
were like a company that provided furniture for immigration detentions or ICE offices
or something. And the employees held a walkout because they were so mad about this.
The very same employees who were complacent
about the whole child trafficking thing.
Joke, for those of you who don't remember 2020,
there was 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, 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 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. 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 when 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 got 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. You 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, 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 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,
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.
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 workaround. 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 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 residency 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 for
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 700 and 800,000 individuals, excludes
them from things like welfare, financial aid for college, does not provide the full rights
and responsibilities of citizenship.
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 immigrants, even at their most basic level, are 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 signed the executive order that passed DACA, but so much of 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 the 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, 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. And just because they had a win, you know,
12 years ago now, 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,
maybe the most 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 bad or 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
as 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 have enshrined are the best
of ourselves. Sometimes they are, like there's really good laws, there's some cool amendments
that I dig. But a lot of it is just kind of what we could get away with at the time, or at its most kind of in the middle, what was necessary.
But the law is not...
LS It's not the same as justice.
LS 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 got to change it. We got 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. Berks 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 bussed 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, you know, 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 a better country.
They 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 preorder 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 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 Alejandro Oliva for being our guest for writing River Mouth out now on
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 for producing. We'll see you in two weeks. you