The Forces Shaping Immigration with Geraldo Cadava

Episode Transcript
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BÁRBARA ANDREA SOSTAITA (00:00):
So what does it mean that immigration processing centers, detention centers, technologies are being weaponized against migrants all over the country? That means the entire country is a border. Rather than disentangle these two, this re-conceptualization of this mobile border actually draws us to further solidarity.

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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:03):
Hey all, thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities Tapes – we are the audio arm of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. Hey we want to hear what you think! You can help shape the future of this very podcast by taking the short listener survey in the show notes. I’m your host Alisa Rosenthal, here to help you find the answers to humanity’s biggest questions by bringing you the best of the best of our live festivals. The 2025 Spring Festival is right around the corner, with tickets on sale now to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes at the Athenaeum, actor Paul Reiser at the Music Box, podcaster Kelsey McKinney and many more. Head to chicagohumanities.org for ticket information and to sign up for our email list.
Today’s program features Geraldo Cadava, Northwestern history professor and contributing writer for The New Yorker, in conversation with UIC professors and immigration experts Dr. Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, Adam Goodman, and Bárbara Andrea Sostaita.

As Chicagoans, some with first hand relationships to immigration and undocumentation, the panel looks at immigration from a variety of angles (00:05):
the theatricality of “the border,” the need to address root causes, and the importance of centering the humanity of migrants in these conversations. Recorded on September 29, 2024, just a month before the 2024 election, they look into the promises and failures of the Obama and Biden administrations, and share anxieties around Trump policies. In the audience Q&A, the panel offers small and empathetic actions everyone can take day-to-day to help our neighbors. For links to their works and many of the resources mentioned, head to the show notes for further reading.
This program was recorded live at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen.
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GERALDO CADAVA (00:09):
Thank you, and thank you to the Chicago Humanities Festival for hosting us and for even thinking that this topic that you know, we we spend most of our days thinking about, and that you, I'm sure, have heard so much about on the news recently for even thinking that this was one of the subjects that you wanted to spend an afternoon thinking about. And thanks to all of you for joining us as well. My name is Geraldo Cadava. This is Bárbara, Adam and Ivón. And yeah, we're going to we're going to have a talk. I mean, the I think the real thing we can do too, first of all, I just decided to like walk over to the UIC Latina and Latino Studies department and bring over everyone I could. And this is that right here. And I would say like, you know, if you are interested in immigration, Latina and Latino Studies UIC these three people here, plus so many others, it's just one of the places you got to look for good information. So, you know, the first thing I wanted to ask, I think, you know, one of the real privileges this afternoon is to have people who are scholars, have spent years researching their subject. And so, you know, you're not going to get a hot take, really. You know, you're not going to hear a pundit here just kind of opining on the news of the day and its relationship with the election. You're going to hear about people who've kind of spent or hear from people who've spent much of their professional lives thinking about this issue. So on that topic, you know, Bárbara, these are all scholars who work on three very different but related topics. Bárbara just had a book published on Friday called Sanctuary Everywhere. And so, you know, Bárbara, maybe we can think of Bárbara's scholarly expertise on this panel as being about sanctuary. Adam wrote a book called The Deportation Machine that is a long history of deportation from the United States. And Ivón is finishing a book on the history of child migration exclusively from Latin America. It's about Mexican and Central American migration, children children who come to the United States. So, you know, different different angles on this topic. And I guess for each of you, the first thing I want to ask is, first of all, can you tell us a little bit about your research and how you think about the relationship of the research you do to kind of public discourse about immigration and the border. I mean, when you watch the news or read magazine or newspaper articles about immigration in the border, does it feel like a totally foreign subject to the one that you've spent your, you know, many years researching? Or do you immediately see the kind of connections between the research you're doing and public discourse?

Thanks, Gerry, and thank you, thanks to each of you for taking the time. It's a Sunday and joining us here for this discussion. I'm also excited to hear from you all about what urgencies and questions you all have around this issue as well. Yeah. So I guess since we are in an election cycle and Gerry, you've already kind of gestured towards elections, I'll frame my project, my current research on Sanctuary around the 2016 election. I had recently started my doctoral program and two months after I start my Ph.D., Donald Trump is elected for the first time, and as grad students, faculty, directly affected staff and undergraduate students, we began organizing around migrant defense. And this was both folks directly affected people with green cards, people maybe on student visas, undocumented folks. Right. All sorts of statuses that muddy this binary that we often have around citizen versus like undocumented migrant. There were all sorts of gray, muddy areas in between. And folks started organizing. And I remember being at one meeting and someone threw out the word sanctuary and they said, Well, what if we mobilize around this word, this tradition and organizing on campus for a sanctuary around the Sanctuary Campus Petition at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I was right? When you start thinking about something, you know, this is everywhere. And I noticed sanctuary restaurants, sanctuary hospitals, sanctuary homes, sanctuary cities. This term there was like a sanctuary astrology app that came out like it became so mobile. And I was really interested in why are folks so drawn to this tradition around sanctuary? And we're in Chicago. And it's really worth noting Chicago's really long history of sanctuary. Not even, many of us, those of you who have been here for a while, may remember Elvira Arellano in the early 2000s who was caught up in a raid while she was working at O'Hare. Post-9/11. Right. The intensification of the US security state post-9/11, and who took refuge in a church in Humboldt Park and became the face of the new Sanctuary Movement. But we can even think further back in the 1980s with Central American solidarity movements during that time. Outside of the US-Mexico border, Chicago was among the most vibrant, energetic, creative spaces for sanctuary organizing with the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America. So Chicago, I want to center our city's really rich history, especially with what we're hearing now about migrants, recently arrived migrants because Chicago has a long history of this radical hospitality. But so I hear "sanctuary" and I travel to the US-Mexico border, to Sonora, and began working with people practicing sanctuary. I make that distinction from practicing sanctuary, instead of a singular place of sanctuary. That's what folks taught me in Arizona and in Nogales, Sonora. That sanctuary was not confined to a singular place of refuge. Rather, it was being practiced by migrants ourselves, not simply North Americans granting sanctuary to people on the move. But it was a woman named Dora who survived a massacre in the Sonoran Desert in the 1980s, where 13 of her 26 companions died while she was crossing the desert. She received sanctuary from North Americans and only months later was housing Central Americans in her house. She wasn't even a U.S. citizen yet, a permanent resident. She didn't even have status and immediately became began offering care to people transiting the desert. Panchito, another one of my collaborators who was known as the walking Ambulance in Nogales carrying medical supplies in his backpack, visiting Central Americans in migrant shelters who could not receive medical care in Mexico because they were not Mexican nationals. From Álvaro, my friend, and an artist who places crosses in the desert to mourn Mark, the migrant dead whose deaths go unnoticed in the Sonoran Desert to a host of other people. My work thinks about sanctuary as this capacious practice that travels with people across deserts and across the interior of the United States in underground spaces, safe houses, shelters, in the most unexpected of places like detention centers. Were women care for each other through touch. So I'm thinking about sanctuary in these very capacious ways and ways that travel and nurture on the move and across borders.

ADAM GOODMAN (00:11):
Thank you all for being here. And thank you, Bárbara, for that wonderful overview of your work. Congratulations on the book. I hope everyone picks up a copy author might be available to sign up later. But yeah, I. I wrote a book that came on in 2020, the previous election cycle. So Gerry asked about kind of things being in the news and whether we see continuities or change and I see a lot of continuity. The book that I published was called The Deportation Machine, which looked at a 140 year history of how the US government had forced, coerced and scared people into leaving the country, through a variety of legal and administrative mechanisms, most of which we knew little about and really went unreported and undocumented purposely so. That wasn't a story that I decided to pick up in the lead up to the 2016 election or a 2020 election. That's something I started during the Obama administration. As many of you may be aware, Obama caught a lot of heat early on in his tenure for really ramping up immigration enforcement. And that was something that I wanted to understand. You know, how could the president, you know, who was preaching hope and change also be apprehending and deporting record numbers of people through this formal deportation mechanism? And that didn't quite make sense to me. And that sent me down a decade long exploration into that into that topic. And what interested me were both the continuities as well as the moments of change. I mean, on the one hand, there's so many startling things that I learned throughout that research process and writing process. I mean, one first and foremost was that during the last century, the United States has deported more people than it's allowed to remain in the country on a permanent basis, which kind of flew in the face of the very idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants. A nation that's historically welcomed immigrants. It kind of called into question when the Trump campaign did start to ramp up the anti-immigrant rhetoric, whether or not that's an aberration from the history of the United States or whether or not that there is a fair amount of continuity, in fact. And I think since you know Biden took took over the White House, there are many questions as well about the Democrats and their immigration politics, with the Harris campaign continuing a through line there, which we can hopefully get into in a little while. But the other thing that I would say is that as much as I found this very overwhelming and more or less depressing history of xenophobia, nativism, and really immigration being used as a political tool for politicians and government agencies, government bureaucracies to achieve their own ends, I found consistent histories of people organizing and fighting back, and that was something that really interested me as well and something that I highlight in the book, and something I'm continuing on with new research. People have always you know fought to defend themselves, their families, their communities in ways that oftentimes transcend citizenship, redefine questions of belonging. And that's incredibly important. You know, and to to piggyback on what Bárbara was just mentioning, so much of that in recent years really was grounded here in Chicago. A lot of the anti-deportation activism started at UIC in our department in Latin American Latino Studies. 2009, there was a case of Rigo Padilla, who was facing deportation for a DUI charge, and that spurred his friends, colleagues, comrades to organize and create what became the Immigrant Youth Justice League, to fight to defend him and to allow him to remain in the country which they were successful in doing. That organization has continued to this day, and now it goes by the name of Organized Communities Against Deportation, OCAD. But a lot of that deportation policy that targeted migrants in our city and people across the country in both urban, suburban and rural areas, it did not go without a response. People have always been organizing and trying to find ways to really insist on their place in the country that they have helped make. And so that's something that I hope that we can talk about as well.

DR. IVÓN PADILLA-RODRÍGUEZ (00:12):
Hi, everybody. I also want to echo my gratitude for all of you being here today. I'm super honored to be on this panel alongside colleagues and friends whose work I admire so much. I have all of their books, all of them with signed copies except for Geraldo's. So now I'm remembering that I need to get your book signed, too. I really appreciate the introduction. I'm a historian of child migration. I mostly focus on the arrival and integration of Mexican and Central American youth across the 20th century. So that's to say that one of the things that I emphasize a lot is that the issue of child migration and the humanitarian concerns that they provoke are not new, that these are questions that have accompanied the arrival of youth for decades. And I specifically focus on the access to the various rites of childhood that these youth have faced across the 20th century. So educational access, their confinement in various different kinds of detention sites, and their labor exploitation, which you'll probably hear me talk about a lot today at this panel. One of the most important lessons that I have learned from studying more than a century's worth of history of child migration to the United States is that restrictive immigration policy carries and produces unique consequences for children. Some of them I think we hear about pretty frequently and make national news and are really centered in national political debates, even local ones, issues around family separation, child detention. But I think that there are also other unique child-centered consequences of restrictive immigration policy that perhaps we hear less about, although I am starting to see somewhat of a change on this in the last year. One of the things that I've been focused on recently in collaboration with practitioners and nonprofits in Chicago is how restrictive immigration policy fuels the child labor epidemic in the United States nationally. This is also a problem locally. I don't know if you're familiar with the 2023 reporting in the New York Times about the migrant child labor force in the United States that various industries across the country rely upon in occupations that are both lawful and unlawful for children to work in, some of them very, very dangerous, dangerous for adults, let alone young people with certain developmental needs, including things like construction, roofing, meatpacking, and poultry processing. There have been very horrific stories that have been reported in the national press about injuries and fatalities of unaccompanied teenagers in these spaces and in the national reporting and in the national rhetoric around this issue of the migrant child labor epidemic, I have noticed that one, the conversation is very ahistorical in that the 2023 New York Times reporting called this problem a, quote, "new economy of exploitation," end quote. But the the research that I have done shows that the United States has been dependent upon migrant child labor exploitation for a very long time, for for decades. I mean, I study migrant child laborers who arrived in the United States fleeing the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the 20th century, all the way up until issues of migrant child labor trafficking that emerged simultaneously with what I think is the moment in which the US-Mexico border became increasingly militarized. So this is one of the issues that I've been working on lately. And to kind of echo some of the really thoughtful comments and work that my colleagues have done, this isn't just a history and a challenge around exploitation. There are certainly lots of different ways in which young people inspire me, both the people that I have met while working in migrant shelters during both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, and the young people whose motivations and migrations I study in the past, that they have done their best to try to take care of themselves, their communities, their families, in spite of really difficult circumstances. So unfortunately, I see a lot of continuity in around the issue of child migration and a lot of like ahistorical conversation in the national sphere.

Thank you all so much for introducing us all to some of the work you do. Have and throughout our conversation, I guess I would, you know, some of the questions I'm going to ask are kind of framed in terms of the present, but to the extent that the research that you've done both over the past decade but about the past several decades is relevant to this topic, I think you should continue to let us know about that. You know, one thing I've always wrestled with is how these two issues of the border and immigration kind of get yoked together in our mind because I do think in some ways we need to separate those two issues for for a couple of reasons, because the border is about so many other things besides immigration, and immigration happens in so many other places besides the border. I mean, we know we hear a lot that, you know, half or so of the undocumented people living in the United States overstayed their visas. They might not have crossed the border, they might have arrived in the United States at JFK or in Miami or something like that. So the border is about much more than immigration. Immigration happens in many places besides the border. But I'm wondering if you guys can talk a little bit about how you think those two subjects have become connected. You know, why do we think of the border and immigration as kind of synonymous with one another and how can we continue to disentangle them? Should I direct my question? Is this an unfair question? I don't know. Maybe they should be yoked together. I don't know.

I think they should.

You think they should?

Yeah.

Okay.

So I actually think there's been a lot of scholarship recently that shows us how borders are mobile. Our colleague, colleagues Jonathan Inda and Julie Dowling call have a great book called Governing Migration Through Crime. And there are they talk about bor - the border the US-Mexico border as a mobile technology. What does that mean? Well, maybe I'll start by talking about the 100 mile border, which encompasses places like New York and Miami that Gerry just pointed us to. Those are actually technically borders because borders are also oceanic. And so the Customs and Border Patrol actually has the authority to patrol to stop a bus or a car and ask for immigration status. They have expanded powers in these 100 mile border zones. Well, what are these right like? These are areas that organizations like the ACLU have called "constitution-free zones," where your constitutional protections are limited and where roving patrols are possible. And I'll highlight an example of this. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, there were actually Customs and Border Patrol agents in cities all over the country policing protests, including in Chicago. So right, like what does it mean when Customs and Border Patrol agents - one more little statistic

I totally agree with -

That was very persuasive.

I don't want to repeat, obviously, too much of what Bárbara said, but it's funny that I also thought that this question was an opportunity to think about the history of this 100 Mile Zone. And you're absolutely right, the fact that in a lot of ways the border is not just at the international boundary that we share with a different nation state. And the fact that this 100 Mile Zone was I mean, Border Patrol officers since their inception have tried to claim broad territorial jurisdiction, but it wasn't until the 40s and 50s that this 100 Mile Zone was codified into law. And I think that this notion that Bárbara so helped us so helpfully helped us understand about how the border is everywhere also helps to explain the way that the harms that child migrants face at the border follow them into the interior of the nation. And the fact that the consequences of border enforcement on the immigration regime can be felt really intimately inside the interior of the nation. And for me, as a scholar and historian of child migration, I often think about the shared kinds of problems that I see in these spaces around child protection, around family unity. I mean, throughout this administration, in the last there have been countless studies about family separation at the border in different expansive ways. At the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration, they extended the Title 42 authority from the Trump administration years. And there is countless research about how the evisceration or the closing off of pathways to asylum and safe and lawful entry at the border forced families to self-separate to send their kids into safety in the United States. And that created a myriad of challenges and harms for these young people. So for them, what happens at the border, the harms that they face there, they then facilitate additional harms inside the interior that create the conditions that make them vulnerable to exploitation. So for me, it's it's sometimes hard to decouple the two as well.

That's great. Adam, did you want to weigh in as well?

I would just briefly say I think the conflation between the border and immigration isn't accidental. I mean, as as you kind of alluded to, Bárbara, it's you know, these are used for strategic political ends by politicians in places like North Carolina and all across the country, in addition to along the US-Mexico border, which I think most of you, I imagine, if someone says the border, that's the border you think of. There's obviously the even larger US-Canada border as well as the oceanic borders. But in part that has to do with the history of policing in this country and the Immigration and Naturalization Service since its inception has really heavily policed the border with Mexico in a way that it hasn't the other borders. In the early decades, there was more of a presence on the Canadian border, and there's more concern about southern and eastern Europeans trying to sneak in 100 years ago to get around the 1924 Immigration Act. And so the centennial of that act, which restricted national origins, immigration from certain places. But in general, just one example of the 20,000 or so Border Patrol officers, I think it's around 18,000 are on the US-Mexico border. 2000 patrol all the other borders. That in and of itself has led to a disproportionate amount of policing of people crossing that border. Today, that is an incredibly diverse group of people from all over the world. But historically, until a couple of decades ago, it was almost all Mexican. And the vast majority were Mexican. And then more and more Central Americans. But between 2008, 2015 of all the apprehensions that the Border Patrol made 94% came from four countries. You probably know what they are. But Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Those four countries. And I think it's important for us as well to think about kind of the repercussions and the consequences of the conflation of borders and immigration, as well as the stereotypes and ideas that the media helps to spread as well. But politicians conscientiously do for their own ends, which we can perhaps talk about in a little bit. And creating an idea of who is a quote unquote "illegal alien" in the language of the law and who is an "undocumented immigrant." Historically, the practices of the immigration bureaucracy tasked with regulating migration across the borders has led, I think, many people to believe that those two are interchangeable. You know, people from Latin America, people from Mexico in particular, kind of feel, you know that that understanding. And that's that's important to understand from a historical perspective as to how it came about so as to deflect the very idea that this has anything to do with something natural or innate to any one group of people.

I, I want to I did want to follow up on a couple of things about like, the theatricality of the border. Maybe we'll get there. I'm also still curious about this "constitution-free zone" idea and this idea that Chicago is a constitution-free zone, one of these and that two-thirds of Americans live in this constitution-free zone. That strikes me as something I don't quite understand. And how can that be? But. But. I guess I'm interested in that. We can continue to talk about that. But in the interest also of kind of moving on through the list of questions, I want to talk about the past four years, kind of I mean, Biden kind of campaigned on this promise of reversing all of the bad things Donald Trump had been doing. And then he wasn't going to build the border wall. He was going to try to reunite families that had been separated. Those sorts of things. And then also, when he came into office, he talked a lot about how his administration was going to address the root causes of immigration. And I don't know about you guys, but to me, I my reaction to that was like, oh good, someone who's going to who understands that, you know, the forces shaping immigration as the panel's called, like extend well beyond the United States to happen in home countries because of political violence, climate change, economic instability, those sorts of things. So the idea of dealing with root causes seemed appealing. But I would like to hear you guys talk about from your perspective, what has been done over the past four years? Have root causes actually been addressed? And, you know, do you think dealing with root causes is a politically astute way of messaging about immigration to the United States. I don't know if I'm asking bad questions or hard questions. I don't know.

I mean, every single question is I mean, throughout our discussion today, I think, we'll, we'll find answers, too. But at the same time, these are very difficult issues. And I think each administration has found that in turn. You know, I'm I appreciate the approach and theory to address root causes. And to understand that migration doesn't start when people show up at the border, wherever that might be or whenever they land in an airport, United States, wherever that might be. I think that's important perspective to have. Certainly much of the work, the incredible reporting by journalists as well as scholarship has, I think, you know, made a compelling case that we really need to understand where people are coming from, where they're passing through, where they're arriving to. And people are moving in on multiple occasions throughout different countries. Countries are countries of transit, they're countries of reception. They're also sending countries. Mexico is a good example. You know, it's changed a lot in the last couple of decades in that regard. And at the same time, when you look at the implementation of any kind of approach to a root cause's solution, it gets pretty complicated immediately. You know, I mean, the United States, the Biden administration has sent a lot of money to Central America, just, you know, to one example. Hasn't solved any of the issues that they hope to. And also, where's that money going? How is it being used? I think that gets very complicated very quickly. And I also think there's a gap that we need to recognize with as much as the popular understanding and the knowledge of the importance of this transnational or international perspective has become commonplace. Look at the way that migration is utilized by politicians. It is entirely domestic. And how are immigrants, how are people who are coming to this country affecting us, our communities, our families, etc.. So there's a gap there. And I think that's important to recognize that kind of aside from whatever the reality might be, the facts might be, just to circle back, cause I really think we've seen this in recent months as in the past, the political utility of migration and of migrants. Who paid the cost of course. That's been, you know, through line in recent years, but also throughout U.S. history.

And people pay the costs of our choices in our actions and involvement in their countries of origin. So one of my difficulties with the root causes strategy is that I finds that it can account for the fact that there's political and economic instability in countries of origin, that we had a direct hand in producing, facilitating, and creating. Especially in Central America, let alone some of the other places that are now, we're now seeing larger numbers of asylum seekers from. So the root strategy, the root, the root causes strategy is largely focused around Central America, but that can account for people who are arriving from Cuba, Haiti, China, etc.. Another one of my difficulties with the strategy, as much as I agree with Adam, that in theory I can appreciate it, is that if you read it, the goals are wide ranging and diverse. They range from things like supporting or rather combating things like food insecurity, the democratic institutions in some of these places to combating gender-based violence and migrant smuggling and trafficking. And one of my difficulties with those two things, which I have done quite a bit of research on when it comes to women, girls, and also child labor trafficking and the smuggling of young people, is that this administration's - and not just the previous administration's actions, with restrictive immigration policy in our outsourcing of border enforcement to other places like the Mexico-Guatemala border, or our agreements with Panama to try to stop or control irregular migration through the Darién Gap exacerbates gender-based violence along the way and makes young people in particular, vulnerable to smuggling and trafficking. Restrictive immigration policies, which I have seen both recently and historically over a long period of time, often get touted and justified by saying they they protect people. That I remember that there was either an interview or or it could have just been a tweet of Stephen Miller's where he said that one of the reasons Title 42 was necessary was that it helped combat child trafficking, but that is not supported by research whatsoever. The reality is that eliminating the ability for children to arrive to the United States safely with their families is actually what what makes them vulnerable to harm to it makes smuggling a necessity and it makes them vulnerable to trafficking. So one of my difficulties with the root causes strategy is that some of the goals that we purport to have we actually make worse.

Yeah, I would actually say this has been really helpful to hear both of you talk about this. I would actually say I don't think the Biden administration addressed root causes. I think they addressed symptoms. I don't think that they've actually done a root causes analysis because it would implicate their administration and their predecessors. And so I actually I work for an organization called Migrant Roots Media and Migrant Roots Media puts out content by directly affected folks, migrants, children of migrants, people struggling to stay in their homelands that addresses root causes. And they actually create, my colleagues, one of whom Linda Brito, is here in Chicago. Another Roxana Bendezú and Alejandra Mejía co-wrote an analysis of Biden's plan to build security and prosperity in Central America. This was released pretty soon after he was elected or came into office, and it was his plan for root to address the root causes of migration. And his very first one was greater private investment. So the very first way he and his collaborators sought to address root causes was greater private investment, less labor protections for workers, making it easier for Americans and foreigners to invest in Central America. Now, this, right like land led to a lot of land grabs. Many journalists in Central America have tied this to the murder of land defenders and Central America, Colombia, these areas are where some of the highest murders of land defenders are, happen in the whole world. Extractive industry. Communal displacement. This built upon CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the 2014 Alliance for Prosperity. And what was Biden's plan to address root causes? To maximize trade and commercial deals. That was their idea of this is how you address root causes. But increasing, so much data and research shows us that these trade free trade agreements and this emphasis on investment actually leads to more displacement and more migration rather than supporting folks. Another one was in this plan for Central America was to maximize security and the rule of law, law and order politics. And we've seen how importing law and order politics from the US like broken windows policing in places like Central America has led to further human rights abuses we can think about El Salvador and [unclear] largest prisons in the hemisphere. So much of his approach is modeled on U.S. history and U.S. carceral logics. And so when you say I'm going to address root causes by maximizing foreign investment, increasing prisons, increasing the law and order policing, rule of law policing that doesn't lead to more security, safety, or prosperity in these areas. Right. And so I think they're not actually doing root cause analysis.

I just want to add, I mean, these are really important points. And I just thought of something as as you all were making them. And, you know, the root cause of strategy, like so many immigration policies, is based on the idea of stopping migration or controlling it at the very least. I mean, the one thing we know throughout history is that people migrate. It's like migration is a constant. Sometimes with authorization, sometimes without authorization. The same people might go back and forth in the same year. Sometimes with a visa, sometimes without a visa or with a Bracero contract. Today is actually the anniversary of when the Bracero Program - the temporary migrant labor program from Mexico from 1940 to 1964, started. September 19th, 1942. And rather than I think for understandable reasons. If you're a politician seeking election or reelection, say that you're going to stop migration. I mean, a policy based on the very idea that people will migrate. How can we facilitate their legal migration through normalized channels that will benefit them and benefit us? That leads us to a very different set of policy options than we have had in the past or that we have today.

I love how you know deep you guys are going on these questions and you know, this is what you get when you have scholars who have studied issues for a decade. I mean, I tend to have maybe it's just a more cynical idea that like Americans, it's not, apart from its aims and whether it's treating causes or symptoms, I kind of think that Americans, it's an unsuccessful political strategy because Americans don't really care what's going on beyond their borders. You know, they only care when it shows up at their at their doorstep, you know? And so, I mean, scholars have written about how, you know, the United States applies pressure on Mexico to kind of do its security work for it by keeping people out of you from the southern border. So anyway, I was thinking just much more kind of simple mindedly about Americans not caring so much about root causes. And that's why it's it's not particularly compelling. But did you want to say something about, no?

I will, though. I will say, like when I was living in Arizona, I was living with a retired nurse who let me use her spare bedroom and charged me very little to live there to do my research. And she would take a lot of interest in my research. Well, where'd you go today, what'd you do today? Oh well, she would come volunteer with me. And she one day was we went to KIno Border Initiative in Nogales, a shelter for migrants. And she came home super-energized. She was a nurse, so she volunteered. She was like, what can I do? Like so many of these people keep telling me they didn't want to come here. What can I do? And I was like, Well, Margaret, let me tell you, like climate crisis is something that is disproportionately affecting Latin America. We in the U.S. are responsible, our military corporations are super responsible for climate crisis. She got solar panels like put in her house, like the next month. She was like, someone's coming in to install solar. So I will say, sometimes people don't care. But there are folks who, when you have, I think we think too little of people's capacity to change. And I think there's so much, I've had so many really encouraging conversations with people who are empathetic and who do care and who see hurt and loss and pain and trauma and say, if I can do something about it, I will. So I think having conversations with folks that are non-judgmental, that are open, that are like really patient, can lead to some of some alternative narratives.

Yeah. Let's find more of those people. So, I wanted to ask you. I mean, we had talked about theatricality, and I think Chicago is one way to begin thinking about that, because we're here in Chicago, we should talk about what's been going on in Chicago the past couple of years. But when you were talking about theatricality, too, I was thinking about, you know, Elon Musk's visit to the border last November and citizen journalism and how, you know, he wanted to have his camera on him where he is wearing his cowboy hat, his aviator sunglasses. That's also theatrical in a way. But, you know, he wanted to deliver this message about how out of control the border is. But in the background, you could see like 100 migrants sitting in the background handcuffed. You know, so is the border really open, if you can also see in the background - and I'm not saying this is the desired outcome, it's just about how he was trying to use the scenery of the border for a particular message when, you know, the 100 or so handcuffed migrants right behind him were undercutting that message. But then there's also, you know, Kamala Harris just visited Douglas, Arizona, on Friday. So there's a question in there about like, what is up with you know, it's almost like a rite of passage these days that a politician has to go be photographed in front of the border. And I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about what that kind of performance means and why they do it. And then the way we get to Chicago is by, I think, talking about the theatricality of Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, you know, who either put migrants on planes to Martha's Vineyard or put them on planes or busses to Chicago. And I mean, I'm still trying to sort through all this in my head, but it is kind of remarkable that these two Republican governors did a lot of damage in Democratic cities, you know, by by the divisions they sowed within within cities like Chicago that are hundreds, thousands of miles from them. You know, it always reminded me of, you know, like border vigilantes like Chris Simcox and the Minutemen in Arizona who would say things like, Oh you know, I don't I don't want to be out here patrolling the border, but the only reason I'm here patrolling the border is that the federal government has failed to do anything about the problem. And I guess they're not really wrong about that. But, you know, it was always an appeal to, like all of you people across the country don't really understand our pain in border cities, so we're going to, like inflict that pain upon you and see how you like it. That's how I was reading some of it. But but all of these are kind of like, theatrical measures about the border. So if you want to approach them in terms of their theatricality, I would love to hear you talk about that. Why is the border kind of the setting for so much drama? And apart from the actual drama of what's going on in the border, how does it get theatricalized? But then also, if you wanted to I was trying to sneak a Chicago angle into it a little bit if you want to take that on. Anyone.

I think that living in the borderlands, doing research there, meeting folks there, there's so much care, there's so much solidarity across borders. The Sonora, Arizona borderlands is indigenous land. And so the Tohono O'odham Nation spans the U.S. and Mexico, so many of their devotional rituals, pilgrimages, salt runs, ancestral rituals transgress borders. There's movement, there's joy, there's performance art. There's a place called Friendship Park where people gather to touch and to commune with their families across borders. At the Tiju - yeah, Tijuana-San Diego border. There's all sorts of movement. There's the movement of javelinas, of jaguars, of mountain lions, of deer. I want to start our conversation or the response to this question just by signaling the vibrancy of life. There's folks who live in Sonora, Arizona, which is where I'm familiar with, but across the 2000 mile-long border who are transfronterizos who live in Mexico but go to school in the US, who cross borders to go shopping. Whenever I was trying to come back from Nogales on the Saturday night it was like always super difficult because people want to go in to party at night or, you know, to visit with family. There's so much kind of like mundane, everyday practices of movement that are invisiblized when we think of the border as this like harsh line in the sand that is unfixed, inflexible and rigid and permanent because there are so many ways that folks kind of get around these controls every day. And I do want to say there are two historians here, so I won't get to that like history of it. But the border for a very long time has been images of masses of migrants who cross in a chaotic and unruly space since like the 1990s with Prop 187 was the reason for like Californians wanting to pass all of these xenophobic laws that like, "We need order. The borderlands is an unruly, chaotic, like space of lawlessness." And I think I wanted to go around the question about theatricality by just pointing you to all of the other forms of life that are flourishing and that kind of defy these ideas of borders that we have.

One of the things that I study is the questions that are prompted by local communities when newcomers arrive, especially when these newcomers are perceived as not white, as foreign. And I also think about in terms of the the bussing episodes, I think about the work of a historian that I really admire, Hidetaka Hirota who talks about the 19th century origins of immigration restriction and the questions in states like New York and Massachusetts that were asked about the care of the arrival of impoverished Irish Catholics who was responsible for their care, should local communities integrate them and treat them compassionately. And in my own work at mid-century, so much of my research on child migration is frankly very depressing. But in in at mid-century, I think that there is like one moment in which I saw the attempt at mobilizing a lot of care for migrant children and families that arrived to agricultural producing rural towns across the United States. And it reminds me that not everybody opposes their arrival. Some people not only see their humanity, but mobilize all kinds of services in the absence of federal government provisioning or care, knowing that undocumented people are ineligible for many federal benefits that would help alleviate their plight. And at mid-century, there were these church women migrant advocates who saw the plight of migrant children and migrant child laborers in the U.S., but also those who had been recently deported and tried to find ways to provide them schooling access, sometimes it was mobile and followed them as they moved, health care assistance, cash assistance. And earlier on the panel, Adam noted that some of these histories and some of these questions prompt us to think about new ways of belonging. And I at this in this moment of mid-century care around newly arrived kids and families to local communities, there were even some advocates who started criticizing legal status requirements because they saw how difficult it was for young people in their families to access the need that they deserved. And somewhat relatedly, there was really excellent reporting in the Block Club Chicago newspaper, I don't know if any of you read it, about how Black and Latinx West Siders and South Siders saw the arrival of asylum seekers as an opportunity to unite around issues that matter to them all issues around labor exploitation, housing instability, food insecurity, and for me, there are also moments in history that have shown me that that certainly there is there are people who care who will mobile try their best, ordinary people to mobilize the services that will help alleviate the plight of young people and their families when they can't get access to work permits because there's a congressionally mandated 180 day wait period for a work permit, that often extends further if you don't have an attorney because of backlogs at USCIS. So I think about that, too, when thinking about the issue in Chicago, that people want to be self-sufficient, people want to work, even older teenagers in safe and dignified work. And yet there are so many obstacles.

We we need you to finish your book, Ivón. We uh, I'm really excited. I really can't wait. You know, I want to pick up on this theme of care, which has come up in both of your comments, but in a slightly different guise. You know, who cares about migration? If we look at the two major parties in this country. And the Republicans under Trump have very much made this their tool to weaponize and mobilize support, and to demonize immigrants and to use them as scapegoats very effectively. In terms of, you know, electoral success in the past and, you know, we'll see moving forward. But they clearly care about this issue and they've been very successful in achieving some of their policy goals because of that. The Democrats not so much. You know, and I think that really does matter. That matters. If there were a party or a politician that cared as much about creating a more humane migration system, and using their capital to do so, which the Biden administration said they were going to do 2020 election. And if there were if there was a chance for the Democrats to stake out some new ground, it was then, kind of following the first Trump administration to really stake out some new ground. And, you know, very quickly they kind of backtracked and pulled away from that, I assume, because of what their pollsters were telling them, what their internal polls were saying, not because it was the right thing to do or they had political convictions about it, but they just really decided to kind of let it be and to ignore it to an extent. And I think that set the stage for then what was to come when the Republican governors started bussing migrants and asylum seekers to Democratic cities like New York, Denver, Chicago. And I also want to say the whole way in which those governors or the Trump administration and the current campaign have framed migration, and as one of the people you quoted Gerry framed migration is as a problem. It doesn't have to be framed that way. I mean, it can be seen as an opportunity as well. And there's so many places, especially across the Rust Belt, that have been, you know, lost population. Their mayors and leaders are actively seeking people to come and settle there to reinvigorate their communities economically, culturally, socially, etc.. Springfield. I mean, the reality on the ground looks very different than what you would hear just based on the talking points. But in part, I really think the Biden administration dropped the ball and really shot themselves in the foot in a way leading up to now of the current election and how that plays out. But I do think that's in part because they just let it be. Like they do not take a proactive role in making this their issue. And I'm not saying it's easy to do so. But that's what would need to happen. Someone would need to make it their issue on the flip side, just as much as the Trump administration has made it, you know, theirs on the other.

Yeah. And I think there's a - there you go - I think there's a history within the Democratic Party of doing that. I mean, I think this is not to say that the Affordable Care Act was not a momentous achievement. But I think, I certainly think of the first two years of Obama's presidency as being really about spending all of his political capital fighting for the Affordable Care Act. And again, that's not an unworthy goal, but I think that made it very difficult to I mean, immigration just keeps getting kicked down the road, basically. Okay. So it is it is Q&A time. I want to, you know, open the floor to have people be able to ask questions. I am going to ask one more, I think, quick question that will give you guys 30 seconds, a minute or two to think of your own questions. But I don't know if this is a fair analogy, but thinking about these kind of big, big problems, sorry, challenges, issues, opportunities. You know, I think about things like climate change and global warming. You know, we we hear about it all the time. We know it's there. But we keep kicking the can down the road and we don't solve it. And I think people's response to that is ranges from like despair or thinking about the major systemic overhauls that need to happen in order to address the challenge. Or they think about, you know, small changes that are politically feasible in order to fix something. You know, and I don't know if immigration is a good analogy here, but, you know, it is similarly one of these big issues that touches on so many aspects of American life and do we need a big overhaul of the system? Or I guess what I'm asking you in the next couple of minutes is just are there kind of small concrete tweaks we could make to the system that would also improve people's lives a lot?

There I'm, I'm not a, you know, a political strategist. And actually, sometimes I get a little bit uncomfortable trying to think about, like, how historians can come up with policy solutions. And yet I collaborate with nonprofit partners and practitioners who are struggling with these very same questions. I think that they have produced a lot of really strong policy recommendations that are small concrete around work permit issues for young people, for thinking about the migrant child labor problem, around opening up access to refugee benefits for people so that they can start to achieve self-sufficiency. Even stuff like eliminating the backlogs and eliminating the the wait time there have on work permits for asylum seekers. I mean, I think that there are an endless amount of ideas about small concrete policy proposals that can help significantly alleviate the kinds of harms that young people and their families face and the consequences that they face because of restrictive immigration policies. I, I increasingly hope that we can lead with these young people's humanity, their families' humanity in trying to find a way forward, because I think that that's really what we all have in common. And these young people and their families, I mean, that's they're human beings. Like that's what we're talking about. And I hope sincerely that the people who have a lot more power than I do, that they can center that in their policy conversations.

I would just briefly say I just reject the framing.

Please.

I mean, it's yes and we need both. I mean, we need small, concrete changes that'll make a difference in the here and now, too, as Ivón says, real people who could benefit from those changes and also not stop there. And, you know, I think that's the the risk is perhaps moving the goalposts and then all of saying - all of a sudden say it's impossible to achieve broader, larger reforms if we make these incremental changes. And at the same time, when there's thousands, hundreds thousand, maybe millions of people that could benefit from those incremental changes can't pass those up either. So. And DACA is a good example of that. I mean, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. So I would say it needs to be both, right?

Yeah, I think my friends, colleagues have answered the question wonderfully. I would also just say, like challenging us like this, like versus like thinking for like to the future. Like this like history is this progressive forward movement. I think the past has a lot of that.

Is that not true?

Unfortunately, it might not be.

Tomorrow's going to be better than today. Tomorrow's going to be better than today!

But I think I think thinking about our past as having resources for us is also super helpful. Why I say that? Because increasingly, over time, migration has become more difficult and Democratic and Republican administrations alike have criminalized migration, restricted it, further militarized borders. So, like, what would it look like to turn back and like to like, think also like about all of the ways that multiple administrations, all administrations are like implicated in the further criminalization and militarization that harms migrants. And like, what would it mean to just turn back to undo?

Thank you so much. And thank you all for giving us a few more minutes of time. We've kind of cut into your Q&A time a little bit.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 (00:46):
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for all that. So my question is, nevermind what could be done or is practical to do or whatever else. What do you all think the United States as a country, should have as a policy and a process, for immigration, for refugees, and for migration. What should it be nevermind what could it be?

This is a historian's favorite question. We love these.

I mean, I guess I would just go back to the point I made earlier about centering the fact that migration will happen. And creating opportunities, legal channels for people to move and to migrate. There needs to be some kind of process, I mean but in terms of political feasibility, I know you said disregard that, but some kind of process in which people can migrate legally that's going to be beneficial to the individuals, the families, the communities, and the country, because that is the constant. I mean, that's what we see. I mean, people have migrated without authorization, lived without legal status in the country, and something needs to be done about that if the problem will ever or the challenge or the opportunity or the issue will ever be resolved it'll be in taking into account the fact that the people currently in the country without legal status need to have some kind of permanent legal status because they're not going anywhere. And also, what happens to people in the future who come. And the last major immigration reform in 1986 that provided some legalization of a few million people, but also ramped up enforcement measures, accounted for the people in the country, but did not account for people that came in the future. So we've seen somewhat of that problem repeating, but I would say centering the fact that people are going to migrate, how can we create the channels for them to do so in a way that makes sense for them and for the nation?

Hi um. So my question is more about local politics, I guess. And the comment about I guess I'm hoping you can comment on the situation in Chicago and, sanctuary city that I feel like this administration, Johnson's administration kind of dropped the ball on a lot of things in a way kind of turned or is I believe is trying to turn people against immigrants in the city. I don't know if it's just me feeling this or just it's really happening as a situation because I feel, you know, there are many too many things that didn't happen that could have helped a lot of people, and the administration is kind of not doing anything to help the situation. So I don't know how, how you are, how you feel about it. And I would like to find out, you know, any comments about the situation in the city.

Everyone's looking at me cause I I mean, I did some reporting and wrote about this a little bit. I mean, I think that, I just think that, I'm condemning it, but I do think that the Republican Party has successfully trolled the Democratic Party right now in recent times. So I think that, you know, if if Mayor Johnson had wanted to I think I think Adam's perfectly right that it is about political will and conviction and belief that you want to do something and kind of being guided by that and following through on that rather than kind of succumbing to political pressure. I mean, I'm I don't I don't believe that this is an easy issue because part of what's going on in Chicago is that a lot of the resentments that Black Chicagoans in particular in Woodlawn, the West Side, Austin, etc. have felt has to do with the ways in which the city has underinvested in those communities, not just now, but over a long period of time. So I think a lot about Woodlawn, where there's a South Shore High school that was part of the wave of high school closures during Rahm Emanuel's mayoral administration, and the local community has been trying to fight for the reopening of that school and control of that neighborhood school because now they have to bus their kids a mile and a half to the nearest high school instead of having their kids be able to go to school in their communities. So, you know, to see the city using that space that they'd fought for for a decade as a migrant shelter, I understand where that feeling slighted, feeling under cared for comes from. And, you know, I think this was, I think that the Republican Party successfully has has been trolling the Democratic Party by kind of sowing those divisions. You see Trump doing it now where he gave a speech here in Chicago at the National - not a speech, but he went to the National Association of Black Journalists Conference, and when immigration came up, he talked about how migrants are taking Black and Hispanic jobs. That's sort of the whole idea it's become a meme about like Black jobs. What's a Black job? I mean, Hispanic job, same thing. But there is a long history within the Republican Party of trying to sow those kinds of divisions. Now, that's what I think's going on. It doesn't really answer your question about that because, of course, like the Republican Party is going to do what the Republican Party is going to do. And Johnson still has a choice of how he's going to respond and to be trolled or not be trolled by the Republican Party or just live by, you know, allowing them to successfully pressure him into what they want him to do. So I think that's where, like having a political conviction and the political will to to to do what you believe to be right is is really important. I gosh, I'm full of self-doubt, even as I say that I don't want to, like, undermine or I don't want to minimize the the real the real criticisms that community members have had about how their communities have long been ignored, and that's why they're feeling the way they feel now. I mean, so many of the people I spoke with during reporting, I mean, they wanted to make it very clear from the very beginning that their beef was not with migrants but was with how the city had treated their community over a long period of time.

Hi. I want to say you're preaching to the choir when you're talking to me, but I have to address a different issue. I never thought I would come out and defend a Trump problem or Republican voters -

Yeah.

But I don't think they see migration as the problem. The first thing my friends will say is, we want them to come here legally. And I think the border is an issue. You can't get people to understand migration if they see what's going on the border. So my question is this

I want to affirm one of the things that you said, which is that, and I really appreciate the question, that asylum is legal. You're absolutely correct about that. No matter where somebody tries to seek it, whether at a port of entry or in between. And my difficulty with those kinds of questions is just that various administrations, including this one, have worked toward eviscerating access to -

Well, currently, the Biden administration has decimated the numbers of folks qualifying for asylum. So there's a cap that he has implemented. It's 2000 people.

There's a number, but it's also there's also vague language about whenever the Border Patrol, like reports, that it feels overwhelmed that they will shut it down.

And these restrictions I have heard from humanitarian activists on the ground mean that let's say I show up and I ask for that constitutional, international law, right, protects that right to asylum. The Border Patrol agent will shut me down without even answer, without even letting me speak. So these restrictions on asylum or these numbers, these caps, well, whenever the Border Patrol, whenever we reach this number, that cap is met and we're turning everyone away. That means that right now, as of now, if your question is like right now, the Biden administration has implemented a numerical cap on how many people every day can seek asylum. What does this mean on a ground, on the ground like for people's lives, they're turned back to Mexico to wait in migrant shelters indefinitely? They are turned back to, they're deported. They are said your case is does not qualify you for asylum. Border Patrol agents are annoyed, bored. So so that currently there is a cap.

I would I would speak to an important point that you bring up, and that is the the the laws regarding migration and asylum are outdated. I mean, you raise an important point. And the last law that really reshaped the migration system in 1965, long time ago, more than 50 years ago, is outdated and implemented an equal kind of in the guise of civil rights in the guise of equality, implemented a visa system that granted every country in the world, whether you're Mexico, Canada or Andorra, Luxembourg, etc. the same number of people could come each year. There are some exceptions to that based on family preference, based on economic and labor needs. But this was a system that did not take into account any historical realities that allowed for 20,000 people each year from all the countries which just does not work. And that has led to a lot of undocumented migration over time. And also the 1980 Refugee Act is the act that governs kind of the current asylum system more than 40 years ago. And so these are outdated systems that need reform that our legislators have not been able to reform. And I think that this does, your larger point that your friends ask about how many people should come, how many should be let in, etc., I think it does go back to this larger failure of the Biden administration right now, at least since it's the most pressing, which kind of have a top down approach to addressing migration and asylum from the federal level to the state to the city level. We shouldn't think just like as Chicago, and what is Chicago doing? What is the Johnson administration doing out there on an island? I mean, a national response that could connect at the federal, state, and local level, a system that could direct people to essentially kind of share, and if you want to frame it this way, the burden, as it's often called, about paying for the social services and providing for the people who have newly arrived, that looks a lot different than today. And so much of, I think why the effect why the bussing was effective is that it placed these really particular cities, Chicago, New York, Denver, among others, in the spotlight. And they disproportionately felt the effect that places along the border had felt. That, in part, is not just because of the governors bussing people, that's because the Biden administration left them out there on their own. And I think that that would actually change the narrative, aside from the politicians who don't want that narrative to change.

Hi. Something that has definitely and is currently shaping immigration in general is the advancements in A.I. and technology at the border and otherwise. There's data that's come out from track that shows that Chicago is monitoring more immigrants than anywhere else in the US through the alternate alternate city detention program. So how do you think the ability and ease to observe and monitor people will affect immigration and especially in a sanctuary city?

Mijente has a really great campaign that I'll just point you to, No Tech For ICE, that is pointing out how sanctuary cities, the protections of sanctuary cities are kind of diminished or rendered less effective when surveillance technologies and companies have access to migrants data. I would point you to Mijente There's No Tech For ICE campaign because I think they're doing really, really great work in addressing these issues.

I was just wondering if you guys have any framing or context I mean, other continents share national borders. This cannot like why is this so seemingly so unresolvable in the United States. Is there lessons that we can learn from Europe or or Africa or elsewhere about how to manage, I love this, that people are going to move. Things move, people move. So how do we maybe learn some of those lessons and apply and facilitate that?

That's a great question and a really important point, and I think it speaks to this, American exceptionalism often when it comes to immigration and the very idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants. I mean, there are many places that are nation of immigrants and places of migration, as I mentioned earlier. I do want to say that I don't think we're alone in the politics that we've discussed today. I mean, so many places throughout the European Union, I mean, Brexit or in Germany right now, kind of the real rise in border policing and kind of policing and cracking down on Turkish migrants and others from the Middle East. I think this is part of a broader international trend that we've seen in recent years, in recent decades, in part because of the prevailing economic policies throughout the world, the stark inequalities and the real need, I mean the real economic need and the need for a more robust social welfare state in many places, certainly in the United States. I think the reason why demonizing migrants and scapegoating migrants resonates is because people have real needs. They need issues addressed and those aren't being addressed. Migration and migrants are not the cause of that problem. But there are real problems and it's easier for a politician to point the finger or to use migrants as a scapegoat than it is to address those issues.

And I will add nation-states as an idea are relatively recent in the history of the world. And you asked if there were other places, other states or other nations or territories that we could think about to guide us in migration. And as Adam was talking, I paused and I thought, Why are we thinking about nation-states as models for thinking about migration when nation states in and of themselves imply sovereignty, state borders, territories that are enclosed and require citizenship? Instead, what if we turn to indigenous communities and indigenous nations as a way to think about movement that celebrates, there's scholars like Leanne Simpson, who has a book called As We Have Always Done. And she thinks about how movement is at the heart of so many indigenous cosmologies and ways of being. Movement as being celebrated that we have communities, but we're engaged with other communities through reciprocal relations, through an ethics of care and reciprocity. And what if, instead of thinking, can we turn to other nation-states? We turn to indigenous communities who have, right, like practiced movement as a way of life and exchange collaboration. Of course there's division and conflict, but borders in and of themselves are an invention of the nation-state. And I wonder if instead of thinking about the nation-state as a model, we think about what is beyond the nation-state and borders as managing and determining belonging and citizenship and inclusion.

Thank you all.
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (01:07):
That was Geraldo Cadava, Dr. Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, Adam Goodman, and Bárbara Andrea Sostaita. For links to their works, as well as many of the resources mentioned, head to the show notes or chicagohumanities.org for further reading.
Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the hardworking staff over at Chicago Humanities who are producing the live events and making them sound great. If you’ve been enjoying our programming, the best way to support the podcast is to leave a rating and review, click subscribe to be notified about new episodes, and scroll through previous episodes for a gem you might’ve missed. We’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode for you. Thanks for listening, and as always, stay human.
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