The Excerpt podcast: Can we please learn to talk about immigration with generosity?

On a special episode (first released on February 8th, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast:

Mention immigration at any gathering these days and it's likely to generate strong emotions. The images of repeated humanitarian crises at the border tug at the heartstrings of some and enrage others. It can be hard to have a conversation about the issue, as divisive as it is today. Veteran Immigration Reporter Lauren Villagran sits down with veteran broadcaster and author Ray Suarez to have a more nuanced conversation about the issues? Can we apply an historical lens to our identification as a "nation of immigrants" to create the space for a more nuanced conversation. Ray's new book "We Are Home," an oral history of new immigrants, hits bookshelves this April.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Lauren Villagran:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Lauren Villagran, National Reporter for USA Today. Today is Thursday, February 8th, 2024. Mention immigration at any gathering these days, and it's likely to generate strong emotions. The images of repeated humanitarian crises at the border tug at the heartstrings of some and enrage others. It can be hard to even have a conversation about the issue, as divisive as it is. As a longtime immigration journalist, I've been thinking a lot about whether it's possible to find common ground and have more nuanced conversations. Our next guest is a veteran broadcaster and historian who thinks there is. Ray Suarez, thank you for coming on The Excerpt.

Ray Suarez:

Great to be with you, Lauren.

Lauren Villagran:

Ray, when and how did the issue of immigration become the divisive policy wedge that it is today?

Ray Suarez:

Throughout the last two decades, it's been a pretty tough issue, but I'd say that things certainly got worse after the 2008, 2009 recession when Americans started to look at the large number of arrivals, legal and illegal, through the lens of taking care of the home folks first, tending to your own first, a kind of idea of who gets to get in line in what order for the goodies that America doles out.

The United States is not a particularly generous place about the role of the immigrant in American society when things are not going well. For instance, during the 1990s, you hardly heard at all about this issue as people were really pouring into the country and there was a blinking neon sign that said, "Help wanted," through much of the decade. But when things got bad early in the decade with a brief recession, again with a Great Recession, at the end of the decade, we started to look around and say, "Hey, what are these people doing here? Do they have a right to be here? Are they part of us? Will they ever be us?" And that's really that kind of lack of generosity and lack of historical memory that surrounds this issue, only makes things worse.

Lauren Villagran:

You've got a book coming out in a couple of months, an oral history based on interviews you did with, "New Americans." It's called We Are Home. You write about how Americans are questioning the most basic tenets of our nation of immigrants, whether people born in the US should automatically be US citizens or whether we should encourage migration from richer, whiter countries and discourage it from poorer non-white ones. You say the questions are, "At once contemporary and very old." What do you mean by that? You're a historian, Ray, tell us a little bit about the history of this issue?

Ray Suarez:

Well, if you look at the foreign born in the United States in let's say 1850, all 10 countries they came from were sending white immigrants to the United States. If you look at a similar list extrapolated from the 2020 census, nine of the 10 countries are basically sending non-white immigrants to the United States. So we're getting to have this sort of family argument, this rendering of garments and gnashing of teeth all over again as if we've never been here before, but now with the added element of race.

It's never been easy to come here from other places in the world. There's always been the question, "Will these new people ever be like us?" It was asked of the Irish, it was asked of the Italians, the Poles, but this time with the added element of skin color, it's being asked in a newer, more urgent way about people from China, from India, from Latin America, and taking on the uglier notes of the Great Replacement and the anxiety about the 2040s when the descendants of immigrants from Europe will become a statistical minority in the United States. Still the plurality and likely to be so for the rest of the century, but a smaller part of us as a whole.

Lauren Villagran:

I come from a family of Italian immigrants. Many Americans can trace their history and do so and tell themselves stories about their family's immigration history. My own grandmother and her parents came through Ellis Island five months before the US sharply restricted immigration from Southern Europe. For some of the reasons that you just mentioned, there were questions about whether Italians or the Irish could be assimilated.

I also cover immigration as a journalist, and when I hear why migrants come and what they hope for in the US, their stories seem remarkably similar to those of my own family, despite the differences in circumstance and timeframe. The reasons people immigrate today are pretty much the same reasons they were a century ago, at least from the interviews that I've done, economic opportunity, religious freedom, a democratically elected government. You write about new Americans. Can you tell us about one of the new Americans you write about? How is their story the same or different from immigrants who came to the United States before?

Ray Suarez:

For some of them, it's pure opportunity play and they're very upfront about that, but some of them come from really dangerous places. Like Jaime from El Salvador, whose father was an ambulance driver for a local hospital in a small rural area and was identified as being with the rebels, not with the government forces, which was somewhat unjust, but you know the way people gossip in small towns. He left the country because of a real fear that he was going to get killed the way many of his neighbors and even his own father had been killed in the terrible bloodletting.

Once he got himself established legally as a refugee, he sent for his sons and their cousin using a coyote, and this man smuggled these boys up through Mexico and across the border. This fellow cleaned offices for a living, even though he felt he had been a promising student in District of Columbia public schools. And rather than go to college, he joined the Navy. And when you ask him about the way the tone around immigration has changed, he says, "Look, when I needed a refuge, this country took me in and I'll never be ungrateful. This country has given me a great deal," but he's also incredibly angry when he sees the way the real stories of hardship and danger and privation are being dismissed by so many Americans who want to shut the door completely.

One of the biggest lies that Donald Trump ever told was that he only wanted to limit illegal immigration. If you look at the trajectory of the Trump years, that was never really true and the pandemic only gave he and his advisors more range to shut down legal immigration as well. And when you had people fleeing the war in Syria, my God, these were people who were being bombed from airplanes and we were limiting the number of people coming in to a handful of thousands.

I spoke to people who fled the Iranian revolution, people who fled from places in West Africa where there was civil commotion, from places where there was literally social meltdown. There are through lines that run through all their stories. One is gratitude, but one is no one ever tells you how hard it is to be here, how hard it is, how hard you have to work, how hard you have to work to be accepted. They really believe it. This idea that people just come loping over the border with their hands out for stuff, I didn't find that to be the case, Lauren, and I'm sure in a lot of your reporting you don't find that to be true as well.

Lauren Villagran:

Yeah. You are hard-pressed to find somebody who comes here hoping for a handout. I've actually never heard anyone say anything like that, and yet here we are at a moment, Ray, that you've described in which the nation really is questioning what kind of immigration system we want and really, what kind of nation we want to be? These seems to be really fundamental questions. I believe the US Census said that as early as 2024, the US population would've begun shrinking if it weren't for the addition of immigrants to the country. This may seem like such a simple question, but why? Why do you think it's so hard for Americans to talk about immigration today without the proverbial shouting matches?

Ray Suarez:

Because all our anxieties about other topics visit themselves on immigration, whether it's the public schools or whether the roads are crowded or not, or how much work pays, or in an aging country, which ours is, hearing somebody in front of you online at the supermarket have trouble making a transaction because the cashier doesn't speak their language or vice versa. These things have a way of piling up, of hardening in our mind, becoming something less than unrelated threads and more like an overall impression.

Some places have managed it magnificently well. About 40% of the population of New York City is foreign born, and I'm a New Yorker and whenever I'm home, it's really just in many ways the way it's always been, and it's really not a big deal, but there are a lot of places in the country that never had an Ellis Island era, that never had an Ellis Island moment, and they are getting used. They are hiring ESL teachers for the first time in the history of their local school district. They are having to talk on the Town Council about putting signs up in other languages in a way that Chicago had this conversation 120 years ago. These places are having it now. It used to be a Great Lakes and border and coast thing. Now it's an everywhere thing. So America is in some ways having this conversation as if it's never had it before. But look, we're a historical people and we do that a lot.

Lauren Villagran:

What's the one message that you'd like readers of your book to take away from the book?

Ray Suarez:

That we risk turning a generation of people who come here full of fire and ambition and hope and aspiration, into a bitter and alienated people. Don't do that. It makes no sense. Their kids are going to be born and grow up here. Their kids are going to be part of us. Don't exaggerate the language problems. Language acquisition is going on the same way it did 100 years ago. If you tell stories about your grandmother and grandfather learning English and how they always spoke it with an accent, well, the children and grandchildren of today's immigrants are telling those stories too, and those will be their stories in the 2030s, 2040s and 2050s. We can do this. It's really not the big deal we're making it out to be, and a lot of our future affluence is going to depend on getting this right.

Lauren Villagran:

Ray, thank you so much for your time today.

Ray Suarez:

My pleasure. Great to talk to you.

Lauren Villagran:

Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Lauren Villagran. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Excerpt podcast: Talking about immigration with generosity