Antiracism & Immigration: People First

Hello everyone, Tim Harford here, the host of Cautionary Tales. We are the podcast that tells you the stories of disasters from the past and what we can learn from them today, and we've just launched a brand new Cautionary Club on Patreon. We'll be dropping an extra Cautionary Tales episode each month, a bonus interview and a newsletter chock full of behind-the-scenes tidbits and anything else we dug up in our research. To find out more, go to patreon.com/cautionaryclub. If I could do one thing right now, I think that on a large scale it would be to change how Americans think about immigrants, because for forever, not just for the last couple of years or the last decade, we've had this dual relationship with immigrants of both celebrating the immigrant story, but also being antagonistic toward immigrants. Let's start with a trivia question. Which famous American leader described immigrants in the following way? Those who come are generally of the most ignorant, stupid sort of their own nation. No, it was not Donald Trump. I'm talking about another guy who called immigrants ignorant and stupid. The answer is Benjamin Franklin, who protested a wave of German immigration to Pennsylvania back in 1753. Racist and xenophobic ideas in the United States are actually older than the nation itself, and those ideas have always justified America's immigration policies. I'm Ibram X. Kendi, and this is Be Anti-Racist. After winning the American Revolution, Americans drafted a constitution that empowered Congress to establish rules for naturalization, the process by which immigrants can become citizens. The members of the First Congress acted quickly, and in March of 1790 passed the Naturalization Act. Under this law, only a free white person who resided in the country for at least two years and could prove they were a person of good character could become a citizen. In other words, the first immigration law in the United States declared that only free white people, specifically wealthy Western Europeans, were welcome to the rights and liberties of American citizenship. American laws grew even more restrictive as the United States grew, extending residency requirements and adding exclusionary racial quotas. Meanwhile, anti-immigration movements shifted their targets based on the economic and political circumstances of the moment. Germans in the 1750s, Irish Catholics in the 1840s, Chinese in the 1870s, European Jews in the 1880s, Italians in the 1900s, Russians in the 1910s, Mexicans in the 1930s. After World War II, more and more immigrants from Europe melted into the pot of whiteness and newly opened suburbs. Meanwhile, Latinx-Black and Asian immigrants continued to endure attacks shaped by their race, place of origin, disability status, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. The anti-immigrant policies and ideas resembled the policies and ideas facing internal migrants and their descendants in the U.S. Between 1915 and 1970, more than 6 million Black Americans fled the Jim Crow South for the North, Midwest, and West. I am the grandchild of people who migrated from rural Georgia to New York City in the late 1940s. My grandfather, a veteran of World War II, worked as a presser at a dry cleaning service. My grandmother, his wife, was an elevator operator. My grandparents, like so many other people who left their counties and countries in hopes of a better future on American soil, were called invaders, as immigrants from the global South are called today. My grandparents were seen as a drain rather than the well of their new communities, like countless immigrant families over the years. Few groups of immigrants in American history from Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa were the right immigrants, or came the right way. Welcome to Be Anti-Racist, an action podcast where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism, how to save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the destructiveness of racist power and policy, how to free humanity through the unity of anti-racist ideas and the constructiveness of anti-racist power and policy. On Be Anti-Racist, we discuss how to make the impossible possible and how to bring into being what modern humans have never known, a just and equitable world. You ready? Let's roll. Hello everyone, Tim Harford here, the host of Cautionary Tales. We are the podcast that tells you the stories of disasters from the past and what we can learn from them today, and we've just launched a brand new Cautionary Club on Patreon. We'll be dropping an extra Cautionary Tales episode each month, a bonus interview, and a newsletter, chock full of behind the scenes tidbits and anything else we dug up in our research. To find out more, go to Patreon.com/CautionaryClub. Julian Castro is the grandson of immigrants from Mexico. He grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where he eventually served three terms as mayor. In 2014, President Barack Obama named him Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a post he held until the end of the administration. In 2018, he published a memoir entitled "An Unlikely Journey, Waking Up from My American Dream." And in 2020, Castro ran for president on a platform that proposed radically reforming the immigration system into a people-first system. Castro now serves on the board of directors for the Center for American Progress and is a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. I recently spoke with Julian Castro about the unbreakable bond between anti-racism and immigrant rights in America. We discussed the common ground on which anti-racist and pro-immigrant battles must be fought. Secretary Castro, I'm so happy we were able to find some time to chat. I can tell you I've long admired you and your work. Thank you so much for having me and I've admired your work for a long time and you're teaching all of us a lot. So thank you for the invitation to join you. I've learned so much from you, particularly about how to be anti-racist, especially in this moment, in this time. I've certainly learned about how to be bold and brave, how to think through with complexity, one of the most difficult and complex issues of our time, which is immigration. This is a pressing issue. This is an issue that's causing people right now in this moment as we speak to sit and stand and move in misery. What are the biggest pain points right now? I mean, if you could change, make drastic or even small changes right now to alleviate pain and suffering, what would it be? If I could do one thing right now, I think that on a large scale, it would be to change how Americans think about immigrants because for forever, not just for the last couple of years or the last decade, we've had this dual relationship with immigrants of both celebrating the immigrant story, but also being antagonistic toward immigrants. We all know the history of it, you know, whether you're talking about the Chinese Exclusion Act or you're talking about Operation Wetback, which sent Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to Mexico. Any number of ways that our country has seen immigrants as other has treated them that way. And right now, after the Trump administration, there's been a particular cruelty, a return to a cruelty that I wish we could get out of and alleviate immediately. And in many ways, we're on that path. Joe Biden is absolutely not Donald Trump, doesn't have the dark heart that Donald Trump had, has made improvements in the treatment, especially of children. But in some ways, there's a danger of taking some of Trump's cruel policies and making them the default. Title 42, for instance, which was put in place during the coronavirus pandemic to summarily keep out people who are trying to seek asylum. They don't even get the opportunity to make the claim. That's still in place for a large number of people who are trying to claim asylum. I would change the system that we've had of keeping families and young people in essentially what look like metal pens or cages and even these HHS-sponsored facilities that are better than that, but still aren't fit for children. And I would get these kids into loving homes, loving families. We need to make so many changes. That's not even addressing the 10 or 11 million people who are here who are undocumented already, who are living in this limbo, but during the pandemic have stepped up in a big way as essential workers and in so many different ways to support the ability of everybody else to go about their lives and be healthy and be safe. One of the most troubling aspects of our discourse around immigrants is that so many Americans today's great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers or great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandmothers were demonized in similar ways that their descendants are demonizing immigrants today. And people don't even realize that a century ago there were efforts to not just exclude people from Latin America, but also people from Italy, from Russia, Poland, people from Spain, from Asia, people from Africa, everyone who was not "Anglo-Saxon" or as they said in the 1920s Nordics, that all of these different groups were demonized. And indeed by 1924, an extremely restrictive immigration act was passed. I've always wondered how you thought about that just glaring historical contradiction. It's almost like everybody has had their turn, right? I mean, there's quotes of Benjamin Franklin about the Germans. There was a time when Germans and all the other groups that you mentioned were looked upon as a scourge on this American society and a danger to it. And they were changing it in bad ways. And you just write that story one generation after the next and one nationality after the next. And somebody's just like, "Oh, that's so infuriating." And you want to say, "Hey, don't you understand that your own family was treated like that at one time?" And you would think that in our country that that would give people a greater understanding, at least provide an opening for the conversation and a point of reflection. And for some people it does, but I find for a lot of folks, they just see that as, you know, either they don't know the history or they don't care about the history or they've reconciled with the history and they think that today's immigrants are different. I've actually heard that argument that today's immigrants are qualitatively different, that they're lazier, that they end up on government assistance more, that they don't want to culturally assimilate the same way that past generations from these other European countries did. And I think people are wrong on all of those counts. You have people today that are hardworking that have the same values. You know, they're prideful about their culture like everybody is, but they also are coming here for a reason to the United States. They want to be a part of it. They see it as the land of opportunity like generations past did. They want to make something for themselves, for their family, but also contribute to the country. They love it. And that's the great irony. If you lined up everybody in this country and you could measure what's in the heart of them when it comes to their patriotism and their love of this country, some of the highest scores there would go to many of the very people who are demonized, who are otherized and who often aren't given their shot at opportunity because of where they came from, because of the color of their skin, because of their accent, because of their last name, because they don't speak English as their first language or speak it much at all. That really is ironic and it's sad about our country. It is. And it wasn't just people from Poland and Italy and Jewish people from Europe who are coming over and being demonized and even called invaders. Black people who were migrating up from Mississippi to Chicago or from Georgia to Detroit or for the Carolinas to New York City or Boston, they were called invaders. And so when I'm specifically talking to Black Americans who to share some of these dominant ideas about Latinx immigrants taking jobs, I talk about this is the same rhetoric that was deployed and utilized and it was rampant in the American discourse. That's true. And you point out it's been used in different ways against different folks and often people of color. And very recently, that division was stoked by Donald Trump. I mean, he was going out and articulating directly, if I remember right, to the Black community that these immigrants are taking your jobs. There's always been an undercurrent of that, but he was saying the quiet part out loud. The way I think about this is that these immigrants include Black immigrants. We often don't talk about that, but more than 20% of those who identify, for instance, as Latinx are Afro Latinx. Some of them have been in the United States for a long time. Some of them are more recent immigrants, but Black immigrants have been invisible in the conversation, but an important part of the immigrant story in recent times. The other way I think about it is just that there's so much more that people have in common than what divides them. When you're talking about the common experience, they're having this country of often working low wage jobs, of living in many of the same neighborhoods, of experiencing not exactly the same, I would say, but still experiencing racism and bigotry, bias. And so there's a lot more, I think, that should unite the immigrant community with the Black community, and it's shameful that there are those who try and divide them. I'm Julian Castro, and you're listening to Be Anti-Racist with Abram X. Kendi. You know, sociologists have been documenting immigration for a long time, and one of the things that sociologists are talking about, and I think this is extremely difficult for many Americans to hear in particular, is what they call immigrant advantage. So they assess immigrants in terms of resiliency, in terms of qualities, that we all as human beings share, and they find that immigrants are uniquely resourceful, uniquely resilient across race, right, across ethnicity, across nationality. And so when we as Americans say immigrants make the nation better, you can actually make an empirical argument for that. How do we convey that to the larger American public? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the biggest crimes when it comes to this whole narrative, that we got convinced somewhere along the way that these folks are lazy, that they're moochers, that they're taking from the country, when all of the evidence and our everyday experiences, walking through many neighborhoods in this country, you see the entrepreneurialism, you see the hard work, you see the obstacles that immigrants overcome, but that story isn't told, not told enough. And I think that changing that narrative begins with telling that story in a very intentional way. And I mean, from the beginning, I mean, right now, when kids go through school, they don't learn that story nearly enough. And that needs to change in our education system. Lately, I've been paying more and more attention to what's happening in this country with what our kids learn in their textbooks, because too often those decisions are made by political bodies in states. And these state boards of education have often been taken over by right wing conservatives, including here in Texas, that don't want those stories to be told. And if from the very beginning, our kids buy into the narrative, that just because somebody is an immigrant working in the fields, that they have less value, that they have somehow failed and they're not contributing as much to the country as other people, then we failed. And we need to change that. I was just thinking about this as you were speaking that for many white Americans who immigrated to this country and became these Titans or great leaders, what's typically portrayed is what allowed them to become successful was their whiteness, as opposed to them being an immigrant. That's a great point, right? Obviously, I am not white. And so I can't put myself directly into the mind of somebody who is, but it does seem like for many white Americans, they don't think of themselves anymore as immigrants. Some of them do, you know, many of them do, and they're certainly still in our country. These pockets, these enclaves of beautiful immigrant communities, I think of going to school up around Boston and the pride that you feel over there, the strong Irish American presence and history and culture. So it exists, right? But I think writ large, that connection isn't there in the same way for a lot of people. And if more thought of themselves directly as the grandson or the granddaughter of an immigrant or the son or the daughter of an immigrant, I do think that perhaps we could find more common ground and immigrants would be celebrated more instead of otherized. And hopefully, going forward, we would avoid what we saw over the last four years, and we would improve what we've seen vis-a-vis immigrants for the last few generations. One of the reasons why I admire you and your work is because I think for a long time in this nation's history, we have conflated immigrant and criminal, but obviously the Trump administration and Trump in particular took that conflation to another level by calling people, animals and rapists and criminals. And you, it seems like more than anyone else, directly challenged that conflation, not only in a narrative form, but even in a policy form. Why has that been so important to you? Well, I mean, it made me mad. It made me mad to listen to what he was saying, how he was demonizing immigrants, the language he was using. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, a community with a lot of immigrants, recent immigrants, and then also folks like me who are second generation, even others, third, fourth, fifth generation. I knew that what he was selling wasn't the truth. I also knew that in a political campaign, you have to translate policy into a narrative. And what I wanted to do was to present a different narrative about immigrants in many ways, the classic narrative of the hardworking immigrant who is here with a dream, who wants to do well for themselves and for their family, but try and update that too to say, look, these folks that are coming from Honduras or El Salvador or wherever they're coming from, they're no different than immigrants who were coming a century ago. So we should give them the opportunity to make a life in the United States the way that so many people had the opportunity to before. In the campaign, I also had to make a decision about whether I would be bold on immigration, knowing that in doing that, a lot of people would write me off as being the brown guy doing brown things. Well, you're just talking about that because you're the Latino candidate in the race. And that that would be an easy way for people to dismiss my candidacy or at least to give it short shrift. And honestly, I put thought into that because when you run for office, you're not just running to run, you're trying to run to win. But I decided that in a time when a lot of people, a lot of politicians were being what I thought was fairly timid and scared of the issue of immigration, that somebody needed to be as bold to actually tell a true narrative and push in the other direction in a sound reasonable way in order to combat what Donald Trump was doing. And I also felt frankly like I would not sell out. I would not let down the community and the communities that I know and that I respect and that had given me lift in life. I wouldn't use my shot as a presidential candidate to sell them out by going quiet on that issue at the very time when a bigoted president was making this his number one issue. What was surprising to me but then again was not surprising to me is black men and Latino men voted for Trump the second time. What do you make of that? Because obviously Democrats are going to have to figure out why that's happening. And the reason why I'm asking is because first is that black men, black people are extremely diverse ideologically just as Hispanic and Latino and Latinx people are. But then also the narrative of change and loss that Donald Trump and others like him are pushing that it seems men of color are being attracted to. At least that's what I'm seeing is happening in the black community that black men are feeling as if they're aggrieved. And I'm wondering if you think it's similarly happening among Latino men. Yeah, I do. I mean, I think there are a lot of things going on there. First, Donald Trump portrayed himself as the ultimate outsider that was throwing a finger at the system. Just speaking for what I know in the Latino community, you have a lot of people that are on the outside. A lot of people that have resentment, you know, at different points in my life, I felt that because you feel like you work hard and you're not getting the same opportunity. A lot of people living in poverty, they see themselves as not part of the establishment. And so that part of it may have connected. The other part that I think connected was a very clear narrative. People knew what he stood for. And I think anytime you provide that kind of clarity, then you're going to get some people that may have been sitting on the sidelines to go in your direction. And then also, I think at a mechanical level, his campaign, especially through social media, including through disinformation, was very good at targeting specific communities, whether in South Florida, or South Texas, or other places, with messages that they knew would resonate in South Florida, that message about socialism in South Texas, a message about guns, a message about oil and gas, whatever it was. And so you add all of that up. And I think that's the movement you see. I will say, when it comes to the Latino/Latina community, the strong majority of people are still voting for the Democrat, and they voted for Joe Biden. But it is a point of concern. The Democrats cannot take the Latinx community for granted. I think that you had a very clear message about how immigration can be changed. And you've talked about people-first immigration. What is that? It's a concern with the well-being of immigrants as people, seeing them first and foremost as people that share the same hopes and dreams and aspirations as all of us. Obviously, like everybody I know, look, the country has borders. Every country is going to enforce their borders. We're going to have immigration laws that we do enforce. But as we talked about, too often times, our policies get over-influenced by this demonization, this otherization. I have often said that if we're not careful in the United States that in 20 or 30 years, we're going to be begging people to immigrate to this country. Wow. Like other countries are? Yeah. I mean, you have that challenge in other countries. And that's not a putdown of our country. I mean, we love our country, and I believe this is a wonderful nation in many ways. But we also have to be realistic when you look into the future, and you set policy for the future, and a sound immigration policy that allows enough immigrants to come and work their magic on the country like they always have. That's in the best interest of all of us. I'm always trying to figure out a way to understand the perspectives and the experiences of different peoples. And one of the ways in which I try to do that is pathways through my own experience. So one of the ways I think about undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship, you tell me whether this is a wrong way of thinking about it, particularly for black Americans. There was a time 200 years ago in this country where you had people who fled violence on plantations and were living where I live now in Boston. But because they had fled violence, they had to almost live in the shadows. And it seems to me that Americans today can understand how precarious the lives of those black folks who fled violence, who fled slavery, to freedom were, but they can't seem to see how precarious the lives of undocumented people are today. Do you think that's an apt analogy? Certainly, I think that, of course, slavery is something different from what people are facing in these Northern Triangle countries, but that fleeing from danger and that common aspiration to find safety and to find opportunity in a better life and to be able to go to sleep at night knowing that your children are okay and that they're going to have a future better than they would have if you stayed where you were. I think that's a common experience of yesterday and today and in those different contexts too. I think you're right that I don't think most Americans think of it that way. You know, in this country, frankly, as you've pointed out and know better than I do, I mean, we have people rewriting that narrative about slavery that don't want to acknowledge what happened, right? And we've had that since it happened. And if we're not even willing to acknowledge what we know happened in our own country, what are we going to do when we don't have that common experience or know, have insight into these other countries that people are coming from? It becomes even easier to dismiss that as, hey, look, you know, I don't know what's going on over there, but they should make it in their own country. One of the things I put out there, which oddly enough, actually, I think resonated because Americans would rather that it be handled over there was this 21st century Marshall plan for Central America, working with those countries, investing in those countries in the right way so that people could find safety and opportunity at home instead of having to make the dangerous journey to the United States. Wait, so you're telling me that the people who rail against the quote "invasion" aren't also seeking to push a Marshall plan? It just doesn't sound right to you. Well, no, I think people are more willing to support that. Some of them don't want to support any of it, right? No, that's what I'm saying. You have some folk who wouldn't even support that plan. Yeah, I mean, at the same time, they rail against people coming. That's right. I think they just, the way they want to solve the problem is just keep them out. And as some said, literally, shoot people at the border. And that sounds like what are you talking about? But remember, Trump was talking in those terms. He would give life to that. He unleashed those kinds of feelings and ideas and gave them sustenance. But I think that when you make policy, you have to take into account not just the people that agree with you, but also the people that disagree with you. And when it came to that 21st century Marshall plan for Central America, I mean, what I wanted to see was these human beings able to live their lives in safety and with opportunity and be okay. And for others, that was, I just don't want them on my doorstep. And I want them at the border of the United States and coming to the United States. But look, we can find common ground there in the sense that I want to make it possible for them to be able to be happy and fulfilled where they are as well, maybe for a different reason. But that part of it was interesting to me during the campaign. What it seems like to me is you're advocating for the United States to ensure that people in the Northern Triangle as well as across the world are treated humanely in their own countries. And then when they come, and if they come to United States, they're treating humanely here too. That's true. Why is that such a radical idea? Yeah, no, I mean, it's not radical. And the United States, that's what we pride ourselves on or have for a long time, right? I mean, we were the champions of human rights on the one hand, but then on the other hand, we have over the years failed in so many ways. And it's been this process of trying to get better and better. And we have made a lot of progress for sure. But sometimes you still have that duality there. Exactly. Well, Secretary Castro, it was truly an honor to talk to you and to learn from you. And indeed, for this community to hear just how critically important it is for us to have a people first immigration system, whereby people are not considered the problem, whereby we're thinking about ways to change policies and practices to treat people humanely, no matter where they come from around the world. And I just want to thank you for your insight and advocacy and your voice on this extremely American of all issues. Dr. Kennedy, thank you so much for having me and thank you for teaching all of us. The contribution that you've made has been enormous. And I'm very grateful for it. Good to talk to you. Of course. Many of us have heard the infamous lines of the sonnet on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these the homeless tempest tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. Edouard de Laboulay, a staunch abolitionist, was the person who first proposed that France give a monument to the United States to celebrate the two countries shared commitment to democracy. Laboulay wanted the statue to commemorate the 13th Amendment's emancipation of enslaved people after the Civil War. French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartoli initially modeled a Lady Liberty who grasped broken shackles in her left hand. She was supposed to represent the abolition of slavery. However, the Northerners and Southerners tasked with raising funds for the Statue's pedestal convinced the artist to downplay the celebration of black freedom and instead emphasize the friendship between the United States and France. Bartoli obliged and placed the shackles in pieces at Lady Liberty's feet, largely hidden under her robe. The shackles around immigrants are no longer hidden under the robe of the Statue of Liberty. Immigrants are being openly shackled. Americans are learning the ways in which their own descendants were shackled when they immigrated to the United States. Immigrants from the Global South have endured this shackling for decades. Based on his own family's experiences as Mexican Americans, Julián Castro proposed a People First immigration system that focuses on building communities and liberty instead of shackles and walls. We must continue to fight for freedom until everyone can breathe free and cross the threshold of the Golden Door as promised by Lady Liberty. We must fight for an anti-racist immigration system. We must be anti-racist. Be anti-racist is a production of pushing industries in our heart media. It is written and hosted by Dr. Ibra Max Kendi and produced by Alexandra Gerriton with associate producer Brittany Brown. Our engineer is Ventolidae, our editor is Julia Barton, and our showrunner is Sasha Mathias. Our executive producers are Lita Molaad and Mia Lobel. Many thanks to Tammy Nguyen and Dr. Heather Sanford at the Center for Anti-Racist Research at Boston University for all of their help. At Pushkin, thanks to Heather Fane, Carly McLeory, John Snars, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find Dr. Kendi on Twitter @DRIbram and on Instagram @ibramxk. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms @PushkinPods. You can sign up for our newsletter @Pushkin.fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you like to listen. Hello everyone, Tim Halford here, the host of Cautionery Tales. We are the podcast that tells you the stories of disasters from the past and what we can learn from them today, and we've just launched a brand new Cautionery Club on Patreon. We'll be dropping an extra Cautionery Tales episode each month, a bonus interview, and a newsletter, chock full of behind-the-scenes tidbits and anything else we dug up in our research. To find out more, go to patreon.com/cautioneryclub.