Immigration

Crypto Dystopia or Popular Democracy w/ Hilary Goodfriend & Jorge Cuéllar

23 Nov 2024
Featuring Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar in the final installment of a three-part series on Central America. This episode picks up with Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crypto enthusiasm in El Salvador; Daniel Ortega’s perversion of Sandinismo’s...

Neoliberalism, Violence, Migration w/ Hilary Goodfriend & Jorge Cuéllar

18 Nov 2024
Featuring Hilary Goodfriend & Jorge Cuéllar in the second of a three (not two!) part series on the history and present of Central America. This interview picks up our discussion of revolutionary armed struggles against...

Empire in the Philippines with Rick Baldoz

24 Apr 2021
US empire in the Philippines, Filipino migration, labor organizing in the fields, and the nativist campaign for Asian exclusion. Dan interviews Rick Baldoz on his remarkable book The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in...

Unforgetting with Roberto Lovato

16 Oct 2020
Roberto Lovato on Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. Growing up Salvadoran-American in The Mission, fighting with the FMLN in El Salvador, making sense of MS-13, weaving back together...

Transcript: Unforgetting with Roberto Lovato

16 Oct 2020
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Border Patrol with Kelly Lytle Hernández

08 Aug 2020
Dan interviews Kelly Lytle Hernández on MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol.

Nativist Carceral State: Aziz Rana interviews Dan Denvir

04 Jul 2020
Aziz Rana interviews Dan Denvir on how policing and mass incarceration became core features of the war on immigrants and on his book All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We...

Daniel Denvir interviewed by Astra Taylor

23 Jan 2020
Daniel Denvir shamelessly interviewed on his own podcast by Astra Taylor about All-American Nativism. Upcoming events: 1/24 All-American Nativism Brooklyn book launch with Aziz Rana facebook.com/events/606979320053356/ 1/27 Race for Profit: A Conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor...

From the archives: Aziz Rana on Two Faces of American Freedom

26 Jul 2019
Dan is taking his first week off ever in Dig history to finish his book. Here’s a classic from deep in the archives: our first interview with Aziz Rana, on his book The Two Faces...

End of the Myth with Greg Grandin

20 Mar 2019
American liberty has since its foundation relied upon the dispossession of indigenous people and Mexicans, upon African enslavement and, ultimately, upon the constant fleeing outward that created an empire that none dare call by its...

Rethinking Migration with Aziz Rana

09 Jan 2019
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The Left Knows No Borders with Richard Seymour

28 Nov 2018
How unlucky it was for Angela Nagle to make her so-called left case against immigration the same week that Hillary Clinton reprised her neoliberal case for border crackdowns. In reality, solidarity with immigrant workers has...

Child Casualties of the Border War

22 Jun 2018
Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind, one very bright spot in an often disappointing landscape of mainstream immigration journalism, discusses the historical, political and legal context of Trump’s family separation policy. Dan also just wrote a...

The Right to Have Rights Part II

04 May 2018
This is part two of Dan’s interview on Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the right to have rights.” This episode covers a lot, including why we must fight not only to expand the democratic political community...

The Right to Have Rights Part I

01 May 2018
What are rights worth when government denies people the very right to have rights? Political theorist Hannah Arendt recognized this loss of “the right to have rights” as millions of refugees found themselves without a...

No Human Being Is Illegal with Mae Ngai

27 Mar 2018
Many Americans take the existence of so-called “illegal immigrants” for granted, whatever their opinion of the matter. But illegality isn’t a property of immigrants; rather, it’s a creation of positive law. And we can only...

Real Sanctuary Means Ending Mass Policing with Kade Crockford

25 Mar 2018
Perhaps nothing has more defined the monstrosity of Donald Trump than his racist demonization and targeting of immigrants from Mexico, Muslim-majority countries and those nations he deems to be “shitholes” or, according to another account,...

Why Democrats Fought Then Folded on DACA with Jeff Stein

25 Jan 2018
Excitement that Democrats had developed a spine in the fight for Dreamers reverted to familiar despondency and fury when they capitulated and voted to reopen the government on Monday. @JStein_WaPo offers his analysis of the...

The Reality of Central American Migration with Noelle Brigden

21 Nov 2017
Trump’s demagogic rhetoric on MS-13 is designed to obscure the truth about the reality and origins of mass Central American migration: the roots of migration from Central America lie in significant part in the violence...

A History of Human Caging with Kelly Lytle Hernández

14 Nov 2017
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández tells the story of human caging in Los Angeles, from the Spanish Conquest to the mid-twentieth century, in her new book. It’s a story of indigenous exploitation and elimination, immigrant detention...

Transcript: César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández: On DACA

08 Sep 2017
Immigration law scholar @crimmigration breaks down the lies, misdirections and bigoted absurdities conveyed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he announced that the Trump Administration would cruelly make some 800,000 young people who came to...

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández: On DACA

08 Sep 2017
Immigration law scholar @crimmigration breaks down the lies, misdirections and bigoted absurdities conveyed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he announced that the Trump Administration would cruelly make some 800,000 young people who came to...

Dara Lind: Trump's uncomfortable resemblance to Obama on immigration

11 Jul 2017
What Trump has accomplished is spread fear through immigrant communities and, with the Muslim and refugee travel bans, made bigotry the explicit cornerstone of immigration policy. But on immigration, as on other matters, Trump does...

Peter Andreas: Trump's Wall Is Already Built

31 May 2017
Donald Trump won the presidency in significant part by pledging to do something that his predecessors had already mostly accomplished: building a big, beautiful wall on the border with Mexico. For liberals and centrists, the...

Fighting the Trump bans: Linda Sarsour and Nicholas Espíritu

31 Jan 2017
Today, we bring you two interviews. The first is with Nicholas Espíritu from the National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups mounting legal challenges against the ban, who will explain the legal and constitutional challenge...

Trump didn't invent being terrible on immigration: César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández & Chris Newman.

21 Dec 2016
Donald Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and pledged to build a “a big, fat, beautiful wall” on the southern border that, of course, Mexico is going to pay for. It’s no...