S4 E2 No place for migrants in the American Dream

Michaela Benson [MB]: Hello. Welcome to Who do we think we are? The podcast where we debunk myths and misunderstandings about citizenship and migration today. No hot takes, no rash analysis with a short shelf life, just real experts in conversation trying together to understand this fast changing field that shapes everyone's lives. I'm Michaela Benson, a sociologist working on citizenship and migration

Nando Sigona [NS]:And I'm Nando sigona. I'm also a sociologist, and I look at forced displacement and international migration. We are fascinated by borders. How they are built through policy and discourse, who they include and who they exclude, how they work, why some people experience the world as their oyster and others face barriers and border guards.

MB: In this season, we're looking at the USA, hearing from experts to ask what role migration and borders play in the MAGA–Make America Great Again–project of Donald Trump and his backers. We'll be looking at events on the ground, but also at the history, the context that frames them. And that was certainly true of our last episode where we heard from Rachel Humphris about the evolution of sanctuary cities.

NS: In that show, Rachel described how people fearing immigration raids in us feel hunted by enforcement officers. And that's a sobering place from which to turn to today's topic, the American dream. Remember that? We are curious, what role has the dream played in migration until now? What is always too good to be true? What remains, if anything, and how long can its demolition hold in a country built on immigration?

MB: So, we spoke to the sociologist Ernesto Castañeda, who's the author with Karina Cione of the book immigration realities, challenging common misconceptions. Ernesto directs the immigration lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, both at American University Washington. We started by asking him something we ask everyone in this season, how have migration and borders played a role in your own life and career?

Ernesto Castañeda [EC]: My whole life! I mean, they make me who I am. Like everybody else. My parents are internal migrants from within Mexico. They are from the provinces. They moved to Mexico City at one point in their lives. As their parents did. I was born and raised in Mexico City, but then I came to the US in 1999 so I've been in us for 26 years, longer than I lived in Mexico. I tell my students, but often in their early 20s, that I been an American longer than they have, even if I have this accent that will never go away, probably. So I've been I've been moving around. I lived in California, in New York, in Texas, in Virginia. I work in Washington, so crossing borders is something that we do all the time. 10 years ago, I spent six months in Oxford, and I've also gone and lived for a year in Paris looking at the lives of immigrants there. So I find it fun and interesting to transgress borders and move around. But it takes a toll. It's difficult living out of a suitcase and then learning new languages, new accents, new cultures. So I know it's a challenge, but it's also full of opportunities. And trying to address what are the realities behind immigration, has allowed me to have a career as an academic dedicated to a large degree to answering those type of questions.

NS: Thank you. Ernesto. So from a migrant to a migrant, also with a very sort of nice accent, I would say of myself, how do you define the American dream and what role it has played in the history of migration to the US?

EC: Right, I mean, it's a colonial settler society, it's part of history and to a degree, it's true that people from different religions, from different backgrounds have come and after a few years, and for sure, after a few generations, people from different backgrounds, different backgrounds, different countries in the world have become Americans and have created this new society that has so many influences from around the world. The American Dream in the last couple of centuries has meant these Protestant Ethic values that if you come, and you work hard, and you act in a moral way, at the same time as a very competitive, aggressive business entrepreneur person, you're going to experience social mobility. You're going to become rich and wealthy. So there's a degree of the rags to riches mythology, that only happens to a very few of the newcomers and the Americans. But that's the hope that any immigrant thinks that they're going to be the exception to the rule, and that they are gonna reach a lot of success. That doesn't happen for everybody. It obviously is impacted by race, gender, nationality, etc, but we can say that for the second and third generation immigrants, it has often been the case that they join the middle class. So I think that's what people aspire. Rhe problems that we have today is that in a time of growing inequality, and a time of deindustrialization, for people that do not attend college, which is a large population of Americans, they are not able to do better than their parents, and they are really upset that that American Dream is not true for them, even if they are born and raised, quote, unquote, "True Blood Americans", and that's part of the allure of Trump and the disenchantment that we face today.

NS: Thank you, Ernesto. I mean, in a way, you gave us a sense of the reality of the American Dream for some migrants rather than others. But I was wondering if the American dream as a narrative also come up in the interviews with the migrants you have met over the years. Is it something that people really engage with as a story to tell?

EC: Absolutely. I mean, the American Dream is an ideology that is permits America, but I think it's most alive, most believed, by minorities and by new arrivals, by immigrants. They're the ones that can have this story about America being the place where everything is possible, being the place where you can remake yourself, and where you can contribute to science like anywhere else, or to innovation and technology. And that is a reality that's still alive and most powerfully I have found this mythology when I have conducted interviews in rural Mexico, in Central America, with prospective immigrants from Venezuela stuck in shelters in Mexico City. But even in North Africa, with Algerians and Moroccans, they wish they had the opportunity to live in America, play soccer here, play basketball, meet the stars of the NFL and NBA and the Hollywood world. I mean, the reach of American music and cinema is global, and it's been so for generations. So there's this imaginary America that exists around the world, of which many people in mobility, people that are having difficulties at home and have to move, wish to claim they're part of it and want to make their mark on that American dream. So while a lot of Americans are actually very cynical and kind of disillusioned to a great degree about the promise of America, immigrants and foreigners actually probably hold it to the ground. And that's some of the things that we do, some of the work. As somebody that became naturalized as an American, I hold America not to the reality of the history, but to the standard of what it could be. So a lot of my policy recommendations vis-a-vis migration is we should try to reach that standard of equality, of due process, of equality, versus vis-a-vis the law, discrimination, moving towards a better union. It's something that there's evidence in the past that has has been accomplished little by little. There's always two steps forward, one step back, but that's a struggle, that is a narrative one, political one, and one in the which we're in the middle of right now,

MB: I find this idea of the American Dream having, still that resonance, having that very powerful migration imaginary really, really interesting in the context of things that have been happening and you've already started to move us towards thinking about policy. So my next question, really is about legislation. So one of the big things that we've seen this year, certainly in the international media, has been the anti-immigration raids, those ICE raids. But the kind of the background to that is that we know that Trump is trying to use the legislative machinery of the US to follow through on his pledge to expel at least an estimated 11 million people from the US. We'll look at the situation on the ground in a moment. But could you paint us a kind of a deeper picture in terms of what's happening in respect to policy and legislation? What can we expect to see in the realm of kind of immigration policy and legislation in the US in the next few years?

EC: Yes, Michaela, in terms of policy, this is a maximalist approach, and the Trump 2.0 administration has gone all out in trying to make a reality that promise of mass deportations. I will say it's the number one area where they are trying to fulfill a campaign promises. One of them was to help the oil industry that's already taken care of in the big, beautiful bill. But the other one that it's very serious is this one of mass deportations. They are not fulfilling the promises in terms of economic growth, in terms of inflation and all those, but immigration is a thing. Even when it's very unpopular, he's not gonna move back or change opinion and approach very quickly. And what you said about price is true. We've been saying think tanks and analysts that this will be very pricey, but the billions of dollars located to this now ICE is going to have more funding than any army in the world, except for the US and the Chinese armies. ICEitself, which is an internal, relatively small federal police force, is becoming it will have more money than the armies of Brazil, Italy or Israel, anyone individually. So it's. It is. It is ridiculous and completely out control and unnecessary. There's also, finally serious money for for the border wall, which kind of had been dropped even from the second campaign, the campaign to the second term, but they may begin the rebuilding of that, or supposedly a lot of money for Border Patrol, a lot of serious amount of money, over $140 billion. So yes, they are, they're willing to pay the price tag at a time when they are putting the US in debt. The deficit has increased, and it's not sustainable. But even the fiscal conservatives are okay with this. And then the last part on what could be a much longer answer, but is the cost that it's going to have on the US economy, which, if we were to deport 11 million people here that were people that are undocumented, without counting the people from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, that are losing their temporary protected status, and therefore there could be over four more million people that are undocumented, but we stick to the 10, 11 million people who are in the US undocumented for the last couple of decades, deporting them, we calculate would cost the US around 10% of its GDP of the economy when the 11 million are gone. So that would be a crisis that we have not seen in over a century. It will be of the dimension of the Great Depression. So it will be something worse than the economic impact of the pandemic. And while that was something that was a public health emergency that was coming from outside that we couldn't control initially, this is a self inflicted wound by the US. But because of this white nationalist project, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and people like them are willing to go all the way, regardless of the financial, moral cost to the US and its image around the world.

NS: Ernesto, can I, can I just follow up on this issue of the money? So when we talk about the huge amount of funding that have been sort of directed towards this goal of the mass deportation. Are we talking just of money that goes to ICE, or the private corporations, private contractors are basically getting a lot of funding, because I remember that during the electoral campaign, some of the main providers of companies that were running immigration detention centers were also among the backers of Donald Trump. So I was wondering, what's, what's the economy of this sort of deportation campaign?

EC: Yes, very important. So yes, ICE would be federal employees, and they're in the process of hiring them, same with Border Patrol, but there's also around $45 billion just allocated to detention centers, and, yes, indeed, in the last years, two corporations, of course, Civic and GEO Group have been the main ones running these private, for profit corporations. So we know that the stocks of these two companies went up when Trump was elected because people expected that there'll be a lot of spending on this, on this area. And indeed, the stocks are doing really well in the stock market. So people that have invested in these two private detention corporations are making money, and they expect to make much more money.

NS: Thank you very much. Just going back to the American dream as an ideology you mentioned early on, not the American Dream ideology, I was wondering how the American Dream looks in Trump 2.0. What is the American dream today?

EC: Yeah, so different, different answers for this. So on one side, I remember meeting Venezuelans and Hondurans and others in Mexico whose dream was to come and look for safety, for economic opportunity, and be part of that American dream. And they said that with Trump and the things that the Mexican Government was also doing in the in the US Mexico border, that they saw that the the American dream was kind of closed to them. And then there was a question whether they could have a Mexican dream, or a dream about a Colombian dream, or the equivalent in other places in Latin America, or whether they're going to go back to their countries and face political persecution and other issues that make them escape. So that's on one end. Also the people that enter during the Biden administration legally with the application, the app in the phone, that legally they could enter and then apply for asylum, I have interviewed a lot of those people that one of them was sent to this detention center in El Salvador. Other people have been in prison for having a tattoo and then being called a terrorist because they supposed to be a part of particular gangs. So in that sense, and speaking to a lot of journalists around that, a lot of people have started talking in the US about the American nightmare for recent Latin American immigrants, when this dream, it was not only a mirage, is the opposite, and everything has gone wrong when they have followed the rules. So they have entered legally, had a permission to work, and they've been detained, separated from families, all these horrors. So they're calling it an American nightmare, which for them is not an exaggeration. Now for the average American, we could say average rural Trump voter, there's been deindustrialization. They are not believing in education and religion expertise. They don't trust the government. So they also have a very obscure view on the American dream. They don't believe in it. That's why they wanted a savior in the religious, charismatic sense, and voted for Trump to bring this American Dream that for them means make America great again, which means make America white again, and having white men on top of the ladder just doing the basics that they are entitled to success and economics and respect. Or else, okay, if they're not going to have it, that's fine, but nobody else can.

MB: I think it's really important to highlight the kind of the flip side of a dream being a nightmare, and for whom it is a nightmare. And it seems quite, quite diverse from that point of view. But you've kind of anticipated a little bit my next question, which really is about MAGA and whiteness, and thinking about what whiteness means in this context. Whether, you know, I suppose the US we know is a highly racialized society. Inequalities play out in that way. But it seems, at least from over here, it looks as though those really have become incredibly, much more divisive than they had been perhaps in the last few decades. Can you reflect a little bit on whiteness in the context of MAGA America?

EC: Sure, Michaela, yes, the white and black line continues, and there's still easier to stigmatize young black men in cities. They're still seen as as problematic. So that continues, but at the same time, since the Obama years, not everybody, but there's been a growing African American middle class that has become very successful. So you have around Washington, DC, for example, in Houston, in many places, you have African American businesses and journalists and all that that had made it into the mainstream. And some of them have chosen to show their their success and their belonging by becoming Republicans and kind of becoming conservatives and espousing the values of MAGA. So in a sense, Trump can point in a rally or in an event and say, "no, no, we're not racist, because here's Senator Scott, he's African American. He won't be my cabinet, but he's my friend, and he supports me. We have people voting for me who are African American, young men", in majority. Again, it's a minority, but, but there are some, and then the question that that poses a lot is amongst Arab Americans, or Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans and Hispanics, right? People of Latin American origin, for example, many people from from Cuba, Venezuela, even recent arrivals, they believe this idea that the Democrats were the socialists, quote, unquote, of the in America. So therefore they had to vote for the right wing that was going to support freedom, free enterprise and all that. And they voted for Trump in Florida, for example, in large numbers. But now they are seeing that they're even though they thought they were part of this white project and this American MAGA project, and they by voting and going to rallies and singing Latinos for Trump and making songs and all that, they thought that they could do a shortcut into whiteness, and it was very tempting. And again, many of them acted like that, but we warned that it wasn't going to be enough. And indeed, we know that people that were making songs, openly campaigning, even speaking in the same rallies with Trump from those diasporas, they or their family members have been detained and deported or people close to them. And even the Congressmen, the Republicans representing Florida are very worried about the realities of ICE that are racial. If you look brown, if you were not born in the US, you're at risk. It doesn't matter if you're conservative right wing Christian or they're going to take you because they have high quotas, high levels to meet, and they're trying to reach those 4 million or 11 million. So therefore they are racially profiling. So that, again, goes back to this racial project of MAGA, which, if you are like Nick Fuentes, an ideologue of the right wing. He's half Latino, but he looks very European, very white, so he's going to be fine, right? Well, other people that maybe they are born in the US, they are citizens, but they look more indigenous. They are being harassed by the authorities. So that's again, when this racial violence is enacted, and the MAGA supporters, they're more than okay with that. They don't want DEI right, diversity, equity and inclusion. So they want the opposite, right? They want homogeneity, they want inequality, and they want exclusion of the minorities that they remember their place at the bottom of the totem. So this is a racial kind of pushback from some members of the white society that see their position in society displaced and are not okay with it. Now, having said that most white Americans actually don't believe that. So again, this is going to create all these good, positive cycles of solidarity, I think, in the present and the future.

NS: Thank you. Ernesto, I was thinking seen from this side of the of the Atlantic, we hear about the sort of the grand rhetoric and the grand standing, and we see the image of ICE raids, but I was wondering if you could tell us something a bit more from what's happening on the ground to the real people, I mean, also to see if there are spaces for solidarity, because those stories really don't reach us here.

EC: Yes. So in my theoretical work, I have been making the argument for a long time that processes of exclusion coexist with processes of inclusion, so two things can be equal at the same time. So the images that you guys have seen around the world of masked agents acting violently against women, children, men in the streets in large numbers, large numbers of agents, few numbers of detainees, those are realities that have really, I was going to say, scared immigrant communities, but Mexican workers in Florida were telling members of my team that they feel terrorized. That's the word they are using. They're not going anywhere but home and work. They're even skipping church at this time. And so that's that's happening, there's no doubt about it. But for the most part, in the large cities, in the workplace, in the school, in the church, there's still a welcoming, not so much a discourse, but acts of inclusion all the time. So, MAGA has become the discourse and ideology of the government. But it's not one of most of the majority. It's not an hegemonic majority, even the xenophobia and the anti-Islam, Muslim sentiment that we saw after 911 that was felt across even some Republicans became very distrustful of people that they saw as Muslim, quote, unquote, in the streets. We don't have that anymore with immigrants. People, I think, actually, I think, are going out of their way to be very nice to the custodians, to the people clean their offices, to the nurses, to the doctors in their hospitals that are foreign born. They know that it's tough for them, and they know that they depend on them, probably more than ever, because they know okay, I voted for Trump, but wow, they they are coming for my nanny. They want to deport my wife. They do see all these stories in even in the New York Times, of people that voted for Trump, and even if they are very, very close family or professionally to undocumented people. Which, again, it's it didn't require a rocket scientist to know you will be affected. But they thought they were going to go for the "bad immigrants". They bought this argument that Trump was going for that all immigrants were bad, except for the people they knew. But now they are realizing that that the immigrants they know, they care about, most of the ones they don't know are more like the ones they know. They haven't committed any crime, but coming to the US with no papers. So that's creating a lot of solidarity, and one quick example of that is we seeing a lot of quote, unquote, white middle-class residents in restaurants in many places of the country putting their bodies in between them, in between ICE and strangers that they don't know in a place being raided and saying, "Hey, you have papers, you have a you have a warrant. Is this necessary? Is that okay?" in a way that I had never seen before happen in the US? There's like a rhetorical, a public opinion, but also a physical fighting or speaking against these abuses of power in the streets that I think are going to become very negative for Trump in the future, politically, and hopefully open the door for a real immigration reform in the future.

MB: I mean, while you're speaking Ernesto about that kind of awakening, I suppose, of realizing the extent of that bordering project that the Trump administration has kind of embarked on, I'm seeing some resonances with Brexit. As you know, Nando and I have worked really extensively on Brexit. And I'm seeing the resonance and the fact that, you know, yes, the politics of migration was really alive and well in the Brexit referendum. But people, for the large part, I don't think, anticipated that this would impact on people that they knew. They didn't really think that, you know, that those crackdowns would be, as you say, on people that they work with or who worked for them. They thought that this was some kind of phantom other, the kind of people you know, that they didn't know. And so kind of the, I suppose, that the kind of mask came off at some stage. When the UK left the European Union, we were obviously right in the middle of the pandemic. That's true. But as time has gone on, what we've seen is quite a different story about both the actual reality of migration to the UK following Brexit, with the numbers rising, but also in terms of people's realization around perhaps what the root causes were so I'm just wondering whether you anticipate a similar trajectory in respect to what's happening with the Trump administration?

EC: My short answer is yes, absolutely. It's very parallel. And when I talk to people in the US, I tell Democrats, for example, to be very careful not to try to jump in the bandwagon of the anti immigration sentiment to win political elections. First of all, that hasn't worked. We have looked very closely at the competitive races, and is not the most anti-immigrant candidate that has won at the local level. And then I also tell them, well, being anti-immigrant may work on the short term, but. It doesn't work long term. And I often bring your friend Boris Johnson, right? He succeeded, and the friends around him in the Tories that were successful in selling the idea of Brexit, they became Prime Ministers, but they lost office really quickly, and probably they're going to be away from power from a long time. So it is these, these realities come back to bite and prove that they were selling a bag of goods or a bag of lies. So another way to say it is that people used to talk a lot of during the campaigns about the big lie and how Trump kind of kept repeating that he had won the 2020 election, when he indeed lost it based on all evidence, but he never accepted that. So that was that one big lie that people always referred to. But another big lie that he has perpetrated for the entirety of his political career has been that immigrants are a threat to America, and that if only we were to get rid of all the undocumented and all people from the from Latin America, for example, living in the US, US will be great again. And I think a lot of people had anecdotal evidence of one incident here and there, or they were seeing the images of people coming at the border asking for asylum. But the media in the US, they always label them as illegal. And then there's since 911 there's been this successful case of making illegality like immoral, therefore criminal. And that was very successful. But now that people are seeing who actually, are they, –which, again, people study migration were not surprised–but most people, they didn't really understand that. Yes, that included their nannies, the people cleaning their houses, the people working in all these important sectors  of industries around the country. They are understanding that right now, because they are they are seeing the fear, they are seeing the rates in the TV, in their phones, in their streets, in their neighborhoods. So it's become a reality. So yes, I think this specter of the immigrant invader, even the MAGA supporters know that there's no there there, so I don't see another MAGA candidate running on the being elected on the on the tails of an antiimmigrant discourse.

MB: I'm just going to jump back in, just because one of the things that I think has just made us here in the UK as scholars who work on this topic is the fact that actually what we've seen from the incoming Labour administration, or the new labor administration, however we want to refer to it, is a bit of a continuation of the politicization of migration. And that, I think, has been quite distressing to witness in lots of ways. Not completely unanticipated given how mainstream that politics had become. I just wanted to throw that in there, because part of me was thinking, yes, we were all saying that that's the advice that we were giving around policy for the for the Labour candidates, for the Labour Party, more generally. And that fell on deaf ears, unfortunately.

EC: Yeah, a lot of the consultants, a lot of the people advising the candidates on the left or center very closely. They are very risk averse, and they think that immigration is a time bomb or a minefield, that if politician is seen as being too pro-immigrant or pro-amnesty, is going to blow in their faces. But that is that is morally wrong, empirically wrong, and politically cowardly, right? And Labour is just creating more trouble for themselves, because, as you were saying your last podcast, one of your podcasts, the goal post keeps moving, and it's never enough. You're never strong enough to be intimidating enough, so you're opening the door to the extreme right wing. So that's we see examples of that over and over in Europe. In the American case, I'm a little bit more more optimistic, not because the Democrats are very brave in terms of this, but Trump has gone to such an extreme and has created such an outcry, he did it with a family separation, which I think is one of the reasons that he lost against Biden, and Biden won because he was relatively pro-immigrant discourse. Now he's doing it in so many arenas that you cannot disentangle the Republicans and MAGA, and you cannot disentangle MAGA from the anti-immigrant policies. So if you are fighting Trump, you're fighting his economic policies. You're fighting many things, but you are attacking, it's very easy to attack, you know, immigration. So therefore it's easier for the social movements, for the bases, to try to push for something, for that kind of that is not easy. It's still a struggle, still a movement, but it's it's become more polarized than, for example, in the Obama years, Obama was trying to go to the middle, and he was reproducing a lot of the ideas. I mean, he deported a lot of people because of the pressure for the right and that fear. In other words, is that before Trump, the xenophobia and the distrust of the undocumented was bipartisan to a larger degree. What we have seen since Trump, and especially in the last years, is that it has become really polarized, really partisan. So Republicans are still in the big majority against immigrants. No, no doubt, but over 90% of Democrats are open. They see immigration as a positive thing. They are open for DREAMERS to become regularized, but they're also the big majority of them, over 80% In favor of amnesty. Same with independence.

NS: This is a great moment to have a break on a positive note, and we will be back with Ernesto in a minute, after words from Michaela.

MB: You're listening to, Who do we think we are? A podcast about migration and citizenship with me, Michaela Benson and Nando sagona. And for this series, we're looking to the USA to reflect on the role of migration and bordering in the MAGA project and Trump 2.0

NS: if you like what you hear, perhaps you use us for teaching or for your study and your research, please follow and rate us on the app that you're using to enjoy this. You will be first to hear when episode came out, and it also helps more people to find us. Thanks for listening. Ernesto, we have touched on some of the language around MAGA, the anti immigration rhetoric, which creates very real fear among the people, but also opportunities for new forms of solidarity and protest. This language is not necessarily specific to the US, we have seen a lot of cases in Europe, for example. And I was wondering if we are witnessing a kind of a global shift, or a global the globalization of migration as a problem.

EC: Yes, absolutely we are. That's why these transatlantic discussions are very important, because we face a common enemy in hate and disinformation. The right wing ideologues talk to each other, take notes from each other, learn strategies that work from each other. So even though these are nationalistic, nationalistic movements in the way they sell them to the local publics, they are indeed a transnational social movement of white nationalism. And tropes get replicated around the world, one of them being anti semitism that is common to many of them. This idea of the Aryan race or white supremacy is also very common. But also ideas that are very anti immigrant. And again, they take different they're tropicalized or localized slightly after their adoption. But this idea, for example, of the Great Replacement that is, it starts in France within its welcoming or arrival of North African Muslims, and then he has this life of its own in France. But now it has become international. And JD Vance and other people in the US take it as some as a matter of fact and as a way to scare the population about supporting these extreme immigration policies that we're talking about? So yeah, that's why it's important that we that we dispel that myth. And something that I say about that fact is that, well, as we know from history, many of those immigrants of color, Italians, Irish, they have become white in the American mainstream population. And the other sense is that this fear that immigrants are going to displace the local culture. So immigrants are not a threat. They are actually an opportunity for growth for the economy, but also they become the best channels to reproduce the culture of the country they move into.

MB: I think that that gives a really, really good example of why we need to look beyond the headlines of the presentation of migration as a global problem, and the movement of states towards increasingly securitizing themselves against migration, which which we're seeing around the world. But in my final question to you, I kind of want to turn a little bit more to this idea of tackling head on some of these myths like we've discussed around the American dream, and this, of course, is right at the heart of that co authored book of yours called Immigration Realities. Now my question here really is about how sociology, particularly as a discipline can help us in that project of shattering myths. And indeed, as you explained in the introduction, in terms of thinking about how things could be different.

EC: Absolutely, Michaela. So there's hundreds of fantastic immigration scholars around the world doing fantastic empirical work on the realities of immigration. So the knowledge is there, and academics, we have it in the field. But the challenge here is, how do we communicate that to the public in a way that is digestible and in a way that is efficient and economic in the sense of or being very compressed and very easy to access? So that's why a podcast like this is crucial in reaching a wider public or explaining things In plain terms to students and beyond. So that's what we try to do in the book, we summarize hundreds of studies from these different disciplines, sociology, one of them, but many others, in a way that you don't have to have a college degree to understand what we're trying to say in the chapters. And some of the takeaways are the points where there's a lot of research and a lot of consensus basically on the realities of this. One of them is that we don't have a refugee crisis. Its the other way around. There's crisis around the world. There's a war in Ukraine. There's totalitarian regime in Afghanistan that has made a lot of people leave. So then some people have been displaced, but that should be the easy, welcoming those people into communities around the world should be the easy part. The hard part is how to put Haiti back together. Those are, those are real crisis, but the few people that are able to escape to save their lives, that should be the easy part. So I think we should reframe those things. Also, contrary to what we hear in the media, the US Mexico border is one of the safest areas in the US. The border cities have some of the lowest crime rates. El Paso, Texas has had for many years a lower homicide rate than Washington, DC and like that is the case. So or if you are a white American citizen, being in any place around the southwest border is one of the safest places. If you are LGBTQ, woman of color, if you're undocumented, then yeah, these are dangerous places for you. But it's not those people bringing criminality and making it dangerous for American citizens. It's kind of the other way around. So we go over 10 myths there that are easy to explain. They're independent. One of the findings is that immigrants learn the language of the place where they move to. We have a chapter on Brexit, kind of making this more international discussion, also examples of cities that manage all the time to integrate immigrants to their benefit. So it is an exercise in trying to reach a wider public that can learn from the research that we have spent so many years doing, because otherwise we're competing with podcasters that have no training, no background, no expertise, and they just turn on a microphone and talk. Or all the social media means and all that that play on the simplest, most basic stereotypes and assumptions that are not for real by reality, and that that's very dangerous because it becomes politicized. So I think that's the role of public sociology to educate about the complexities, but also how some of the questions are actually very simple, and we know a lot, and we can say, No, that is false. No, that is not true. Yes, that is true because of this and that, and we can solve it in this way.

MB; Thanks very much. Ernesto. And while you were speaking I was thinking this sounds very much like the public sociology agenda that was laid out and has been core to the work of the American Sociological Association, following Michael Burawoy's presentation in 2004. And some of the most exciting work that's happening in the US is precisely in that area, is precisely through that migration stream within the ASA. So thank you very much, Ernesto. It's been great talking to you today.

EC: Thank you. Thank you, Michaela. Thank you, Nando, 

NS: Thank you.

MB: That was Ernesto Castaneda talking to me, Michaela Benson and Nando sagona, and thanks for listening to who do we think we are? This season is being made as part of the research project re bordering Britain and Britain's after Brexit, MIGZEN, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Learn more @migzen.net and you'll find show notes and transcripts over at Who do we think we are.org? Thanks to my producer, Alice Bloch, to Emma Halton at Brilliant Audio for post production and to George Kalivis for artwork. Do follow and rate us on the app you're using to hear this, you can also find us on Instagram @Abtcitizenship. Back with you soon. Bye for now.