Writer Michael Lewis tells the story of a man named Emir Kamenica, whose path to college started with fleeing the war in Bosnia and becoming a refugee in the United States. Then he had a stroke of luck: a student teacher read an essay he’d plagiarized from a book he’d stolen from a library back in Bosnia, and was so impressed that she got him out of a bad high school and into a much better one.

For many years, Israeli citizens learned a sanitized version of what happened during their War of Independence in 1948. They learned that 700,000 Arabs fled the country on their own accord.

Modern-day fables of two different kinds of do-gooders during and after the 1994 genocide in the African country of Rwanda. Philip Gourevich, author of the book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, tells first about international relief workers who served as "caterers" to some of the Hutu powers as they continued their policy of ethnic cleansing after fleeing to refugee camps.

About fifteen miles from Pearlington, Bay St. Louis and Waveland are other communities struggling to bring themselves back to life.

It turns out winning the lottery is only the first step in trying to come to America. More than half of the people who win each year never make it.

One good place to see how this ad hoc response is working is at an abandoned baseball stadium in Athens. About a thousand Afghans are now living here.

Three weeks ago, Abdi Nor became a U.S. citizen, in a ceremony in Maine. We go to the ceremony, and then head back in time to 2013, when he won a visa under the Diversity Visa Lottery.

This week we document what happened when the President’s executive order went into effect, and talk about the way it was implemented. A major policy change thrown into the world like a fastball with no warning.

Foreigners arrive in the United States believing all kinds of misinformation about us...misinformation that turns out to be true. Mary Wiltenburg tells the story.

Host Ira Glass takes a tour to walls all around the world. (9 minutes)

One way to understand the split inside the Republican party is to look at immigration. It’s this urgent, emotional issue for so much of the party these days.

There’s a group chat for Nigerian students living in Ukraine that got totally upended by the war.

Producer Zoe Chace hung out with some immigration lawyers who are getting calls from their nervous clients.

It turns out winning the lottery is only the first step in trying to come to America. More than half of the people who win each year never make it.

Ira takes us through a couple of occasions in which President Trump has evoked the brutal street gang MS-13. The President has lauded local law enforcement on Long Island on its efforts to stop the gang.

Ira tells the story of Meron Estefanos, a freelance journalist who in 2011 got a troubling tip: A group of Eritrean hostages was being tortured and held for ransom in the Sinai desert. Along with the tip was a phone number.

Reporter Mary Wiltenburg tells the story of a little boy stymied by the question "Where do you come from?" (8 minutes)You can read more of the family’s stories on Mary’s website.

Nauru is a tiny island, population 12,000, a third of the size of Manhattan and far from anywhere: Yet at the center of several of the decade's biggest global events. Contributing editor Jack Hitt tells the untold story of this dot in the middle of the Pacific and its involvement in the bankrupting of the Russian economy, global terrorism, North Korean defectors, the end of the world, and the late 1980s theatrical flop of a London musical based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci called Leonardo, A Portrait of Love.

Kirk sleepwalks through an open window and into a completely different life. He explains how he starts compiling a list of Iraqis who’d worked with the U.S. government after the invasion, whose lives were now in danger because of that.

The podcast and stream versions of the show include a story here that is not included in broadcast. It catches us up with an Iraqi translator named Basim, who fled the country to Norway after his life was threatened because he aided the American forces.

At Sullivan High School in Chicago, being able to communicate is key. (5 minutes)

Leo Hornak's story about Abdi continues. Abdi encounters one obstacle after another on the streets of Nairobi.

Ira talks to cyber cafe workers around the world about something that lots of Americans have never heard of, but that people in other countries know all about: a lottery run by the U.S. government where the prize is a visa to come to America. Each year people flock to cyber cafes to enter it, hoping for a lucky break that will change their life.