Over the last few years, there’s been a flood of kids from Central America who’ve arrived in the United States by themselves. With no adults.

Host Ira Glass tells the story of Marisela and Yadira, who were honors students in high school. They wanted to go to the best colleges, but they couldn't get federally-funded scholarships because they weren't U.S. citizens; they had come from Mexico when they were little.

Ira talks with Lee Qi, who came to America from China. He worked in Chinese restaurants in small towns, live in tiny apartments with other illegal immigrants who worked there as well—apartments that were sometimes in the back of the restaurants.

This is a story of a father and son—told by the son, Juan Zaldivar, who was born in Cuba. Juan has spent the past four years shooting a movie about his father, to try to reassure him that he did the right thing to leave Cuba with his family in the 1980s and come to America.

Producer Aviva DeKornfeld talks to Ranjani Srinivasan, who tells the story of how her life was transformed over five days via a series of events that started out confusing and escalated to frightening. (25 minutes)

Ira goes to the courtroom of Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, who, at 93, presides over the ceremony to make people citizens. In this setting, it's hard to talk about America as it is.

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.

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.

Keith Gessen, a young Russian emigre, revisits the heroes of his youth: the brave Soviet dissidents who risked their lives at the height of the Cold War. Many of them resettled into comfortable suburban lives in America.

Reporter Douglas McGray interviews a college student in California with good grades, an excellent work ethic, but no possible way to get a legal job. She's lived in the U.S. since she was little, but her parents are undocumented; and she is, too.

The President has cut the number of refugees officially allowed into the U.S. So a bunch of refugee resettlement offices are shutting down.

Lots of people in America share actual beds, but almost never see each other; flight attendants have crash pads near airports, oil rig workers carry their own sheets and sleep in shifts in an RV. Producer Stephanie Foo has a profile of Mexican immigrants who share a few beds in a tiny trailer in upstate New York.

Ira Glass talks with Robert Costa of The Washington Post about President Trump's promise that Mexico would build the wall.Then Brian Reed investigates a wall that may or may not exist. Brian is our senior producer and host of our podcast series S-Town.

Just near the US-Mexico border, a group of self described "pissed off patriots" called the Minutemen stake out illegal immigrants trying to cross the border. They've got call-signs and walkie-talkies and guns.

Host Ira Glass talks to reporter John Bowe about the story of John Nash Pickle, who ran a company in Tulsa, Oklahoma that made steel tanks used in the oil industry. According to 52 Indian men whom Pickle hired and brought to America, Pickle was trying to compete with foreign companies, doing something most companies never try.

Reporter Michael May tells the story of activists from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance who intentionally got arrested for being undocumented. They believed if they could get inside the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, they could prevent lots of the immigrants there from being deported.

When Muhammad Kamran's Pakistani parents sent him off to college in Philadelphia, it was understood that he'd come back to Karachi after four years. But now that graduation is almost here, Muhammad thinks he might want to stay in America.

Writer Malcolm Gladwell, reads from a story that he first wrote for the New Yorker magazine about his cousins, who immigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica 12 years ago.

We continue the story of John Pickle. He hires skilled, experienced welders in India and brings them to the United States.

Ira's quest continues. He calls his Uncle Lenny, who gets his news from Fox and the Wall Street Journal, and lives with an entirely different set of facts, and Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the CATO Institute, who explains that the central issue in Donald Trump’s candidacy is based on something that isn’t true.

A tale of two siblings — separated, but not at birth. Reporter Paul Tough and his sister grew up in Toronto, the most American of Canadian cities.

We hear the companies’ side—they have a totally different story to tell than the workers. We also go to one of the leading researchers on the economic effects of immigrants, Giovanni Peri, who chairs the economics department at UC Davis. He and researcher Justin Wiltshire did a study for us on what happened to wages and jobs in Albertville.

One woman needs to find shelter for 27 young men in a matter of hours. (15 minutes)

Writer Achy Obejas reads a piece of short fiction from her book, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (11 minutes)