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Act Two: No One Has Seen Them Made or Heard Them Made

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.
636: I Thought It Would Be Easier
Jan. 19, 2018

Act One: Send in the Gowns

Marshall Project reporter Julia Preston and producer Jonathan Menjivar visit an immigration court in Laredo, Texas to find out how one of Trump’s mandates—to quickly expel immigrants from the US—is going.This story was produced in collaboration with The Marshall Project where Julia is a contributing writer. Julia’s print version of the story, “Lost in Court,” is on the The Marshall Project website.

Act Two: The March

Latino residents decided to organize a peaceful march in support of a path to legal status, and their white neighbors were shocked when 5,000 people poured into the streets.

Act Three: Backlash

Suddenly realizing just how many Latinos had moved to town, longtime residents jumped into action, fueled by a wave of national and statewide anti-immigration fever. Then in 2011, Alabama adopted the most extreme anti-immigrant law in the country.

Act Four: Let’s Do the Numbers

One of the things we were excited to investigate when we went to Alabama was to answer the question at the heart of the immigration debate: what does it cost taxpayers when we let in millions of immigrants, documented and undocumented? In Albertville, how much was it? We asked economist Kim Rueben and her colleague Erin Huffer to run the numbers.

Act Five: Today

In 2012, the fever broke, and the Albertville city council stopped targeting Latino residents. The mayor says he and the council are taking a cue from the public schools.

Act One

We’ve visited Albertville, Alabama many times now, to figure out exactly what happened when the population shifted from 98% white in 1990, to a fourth Latino twenty years later.

Act Two

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.

Act One: Fear

Brian Reed continues his story about the town of Homer, Alaska. He talked to all sorts of people involved in the debate over whether the town should welcome immigrants.

Act Two: Loathing

In the first half of the show, we documented a community that was worried about what might happen, theoretically, if undocumented immigrants arrived. In this act, Producer Zoe Chace looks at a community where the immigrants have already arrived – Rockville, Maryland.
611: Vague and Confused
Mar. 3, 2017

Prologue

The Department of Homeland Security’s new policies on deportation have sown fear and confusion among undocumented immigrants. Ira Glass and Lilly Sullivan go to Chicago and meet a family trying to navigate the situation.

Act Two: Heavy Vetting

One of the justifications for the executive order from the administration was that we needed to temporarily stop admitting immigrants and refugees from these seven countries in order to scrutinize and improve the vetting process. Ira speaks with the vetters about how they vet and what they make of the new order.