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632
December 8, 2017

Our Town - Part One

We spent eight months and did over a hundred interviews to try to bypass the usual rhetoric and get to the bottom of what really happened when undocumented workers showed up in one Alabama town.

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Albertville “Miss Chick” 1954.

Courtesy of The Sand Mountain Reporter

More in this Series

633
Dec. 15, 2017

Our Town - Part Two

Note: The internet version of this episode contains un-beeped curse words. BEEPED VERSION.

Prologue

Prologue

Today's show came out of something we heard politicians saying. And we wondered — is that true? And the answer set us on this eight-month journey on which we started to learn all kinds of things that we had never imagined.

Act One

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. We interviewed more than one hundred people.

Sessions is not totally right, but he’s not totally wrong either.

Our main witnesses to what happened in the plants are three long-time workers named Pat and Martha and Carlos.(29 minutes)

By

Ira Glass
Miki Meek
Act Two

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. They compared wages and employment in the area around Albertville to places in Alabama with similar job markets that did not have an influx of immigrants. Read their full study. (26 minutes)

By

Ira Glass
Miki Meek

Song:

“Workin’ Woman Blues” by Valerie June
Report

Our Town: The Economist’s Report

Jeff Sessions believes undocumented workers drove down wages in Alabama poultry plants. We commissioned a study to see if he’s right.

Related

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Act Five: Today

In 2012, the fever broke, and the Albertville city council stopped targeting Latino residents.
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Act Two: The Cost Of Misunderstanding

The story of how an understanding of Bible prophecy by the FBI could have prevented the tragedy at Waco at the Branch Davidians compound.
520: No Place Like Home
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Act Three: The Hostess With the Toastess

John Gravois tells the story of a potentially annoying San Francisco food trend: artisanal toast.

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The pandemic forced jobs to change, but then the workers changed, too.

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