Tag: Immigration

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10797 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-07-30 20:25:57 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-07-30 20:25:57 [post_content] =>

A strangely hopeful book that looks at the longer arc of history to find lessons for abolition today.

A few years ago, I spent a couple of nights at the Panama Hotel in Seattle’s International District. The 1910 five-story brick building was designed for migrant workers by the city’s first Japanese-American architect, Sabro Ozasa, and smelled as mildewy as it was old. The wooden floors creaked loudly and the water traveling down the pipes roared whenever someone above me flushed the toilet. When booking the hotel, I had no idea about its quirks nor its story.

On February 19, 1942, after then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forcefully removed from their homes and taken to internment camps. As a hub for Seattle’s Japanese community, the Panama Hotel offered to store many of these families’ heirlooms, their furniture, and trunks full of other valuable objects, until they’d be able to come home. But even after the last of these internment camps was shut down in 1946—after myriad families lost their homes, their livelihoods, and were forcefully relocated yet again—many personal possessions went unclaimed. Today, there are still around 8,500 objects in the hotel’s basement—a beautiful and devastating testament to its place in history, and to the immeasurable harm these camps left behind. If you go to the tea house on the first floor, you can see many of them through a glass panel: dusty leather trunks, silk kimonos, books, purses, and the yellowed front page of a newspaper announcing forced evacuation orders during World War II.

I think about those unclaimed family objects every time I read yet another headline describing the terrors of Trump’s turbocharged deportation campaign. In 2025 alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 442,637 people; according to the latest data, there are between 60,000 and 70,000 migrants stuck in ICE detention in the U.S. More than 70% of them have no criminal convictions.

Author John Washington (a fellow journalist and friend) has been investigating what he calls the “immigration enforcement regime” for years. His 2023 book, The Case for Open Borders, called for the abolition of border control as a way to minimize suffering and bring more equitable global economic growth. His latest, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, is an unapologetic look at the echoes of Japanese internment. As its title suggests, it is also a timely how-to guide for blocking the creation of new immigrant detention centers and the repurposing of old ones, and for changing the perception of migrants as “a population subject to detention under the guise of military necessity.”

How to Close a Camp shows how the more things change, the more they stay the same. How, just like Chinese migrants were detained as soon as they crossed the U.S.-Canada border in the 1880s, today’s brown and Black migrants are being kidnapped by masked federal agents and kept behind bars in horrid conditions for months. Part of that history, too, is the prison boom of the 1980s tied to the “War on Drugs,” and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security two decades ago as a response to the “War on Terror.”

“A camp warps and degrades reality both for those in fear of ending up in one and for those living alongside them,” Washington writes. “Our decisions as a society, meanwhile, are uprooting more and more people from their homes, pushing people to flee, and failing to meet them with the protection, basic rights, freedom, or dignity they seek.”

In spite of all this, How to Close a Camp is a strangely hopeful book. It is much more interested in the longer arc of history and what lessons it brings for abolition today. By examining successful direct action and pressure campaigns from the past, Washington identifies six main ways to get communities involved in exposing—and shutting down—the brutal for-profit immigrant detention system. “Closing a detention center is rarely a single strike,” he writes. “It’s a siege: conditions exposed through sustained communications with those inside, licenses challenged, permits denied, inspections weaponized, contracts terminated.” The sixth step? Let everyone know about your findings and what they mean. “You need to harness the research into a narrative, then start pressing on those levers of power.”

Albeit slowly, this shift is already happening: “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention facility built in the Florida Everglades, shut down last month after multiple lawsuits and public outcry over its inhumane conditions. With How to Close a Camp as our guide, we gain a better understanding of how we can begin to close more of them.

[post_title] => Book of the Month: "How to Close a Camp" by John Washington [post_excerpt] => "How to Close a Camp" is a strangely hopeful book that looks at the longer arc of history to find lessons for abolition today. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => how-to-close-a-camp-by-john-washington-immigration-detention-internment-book-of-the-month-botm [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-07-30 20:25:59 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-07-30 20:25:59 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10797 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 30, 2026July 30, 2026

Book of the Month: “How to Close a Camp” by John Washington

by Ruxandra Guidi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10700 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-07-08 22:54:49 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-07-08 22:54:49 [post_content] =>

In their own words, how people in Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Los Angeles are still showing up for their neighbors in the fight against ICE.

Minneapolis, MN — Molly M.

In early December, kids stop coming to school. My daughter’s third grade class shrinks from 22 to 15, then eight. Over the next two weeks, a handful of parents and teachers raise funds for Christmas gifts and toiletries; organize rides; deliver big hunks of meat, tortillas, eggs, and beans. Families begin planning to send their kids back to school after the holidays. After my final food and supply delivery, I pat myself on the back. Wow, look at us. We did it!

Then, three days after winter break, Renee Good is shot in the face a mile from our house. ICE agents indiscriminately teargas a nearby high school. The city of Minneapolis cancels class for the week. The district announces distance learning for children terrified to leave home. I arrive at school to help organize tablets, Chromebooks, hotspots, and food. Hundreds of brown paper bags fill the room adjacent to the cafeteria; 175 students at my child’s school have opted into distance learning, and every single one needs something in this room. Our principal hovers over a spreadsheet. This is the craziest shit ever, she mumbles under her breath. I see a teacher crying, then another.

I deliver supplies to four families. At the first stop, an apartment building above a Somali shopping center, a masked ICE agent marches past me. I’m a blonde, white, middle-aged woman carrying three grocery bags; I’m his sister, his cousin. I’m someone he knows from high school. I take the elevator to the seventh floor and hand everything to a terrified mother who hasn’t left her apartment, or her children, in weeks.

"The news cycle has moved on. We have not."

The version of me that existed way back in 2025 could not fathom what we’ve pulled off in the months since. A small team of parents and educators raising over a quarter of a million dollars for rent, utilities, legal fees, groceries, hygiene products. We’ve organized food and supply deliveries for 75 families. We’ve patrolled the streets around school, scanning for ICE vehicles while simultaneously smiling at children—letting them know Everything will be fine! As if we know.

Operation Metro Surge ended in February, but did it? The week Tom Homan announced the departure of 700 ICE agents from Minneapolis, three parents at my kids’ school disappeared. ICE has merely changed tactics—they’re quieter, less overtly violent, but they’re still here. The news cycle has moved on. We have not.

Our mutual aid group is exhausted, as is every other one just like ours. We’re just regular people, primarily moms, with regular jobs and responsibilities—cooking and cleaning for our own families, caring for aging parents, driving our kids to swimming lessons. Teachers should be focused on instruction, not learning the habeas petition process or figuring out a 1:1 tutor to help homebound kids desperately behind. They should not be scrambling to find emergency mental health services for children.

For the families we’re supporting—our kids’ friends and classmates, their parents, their siblings—things aren’t even close to normal. They’ve depleted their savings. Parents have lost jobs, and even if a position is being held for them, many businesses teeter on the brink of closure, unable to offer the hours required to support a family.

Yes, Minnesotans deserve accolades for showing up 50,000 strong to protest on the coldest day of the year. And frankly, I think we deserve that Nobel Peace Prize, too. But the fight is not over. Springsteen has left, and what remains is the basic, boring, unsexy work of feeding people and keeping them in their homes. And because no one else is coming to save us, we will continue to fight ICE ourselves, one $20 donation, one box of diapers, and one carpool at a time.

New Orleans, LA — Rachel T. (Unión Migrante)

Last December was a hurricane of emotion. Agony. Terror. Heartbreak. You can't unhear girls sobbing as their dad is taken away by masked agents.

But New Orleans weathers every storm of government abandonment. People are used to helping their neighbors survive, and that includes helping immigrants remain in our city.

Our system is called Ojos (Eyes). It works in limitless chats and social media posts on Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, wherever. Neighbors share information about ICE and police activity: the exact location, a time stamp, a description. We communicate verifiable, protective facts, not fear. Community “dispatchers” comb through group messages, call eye witnesses, and signal boost confirmed alerts in Unión Migrante forums. Allies head to the scene to film, sometimes exposing ICE live, often just arriving to post “DESPEJADO” once ICE leaves, so folks can transit there again.

Ojos is operated by everyone at once, in real time. Thousands of people participate. Some are confined to their homes for their safety. Some are citizens who parked up in churches, bars, and Mardi Gras krewe warehouses every day and night but Thanksgiving during the height of the Border Patrol occupation.

In a state where the Attorney General threatens prosecution of anyone who “interferes” with ICE arrests, we remind our participants that we're not impeding ICE’s operatives—the Constitution is; we just witness. We’ve learned to peacefully, legally, safely and effectively film and expose ICE and police, without getting Obstruction of Justice charges.

Limiting ICE’s ability to make arrests is paramount—we can't pay rent for everyone in the city for as long as these attacks may continue. People have to go to work. Rather than falling short with a finite band-aid of charity on these deep wounds, peaceful confrontation slows harm at its root.

"You can't unhear girls sobbing as their dad is taken away by masked agents."

We can't stop every arrest. But we can do a lot. Beyond alerts, Ojos educates followers on our rights to demand a warrant, to remain inside, to maintain silence, to film. Peaceful filming in the streets becomes a daily protest broadcast live as soccer moms, bartenders, and tech workers film ICE and Kenner cops, and then share their own families’ immigration stories on Facebook Live—Sicilians who fled gang violence not unlike in Honduras’; Jews who were kidnapped off the streets in broad daylight. It changes the public narrative.

Footage has aided civil lawsuits and deportation defense. Ojos led a 14-hour stand off between neighbors and ICE agents and cops at a trailer park in red voter Hammond, a suburb north of New Orleans. There were solidarity pizzas, politicians, journalists, thousands of viral views, and substantially fewer arrests than might have happened without so many ojos watching. Hammond’s City Hall exploded with vitriol against the agreement of local police collaborating with ICE in the aftermath.

Putting our bodies publicly and peacefully on the line isn't just about keeping our neighbors here. It's about keeping our democracy. I know this personally: Federal agents have come to my home to intimidate me. An eerie echo of the state violence I hear in the asylum interviews I interpret for. It’s the same violence my child’s father endured when he was beaten and wrongfully arrested while filming ICE, profiled as an undocumented Hispanic construction worker, though he's a citizen.

But We The People create our government and our reality. We the People of New Orleans choose love and peaceful, public, unified resistance, rather than cowering in fear and doom-scrolling in isolation. This choice is the future of our democracy. We hope others choose it, too.

Los Angeles, CA — Bitta S. (Mar Vista Voice)

When immigration raids intensified across Los Angeles last summer, almost every day seemed to bring another report of a neighbor’s disappearance. On the Westside, where I live, a beloved paletero was detained while selling ice cream on the street corner. Immigration agents kidnapped workers from a local car wash and day laborers outside a Home Depot. Neighbors reported seeing ICE vehicles staging at familiar shopping centers and church parking lots, turning ordinary places into sites of fear and uncertainty.

Suddenly, families across the city were faced with impossible choices, and many stopped working because they feared they would be next. Others returned to work because they felt they had no choice: The alternative meant falling behind on rent and risking their ability to support their families.

Like many, my neighbors and I wanted to do something concrete to help. Around that time, we saw that Ktown For All, a mutual aid organization in Koreatown, had begun buying out street vendors, and had published a guide explaining how other communities could do the same. That was the moment it clicked. Mutual aid is strongest at the hyperlocal level, where trust already exists and people can stay connected long after the immediate crisis has passed. We didn't need to invent something new to support and protect our neighbors. We could learn from organizers who had already done the work, and adapt it to our own neighborhoods.

As ICE raids have continued into another summer, street vendors remain among the workers most exposed to immigration enforcement. Their livelihoods depend on being visible in public spaces, often in the same locations every day. Many are women balancing the work of running a small business while caring for children and supporting their families. When those spaces become unsafe, they lose the ability to earn a living at all.

"Mutual aid is strongest at the hyperlocal level, where trust already exists and people can stay connected long after the immediate crisis has passed."

Our idea was simple. If the community could temporarily replace a vendor's lost income, that vendor would have one less reason to choose between personal safety and paying the bills. We started by visiting vendors we already knew. As the project grew, we partnered with local rapid response networks whose trusted community relationships helped us reach many more vendors than we ever could have on our own.

We expected to help a handful of people here in Mar Vista. Instead, our work has expanded to the entire Westside.

When we first started Westside Vendor Buyout, we realized almost immediately that the challenge wasn’t convincing people to care. It was giving people a tangible way to turn their concern into action. Hundreds of neighbors donated, and volunteers stepped up to contribute however they could. Some helped with translation or behind-the-scenes support, while others connected us with families we never would have met otherwise.

As we spent more time with vendors, we began to understand that the raids were doing far more than sowing fear. They were destabilizing entire households and livelihoods. Vendors described living day to day as plummeting sales turned to mounting debt and missed rent payments. One mother told us her son had considered leaving college because weeks of lost income made it impossible to keep up with household expenses. Another vendor received an eviction notice after staying home because she was too afraid to return to the corner where she had built her business. As customers disappeared, neighborhood businesses struggled.

We had originally imagined the Vendor Buyout as an emergency fund, but every conversation revealed another way the community could help. We created a Hire a Vendor program so neighbors could continue supporting local vendors whenever they needed food for an event. When families faced eviction, we organized emergency fundraisers to help keep them housed. We also partnered with community organizations to host tenant rights clinics and organized a Thanksgiving gathering where we broke bread with vendors and their families, shared groceries and holiday gifts, and spent time together outside the pressures of work and immigration enforcement. The gathering met immediate needs, but it also gave people a chance to get to know one another and build relationships that couldn't be forged through a cash transfer alone.

"We weren’t starting from scratch, but instead joining a much larger tradition of community care."

One of the most important lessons has been recognizing that our efforts did not emerge in isolation. Long before the current wave of raids, immigrant communities across LA were already building rapid response networks to combat years of immigration enforcement, creating trusted systems for sharing information and supporting families in moments of crisis. At the same time, mutual aid networks have expanded across the city, especially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2025 fires, creating new ways for neighbors to care for one another. We weren't starting from scratch, but instead joining a much larger tradition of community care, and have continued learning from those who have been doing this work for years.

Today, whenever possible, we also use Buyout funds to purchase food from participating vendors for mutual aid efforts already happening across the city. A contribution meant to support immigrant vendors can also help feed unhoused neighbors at a local distro or help sustain another community organization. It’s the main lesson I think we'll all carry forward, even long after ICE has left. The strongest mutual aid isn't a collection of disconnected projects. This work is about building a network of relationships where each act of solidarity makes the next one possible.

[post_title] => Helpers On the Ground [post_excerpt] => In their own words, how people in Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Los Angeles are still showing up for their neighbors in the fight against ICE. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => helpers-on-the-ground-protest-mutual-aid-community-organizing-ice-raids-immigration-border-patrol-arrests [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-07-09 00:26:22 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-07-09 00:26:22 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10700 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 8, 2026July 9, 2026

Helpers On the Ground

by The Conversationalist Team

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10702 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-07-03 01:59:26 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-07-03 01:59:26 [post_content] =>

Across the United States, activists and organizers are 3D printing one of the most surprisingly effective weapons against ICE.

So far, they've distributed over 1.5 million of them.

Before I even get a chance to ask my first question, Heidi DiJulio, Operations Manager at Protoplant, Inc., is off and running. A Vancouver, WA-based producer of filament for 3D printers, the company has become a part of a growing grassroots movement in the United States, whose organizers need what they sell in order to make one of their most effective weapons: 3D-printed whistles.

Across the country, whistling has become an ever-present background noise in communities invaded by ICE, a low-cost, instant-alert system that anyone can participate in. Everyone from crusty gutter punks to activist grandparents have been blowing whistles to alert people to immigration raids; as well as gathering outside hotels and other spaces used by immigration enforcement to ensure they cannot rest, eat, or move without being accompanied by a cacophony. It prevents abductions, saves lives, and makes ICE agents absolutely miserable. And, as noise protests have continued to grow, 3D printing has proven to be one of the most effective and affordable ways to get more whistles into more hands, fast.

“Protoplant is very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish,” DiJulio says. “We’re very proud to bring it into our workspace, and figure out how to be part of a better future.”

While the ICE occupation—and noise protests—aren’t as visible as they were on social media in February and March of 2026, the demand for whistles is going strong. Over the last six months, Protoplant alone has shipped out over 500 kilograms and counting of their filament at a specially discounted price, and an additional 100 kilograms in gifted spools, enough to make approximately 300,000 whistles.

This steady supply of filament is essential for the activists and organizers—many working invisibly and unheralded—who continue printing and distributing thousands of whistles a week.

It’s also just one piece of a much larger movement still fighting back against ICE and showing no signs of slowing down.

Sounding the Alarm

When ICE first occupied Chicago, mutual aid organizers Emily Hilleren and Lauren Vega were quick to spring into action. They started distributing whistles at mass scale, among other supplies and support, and put out a call asking people with 3D printers for help meeting demand.

“I saw a neighbor in Chicago posting about leaving whistles in little free libraries and I was like ‘ooh I can probably do that,’” Hilleren wrote on Bluesky. “[S]uddenly I had tens of thousands of whistles passing through my condo.”

Chicago-based journalist Mo Ryan was early to join these efforts, and shared a few of the whistle calls with her friends, romance authors Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan. Though not local, the two were eager to help: both have large social media platforms, extensive networks, a love for 3D printing, and experience organizing under fascism. They began sharing information, boosting tips, and gathering resources and support, helping to raise awareness for what was quickly becoming a nationwide effort. As more and more people joined in, others were encouraged to contribute in whatever ways they could.

Before long, the group—alongside a rapidly growing collective of printers, activists, and organizers—became known as the Whistle Crew. Today, they’re one among many distribution groups across the United States rising up for community defense against ICE.

"Everything is very grassroots, driven by ways to put information in front of the people who need it."

They’re also still growing: As ICE has invaded more and more cities across the country, Hilleren and Vega have applied their experience in Chicago to supporting efforts in Minneapolis and beyond. So have Milan and Rocha, alongside the rest of the Whistle Crew, in an ongoing mass-distribution effort made possible through collaboration, skill-sharing, and organizing that is responsive to the needs of individual communities—rather than a top-down approach, one rooted in principles of mutuality and care.

The origins of this incredible mutual aid effort reflect a lengthy history of feminist organizing, drawing upon decades of lived experiences that value collectives over individual work. It also taps into the glorious side of human ingenuity that utilizes tech for good—a welcome disruption to our current tech dystopia.

Mary Sturgeon, who runs Solder and Bubblegum—a Seattle-based makerspace where visitors can use equipment (including 3D printers), learn technical skills, and connect with fellow nerds—was quick to get involved with the group after she saw Rocha posting about it. “Something I studied very heavily before I opened my space is the riot grrl movement and women in making,” she tells The Conversationalist. “What fascinated me was how underground it was, how record companies, everyone official said, ‘We’re not interested,’ so women just said, ‘We’ll figure this out ourselves.’”

A similar ethos, she believes, is core to how the Whistle Crew operates. “Everything is very grassroots, driven by ways to put information in front of the people who need it,” she says. “That’s it, that’s all we need to do.”

In the case of the Whistle Crew, as their work has expanded, so has their need for structure: to track who needs whistles, who can print them, and how to get whistles where they need to go. Both Milan and Rocha stress that while they are very public faces for the group, they are far from the only organizers in a leaderful movement—adding that some core contributors to the Whistle Crew remain invisible for safety reasons. Today, their network includes a distributed and diverse collective contributing logistical experience, tech expertise, and other critical moving pieces. They also resist hierarchical structures, rooting their work in the “we,” as Milan puts it, which is essential for effective, sustainable, and anti-patriarchal community organizing.

So far, the Whistle Crew has produced and shipped over 1.5 million whistles.

To continue this work, the group practices both conscious security practices and redundancy, calculated to avoid burnout and to avoid creating bottlenecks. Coordinating over Signal, they get supplies where they need to go as quickly as possible. If you’re a person who needs whistles, you email whistlerequests@proton.me. The person wrangling the inbox adds it to a list of requests for individual printers to claim, print, and ship directly to the requester. The group has been so overwhelmed with support that they’re not currently accepting new volunteer printers, but they have published a Wiki with information on printing and distribution so anyone can pick up this work in their own community. People who can’t print or be involved in logistics can also donate funds or purchase filament directly via Protoplant or Amazon wishlists, to ensure their printers have a steady supply.

“The goal,” says Zoe Quinn, one of the printers involved in the effort, “is obsolescence. I would love to not be doing this.”

Anti-Patriarchal Organizing for Fascist Times

There’s an interesting undercurrent to this incredibly rapid mobilization: It’s rising to meet a need, but has also at times been surprisingly whimsical. There are sparkly whistles. Transparent ones in a range of hues. Whistles in metallic rainbow tones. Fun shapes like fish and cats, and designs intended to be beautiful and sometimes silly as well as functional. A whistle is a whistle is a whistle, but there are more unconventional ways to get one, too. You can go to https://linktr.ee/3Dwhistles if you want, but toottootmotherfucker.com, whistlegoblins.fun, and whistlecoven.com will all get you to the same place.

One reason for that playful approach amongst the Whistle Crew? Many of the people doing the work are linked to Romancelandia, the community of romance readers and writers that moves mountains, and rarely shies away from hard work and fighting on the right side of history.

"Political resistance is women’s work and always has been."

As a historically gendered genre read predominantly by women, romance readers and writers are frequently derided and discounted, even though romance is consistently one of the best-selling fiction genres. (According to industry group BookScan, 51 million units sold between May 2024 and June 2025.) Unlike many other genres, romance also isn’t dominated by traditional publishing, and many authors choose to self-publish or engage in a mix of both. Romance writers often have incredible business acumen as a result, acting not just as authors, but editors, publicists, web developers, designers, and more, with incredibly diverse backgrounds and skillsets. (Milan, for example, is an attorney who clerked at the Supreme Court—and far from the only lawyer-romance writer.)

Milan and Rocha are also no strangers to political organizing: Their Romancing the Vote project, which started with 2020’s Romancing the Runoff in collaboration with fellow romance author Alyssa Cole, has raised more than a million dollars to support nonpartisan voting rights organizations, and the 2026 edition just launched, with auctions running through July 5. That experience—with promotion, logistics, and coordinating—has been critical for the whistle distribution effort.

Political resistance is women’s work and always has been. Even as people dismiss romance as unimportant and inherently less valuable because it is feminized, romance writers are engaging in an ancient form of unappreciated work traditionally performed by people who are not cis men: getting things done, cooperatively. “We have seven admins, zero are masculine,” Sturgeon says. Not everyone involved in the Whistle Crew is a romance writer or reader, of course; but feminist mutual aid and support principles are core to their work.

Fundamentally, it is also important not to mistake the Whistle Crew’s whimsy for unseriousness. The reason people are printing whistles is not fun. The way some are building sustainable networks for printing and distribution, though, is joyful, kind, and spacious—all necessary in the inclusivity and sustainability of this essential work. It's an approach that makes room for both people who are new to activism as well as old hands, for people who want to print no-nonsense, matte black whistles right alongside Quinn’s glow-in-the-dark ones.

"People of minoritized genders are used to working collectively for survival."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some people are not happy about this “rainbow sparkle agenda,” as Rocha puts it, noting that a very small but sometimes loud group of people—mostly cis men—seem to be very upset about women making 3D printing cute. (Though everyone is quick to state that the positive responses far outweigh the negatives.) The response reflects a larger history of pushing women out of tech spaces, hearkening back to the treatment of women’s creative work as that of hobbyists and crafters, in contrast to men’s.

It's also a theme that long predates 3D printing, or for that matter, whistles.

The devaluation of women’s work replicates itself everywhere, including in online conversations as well as offline makerspaces, which are often where people curious about 3D printing are first introduced to it. These sites provide access to equipment, training, and space for a wide variety of projects, but are often heavily male-dominated. This is despite the fact that the original makerspaces were sites of women’s “craft” and housework, such as sewing circles and other resource-sharing activities, enabling women to teach each other skills, perform tasks together, and access equipment and other resources too expensive to afford individually—all of which is echoed in how the Whistle Crew operates today.

Women are consistently early adopters and creators across tech, from Ada Lovelace to Katherine Johnson to Reshma Saujani. They also currently lead several high-profile 3D printing companies, including Cinderwing. Still, men enjoy being loud and wrong, convinced that they are the original innovators and that work only becomes serious when they’re involved.

The whistle goblins are having none of it. Among other things, Sturgeon notes, mansplainers who complain it’s wasteful to use sparkly or rainbow filaments for 3D printing seem to have a skill issue.

“It’s not inefficient,” she tells me, “when you know what you’re doing.”

These derisive comments about colorful, playful whistles have often been accompanied with equal surprise that women can be such effective organizers. In January, one Twitter user complained, “The ‘No-Go-Zone’ in Minneapolis is getting fully stocked like a pop-up leftist supply depot, free hand warmers, winter gear, coffee, food, milk, you name it. This is PROFESSIONAL-grade logistics. Someone is BANKROLLING this autonomous zone.”

For organizers, though, it was just another day ending in "Y." People who are not cis men are often accustomed to being the logisticians both at home and at work, expected to make sure everything runs smoothly, with labor that remains largely invisible. The ones who cook the meals and wash the dishes, who shop for school supplies, who manage all the appointments, make the office coffee, and become the de facto note takers at meetings.

If you want distributed logistics to run smoothly, you need people who can work cooperatively and efficiently together—and people of minoritized genders are used to working collectively for survival.

They’re also the ones physically showing up for their communities to push back against ICE.

“The bravest and fiercest defenders of their neighbors,” shares one supply runner, who asked to remain anonymous, “have been women and especially teenage girls in Chicago.”

Making Organizing Sustainable with Play

For Quinn, who has been outspoken about their experience with depression and anxiety, finding a fun thread for their brain to focus on, like experimenting with a new filament or whistle design, has helped them build community. It has also helped them cultivate sustainability for themselves, something that has not only been critical for avoiding burnout so they can continue doing this work, but also, for their mental health.

Sometimes, Quinn says, a person just wants to “have a better day. I like having better days.”

“We’re printing whistles to fight back against people with guns and immunity,” an activity that can feel incredibly existential, depressing, and enraging, says Quinn. “If that’s all you have, it’s going to be really hard to sustain that. Play matters. It allows people to engage in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. It allows us to get through the shitshow.”

This is not just about finding joy for those involved in the herculean whistle distribution effort, but also making whistle use more accessible for people who are new to mutual aid and direct action. Anyone can carry and blow a whistle. But whistles are only effective if you wear them, and if you’re a person who loves fun and whimsy, you may be more likely to consistently carry a purple sparkly whistle than a plain one. That approachability is very much by design, allowing people to be more comfortable getting involved. For some, this might start and end with whistles, but it can also turn into more engagement with community organizing.

"An expansive approach to activism makes room for everyone and builds long-term sustainability."

This doesn’t mean the Whistle Crew doesn’t have room for those who prefer the plain and understated. As a marginalized person who has been treated like political fodder, Quinn stresses that they “don’t fault anybody who’s in a space where they can’t engage with [whimsy],” recognizing the essential value of diversity in organizing tactics. An expansive approach to activism makes room for everyone and builds long-term sustainability. Both whimsical and deeply serious people are essential to the ultimate cause of fighting fascism and protecting our neighbors. So is letting go of the ego behind wanting to be right, to fix what isn’t broken, to tell people who have been engaged in this work for a very long time that they’re doing it incorrectly. Feminist organizing, like the Whistle Crew has practiced, highlights how important this is, and provides a model for doing it.

A whistle a day—whether printed in army drab or trans pride stripes—keeps the jackboots away.

“I’d rather be printing swords,” Quinn says at the end of our conversation, returning to what got them interested in 3D printing in the first place. “Swords are cool, swords are fun. But we have to do what we’re doing because our country is setting up concentration camps, they’re kidnapping our neighbors, they’re scaling up at an alarming rate.”

“Hear me out,” I reply. “Whistle sword.”

“Hold on,” they say, as their eyes light up. “I gotta write this down.”

[post_title] => Welcome to the Whistle Rebellion [post_excerpt] => Across the United States, activists and organizers are 3D printing one of the most surprisingly effective weapons against ICE. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => whistle-rebellion-crew-mutual-aid-ice-immigration-raids-romancelandia-activism-3d-printing-technology-noise-protests [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-07-03 01:59:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-07-03 01:59:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10702 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

July 3, 2026July 3, 2026

Welcome to the Whistle Rebellion

by s.e. smith

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8823 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-09-09 21:36:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-09-09 21:36:41 [post_content] =>

Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from.

The way it looked promised richness and flavor. Sharp green leaves, stemless, in a transparent plastic package with the words “organic” and “triple-washed.” It was something I’d never seen before: ready-to-eat spinach with no dirt, worms, or roots. In Colombia, my home country, produce always needed to be washed. Spinach, in particular, needed extra effort, because it was always sold as a whole. I usually soaked it in vinegar and lemon for half an hour to kill any parasites or bacteria. But in the United States, everything seemed easy, fast, and reliable—no soaking required. I bought the bag of spinach, and prepared a fresh salad with goat cheese and walnuts. In less than two minutes, it was on my plate. I chewed and chewed. But while there was a hint of spinach in whatever those leaves were, it was certainly not spinach.

In Colombia, I lived in Bogotá, a densely populated and urbanized area. With reduced access to green spaces, I felt most connected to nature through food. Vegetables came from the earth and still carried the signs: roots that once absorbed nutrients, stems that transported water and sugars, bugs that had nibbled on the same leaves I would soon eat, too. Seeing all this reminded me that my food had been grown, not manufactured. It connected me to the farmers who had cultivated, cared for, and harvested it. I felt grounded when peeling, chopping, smelling, washing, and eating my produce. At the end of the day, I was manipulating something that came from the earth.

When I moved to New York City in 2022, I noticed how little people manipulated their food by comparison. Grocery stores sold pre-washed and pre-cut vegetables, and people just opened the packages and threw food on a plate and called it a meal. They didn’t need to bother getting their hands dirty, because their food was already chopped and sanitized.

To me, this disconnect was clearly separating people from nature, making food’s origins feel unfamiliar. When people don’t see, feel, and taste the whole flavor of produce, they also feel less encouraged to eat it. A mango that once grew on a tree, appears nature morte—a dead nature—in a plastic container, more like a granola bar than fruit. In Colombia, produce tasted intense and complex. Spinach, for example, tasted bitter, earthy, and savory. A friend from Peru tells me she avoided fruit her first year in New York because it tasted too sugary and artificial. Another friend from Mexico will only eat pineapple, because she thinks other fruits taste as if they’ve been diluted in a water and sugar solution.

The University of Florida found the reason that fruits, like tomatoes, taste so insipid in the U.S. is because, in the pursuit of higher yield, disease resistance, and shelf life, the genes responsible for flavor were bred out. While unsanitized produce may be risky for gastrointestinal health, GMO and ready-to-eat produce isn’t necessarily always “safer,” either. Processing facilities or farms, for example, frequently wash greens with water and chlorine. While safe in small doses, regular consumption can pose health risks. Other additives, like preservatives or antioxidants, might also cause immune diseases and antibacterial resistance.

It’s also just unnatural. A Colombian friend living in San Francisco tells me she once forgot about a bag of mandarins for two months. When she rediscovered them, they were still edible. “The mandarins were supposed to be spoiled,” she said. “What kind of component do they have to survive for months?”

It is a universal truth that Western society is obsessed with germs. We fear bacteria so much that we do everything we can to isolate ourselves from it, no matter the source. But when it comes to food, are we truly that delicate—unable to tolerate mud on our fingers or on the ground beneath our feet? Is our obsession reinforcing the binary vision that nature is dirty and dangerous, and human creations safe and clean? And what are we robbing ourselves of in the process?

Research published in Communications Psychology found that the more people interact with nature, the more fruits and vegetables they eat. While this affects us all, it disproportionately affects some of us more than others: Access to nature and socioeconomic and racial inequalities in U.S. urban areas have long been related. Simultaneously, the more urban the environment, the fewer healthy food choices are available—especially amongst Black and Hispanic communities, who often have less access to green spaces.

Community gardens and farmers markets help mitigate this gap. They also provide more affordable prices than grocery stores for organic and whole produce. I used to visit a community garden in Queens, where I learned how to compost and take care of the crops they had, allowing me to feel close to food again like I once did in Colombia. I have also tried to buy my produce in farmers markets that sell whole foods, rather than their chopped and sanitized counterparts. But access to these spaces is limited. Community gardens can’t produce the amount of food necessary to feed the whole city. Farmers markets are only in certain neighborhoods and on specific days a week, limiting access for working-class people. Not everyone has the privilege to eat spinach from the earth and not a bag.

I don’t have a solution to this disconnection. But I do know this: We understand the world through our senses. The feel of a vegetable in our hands, the smell of it, the taste, reminds us we exist because of the earth, what we feed ourselves comes from the earth, and that our cells are built from the earth, too. Our bodies evolved alongside the earth. Our ancestors touched soil, grew food, harvested crops, and fed their communities with their hands. And it seems likely for our collective wellbeing that we still need to do everything in our power to do the same.

[post_title] => Food is Meant to Be Touched [post_excerpt] => Over-processed produce is disconnecting us from where food comes from. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => food-groceries-united-states-colombia-produce-packed-pre-washed-cut-processed-gmo-ready-to-eat-fruits-vegetables-treatment [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 22:30:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 22:30:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8823 [menu_order] => 10 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 9, 2025August 3, 2026

Food is Meant to Be Touched

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9098 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-08-01 17:42:22 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-08-01 17:42:22 [post_content] =>

As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home.

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

For months, I thought coming to New York City was a mistake. I’d accepted an unpaid internship in the city, leaving my home in Bogota to try living abroad. I dreamed of going to Broadway shows, dining out at different restaurants—enjoying all the fun New York had to offer. But instead, in addition to my internship, I ended up taking another job, just to afford rent. I worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with little time to socialize. I was burned out and deeply lonely. Then, one day, my friend Carolina suggested we go out after our internship and do something fun.

“We should go rollerskating at Rockefeller Center,” she said.

I used to skate for fun back in Colombia—my home country—when I was a teenager, but hadn’t gone in years. Still, I thought it was a great idea. Carolina was a talented skater, and we had so much fun looping around the rink that I was reminded of the joy skating had once made me feel.

For the first time in months, I was completely at ease. Then, as we were leaving the rink, I fell. When I looked down, my arm was shaped like the letter “s”: I’d broken my left wrist. Carolina, somehow, found the strength to pull me up, call an Uber, and take me to the nearest hospital. She waited with me for hours in the emergency room, where I learned I’d need nails and a cast to fix my broken bones.

As my arm healed, Carolina took the subway with me to work every day, protecting me from accidental bumps. She brushed my messy hair, pulled down my pants so I could pee, and dressed me up again; all things I’m not sure I’d ask even my closest friends to do for me back home.

At the time, we had only known each other for four months.

I once read an Instagram post that said being an immigrant is like becoming a dog: one year as an immigrant equals seven years of life experience. Friendships, then, become intense and profound more quickly than they might back home. Sometimes, out of necessity, they become deeper than our friendships back home, too.

Adult immigrants often find themselves profoundly alone. Our families and closest friends usually remain in our home countries, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The friendships we form in our new lives, then, become everything to us: our support network, our first call, our emergency contacts.

In an unfamiliar city, we also seek familiarity. As immigrants, we tend to connect more deeply with people from similar cultural backgrounds, something especially meaningful when we suddenly become the “other” after a lifetime of living in a country where we are the “norm.” Sharing a language, traditions, and social cues lowers the barriers to intimacy: When someone understands the way you were raised, you don’t have to justify or over-explain everything you do.

Carolina was from Bogota, too, and had started at the same internship a week before I had. We had a lot in common: We both came from Catholic-conservative backgrounds, needed to be very mature at a young age, identified as feminists, had issues making friends, and wanted to start life from scratch in the city. We shared similar experiences growing up, and similar experiences since coming to New York. But our friendship deepened after I broke my wrist: I knew then that we could rely on one another. That if something ever happened to me again, she would take care of me—and if something ever happened to her, I’d take care of her, too.

Carolina isn’t the only immigrant friend I’ve felt this immediate intimacy with. One day, I was hiking with Nicol, a Peruvian friend. The trail was rocky and we had to march in rhythm just to move forward. Suddenly, a memory popped into my head: In primary school, I used to march like a soldier with the rest of my classmates. Military culture is deeply ingrained in Colombia because of our near century-long history of war and internal armed conflict. It felt silly, but I decided to share my memory with Nicol.

“Oh, yeah, we did that at my school, too,” she said. “It was so ridiculous. Our parents would come watch us march in squared formations.”

Of course. Peru, too, has a history of armed conflict, and military culture was a part of her primary school indoctrination as well. She didn’t make fun of me for what I thought might be a strange confession. Instead, she took my memory and treated it with care—turning it into something funny and shared.

I immediately felt closer to her, something unusual for me. I’ve always considered myself introverted. During my undergrad years in Colombia, I experienced severe social anxiety. I was trapped in an internal monologue that told me I was boring, strange, and hard to love. For nearly two years, I didn’t make a single friend. I built high walls around myself that kept everyone out. After a while, I made meaningful connections that have stayed with me, but I’d never found it easy.

When I migrated, I assumed I’d again struggle to make friends—especially since, on top of everything else, I now had to add “not fluent enough in English” to my long list of self-demeaning adjectives.

But when I started grad school in the States, I made friends within the first two weeks. At the time, I thought maybe I had changed somehow; become more at ease within myself, more confident. But looking back, I can see it was something else: My deep, human need to belong—and the comfort I felt around other Latin American students—had activated parts of me that had been frozen.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon with María, a friend from Mexico. Before coming here, I had never had friends like her—extroverted, party lovers, heavy users of dating apps, full of energy. After a long conversation about how Latina diet culture has shaped our relationship to food and our bodies, I realized our friendship had grown strong, in spite of our differences, because it was rooted in something larger than us. Like with Carolina, and Nicol, and countless other immigrant friends, we were united by our need to resist a homogenizing environment. We were united by our shared confusion about U.S. social cues. We were united by our warmth, our humor, and our overlapping memories, even if we didn’t grow up in the same country.

“I’ve noticed you’re literally like my younger sister,” she told me. “The good girl who wants to fit in and carries the weight of your lineage. We’re very different, but there’s a strong emotional connection between us.” I realized then that she is, indeed, a lot like my older sister, too.

I’ve been in the U.S. for almost two years now, and I still find it hard to make American friends. Sometimes, people make xenophobic comments to me in the streets. When I meet people who grew up in the States, I quickly find myself running out of conversation topics, unable to find much common ground—something that still makes me feel out of place. But my immigrant friends are part of the reason I still want to stay, to put down roots.

At the end of the day, home is where you feel safe, loved, and cared for, rather than where you grew up. If I have friends who look after me, who resist the harshest expressions of discrimination and exclusion by my side—then here, I’ve found a place to call home.

Don’t get me wrong: I have beautiful, loyal friendships in Colombia, too. But my friends there don’t need me to survive. In Colombia, if I got sick, I could call my parents or sisters, and they would drop everything for me. But there, I had never been anyone’s emergency contact. My friends back home already had someone else to call—their own parents, siblings, partners.

In contrast, my friendships in New York became lifelong within months. I’m now the emergency contact for two friends. I’ve been the caregiver for one of them coming out of a medical procedure that needed anesthesia. Here, my friends and I depend on each other to be each other’s version of family, to be a shoulder to cry on, to be someone reliable for medicine delivery; as a party plus-one, a caregiver, a babysitter (or cat sitter!), among many other things.

The need to survive, to resist, to belong, and to be comforted—that’s what first pushed us together. But it’s the care, love, and familiarity that’s kept us bonded.

[post_title] => Emergency Contact [post_excerpt] => As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => immigrant-friendships-migrant-friends-relationships-home-emergency-contacts-shared-language-culture-latin-america-immigration-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-01-15 19:22:16 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-01-15 19:22:16 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=9098 [menu_order] => 3 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 1, 2025January 15, 2026

Emergency Contact

by Ana María Betancourt Ovalle

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8185 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-04-17 20:59:49 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-04-17 20:59:49 [post_content] =>

Under Trump, the ideology is on the rise. But ultimately, eliminating eugenic beliefs from our shared society may require dismantling the United States itself.

In a moment when the experiment of the United States is teetering on the brink, the Trump administration is weaponizing deep-seated hatred of marginalized people to exacerbate ideological divides and deepen MAGA’s cult-like relationship with the president. A key component to this is their belief in and use of eugenics—the idea that it’s possible to create an ideal human by eliminating “undesirable traits.” Meaningful resistance to Trump, then, requires a culture shift grounded in understanding the ideology’s history, the tech industry’s role in encouraging it, and the complicity of liberals and the left in conversations about whose life has value. It also means acknowledging just how deeply baked the ideology is into modern American culture.

Many people associate eugenics with the Nazis, comparing what’s happening in the United States today—the disappearing of immigrants without due process, the erasure of anything considered DEI, the destruction of archives—to the Nazi movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Nazi policy called for the extinction of unwanted communities via any means possible, including forced sterilization, social control, and, of course, “euthanasia” and mass murder. Yet in this pursuit of an improved “Aryan race,” the Nazis didn’t just want to populate the world with nondisabled blue-eyed blonds: They also viewed circumstantial, socially-mediated experiences such as criminality and poverty as genetic and therefore targets for elimination via breeding, an idea fundamental to the broader eugenics movement.

But the movement didn’t start there: The U.S.-based eugenics movement of the early 20th century was a tremendous influence on the Nazis, as was the work of British eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Julian Huxley. In the U.S., Charles Davenport, Henry Goddard, and many others aimed to “improve” humanity by fighting “dysgenic” influences, with prominent corporate foundations bankrolling their efforts. The normalization of American eugenics was also supported on a broader, sociocultural scale: Across the United States, laws encouraged marriage and children (for the right people), while simultaneously promoting the institutionalization and mass sterilization of disabled people, poor people, and Black, Indigenous people of color. “Better Babies” contests at county and state fairs promoted eugenic beliefs, alongside “fitter family” lectures and informational pamphlets.

Eugenics in the United States didn’t stop in 1945 with the fall of the Third Reich, and is very much still reflected in standing policies from both major parties in the U.S. today. Laws across the country still criminalize poverty. A growing number of states take eliminationist approaches to unhoused people and use poverty alone as grounds for removing children from their families. The state still promotes the use of sterilization and long-acting reversible contraceptives, disproportionately using both in some communities more than others. As recently as 2010, the California prison system sterilized incarcerated women without consent. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently released guidance justifying the use of permanent contraceptives in children and youth with intellectual disabilities, in which the authors simultaneously acknowledged the heinous past of permanent sterilization while suggesting permanent contraception without the capacity for consent is “respecting their inherent reproductive rights.”

The normalization of these policies across the U.S. has directly fed the rise of Trumpism, and the return of eugenics to the mainstream. The president’s support of this ideology is also explicit: Trump, throughout his campaigns and now in the White House (again), has made comments about “immigrant bloodlines,” implying Black and Brown immigrants are inherently animalistic, criminal, subhuman. This, despite the fact that Trump himself is the child of a Scottish immigrant, and the fact that he has been married to two immigrants himself—collectively, the mothers of four of his five children. The only difference, of course, is whiteness.

We’ve already seen Trump’s belief in race science—and eugenics more broadly—reflected in his administration’s actions so far. His Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, has proposed prioritizing funding for areas with higher marriage and birth rates, a directly eugenic project echoing the “marriage incentives” long promoted by the right. The administration is attempting to write trans people out of existence, both in the sense of stripping all references to the community from federal reporting, documents, and initiatives, and attacking transition care. And while abducting and trafficking people to high security foreign prisons without due process, Trump has simultaneously begun offering “golden visas” to more “desirable” (re: rich, white) immigrants to take their place, including offers of a “rapid pathway” to immigration for white South African farmers, whom he claims are subjects of “reverse racism.”

The goal of the current administration is clear: Advancing whiteness and eliminating marginalized and variant bodies. And the administration is acting quickly. Musk’s slash and burn approach to “cutting government spending” is targeting a variety of agencies and efforts that fund research and treatment of disease; an open eugenicist is heading the Department of Health and Human Services, promising to “Make America Healthy Again” by dismantling the vaccination apparatus and attacking mentally ill people; Trump has withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization; and the CDC just announced a plan to study (YET AGAIN) the thoroughly debunked connection between vaccines and autism. They’ve allegedly done all of this in the name of reducing government waste. But not coincidentally, the “waste” they’ve decried in government is often associated with programs that keep people alive, attempt to make the nation more equitable, and protect people from discrimination, all of which ties back to eugenics under a cloak of “meritocracy” and “fighting reverse discrimination.”

Enter the tech industry, whose belief that it’s superior to representative democracy isn’t anything new. Eugenics has always been a component of big tech ideology, and unsurprisingly, its cited goal of “human improvement” has only made this more explicit. The transhumanist movement in particular is rife with disablism, with disabled culture critic Anna Hamilton noting that under transhumanist frameworks “certain disabilities can, and should, be fixed for the good of humanity.” The biotech industry may be behind critical advancements, but these advancements have also come with complex implications: CRISPR, for example, makes it possible to edit the human genome, but has also allowed for tailoring embryos beyond targeting issues such as lethal fetal anomalies, and well into designer babies.

Silicon Valley is also obsessed with Great Replacement Theory—the idea that the “white race” is somehow under attack—a particular interest of the right. Musk is notably fixated on having as many (white) children as possible to do his part for the cause, seeding the world with what he describes as his superior genetics (often, allegedly, via IVF), with his daughter Vivian Wilson claiming that Musk and her mother Justine even engaged in prenatal sex selection. Fellow technocrat Mark Zuckerberg also longs for a “tribe” of children. The technofascism is on full display as a growing number of tech companies publicly move right, sometimes actively repudiating former progressive stances, while the billionaires who run them move to control the media and government.

Disabled people; Black, Indigenous people of color; low-income people; Jewish people; trans people; and others very familiar with navigating a hostile United States in undesirable bodies have been warning about this for a very long time. And while liberals and those on the left may think of eugenics as a rightwing ideology, it’s also baked into some of their attitudes, in part because eugenics is so core to U.S. culture. Recognizing that some lives are valued more than others, and the ways in which this interacts with liberal and left praxis, is challenging, especially with the external pressures of fascism and capitalism. But shying away from our own complicity in these systems only perpetuates them, and leaves some marginalized people feeling like perennially conditional members of these social movements and society at large.

This is on particular display for the disability community, which has repeatedly expressed concerns about being left out, and is tired of being told to wait its turn for liberation. This frustration is rooted in the community’s continued dehumanization, and a general sense that disabled lives are somehow more expendable than others, that disabled bodyminds do not have a role to play in the collective struggle. The long covid community, for example, as an active advocate for masking and other basic measures to prevent the spread of infectious disease, is increasingly shut out of theoretically left organizing spaces. Rhetoric in support of abortion raises the specter of a “disabled” fetus as grounds for ensuring continued access to reproductive health care. Conversations about medical aid in dying often revolve around the idea of being a “burden” on family members, or assumptions about quality of life that are rooted in solvable problems, for those with the money and the will to solve them. There is a sense that some disabled people are “unfit” for political struggle, and therefore “unfit” for existence—echoing the rejection of “the unfit” throughout the history of eugenics.

This isn’t just about disability, but about a larger lack of support for marginalized people in the midst of a project to eliminate them. This includes the sidelining of trans people at a time when they are under active assault; the prevalence of respectability politics for Black, Indigenous people of color; and the dehumanization of red states and their most marginalized residents—all of which highlight a willingness to leave some communities behind for factors entirely out of their control. The fundamental implication that life would be more convenient if these populations were to shut up, or simply not exist, is always bubbling below the surface.

Fighting eugenic influences requires challenging racism, disablism, and other discriminatory attitudes that are deeply woven into our society. It requires reckoning with the fact that class does not exist in a vacuum; and acknowledging that a person’s worth should not be dependent on their ability to “contribute to society” through capitalist exploitation. In many liberal and left spaces, this includes eliminating the anti-Blackness that pervades so many conversations, and learning the most basic foundations of disablism, starting with the continued treatment of disability as a medical issue rather than a social identity, and the assumption that disabled people want cures over full social inclusion. Antisemitism in liberal and left environments is also an enduring problem, as is resistance to conversations about how these spaces are falling short.

If it is possible to create some version of the United States that is not inherently morally bankrupt, fighting eugenics is essential, as is truly valuing marginalized people and making a robust case for their defense and inclusion at all costs. Change is possible. During the Occupy movement, for example, organizers fought—with varying degrees of success—for the application of gender and racial analysis to conversations about class. The Disability Working Group at the Democratic Socialists of America, and the increasing number of disability caucuses in other left and progressive organizations, shows that there is a growing understanding of disability’s role in the struggle. Solidarity is also on display in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, itself a eugenic project, and one Trump very much supports.

Ultimately, eliminating eugenic beliefs from our shared society may require dismantling the United States itself. The first step in that project, however, must involve an engagement with the role of eugenics in political thought, and conscious efforts to acknowledge and make good on the harm done. In the midst of the current political climate, pulling at the threads of eugenics isn’t adjacent to fighting the political right: It’s essential. The nation was founded on a basis of white supremacy, which is now woven deeply through the nation’s legal and popular culture. Whether liberals and the left are willing to continue building momentum, let alone face up to the influence of eugenics on their political values, is an open question and one that needs to be decided quickly. Challenging eugenic influences on political ideology isn’t infighting or purity policing: It lies at the heart of an inclusive political movement that actually strives towards liberation for all.

[post_title] => The United States of Eugenics [post_excerpt] => Under Trump, the ideology is on the rise. How do we finally dismantle it once and for all? [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => united-states-america-eugenics-politics-policy-race-science-disablism-transphobia-racism-xenophobia-trump-immigration [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:11:23 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:11:23 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8185 [menu_order] => 22 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 17, 2025August 3, 2026

The United States of Eugenics

by s.e. smith

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8116 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2025-04-04 16:06:16 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-04-04 16:06:16 [post_content] =>

In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends.

“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.

“You don’t seem like an only child,” people often tell me after I reveal to them that I was raised without siblings. Unsure if this comment is a compliment or a backhanded remark, I usually shrug and reply with something like, “Well, I grew up with cousins…” But what I don’t often say is my cousins didn’t quite feel like siblings, either. They felt like something else.

The truth is I don’t have an unusual amount of cousins. Five first cousins in the U.S., and one in Estonia, who I’ve never met. A growing number of second cousins once removed (the children of my first cousins). And a scattered few second cousins twice or three times removed (my parents' cousins and their offspring, respectively). It’s my first cousins, though, that I’m closest with—in large part because, as is true for many immigrant families, they were also my first friends.

As new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, my parents relied on the built-in community of care provided by our extended family: an old-world-style network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But while the adults in my family did play a role in my Los Angeles upbringing, it was my cousins who did the majority of the caretaking.

Only seven years older than me, two of my cousins in particular were somewhere between my babysitters, part-time siblings, and friends. Together, we would spend long sun-soaked summer days playing outside my aunt and uncle’s apartment. We’d make up elaborate games based on movies we rented from Blockbuster or 20-20 Video, where an older cousin worked. Sometimes, we were the “karate family,” influenced by none other than The Karate Kid. In silent agreement, we’d transform into a group of vigilante karate enthusiasts, climbing parked cars and saving stray cats from danger; cats that my uncle would rescue and bring home from his job as an LAX cab driver. Sometimes we would write our own Nightmare Before Christmas-style songs, practice obsessively, and perform them for the whole family. OOOo spooky, oooo spooky….I see a big fat moon…in the skyyy….a very big fat mooon. Sometimes, we’d be aspiring horror film producers. We would borrow my dad’s precious camcorder and record over family home videos with our very own renditions of the Blair Witch Project, nostrils and all. We even made our own version of the movie Hocus Pocus, which we titled, “The Heart of a Little Girl.” I was the little girl.

Then, the sun would set and my aunt would come home from her job as a cashier at the local grocery store, and my mom and dad would pick me up after a day of English and bookkeeping classes at the community college; or after a day of driving rich kids around. And I would always, without fail, break into tears, grabbing onto the leg of one of my cousins as they would obediently lead me to the door.

Only other only-children can relate to the loneliness. The pit of despair that formed each time, as a child, you were plucked from a social event and brought back to your parents’ apartment where you were forced to find creative ways to entertain yourself. Before we had the internet (and even after), I would spend long hours talking to the bathroom mirror, pretending my reflection was someone else. When I was with my cousins, the loneliness disappeared. When I left them, it would come back heavier than before.

The research is shoddy, but it is believed there is a correlation between only-childness and loneliness. In fact, studies have found that, compared to adults who grew up with siblings, only children often become adults who have significantly less interaction with their relatives. This may be true for some onlies, but not for me. I still, to this day, have remained close to my cousins. Even the older ones who had no interest in me when I was a toddler and they were teenagers. The ones who acted more like older siblings than friends by simply ignoring me, or making fun of my unibrow because it would “build character.” The ones who drew sharpie tattoos on my favorite doll’s face in between shifts at the video store, and made up for it by buying me a coveted “Diana’s Parking Only: Keep Out” sign for my bedroom door. And I’m still close with the ones who played “karate family” with me, too.

Cousin in Russian translates directly to “once removed sibling”; but often, the term is just abbreviated to brother or sister. Same goes for other Eastern languages like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, and Korean. This must have something to do with Western Individualism vs Eastern Collectivism. The cultural values placed on the community, rather than the individual, have slowly been eroded from Western society, leading to recent phenomena like the loneliness epidemic. But many immigrant families never fully abandon the cultures they came from, including mine—and ultimately, cousins have an important role to play in keeping it that way. They are role models. They are siblings. They are caretakers. They are friends. They preserve family traditions, like avoiding the aspic and playing Monopoly on Thanksgiving. They step in and help out when a family member is in the hospital; and when you get in a fight with your mom, they are one of the only people on earth that truly understands. Because that’s what families are for.

Of course, not every American family looks like mine. We are apparently in the middle of The Great Cousin Decline, coined by Faith Hill for The Atlantic. This is due to the usual suspects: U.S. population decline, women choosing to have children later in life, and parents having fewer children in general. As of 2022, about 55% of Americans live an hour away from their extended families, while highly educated Americans live even further. Immigrant families remain the exception. My own very American husband has little interaction with his cousins, mostly due to their geographical distance. But there is much to be lost in living apart. Hill reminds us that the often overlooked reason why cousins are especially important is that “they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.” Growing up, that’s why the loneliness never stuck around too long: I always knew that my cousins were only a phone call away.

In the Oscar-nominated film A Real Pain (2024), a pair of cousins, Benji and David Kaplan, embark on a journey to Poland funded by their shared grandmother’s inheritance. It is meant to be a cathartic trip to both honor and witness where she came from and bear the weight of the concentration camp she survived. But the cousins could not be more different. David (played by the film’s writer-director, Jesse Eisenberg) chooses to settle into modern society and accept that life is suffering, while still doing what he can to enjoy it. Benji (played by Kieran Culkin, who won Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance) is the more nostalgic feeler, who cannot seem to settle down and process pain in a modern sense. He is overwhelmed by his grandmother’s loss, and, as it’s revealed later in the film, even tried to overdose on sleeping pills a few months before the trip. In Poland, Benji cannot stomach the juxtaposition of privileged American Jews riding first class on a train to tour concentration camps, and lashes out at the group. Eventually, David reaches his limit:

David Kaplan: ...I love him and I hate him and I wanna kill him... and I wanna be him, you know? And I feel, like, so stupid around him, you know, because he is so fucking cool and he just does not give a shit. And then... just, like, being here with him is just so fucking baffling to me, you know? It's just baffling, 'cause it's like: How did this guy come from the survivors of this place, you know?

Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, who studies kinship dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, tells Hill in an interview that, “Cousins are essentially peers who can stretch your assumptions—without as much fear of the relationship ending if debates get heated.” In A Real Pain, we watch this play out: Once inseparable as children, the two cousins have since drifted further and further apart. But the cousins are also connected by their shared ancestral trauma and their unique perspectives on how to survive in modern society despite its contradictions. No matter their differences, neither will ever abandon the other.

My own relationships with my cousins have shifted over the years. I’ve become closer to some and drifted apart from others. There are religious differences, socio-economic differences, and the fact that we are simply in different stages of life. But when times get tough, we always reconnect. Like when my second cousin was diagnosed with Leukemia at a young age and I would visit her at the children’s hospital, or when our maternal grandmother who survived WWII died a few months before the pandemic, or when the most recent wars in the region broke out.

Cousins have our backs. They are our built-in friends. And from an evolutionary perspective, they have a biological stake in our survival. Our cousins are our companions for all of life’s curveballs. And while sometimes, we don’t get along, like siblings, cousins share both our family secrets and genetics. They share our lives.

I recently got married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator at the famed Little White Chapel. This wasn’t an elopement, although that was our original intent. Once we started telling our friends and family about our plan, however, some insisted on coming.

Our wedding happened this past January, in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that almost burned down my high school and destroyed so many homes of friends and acquaintances, I’ve lost count. My cousin, who was supposed to make a speech at the wedding, was evacuated from her home the night before her flight to Las Vegas. In a last ditch effort, she ended up driving with her husband, young son, and mother-in-law with nothing but the clothes on their back to make it in time for my ceremony, like a true cousin, sister, or friend, or maybe, something even better.

[post_title] => First Friends, Once Removed [post_excerpt] => In immigrant families, sometimes your cousins can be your earliest friends. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => first-old-friends-cousins-immigrant-families-los-angeles [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:15:08 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:15:08 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=8116 [menu_order] => 24 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 4, 2025August 3, 2026

First Friends, Once Removed

by Diana Ruzova

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7357 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-10-25 17:34:53 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-10-25 17:34:53 [post_content] =>

Why you should pay attention to Arizona's Proposition 314 this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

Matilde* knows firsthand the ramifications of letting local police departments enforce federal immigration laws.

She was seven years old when her father was supposed to pick her up from school one day but never arrived. Later, she discovered he’d been taken into custody by local law enforcement after a traffic stop. Her father spent almost five months separated from his family before they were eventually reunited.

“It’s a really hard thing to understand as a child that, because your parents don't have proper documentation, that they’re gone,” says Matilde, who grew up in Prescott, Arizona, about an hour and a half north of Phoenix. “It’s something that’s really hard and traumatic for children and because of that, I grew up in fear of law enforcement.”

Matilde's parents are immigrants from Mexico, and her father had been arrested after the 2010 passage of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070—colloquially known as the “show me your papers” law—which allowed local and state law enforcement agencies to ask for proof of citizenship if they suspected someone was in the country without authorized documentation. It was one of the strictest anti-immigration laws in the country, and its passage led to both national and international outcry, including marches and boycotts.

Matilde, 20, now attends Arizona State University, and is one of many activists throughout the state speaking out against a new measure—Proposition 314—that will ask voters to once again let the state enforce federal immigration laws. She is currently an Arizona’s Future Fellow with Aliento, a youth-led organization that advocates for undocumented immigrants, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and families with mixed immigration statuses within their household. Through this leadership development program, she’s been working to educate voters on the potential effects of the proposition, hosting voter registration drives, and conducting outreach campaigns within her community and on college campuses.

If passed, Proposition 314 would make it a state crime for migrants to enter the country at any location that’s not a port of entry, allow state and local police to arrest noncitizens who have entered the country illegally, and allow state judges to order deportations. The proposition would also criminalize migrants who knowingly submit false documentation when applying for federal, state, or local public benefits, as well as those who submit false information or documents to an employer to avoid detection of employment eligibility under the E-Verify program. (E-Verify is an online system that allows employers to confirm whether their employees can work in the United States.) If passed, the law would also enact certain penalties, such as an additional five years added to any prison sentence for anyone who knowingly sells fentanyl that was smuggled into the United States and causes the death of another person.

The Republican-controlled Arizona State Legislature passed a similar law in March during the legislative session, but Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed the measure. At the time, Hobbs said the bill would hurt businesses and communities around the state while overburdening law enforcement and potentially attracting lawsuits.

The state legislature referred the measure to the November ballot in June, and in August, the Arizona Supreme Court helped the proposition clear a final hurdle after it rejected a legal challenge from Latino advocacy groups who questioned the constitutionality of the law, allowing it to remain on the ballot.

In the leadup to the election, Proposition 314 has drawn the ire of activists, civic groups, religious leaders, and even some law enforcement personnel, who view the measure as an unfunded mandate that could pack the state’s prisons, overwhelm police and sheriff’s departments, promote racial profiling, and instill fear into immigrant communities throughout the state.

“It’s a huge overreach in regard to law enforcement overstepping boundaries, leading up to potential racial profiling,” says Alicia Contreras, executive director of Corazón Arizona, an interfaith grassroots organization that has spoken out against the proposition. “It really puts extreme risk and harm in our community, and when we talk about our communities, that’s our Black, brown, [and] indigenous people of color in [our] community.”

Corazón Arizona has worked with a coalition of other groups to conduct voter registration drives, host a press conference, engage the community through town halls and roundtable conversations, and work with faith leaders to help educate their congregations, Contreras says. She believes the work will continue beyond election day.

“Nov. 5 is not the end,” she said. “We’re going to continue to fight with our communities, organize with our communities, and stand up to unjust laws.”

Contreras referred to the proposition as “SB 1070 on steroids,” saying it could cause further division within communities across the state and harm Arizona’s most vulnerable populations.

“It is not going to support us, and, to be clear, it does nothing to improve our immigration system,” says Contreras, who organized and protested against SB 1070 14 years ago.

Arizona recently ranked as the state with the highest number of migrant crossings, although the number of crossings along the Mexico border have plummeted after President Joe Biden enacted asylum restrictions this summer. Biden implemented the restrictions at a time when more Americans, including Democrats, have become more resistant to immigration.

In Arizona, a poll released in September by Noble Predictive Insights showed that Arizona voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 314, with 63% saying they would support it and 16% saying they would vote in opposition to the measure. However, if passed by voters, Proposition 314 wouldn’t become law unless a similar measure in Texas, Senate Bill 4, is deemed constitutional. The Texas law, which was passed by its state legislature in 2023, has been blocked due to legal challenges.

The state’s Republicans have continually described the arrival of migrants as an “invasion,” with Republican State Sen. John Kavanagh saying during a televised debate last month that the proposition would attempt to address problems caused by the “tsunami of illegal immigrants.”

According to Kavanagh, Proposition 314 is supposed to target the “worst of the worst” such as drug smugglers, human smugglers, those on the terrorist watchlist, and others who wouldn’t qualify for asylum.

Kavanagh, who supported SB 1070 and defended the controversial law during the debate, said this measure is supposedly different because of its “laser beam” focus on stopping criminals and smugglers, instead of authorizing law enforcement to conduct roundups of migrants.

Democratic State Rep. Analise Ortiz called the proposition “unconstitutional” and a “waste of your tax dollars” during the debate with Kavanaugh. She also argued that it wouldn't “secure the border” and invoked its similarities to New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy, turning law enforcement and civil servants into immigration agents without the financial backing.

Matilde, meanwhile, only remembers the trauma of not seeing her dad for months, and has expressed fear that children and their families could experience the same hardships if this proposition is approved by voters.

“No matter your immigration status, it’s going to impact so many different families within the state of Arizona,” she says. “Our biggest thing is we don’t want children to grow up in fear.”

*Due to increased safety concerns, Matilde requested anonymity for this piece.

[post_title] => When Local Police Enforce Federal Immigration [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Arizona's Proposition 314 this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => arizona-proposition-314-immigration-border-control-patrol-law-enforcement-deportation-law-united-states-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:49:21 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:49:21 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7357 [menu_order] => 38 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 25, 2024August 3, 2026

When Local Police Enforce Federal Immigration

by Jamar Younger

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7331 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-10-23 04:23:19 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-10-23 04:23:19 [post_content] =>

Why you should pay attention to the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment this election.

This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.

As voters around the United States prepare for a tight presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, they will also have to make pivotal decisions on ballot referendums in their respective states. In Wisconsin, one of the questions this year revolves around noncitizen voting.

Noncitizen voting is illegal at the state and federal level in the U.S. On voter registration forms, people must sign under the penalty of perjury that they are a citizen, facing punishment of fines, imprisonment, or deportation if they are not. But on a local scale, noncitizen voting is allowed in some cities and towns in Vermont, California, and Maryland, allowing residents to cast a vote in school board and city council elections.

At this time, there are no elections in Wisconsin that allow for noncitizen voting. Wisconsin previously allowed noncitizen voting in 1848, but that was disallowed by 1912. In a ballot initiative on deck for Nov. 5, however, a coalition of Wisconsin Republicans are seeking to change language in the state’s constitution around citizen voting, making it as explicit as possible that noncitizens cannot vote in any election in Wisconsin.

Currently, the state’s constitution reads “every United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district who may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum.” The referendum, however, would change the language to “only a United States citizen age 18 or older who resides in an election district may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum.”

A yes vote for the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment would allow the language change and a no vote would prevent any changes to the constitution.

Behind the bill

There are 14 Wisconsin state senators and 41 state representatives behind the push to pass this referendum, an effort which began in September of 2023.

While several members of the Wisconsin Legislature did not reply to requests for interviews, Sen. Julian Bradley, a Republican among the coalition that introduced the ballot measure, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that their goal is to make it extremely difficult for noncitizens to ever have an opportunity to vote in Wisconsin. He also said he wants less room for interpretation around the law.

"If you want to vote in elections, then you have to declare your citizenship, and you have to go through the process," he told the Sentinel.

However, Debra Cronmiller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, says the initiative is unnecessary and could foster misinformation. The league was one of 30 organizations that has endorsed a no-vote on the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment and also released a toolkit with information about the ballot.

“It creates an opportunity to suggest, imply, whatever word you want to insert there, that this is a problem. This is not a problem. That's been documented time and time again,” she says. “It makes me wonder, is the real motivation here not to change the constitution to prohibit noncitizens from voting in municipal races, but is it to fuel a conversation that is more about us and them, who should have the rights and who shouldn't have the rights.”

Cronmiller compared the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment to a 2011 push by Republicans in Wisconsin to require voter IDs during elections. She said that on its surface, both sound good: ensuring that only citizens of Wisconsin are voting in elections. But she also pointed out the unintended consequences of these policies. In the case of voter IDs, not everyone has a driver's license or works for the state or is a member of a tribal community. And in 2017, the Associated Press reported that the law ultimately turned eligible voters away as a result.

“There's too many people who were unnecessarily disenfranchised because of what sounded like a good idea,” she says. “We suspect [the same] in this instance, where only a citizen should vote sounds good, but the constitution actually already guarantees that.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission, a six-member board created in 2015 to oversee election processes, reported 30 potential cases of fraud from July 1, 2023 through September 12, 2024. However, none of the cases were related to citizenship, and most were related to people voting twice or involved people with felonies.

In October of 2023, a woman in Wisconsin was charged with election fraud for voting in an April school board election, despite not being a citizen. But she admitted to the act, saying that it was a misunderstanding and that her daughter-in-law completed the paperwork due to an English language barrier, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She has since entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and the charges will be dismissed.

Anti-immigrant concerns

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin organization that works with the civil rights of immigrants, says the drive behind the ballot initiative is anti-immigration sentiment and disinformation.

“My greatest concern is that this is being used to create a narrative that is intended to motivate part of Trump’s MAGA base to turn out on election day and based on how people look, and if they’re not English dominant, they will try to intimidate and harass U.S. citizen voters to try to steal the elections,” she says.

Neumann-Ortiz is also concerned that the ballot initiative is part of a longer-term strategy of voter suppression.

“It’s been a very calculated agenda by the right wing,” she says. “There’s been a relentless attack on eroding voting rights.”

She pointed to a lawsuit, Cerny v Wisconsin Elections Commission, filed by a citizen in Wisconsin in August. In the case, Ardis Cerny, a resident of Pewaukee, sued the commission and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to challenge how the state verifies the citizenship status of voters with drivers licenses. Cerny alleges that the commission does not check the registration of applicants with the Department of Motor Vehicles list of driver’s licenses and identification cards to ensure they have citizenship. The lawsuit is still ongoing.

Neumann-Ortiz believes that the amendment would “disenfranchise so many people,” because when residents become naturalized U.S. citizens, they don’t have to go to the DMV to update immigration status, meaning the documentation isn’t always aligned. When they register to vote, however, they have to show evidence of citizenship, she says.

Immigrants who are working to gain citizenship are not interested in registering to vote illegally and jeopardizing their future, Neumann-Ortiz added.

“It’s more anti-immigration rhetoric, it’s more disinformation, and it’s voter suppression for all voters,” she says. “It’s an attack on democracy.”

The Wisconsin constitution has been amended 148 times, with the most recent change in April of 2023. In regards to voting, previous amendments have been made to expand rights based on race, gender, and age. It will also not be the only state where noncitizen voting is on the ballot in November: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina also have ballot measures regarding noncitizen voting this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislature, a coalition of members of state legislatures around the U.S.

“This question on the ballot sounds pretty good, but what you have to do as a conscientious voter is look behind the question. Why is it being asked? What could be the unintended consequences?” Cronmiller says. “Our elections are fair, they're safe, they're accountable, only the people who should be getting ballots are getting ballots. There's no problem to fix here and I think we're actually potentially creating a future problem by enacting this particular constitutional change.”

[post_title] => Is Noncitizen Voting Actually a Non-Issue? [post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment this election. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => noncitizen-voting-wisconsin-citizenship-voting-requirement-immigration-local-state-federal-united-states-election-2024 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 23:55:04 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 23:55:04 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=7331 [menu_order] => 40 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

October 23, 2024August 3, 2026

Is Noncitizen Voting Actually a Non-Issue?

by Cassie McGrath

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 6581 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-02-07 19:39:54 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-07 19:39:54 [post_content] =>

An interview with the writer-director of "Astonishing Little Feet," a short film about the first documented Chinese woman to come to America.

The first documented Chinese woman to come to the United States was told it would be temporary.

Just 19 years old (or 14, or 16—reports vary), Afong Moy was brought to America not as an immigrant, but as a curiosity, sold off by her father to a ship captain who promised he would return her on his next voyage back to Canton in two years. Moy's father wouldn't be the only one to capitalize off of her: Arriving in New York in 1834, Moy's main purpose would be to help two American merchants, the Carne brothers, sell "exotic" goods—essentially acting as a living mannequin, singing traditional songs, demonstrating how to use chopsticks, and, on occasion, walking for short distances on her bound feet as a way to solicit interest in the brothers' imported Chinese wares.

She would never return home.

Moy would go on to become incredibly famous—so famous she eventually met then-President Andrew Jackson while touring around the country. She would also die in obscurity, no record of her existence after 1850. Very little is known about her today, and even less about how she might have felt about her new life and exploitation. But a new short film seeks to capture a glimpse at both: Astonishing Little Feet, written and directed by Maegan Houang, reimagines what Moy's first experience "performing" for potential investors might have looked like—and the result is harrowing, an uncomfortable exploration of complicity, curiosity, and the history of Asians in America.

Below, we spoke with the writer-director about her film—the title pulled from surviving advertisements that bill Moy as the "Chinese Lady" with "astonishing little feet"—and the importance of not looking away from an ugly past.

The Conversationalist: How did you first decide you wanted to do a film about Afong Moy?

Maegan Houang: I was reading The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee, and there’s one line in it that mentions her. I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. It really struck a chord with me—I felt so connected to the idea that the first Asian woman most people in the United States saw was there to help someone else sell goods, just because she seemed particularly exotic and strange. I immediately thought there was a movie there.

From what I’ve read, it seems like Afong Moy was treated as a “good” herself, as a commodity. I only knew the bare minimum about her before watching your film, and then I went down my own wormhole. What struck me is how young she was. Some reports say she was as young as 14—so to even call her the first documented Chinese “woman” is a misnomer.

She was between 14 and 18—max.

What resonated most with you about her story?

It was what you just said, that she was a commodity. That she was commodified to help other people make money, because she was such an interesting, exotic object. To me, there’s no way there’s not an element of hypersexualization there, which was really resonate to how I felt growing up. For context, I’m half Asian, and I grew up in Michigan, where there were mostly white people at my school. I grew up being perceived as Asian; I also grew up understanding that I was being seen as different—but no one was explaining to me why. To me, that’s a deficit in our education as Asian Americans. I think it’s easy to blame the system, but I think it’s our own parents, who are immigrants, who really don’t—understandably—know the history of the country they moved to, and the history of how Asian Americans have been treated, and therefore have no reason to tell us. So we’re thrown into a system where we don’t really understand all this context and all this history.

In high school, when I was being really hypersexualized and sexually harassed, as many young women are, there always seemed to be a layer of cruelty, of dehumanization. I didn’t understand it, and I felt like it was my fault. As anyone who’s a woman of a minority, we all understand that there’s no one reason for everything. I can't sit here and say it's a hundred percent that I'm Asian. I don't know. But I think what I wanted in this film was—if other people know her story, maybe they'll better understand their own context as young women in our country. Because there’s no way that kind of introduction to Asian women—which continued throughout the 1800s with P.T. Barnum, with different circus acts [including Moy]—doesn’t impact our present day understanding of what and who an Asian American woman is.

Obviously, my life is not nearly as horrific as Moy's. I’m not trying to create a false parallel of trauma, because I actually really despise that. But at the same time, I think it's really important to know that there might be things about our existence and the way we're treated that really have nothing to do with us, so we don't internalize them. And that's why I wanted to make the movie, and why I wanted it to be hard to watch. Because the other thing is, I don't think there's anyone watching the film, including myself, who kind of doesn't want to look at her foot.

I was going to ask—you made the decision to show Moy's bound foot. Why give in to the curiosity of the viewer?

I think we're all ultimately quite complicit in the systems of exploitation and capitalism of even our own bodies and people. As a filmmaker, it was instinctual to some degree. But also, people feel bad at the end of the movie, because they did participate in it. I think that's fine. It's okay to feel bad. It's okay to have to question your own role in the way that we live our lives. I'm not trying to create a false equivalency. Objectively, things are better than they were then. You and I are not people who were trafficked from Asia to make people money.

It's not that our experiences are equivalent, but it is shining a light on the historical origins to certain narratives and how they're baked into Western and American culture on some level. Even though it's not nearly as bad, or as surface level.

Yeah, totally. I do believe in historical consciousness. It was only forty years ago, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. That's not very long ago.

Talk me through what was important to you in portraying the other characters in the film, especially Captain Obear and the Carne brothers.

Sometimes, I think we over-intellectualize, or—it's not a real word, but—evil-ize people, trying to prescribe more evil intention to certain things that I fundamentally don't think is there. All of them just want to rise in class. And it has an abhorrent result. But none of them think they're a bad person. None of them think they're doing something wrong. They're just operating within the rules of our society and our system. I was happy when I would screen it and people would laugh at certain things because that shows a discomfort with the absurdity of the past; we can't imagine being that way. But I think people were. So I wanted them to be realistic, but hopefully inspire people to think about the parallels that we might still have—which is also why I wanted to show the foot from their point of view, because sometimes, when you finally get what you wanted, it's really horrible, but it doesn't change the fact that you wanted it. And that's an uncomfortable space.

So much of what you're talking about is complicity and capitalism; that if you're conditioned to believe that this is the only way to succeed in life, then you become blinded by what you're sacrificing morally or otherwise in the process to achieve it.

Yes.

Which, going back to the choice to show the foot—I do want to discuss the very intense and visceral scene of the unwrapping in a second, but first, I was really struck by your choice to switch back and forth between perspectives in the film, almost as if we're both being perceived and also the perceiver.

In early screenings, I actually got notes from people that it should be more in her perspective. And I was so bummed out by that note—because that's the easy way out. Because if you're aligned with her, you are like, "I'm aligned with the victim, I'm aligned with the person being oppressed." And I think that's trauma porn, a little bit. If it's fully from her perspective, we get to feel okay, and I think that's dishonest.

It was interesting the extent to which this note would mostly come from men. I'm like, why do you need me to spell this out for you? Why is that something you need?

That's interesting, given the scene where her foot is being unwrapped—there are very obviously a lot of parallels to assault, to rape. It feels like a rape, I think, to the viewer. And that felt very intentional. I wanted to just talk a little bit more with you about your decision to approach it that way, and her translator Atung's place in all of it as the one who actually unwraps her foot while the other men watch.

All he does is unwrap her foot, and it feels like assault. I would imagine that's what it feels like to her.

Yes.

It's horrible, but it's also obviously what the men want to see, and then they're also a little bit stunned by it. With the translator, he is trapped. He just has to do what they say—this is how he eats, this is how he lives. Now, it's not enslavement, but it's imprisonment through capitalism, it's imprisonment through just needing to survive. So he doesn't want to do it, but it's what he has to do. Those are just the terms that you accept sometimes when you immigrate to a new country where you're a minority, and they're unpleasant, but they're also just reality. Unfortunately, people don't really stand up to power—but he tries. She tries. Meanwhile, [the merchants] aren't doing their own dirty work. They're observing it.

The voyeurism of it was really striking to me.

Not to be lame, but I'm a student of Hitchcock. And his whole thing was that everyone has a dirty little mind. I was trying to play with that idea, which, again, doesn't work if you're only in her perspective. You have to feel like, oh, I am sort of drawn in to this act, but I know I shouldn't be.

I really loved that the film was in Cantonese, and how that added another layer to her isolation within it.

My family is from Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese.

Mine, too.

It's really painful because Cantonese is the oldest spoken Chinese language, and when going back thousands of years to characters that we don't know how to read anymore, it's Cantonese that helps guide you, not Mandarin. It's also accurate—they would've spoken Cantonese.

It's also another way of feeling othered, being disconnected from the language around you. She couldn't speak English, which means she couldn't understand what was being said if it wasn't translated for her.

A lot of people say, well, women didn't have agency [back then], and that's something I just don't agree with. Women had agency within the confines of their circumstance, and they did employ their agency however they could. It's a myth that we have about women in the past, that they're just sitting there while things happened around them. Moy is deploying whatever agency she has. It just may not work, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't have it and that she doesn't try to use it and that she doesn't feel proud of where she's from in her culture. I imagine her dad was like, you're going to go show people what China's really like; that she was told she was going to help educate Americans. That he told her some kind of fable, because that's what people do to survive. And ultimately, she met Andrew Jackson—which, there's no way when that was happening, she wasn't like, "I'm a badass." That's just the reality of power. It's better to be an oppressed person with status than to be an oppressed person without it.

What do you think Afong Moy dreamed of?

I think she dreamed about home. There are moments even I dream about this, and I am obviously born in America, but I still dream of going back home. It's not to live there, but it's to touch and feel the culture that I don't have as easy access to. It's why I would want to go get dim sum, or why I would want to get Hong Kong breakfast, or—my family's also Vietnamese—why I sometimes just really want a bowl of pho. And I imagine in that time period, all those kind of home comforts, particularly food, would be so out of reach and so inaccessible that I would probably, if I were her, really yearn for some of those things.

On the flip side, I also think if I were her, I would dream of other types of fame, of success within the system that she's trapped within. Or freedom, which in that situation, might have been someone marrying her. I don't know.

Of course, we can't know. I was just curious what you imagined when trying to get in her headspace.

No, no, I love that question. It's so interesting. I mean, you just try to think how it would feel to be so far from home, and so poor—and disabled, which is a whole other thing. Women with bound feet were trapped in their houses basically, because they couldn't really walk. It was a status thing, and people were proud of it, but it's still really fucked up. We've tolerated a lot from the way men have tried to disempower us, and she really embodies a lot of those longstanding trends.

It feels fair to say Moy wasn't just commodified for her ethnicity, she was also commodified for her disability. Although there's overlap between the two.

Yeah. Well, it's clearly stemmed from a fetish in Chinese culture that it was more attractive to have a really small, tiny foot, to the point where everyone was maiming themselves—or each other, with the help of older women—to achieve this strange fetish. You could argue foot binding in China was also a commodification of women, because you're making women into an object that's appealing to men. I think it's a pretty abhorrent custom, in that it limited women's ability and mobility to do so many things. Now the tricky thing is not exceptionalizing or exotifying that custom as morally better or worse than other customs that other people have done to women in other cultures all around the world. It's disgusting, but I also would argue that there's a lot of disgusting things we do to ourselves to make us interesting to men that we'll all look back on in different ways, to different degrees, that become more or less acceptable depending on what's in fashion. You could argue weight loss and disordered eating is a different version of self harm and mutilation for men. Or attempting to stay young. And some people hurt themselves to do that.

I was going to say, binding feet in an attempt to keep them as small as when you were a child—could also be a means of sexualizing youth, in an extreme way.

Yeah, totally. I just view it as another norm that was really brutal, but that still has parallels to norms that we live in at the moment.

What else do you hope people take away from the film?

I just hope people think about Asian Americans in history, and how that pertains today. And also their complicity within a capitalist system of exploitation, and not in a self-flagellating way. There's a bit too much of that in our current society, and I don't think acting out of shame for the past or the present is going to resolve how our system works. We have to shine a light on things that are horrible, but also have empathy for ourselves, and for people in the past—that they're doing the best they can because of systemic factors instead of trying to look at everything so individually. That's not going to be how any of our current crises get solved. Climate change, for example, won't be solved by one person. It's going to require and necessitate collective action to fight back against the system that we live in, and it's going to require sacrifice from a lot of people that don't want to sacrifice, and questioning why do we place some lives above other lives?

I don't know. Those are just the things I thought about while making it, but I'm also fine with people taking away whatever they want, because I do think as artists, we aren't able to really control how our work is interpreted, and we have to let that go. White men love the movie, actually—I get the most compliments from white men, weirdly.

But I mean, I made it for us. People are like, "Who did you make it for?" Other Asian American women.

You can stream "Astonishing Little Feet" on Vimeo here. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

[post_title] => What Did Afong Moy Dream About? [post_excerpt] => An interview with the writer-director of "Astonishing Little Feet," a short film about the first documented Chinese woman to come to America. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => afong-moy-first-chinese-woman-america-astonishing-little-feet-short-film-maegan-houang-interview [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:49:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:49:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6581 [menu_order] => 65 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 7, 2024August 4, 2026

What Did Afong Moy Dream About?

by Gina Mei

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5693 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-03-20 17:53:11 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-03-20 17:53:11 [post_content] =>

How my culture's food brought me closer to myself.

“That’s the whitest pronunciation I’ve ever heard before.” My friend, Kian, stood to my left, joking or maybe humiliated, while a smiling Persian kid spooned a scoop of faloodeh and a scoop of pink rose ice cream into a cup, passing it to me over the register at Saffron & Rose.

“Fuh-LOO-duh,” Kian mimicked.

“You know I don’t speak Farsi,” I laughed, joking but actually humiliated. The kid handed a cup of Saffron Pistachio, described as a “love potion of Middle Eastern flavor,” to Kian. As we walked out, it occurred to me that while everyone in the shop had been Iranian, myself included, I had still been the other. I couldn’t even pronounce what was allegedly the first frozen dessert in the history of mankind, a delicious ancestral treat of paper-thin rice noodles and chilled rosewater sorbet. But I could learn, right? It was in my blood.

“Ok… so, how do you pronounce it?” I asked.

“FAH-loo-deh.”

FAH-loo-deh. Got it. I practiced a few times — and fucked up a few times — as I inhaled my pink rose ice cream and FAH-loo-deh. Being cultureless is so embarrassing sometimes. I promised myself the next time I ordered it, I’d be able to pronounce it, too.

I’m convinced I’m on this earth to eat. While adulthood has insurmountably jaded me, food is the one thing I still have child-like adulation for. I spend nearly a third of my waking life debating what to cook next, the ingredients I’ll experiment with, and which new restaurant I’ll make a sweaty, 40-minute, gridlocked-Los-Angeles-traffic drive for. I’m a proud member of probably 30 recipe subreddits. On TikTok, I’ve strategically lassoed my algorithm into serving me solely food-related content where I watch people cook with pride and eat with joy, just like I do. All Day Long I Dream About Food.

But as a half-Iranian raised by two white parents, I grew up more on hot dogs, steamed veggies, and the occasional Pennsylvania Dutch indulgence—like apple dumplings, or pork chops with sauerkraut—than anything with even a remote nod toward my Middle Eastern heritage. For a long time, I honestly didn’t even know what Middle Eastern food was.

Growing up, I never wanted to disappoint the people who raised me with excitement for something they weren’t or couldn’t understand. But naturally, I never felt my parents understood me, either. I was an insecure, unibrowed, deeply tan, and raccoon-eyed kid supremely confused about her identity. I’d stare at maps and wonder what it meant to be from “I-Ran,” as my folks and other Pennsylvanians pronounced it. Was I Asian? I wasn’t fully white. Was I Arab? Kids at school told me I was. Was any of this the reason why my hair was so thick and my eyebrows so nauseatingly connected? I liked to think I looked like Princess Jasmine with a plait down my back, but her legs weren’t nearly as hairy as mine were at eight years old. I couldn’t ask my parents questions, either, so if someone said “what are you?” and then looked at me funny when I replied “Iranian,” I’d quickly correct myself and say that actually, I was German. It was technically true, on my mom’s side. And the Pennsylvania Dutch are, after all, also German. So for me to be singularly German was easier for everybody.

While it took me much less time to admit I was also definitively Iranian, it took me nearly 30 years to explore Persian food. In a way, I was scared of what I’d find, or how much I’d enjoy it. I’d always wondered what I’d been fed during the months I’d spent in Iran as a baby. If I tried those foods again, would some small part of my soul recognize the flavor; the texture; the feeling it invoked? Would it trigger something inexplicable in me, good or bad? Would it just make sense? Would I finally become Persian?

When I first sought it out, I found Iranians are happy to share their culture of food with you, and through it, their love. They’ll also readily accept you as their brother or sister even when you know nothing about it. If you’re Persian—even half, like me—you’re unequivocally part of the tribe, fused by some ancestral chemistry and recognition I can’t quite explain. It’s like we’re all aware of the possibility we’ve known each other in previous lives and in previous, ancient lands. There within lies some familial bond.

“I don’t really know much about Iranian food,” I told my friend Nilu, who was visiting from London, over a lunch of raw onions, Persian naan, beef koobideh, and chicken kabob at Glendale’s Shamshiri Grill. It was still early in my cultural food odyssey, and we were celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which marks the beginning of spring equinox and the start of Farvardin, the first month of the ancient Solar Hijri calendar. Despite knowing nothing about it at the time, I’d already been kindly greeted with “Norooz pirooz!” and “Nowruz Mobarak!” (both roughly translate to “Happy New Year”) by several Persian friends that morning, simply for existing and being Iranian. I did not feel like I deserved it.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re Persian, and it’s Persian New Year. That’s why we’re here!” Nilu said, having admonished me just moments ago for not knowing Iranians eat plain, raw white onions the way some people might bite into an orange. “NOW TRY MY CHICKEN!” She’d ordered chicken marinated in saffron and yogurt over saffron rice with green veggies. I eyed it suspiciously.

I knew to “become Persian” I’d have to get over my immense dislike for chicken. My mom, god bless her, fed me and my family boneless, lightly seasoned, baked chicken breasts with steamed veggies several nights a week, though in my memory, it felt like every night. Pair that with a nightmare I had in college where I bit down on a chicken nugget filled with human teeth, and you’ll find chicken and I don’t have the best relationship.

I begrudgingly forked the chicken up with some rice and bit into it like a child taking a bite of asparagus. Hm, I thought, chicken’s not half bad when it’s seasoned properly. Maybe the onions would grow on me, too.

The next step in my journey was cooking a fully Iranian meal. Even though I cooked all the time, this was uncharted territory; and while I could do it myself, I knew who to call to help. My friend Jasmine (Yasi) had lived in Tehran until she was seven, and, unbeknownst to her, had given me the kindest gift a few years prior: She’d taken me to my first ever Iranian restaurant, Café Glacé, a Persian pizza spot in Westwood. There, I’d eaten a popular Iranian street food for the first time: pizza with thick bread, minced meat, loads of cheese, and no tomato sauce. Delicious. Chef’s kiss. Five stars. The stomach ache I had afterward was worth it.

Yasi had also recently given me a handful of Persian fruit leather and candies from Tehran that I think may have caused my entire awakening. So when it came time to actually try cooking something, I asked her if she wanted to make her favorite childhood meal with me, her mom’s Iranian macaroni, or spaghetti tahdig, an upside-down cake of thick noodles with tomato sauce and ground beef, seasoned with traditional Persian spices like turmeric, cumin, and cinnamon. I knew Yasi had the recipe because her mom had recorded a video of herself making it for her at the beginning of the pandemic.

“Duh,” she replied.

We dumped a can of Carbone pasta sauce into a Dutch oven already simmering with diced onions and minced garlic. After adding spices, we broke up a pound of ground beef into the sauce and let it simmer for 45 minutes, boiling bucatini in a pot for the last 15. We then filled the empty Carbone jar with boiling pasta water and dumped it into our sauce. I felt like a kid watching Yasi prepare our dinner. She was Mother at that moment, telling me how to break up the ground beef or stir the bucatini, and how much seasoning to add into the sauce. More turmeric, less cinnamon. Okay, even more turmeric.

I stirred both the sauce and the noodles individually, and watched the water evaporate along with many of my cultural anxieties. I am Iranian. It wasn’t my choice to grow up without any of the culture, and it’s fine that I was just now learning about it. I was done feeling embarrassed at my lack of knowledge. It’s not like the Persians in my life hadn’t been patient, kind, and generous with theirs.

After seasoning the sauce generously with cinnamon one more time and draining the pasta, it was time to form it into a traditional tahdig, which literally translates to “bottom of the pot” in Farsi. The point is to create a hard shell of pasta on the bottom that becomes a crispy crown once you turn it over and onto a plate. Yasi drizzled some olive oil on the bottom of the saucepan and started layering the bucatini as I heaped spoonfuls of our sauce over it. Once the pasta crisped up, we awkwardly placed a plate over the saucepan and used all four of our hands to topple it over. We ate it on her back porch with olives. She snapped a photo for her parents and I snapped one for myself.

My appreciation for this food is now indelible. Saffron has become a pantry staple and rosewater pistachio ice cream can always be found in my freezer. I intend to try a new Persian meal each month until the words, flavor combinations, and textures become second nature — this month, it was Albaloo polo: rice and sour cherries. Maybe by next year I’ll have developed an affinity for raw onions. Or maybe just a tolerance.

I live in Los Angeles, cheekily dubbed Tehrangeles, as it actually has the largest Iranian population outside of Iran. I’m in no better place to “become” Persian, because I’m in no better place to eat my way there. The beauty of food being at the center of culture is that food is a language everybody understands and, thus, can bring everybody together. When you’re breaking bread, you don’t have to speak. You all know what you’re tasting. And — outside of the idiom — I don’t need to “become” Persian. I am as Persian as my Safavid era ancestors who cut pomegranates from their trees and scooped sweet-and-sour stews up with their hands. But you can only be so close to a culture without knowing its food. Food is the dock in a harbor that guides your boat in and grounds it back to the earth. It’s a holy connector. It unifies and reunifies and is one of the only things everyone needs and enjoys. It’s home.

Now that I’ve learned them, Iranian flavors feel almost inherent to my palate. Some, in fact, taste so familiar I wonder if, as a tot, I’d ever been given a spoonful of ghormeh sabzi, Iran’s national dish of meat and kidney bean stew loaded with herbs and dried limes, or a spoonful of rosewater ice cream, which has been one of my favorites since I tried it for the first time as a teenager. Maybe I’d even had a taste of FUH-loo-deh as a baby. I know someday my children will. And I know I’ll be able to pronounce it then, too.

[post_title] => Becoming Persian [post_excerpt] => How my culture's food brought me closer to myself. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => persian-iranian-food-culture-identity [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 19:29:54 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 19:29:54 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5693 [menu_order] => 90 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 20, 2023August 4, 2026

Becoming Persian

by Helen Donahue

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 3951 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2022-03-10 22:04:05 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-10 22:04:05 [post_content] =>

Language around migration can be confusing, and the way it’s used can impact meaning. When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee?

Immigration. It’s a topic at the heart of political arguments and family dinner table rows all around the world. It drives tabloid headlines. But it’s an issue that’s poorly understood by many people. What makes someone a refugee, and what’s an economic migrant? Why do people leave their homes? How easy is it to cross a border?

This is your immigration cheat sheet — an introduction to how humankind migrates. It’s the why, how, and where. The emotional toll many have to face, and the opportunities others enjoy. The changing policies that are impacted by the world in which we live.

What is immigration?

Language around migration can be confusing, and the way it’s used can impact meaning. When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee? Meanwhile, the word migrant is often used as an umbrella term for everybody moving somewhere new, regardless of the reason — it isn’t specific to refugees. Here’s a breakdown of some key terms.

Immigration vs. emigration

The difference between immigration and emigration is about whether you’re coming or going. People immigrating are moving into a new country to live, where they become immigrants. Whereas emigration relates to those leaving.

People might also talk about net migration. This is a calculation to show whether more people are moving into a country, than out of it, affecting the overall population. If there are more immigrants to a country than people emigrating, it’s known as positive net migration.

Immigration vs. migration

Moving into a new place is known as immigration. Migration, on the other hand, is the actual act of moving. It’s when people (or birds) leave one location and journey towards another. People might cross multiple borders, or they might even stay in the same country and migrate to a different area.

Immigration under duress

Not all migration is through choice. Many people are forced to move away from their countries, leaving behind homes and loved ones.

Refugees

There are 84 million people in the world who have been forcibly displaced, either within their own countries or beyond its borders. People forced to flee their home countries for fear of being persecuted are known as refugees, and they’re often at risk due to their political beliefs, religion, race, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or sexual orientation. They might be facing war or violence in their home countries. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, people are guaranteed the right to seek asylum in another country. They’re also protected from refoulement, where states must not return refugees to places where their lives or freedom would be under threat.

Asylum seekers

Refugees who have made an application to stay in a new country, but have not yet received a decision, are known as asylum seekers. They can only make that application once they’re in the new country. As of 2021, there are 4.4 million people waiting on asylum applications across the world. Some travel through several nations before making an application — there is no obligation for people to seek asylum in the first country in which they arrive. Asylum procedures can be complicated, involving interviews, lengthy legal processes, and even detention-like accommodation.

Trafficked people

Human traffickers take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. Those escaping risky situations, or deceived into believing strangers can find themselves in disastrous situations. Victims of human trafficking can be forced into sexual exploitation, slavery, marriage, or crime. It happens both across borders and within people’s home countries.

Immigration: a brief history

People have migrated throughout the whole of history, from early human movement out of Africa to periods of colonialism. It’s nothing new. But the ways migrants are treated and the factors that drive movement are ever shifting. Climate change is forcing more people to leave their homes, and technological advances mean those who want to work from anywhere often can. The Coronavirus pandemic forced countries to close their borders, and some governments used it as an excuse to turn away people.

Immigration laws

Here’s a snapshot of how immigration laws have changed in recent history, and the moments that made big impacts:

United Kingdom

During World War II, the UK took in around 70,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. British children from cities and towns, known as evacuees, were sent to live in the British countryside, or even in other nations, away from the threat of bombs.
After World War II, the country needed help rebuilding cities and staffing the healthcare system, and invited people from the Commonwealth to move to the UK. Those arriving from the Caribbean were known as the Windrush generation. They were automatically British subjects. However, in 2017, it became clear that the Home Office had wrongly deported commonwealth citizens, after destroying documentation which would have proved their right to live and work in the UK.
The introduction of the Immigration Act in 1971 put an end to Commonwealth citizens enjoying more rights in the UK than those from other nations.
In 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union. On 31 January 2020, Brexit came into force, putting an end to freedom of movement for British citizens in the EU.

The European Union and Schengen area

In 1951, six European countries joined together with the key aim of preventing further war and furthering economic growth. Through the European Economic Community, workers were eventually given the right of free movement in 1968.
In 1992, the European Union (EU) was created. Freedom of movement for all EU nationals was enshrined in law. Two years later, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Sweden were also included in free movement measures.
The creation of the Schengen Agreement means that citizens can now travel across 26 European countries (four of which are non-EU) without facing border controls. It is a passport-free zone.

United States

The United States has long been known as a country of immigrants. In 1892, the country’s first immigration station opened — Ellis Island.
The Immigration Act of 1924 brought big changes. Fears of communism were spreading, and many Americans wanted to separate themselves from other nations after the horrors of the First World War. Racism and discrimination increased and the new law limited migration based on nationality. In the same year, the US border patrol was established to stop illegal immigrants crossing into the country.
In 1965, the nationality-based quota system finally came to an end with the Immigration and Nationality Act.
During the Trump administration, the environment for refugees became more hostile. People were forced to wait in Mexico, and anyone traveling through other countries before arriving in the US was denied the right to claim asylum. Some refugees are sent to Guatemala in a “safe third country” agreement.

Japan

Japan has a reputation for strict immigration controls. For much of history, the country has been fairly isolated, with little mix of other ethnicities.
Between 1905 and 1945, a large number of people from Japanese territories migrated to the mainland - they were Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese. After World War II, controls tightened.
The 1952 Immigration Control and Refugee Act made it difficult for foreigners who wanted to live and work long-term in Japan.
By the 1990s the aging population was causing labor shortages, and some unskilled workers were given opportunities to move to Japan. Many other visa controls were tightened.
In 2021, the government shelved a bill which would have allowed asylum seekers to be pushed back to their home countries when their applications were under appeal.

Uganda

During World War II, Uganda hosted around 7,000 Polish refugees. From this point, the country continued to welcome groups of people in need of refuge.
Uganda now has the largest number of refugees across the whole of Africa. It has an open-door policy, and people from neighboring East African countries arrive to seek safety. Refugees are given plots of land on arrival, access to healthcare and education, and the right to work - it’s known as a self-reliance model. This isn’t the whole story, and there are many challenges, but Uganda’s refugee policies are largely considered progressive. Nearly 1.5 million refugees now live in Uganda.

Immigration visas

Variations of passports and visas have existed throughout history, but up until World War I people could move fairly freely — although the opportunities might not have been as numerous. Following the war years and subsequent security fears, passports as we know them now came into being.

In 1920, the League of Nations set a global standard for the documents. While Western countries were keen for these identity documents, many other countries were against the idea and saw them as restrictive. With the introduction of passports, came entry visas, with the same goal of national security. Just a year after the League of Nations meeting, the US introduced an act that put a quota on the number of immigrants allowed into the country.

How different nations approach immigration visas is constantly in flux. EU citizens don’t require visas to move to other EU states, while nations like New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are pickier in who they welcome into their countries. There’s a large expat population in Singapore, and depending on which country you come from, getting a visa could be fairly straightforward.

World events impact visa restrictions. The coronavirus pandemic means some countries require anyone entering to be vaccinated. Technological advancements and a rise in working from home have created changes too. Estonia, Cape Verde, and Barbados are just some of the countries offering digital nomad passports, allowing people to enjoy residency in a new place, while their career continues from a laptop.

What immigration is like today

United Kingdom

Immigration laws are in a state of flux in the United Kingdom. Since Brexit, this island nation no longer allows people from the EU to live, study, or work in the country visa-free, as was the case before. In the rest of the EU, citizens can move freely.
Following Brexit, the UK has a points-based immigration system.
The government wants to change the asylum laws and push back people arriving via irregular routes. Many are forced to cross the English Channel on dangerous boats or stowed in lorries, for a lack of a safe alternative.
The UK granted British citizenship to 146,483 people in 2021 and gave residence documents to 10,135 people from EEA (European Economic Area) countries. The nation gave protection to 13,210 asylum seekers in the same year.

United States

People who want to call the United States home must first get an immigrant visa. When they land on US soil, they become a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR), allowing them to apply for jobs and live in the country. After five years, they can apply for US citizenship.
There are different rules for immediate family members of US citizens, who have to meet certain eligibility criteria. Skilled workers can also get special visas on a temporary or permanent basis.
Refugees can apply to become LPRs one year after arriving or receiving asylum. They go through a complicated system.
707,362 people received permanent residence status in 2020, a figure likely impacted by the pandemic. Previous years have usually exceeded 1 million. 29,916 people arrived in the US as refugees in 2019.

Japan

Japan is facing a labor shortage and a shrinking population. For a country long-averse to immigration, things might be about to change. The country plans to start welcoming skilled workers to stay in the country indefinitely. Until now, their visas have only been valid for five years and didn’t extend to family members. Many of the workers come from Vietnam and China.
The country operates on a points-based system for foreign professionals. Most people need a Certificate of Eligibility, applied for by their sponsor in Japan.
People between 18 and 30 can apply for a working holiday visa, which lasts for a year.
Japan has a low rate of accepting asylum seekers, compared to other wealthy countries.
Japan welcomed 115,000 immigrants in 2018, which was around 15 percent more than the previous year.

South Africa

People who want to emigrate to South Africa can first apply for a temporary residence permit, before looking towards permanent residency.
After working in the country for five years, people can apply for permanent residency. Those partnered with or related to a South African citizen can also apply, as well as some other categories.
South Africa has the largest number of immigrants in Africa — in total about 2.9 million, just under 5 percent of the population. 255,200 of them are displaced people.
Policies have become less welcoming to refugees in recent years, with 96 percent of all asylum cases rejected in 2019.

Sweden

Sweden is a member of the EU, which means that anyone within the Schengen area is free to live and work in the country. Non-EU/EEA citizens need an offer of work to apply for residency.
Different European countries have different refugee policies. Sweden had a welcoming refugee policy until 2016, and offered permanent residency visas to refugees. Since then, the number of applications being granted has declined. In 2021, the new government replaced the offer of permanent visas with temporary ones. However, the country continues to accept 5,000 quota refugees a year, who are people that UNHCR (the UN’s Refugee Agency) select to be housed in safe countries.
Sweden welcomed 82,518 migrants in 2020, which has steadily dropped from double that in 2016. The number is likely to have been impacted further by the Coronavirus pandemic. There were 12,991 new asylum seekers in the same year.

Saudi Arabia

Whether permanent or not, a visit to Saudi Arabia usually requires an in-country sponsor. However, some expats are now able to apply for a Premium Residency Card without a sponsor.
The country does not recognize dual citizenship, so taking two passports could mean you get one confiscated. Anyone who’s visited Israel might face problems entering Saudi Arabia.
Immigrants make up 38.8 percent of Saudi Arabia’s population.
877 people applied for asylum in 2020 and while very few applications have been processed yet, they’ve all been accepted. It’s worth noting that 247 people from Saudi Arabia applied for asylum in other nations.

Why people migrate

Whether choosing to set up home in a new country or forced to make journeys across borders, there are many reasons people migrate. Economic need or opportunity is a huge driver, while war and violence displace millions every year. People move to join family, study abroad, or retire. And throughout history and today, Indigenous communities have been forced from their native lands.

Migrating for economic reasons

Money is a huge driver of migration. Many people are forced to move, because of a complete lack of opportunity to earn a living in their region. Economic migration is often viewed as a choice, but poverty, dangerous working conditions, or food insecurity can mean some people have little choice but to leave their homes. For these people, migration is a case of survival.

Others choose to migrate because they can earn higher wages in other countries, find more opportunities, or follow particular career paths. Professionals from all over the world take opportunities to make homes in new countries.

Some migrant workers face economic insecurity in their own nations. For these people, the jobs on offer when they migrate are often the ones that nationals don’t want to take on. These industries can be unregulated and migrant workers are at risk of exploitation.

Demographic changes also impact migration. Aging populations come hand-in-hand with labor shortages, leaving a need for young workers. As of 2018, Japan is facing the greatest skills shortage in the world, followed by Turkey, Greece and India.

According to the World Migration Report 2020, there are 164 million migrant workers. They make up 70 percent of all migrants.

Migrating for safety reasons

There are 26.6 million refugees worldwide, with a further 48 million people displaced within their own countries, according to UNHCR. More than two thirds of these people have traveled from Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. In these countries and others, people face war, violence, and persecution. Syrians have witnessed executions in the street and had their towns and villages bombed. Politically-driven violence and food insecurity in Venezuela forces people to leave. The recent fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban has put people in serious danger.

In Ethiopia, the Oromo people face violence and persecution, as do other specific groups of people across the world. LGBTQIA+ people are often forced to leave countries that outlaw homosexuality, or face prison, violence, or even death. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, unrest and fighting between different groups means people are forced to flee. In some nations, citizens face mandatory military service. In Eritrea, that service sometimes becomes indefinite.

In North Korea, human rights barely exist. There is no access to media from outside the country, famine is rife, and citizens are conditioned to devote themselves to the ‘Great Leader.’ Defectors have little choice but to put themselves in the hands of smugglers. If they are caught escaping, they face forced labor camps. China does not recognize North Koreans as refugees, and so those who are caught are returned.

Many people who become refugees for safety reasons are forced to choose between leaving family behind in dangerous situations, or putting their loved ones at more risk on perilous journeys. It is an impossible decision. For those making the journey alone, they may have to wait years for an asylum decision before accessing family reunification channels, where some can be reunited with their families.

Migrating for family reasons

Many people cross oceans to be closer to their families. Some refugees aim for specific countries because they already have family connections, which they hope will make integration easier. Others are the partners or children of migrant workers. Then there are people who have been apart from their families, and choose to reconnect with them: they might be caring for elderly parents, seeking comfort after changes of circumstance, or moving in with different family members. Some have new family ties — through marriage, long-term relationships, or adoption.

Depending on which country they’re applying from, some people with refugee status can go through family reunification channels to bring their loved ones into their new home country.

In 2018, around 1.9 million people moved to OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation) countries for family reasons. Around 40 percent of family migrants live in the US.

Climate migration

The climate crisis is a growing concern. So too is climate migration. As our planet heats up, geography and weather patterns are disrupted. Island nations like Tuvalu are witnessing rising sea levels before their very eyes and people are reluctantly making migration plans. Storms, droughts, and floods are battering communities across the world, forcing people to relocate. To adapt to climate change, people are moving. Most people are displaced within their own countries, others are crossing borders.

Papua New Guinea is one nation under threat from climate change. Between 2008 and 2013, 151,000 people were displaced in the country, and two thirds of those were due to environmental hazards.

In Peru, people’s livelihoods are impacted by climate change. Glacial melting and temperature extremes mean fishers and farmers are facing new challenges — as are the people relying on these food sources. People are forced from rural areas into cities. Many face floods, landslides, cold, and drought.

Australia was hit by bush fires in both 2019 and 2020, forcing thousands of people from their homes and causing huge destruction to the environment.

In 2020, 30.7 million people around the world had to migrate because of disasters. 98 percent of those disasters were caused by weather and climate.

Barriers to immigration

Immigration isn’t easy. Once geographical and emotional barriers have been navigated, there are those conditions imposed by governments. And when people are accepted into countries, they might face new challenges — language and cultural barriers, racism, and finding work. The coronavirus pandemic has put another barrier in the way, causing backlogs and closing borders.

Government paperwork

For people who’ve been forcibly displaced, one of the first barriers to immigration can be a lack of passport. People who’ve fled their homes with nothing have difficulty proving their identity or crossing borders safely. When it comes to accessing jobs and education, it can be hard to prove education levels without physical certificates. Once people have applied for asylum, complicated processes, technicalities, or a lack of support can leave people with rejected claims or facing deportation.

Migrants who have relocated willingly are still at the hands of bureaucracy. Lengthy forms or restrictive visas can dissuade people from migrating, or they might be rejected for visas. For people on temporary visas in certain countries, accessing permanent residency can be a stressful process that takes years. I could mean staying in unpleasant jobs just to hold on to a sponsor, or paying out vast sums of money.

There are other pieces in the paperwork puzzle. Criminal record checks, medical reports, and vaccination certificates, to begin with. Couples and families might need to prove that they’re in genuine relationships.

Language

People applying for citizenship in some countries have to prove their knowledge of language and culture.

Asylum seekers can be acutely affected by language barriers. A lack of suitable translators leads to some claims being misinterpreted. People can be, and are, returned to unsafe countries due to being misunderstood or not being given enough opportunity to represent themselves. Accessing services and assimilating into wider society can also prove tough when people are learning a new language from scratch, all whilst dealing with the impact of trauma.

Financial requirements

Immigration can come with a huge price tag. Aside from the usual costs of moving home (along with flights and international haulage), there might be expensive visa fees.

Beyond this, some countries impose further financial requirements, like the salary that migrant workers need to earn. Those applying for family visas in countries like the UK and Canada might have to prove that they can financially support the people they want to bring over. In Australia, those applying for student visas need to prove that they can financially support themselves. In South Africa, anyone who wants a retired person’s visa needs to prove that they earn at least R37,000 (nearly $2,500 US) per month.

Restrictions on migrants

Migrants don’t always have the same rights as nationals. Asylum seekers in many countries are prohibited from working or studying while their applications are being assessed, which can make supporting themselves difficult, as well as impacting their wellbeing. Even though many have been through traumatic experiences, some asylum seekers are held in detention centers. They can be unsanitary and crowded.

In some countries, immigrants are required to pass a language test, undergo medical tests for things like Tuberculosis, or pay extra to access healthcare systems.

People arriving on some visas might be advised not to leave the country again — for example fiancé(e)s arriving on a family visa before the wedding takes place — or risk having to reapply.

The future of immigration

The climate crisis, a health pandemic, and political tensions are all playing into how migration is changing. People stayed put as borders closed to stop the spread of a virus, while others were forced to flee their homes regardless. Technological advances offer greater opportunities for global citizens, while far right politics threaten freedom of movement. How countries respond to refugees is in constant flux, and there are at the same time both positive and worrying trends.

According to Move by founder of FutureMap, Parag Khanna, throughout history we humans have been driven to migrate by five forces: climate change, demographics, politics, economics, and technology. Climate change, now more so than in recent centuries, is going to have a huge impact on migration. It is already happening.

As the US moves further away from the Trump administration, which was famously hostile towards migrants, the UK closes its borders to many. The effects of Brexit are coming into being. Tension in Russia casts a shadow over Europe and beyond. And people left at risk in Afghanistan are still awaiting the refuge that so many countries have promised.

Whether the world chooses to build more bridges, or more walls, is yet to be seen.

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March 10, 2022August 28, 2024

A beginner’s guide to immigration

by Katie Dancey-Downs

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