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Immigration Episodes

Dec. 11, 2023

Jewish War Brides of World War II

In the ravages of post-World War II Europe, some Jewish women survivors of the Holocaust found the beginnings of a new life when they met – and married – American (and Canadian and British) men serving with the Allied forces…
Guest: Robin Judd
May 15, 2023

The Diversity Visa Lottery

In the 1980s undocumented Irish immigrants convinced United States lawmakers to create a program that would provide a path to citizenship for individuals without family connections in the United States. That program eventual…
Guest: Carly Goodman
Feb. 27, 2023

The Eastland Disaster

On the morning of July 24, 1915, employees of the Western Electric Company and their families excitedly boarded the SS Eastland near the Clark Street Bridge in Chicago, eager to set off for a day of fun in Michigan City, Ind…
Feb. 20, 2023

The History of Polish Chicago

If you’ve ever lived in Chicago, you’ve probably heard at some point that Chicago has the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw. While that’s an exaggeration it’s certainly the case that the Chicagoland region has a la…
Nov. 28, 2022

Single Irish Women & Domestic Service in late 19th Century New York City

As many as two million Irish people relocated to North America during the Great Hunger in the mid-19th Century. Even after the famine had ended, Irish families continued to send their teenaged and 20-something children to th…
Guest: Vona Groarke
Oct. 17, 2022

Bert Corona

Labor leader and immigrant rights activist Bert Corona viewed Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the United States, both with and without documentation, as one people without borders, and he understood that their st…
Oct. 10, 2022

The Effect of the Mexican Revolution on Mexican Immigration to the U.S.

The Mexican Revolution in the early 20th Century was a pivotal moment in Mexican history, and it was also a pivotal moment in United States history, as huge numbers of Mexicans fled war-torn Mexico and headed to the US borde…
Guest: Alda Dobbs
Oct. 3, 2022

Southwest Borderlands in the 19th Century

Through the 19th Century, the US-Mexico border moved repeatedly, and the shifting borderlands were a space of cultural and economic transition that often gave rise to racialized gendered violence. In this episode I speak wit…
May 30, 2022

Chinese Grocery Stores in the Mississippi Delta

During Reconstruction, cotton planters in the Mississippi Delta recruited Chinese laborers to work on their plantations, to replace the emancipated slaves who had previously done the hard labor. However, the Chinese workers …
Guest: Larissa Lam
May 16, 2022

The US-Born Japanese Americans (Nisei) who Migrated to Japan

In the decades before World War II, 50,000 of the US-born children of Japanese immigrants (a quarter of their total population) migrated from the United States to the Japanese Empire. Although these second generation Japanes…
Guest: Michael Jin
May 9, 2022

Thai Americans & the Rise of Thai Food in the United States

There are around 300,000 Thai Americans but almost 5,000 Thai restaurants in the United States. To understand how Thai restaurants became so ubiquitous in the US, we dive into the history of how Thai cuisine arrived in the U…
May 2, 2022

Mary Paik Lee

Mary Paik Lee (Paik Kuang Sun) was born in the Korean Empire on August 17, 1900, and was baptized by American Presbyterian minister Dr. Samuel Austin Moffett, one of the first American Presbyterian missionaries to come to Ko…
Guest: Jane Hong
Dec. 13, 2021

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was born in China in 1896 but lived most of her life in the United States, where, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, she had no path to naturalization until the law changed in 1943. Even though it would not…
July 19, 2021

The El Centro Hunger Strike of 1985

In 1945, United States immigration officials opened the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp in El Centro, California, to be an administrative holding center for unauthorized Mexican migrants, many of whom had been working o…
Guest: Jessica Ordaz