 The basic stories are people are escaping all kinds of persecution in the homeland because of who they are. And because of climate change, people want to have a better world for themselves and for their children. And those are so primary desire of all human beings. It's just that in the world today, even our national borders, we are closing those doors and therefore refugees and asylum seekers have become an issue. But asylum seekers and refugees are not asking for their hand out. They are simply people migrating to a better place to make life better for their children and their family. They want to be free. I mean this is our human spirit, we all want to be free in whatever way you do it. I'm not putting a political term to it. They want to be free to be happy, to be able to support themselves, explore the world, have a chance for their imagination to bloom. So I think this is a basic human spirit using anthropology to go into doing work that assists the asylum seekers by seeking refuge. I know someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Allen? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sacian. We are still on site at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. This is our second partnership with them. We are now going to be speaking with Dr. Chor Suan Ninh. Hi Suan. Hi. Good morning. Thank you for coming on our program. Thank you for having me. And congratulations on your new book, Identities on Trial in the United States. You've been professing for a long time, 26 years at Cal State, Los Angeles. You also founded the Asian and Asian American Studies AAAS program at CSULA. And this new book is really profound about the radical shifts, radically shifting the asylum-seeking narrative. And I'm really excited to dive into it. I want to ask you one of our favorite questions that we ask on the show. Do you think that we're really all one? Yes, of course. The refugees and asylum seekers are no different from us. We are all one. We are all part of the human condition. What is the most upstream issue that we face? Is it our feelings of separation from each other and from nature, this lack of interconnectedness? I think we are really connected. Refugees and asylum seekers are knocking on our doors. And what do we do? All that we need to do is just open the door. We are one. We are really one. And in a way, we could ask the question. Why are we knocking on our doors, the doors of mostly the Western democracies? And that's because there are problems in the world. I think if we don't see them in a negative way, if we see them as people who are questioning the system that's not right in the world, then we all want all of us inside behind this door are also searching for a better world and finding better answers for all of us in the world. Yes, yes, architecting the next world that maximizes flourishing for all of us. And what is it about this from a very macro level perspective, from a very historical context, it doesn't even seem like there were ever any borders, that there were ever any tribes, that this has always been just a human tribe, and then over time it became borders with resources, with governments, with hierarchies, with tribes. With now, there's an asylum seeker and they even have to knock. And that even with the more enlightened we are, the less we even have war and conflict that causes asylum seeking. Has that been a pretty common theme? Is that, is it war and conflict that causes people to asylum seek in the first place? There are two parts to it, if you look at the world historically. People have always searched for refuge in the Arabian Peninsula in the past. People knock on doors and in the past people provided hospitality in their tents for people who escaped difficulties in their tribe and in their homeland. Today we have the same mechanism, but it's more text that's all. So the question is, do we have the same hospitality for those who are seeking help? If you think about the major religions in the world, we have always given help to other people. So given hospitality and help, it's a human value, it's a human condition that we have always done. And the fact that we are closing more doors, of course, the governments can say we are overwhelmed by all these ravages coming to our country. They can always say they are in various negative terms. That is the current condition, okay? We can go into why those things happen. But in terms of the larger picture, we have always been asking for help. And hospitality. And given hospitality at the same time. So this is no different. I love those two words, help and hospitality. So over time, there's always been, since the dawn of time, there's always been times of people coming and asking for help and other people providing hospitality. And that's been a major aspect of our cooperation and our social bonding and our ability to do that process of maximizing flourishing, just making it so that people feel loved. And that being a really rooted principle, I like that a lot, help and hospitality. Now what is, you know, it does seem like there's a mainstream media fear-based narrative that is propagated. And also you can kind of see in some levels of childhood consciousness that children that are born with other children around them of different religions or skin colors and all these different types of things end up being more open. They have a deeper level of openness. And then kind of like the more archaic, older consciousness maybe still has a little bit more fear, xenophobia, things like this. Do you kind of see a younger consciousness that's more open as well? I think we can go into the theories and topology as to why people close their doors, why people put up categories of who can get in and who cannot get in. But I hope we don't go into that topic today because there are some basic stories we need to tell first. Yes. What are these stories? The basic stories are people escaping all kinds of persecution in their homeland. Because of who they are. And because of climate change, people who want to have a better world for themselves and for their children. And those are so primary desire of all human beings. Yes. It's just that in the world today, even on national borders, we are closing those doors and therefore refugees and asylum seekers have become an issue. But asylum seekers and refugees are not asking for a handout. They are simply people migrating to a better place to make life better for their children and their family. That's very profound, even just that. You kind of give us this idea of someone just being born into the world and wanting to, when they look around them, they see a lot of maybe conflict or complexity, things that cause them to want to seek a better life for themselves and their children. And then this is where maybe refuge and asylum seeking happens and not seeking a handout but seeking a better life for themselves and their children. I like that way of framing it. They want to be free. I mean, this is our human spirit. We all want to be free in whatever way you do it. I'm not putting a political term to it. They want to be free to be happy, to be able to support themselves, explore the world, have a chance for their imagination to bloom. So I think this is our basic human spirit. Yes. Wherever you go, that's why we migrate out of Africa. Human beings have gone all over the world. Exploration. Exploration. Adventure. Creativity. Creativity. Right? Yeah. So it's not because they are here knocking. I don't know. Do you want to say, give me your welfare system? No. They think about themselves, but they don't think about what you have. They think about who they are and what they want to do because of their love for their family and for themselves because they're adventurous. That's our basic human spirit. Swan, I have a question. Where were you born? I was born in China. Where? In China. In South Eastern part of China. The reason is because my grandfather had gone to Southeast Asia before the 1900s, then he sent for my father to join him. Then when my father was of age, he sent my father back to China to marry my mother. It was a matchmaker marriage. So I was born there and when I was two, they took me to Singapore to join them. Then they sent me to Malaysia. My father and my mother went with me to, at that time, British Malaysia. And that's where I grew up. Wow. And so this also, in many ways, explains your focus on Southeast Asia and Asian refuge and asylum seeking. So now what's actually going on? There's a lot of conflict. Let's talk about what is the conflict that is causing people to want to do refuge and asylum seeking and then we can get into the actual stories and trials. There's conflict everywhere in the world. People have conflict because of differences between groups. And oftentimes the differences are created artificially by dosing power. And as a result, people who want to search for a better refuge or to be free, they leave their country. This is speaking about people migrating in general terms. What is the interest of people in power to create artificial differences to try and move people into asylum seeking or refuge? Do they want their land? Do they want their resources? What do they want? Why do people want power? Why do people seek more things beyond what they need to live on, to eat? If you have one pillow to sleep on, why do you need six pillows? If you need one plate of food, why do you need five plates? Or if you have one house, you have shelter, why do you need real estate everywhere in the world? I mean, that I do not know. So I think it's that greed for power, the greed for resources that lead to other people not having some of those things or preventing other people from having some of those things. So some people must leave. And then the explanation we give is because, oh, they are from a lower group of people in society. They are from there. They are not one of us. They don't have the same belief. They don't have the same outlook about life. So this is why people are persecuted, that's the word. It seems like the most upstream issue then is people that have yet to enlighten and therefore focus more on greed and dehumanizing and creating the artificial differences that then cause asylum or refuge, which then make it so that they themselves can do things like further propagate their power, their wealth. So there is a really deep need, we talk about this quite a bit, for these 1500 billionaires on the planet to have a deeper sense of interconnectedness, unconditional love, architecting the next world but also on a grassroots level, we need to build that next world as well. And I want to, let's do some of the examples are some of the, I think this one at least has been talked about a little bit, but the Rohingyns is one of them in Myanmar. This is one of the examples of people being displaced. Yes. Yes. The Rohingyns are Muslim and the country where they came from is Myanmar and most of them are Buddhist. Of course the Buddhists could see them as Muslim and try to expel them and that's the official narrative. But if you were to look at the grassroots level, Muslims and Hindus have always lived next to each other throughout most of Southeast Asia. Even today, there are Muslims and Hindus and Christians who live right next door to each other. So how did that happen in Myanmar? That's the question I think and each country has its own story about exclusion, but then go back to your question about the grassroots level. Do we know our neighbors? Do we worry if our neighbors are Christians or Buddhists or Muslims? For the most part, we don't care. It's not an issue. We can still go about our business washing our cars, cooking our meals, going to work. We don't worry about their beliefs. And it's at that point about how can we get along? Can we still coexist regardless of their beliefs? Or if we still go to work, you know, go through our routine every day? So it's not in the way they're religion. It's not the religion. It's not in the way. Many things that we talk about that divide us. So how do we then... So I mean, go back to your thing about the millionaires and millionaires. Should they think about... Should we try to enlighten them for them to think about the rest of the world? I don't know. I don't know what to do because I don't know any millionaires. But I think at the everyday level, if the person happens to be my neighbor, could I be a friend to that person regardless of the person's wealth? The same way I say, can my neighbor be my friend regardless of the person's belief? So it's that level of interaction. So human... I don't think about you right now as a person of a different color, faith, or wealth. So we are able to talk to each other and explore these very important and unique questions about human condition. So how do we reach that level of our... So we use the word commonality. That commonality is our humaneness, our human oneness. The love in the hearts, just that unity. How do we reach that? How do we make that something common for not only people at the top of socioeconomic status, top of governments, top of corporations, and also on a grassroots level? How do we make it so when children are born into the world that those are the things that we prioritize? We talk about this so much, but rather than prioritizing the... You mentioned this as well. Instead of when you have one home, instead of going for five or 10 homes, or five or 10 designer watches, or clothes, or cars, or boats, or planes, et cetera, think about the other gifts that humans can bring into the world that 50% of them are still making less than $2.50 a day. What if they got patroned even $1,000 from you or $10,000 from you? What could they unleash creatively into the world that would make the world a better place? And so I'm very, very fascinated with that exact question, and then architecting the next protocols that enable the flow of that enlightened capital to the artistic endeavoring of these beautiful hearts of so many people. And then also, we started on... We just gave one example of Muslims and Buddhists living nearby each other and being able to find peace in pluralism versus trying to create some sort of artificial differences that then create refuge and asylum seeking. I really want us to get behind the eyes of specific cases that you write about, and you actually even had a courtroom attorney who participated in some of the chapters. So yeah, teach us about... Let's get behind the eyes of some of the examples and then the complexity of what the trials are even like. Well, since we are at the American Anthropological Association, I'm going to talk about what we do in anthropology. So in anthropology, we teach about race. We do research on race, culture, ethnicity, gender, religion, issues. And these are the subjects our students learn. But in the case of asylum cases, these are the same criteria that the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees require for people to say, I was persecuted on account of my race, my religion, my membership in a particular social group that usually means gender issues, my nationality and my political opinion. So how can we think about using anthropology to go into doing work that assists the asylum seekers who are seeking refuge? Okay, that's a macro question we are talking about. And I should tell you also my first case. My first case came about because this woman from Indonesia, she said she was from Indonesia and she faced a kind of turmoil in her homeland and then she escaped by coming to the US on a tourist visa. Then she applied for asylum and the immigration officer in Anaheim, Orange County said that you have not proof that you are of the Chinese race. She said that you were persecuted because you were Chinese in Indonesia. Well, go prove that you are Chinese of the Chinese race. But she said, how do I prove myself as a Chinese race? And he said, go and find an anthropologist. So this woman and her paralegal actually contacted a forensic anthropologist who told her that if you came to me dead on arrival, I could do some osteometric measurement on you. Then maybe I could tell you where you came from. But she said that's not the kind of answer I want. So she contacted me not because I've done anything like this. I teach anthropology, general anthropology, I teach courses on race and racism, courses on Asia. And then the first question she asked me when she came to my office was, can you tell that I'm Chinese? Well, anthropologists talk about race as a social construct. We cannot tell if a person's of the Chinese race or whatever. So I said, I'm not going to answer that question. Then she told me her story about what had happened to her and how she fled with 100,000 people from Indonesia, about what, about Chinese towns were burnt and Chinese women were getting raped in public. So I was thinking to myself, how can I help her? I've never done this before, and who should I contact? I don't know. But I grew up in Malaysia. I speak the local languages, Bahasa Malaysia, the language of Malaysia and also the language of Indonesia. I also speak several Chinese dialects. So I said, if I don't help her, who will? So I sat down with her and we had a long interview. And I figured out who she was. The other thing was, if I cannot use the word, the idea of race in court, then what about using her culture? If you don't use race as a criteria. If I'm not able to verify her race, what about using culture as a proxy, as a substitute? But this woman came to me without a Chinese name. She didn't speak Chinese. She didn't know how to write Chinese. How do you prove that? She's of Chinese background. So I worked on that and I wrote a chapter called, How Chinese Must a Chinese Be in the Book. So how much do you have to be of Chinese value or characteristic in order to be a Chinese? But eventually, using a kingship diagram, using how she addresses her relatives, using how her mother addresses her, calls her. I was able to figure out she was indeed of Chinese origin. When you compare her by a process elimination, she couldn't be another person from Indonesia. So I was able to do it, despite the fact that the lawyer for her and the immigration officer said that we need to prove her race. So I was able to verify that she was of Chinese background without using the idea of race and the judge granted her asylum. Why do we even ask for proof of race? And can't we use DNA ancestry? Can't pinpoint where from hair or saliva? The idea of race was created during the enlightenment when the Europeans were out there exploring the world and they came upon people who were quite different from them. So at that time, there was a classification of people based on different so-called races, Caucasian, Mongolian, and so on. And those ideas had been banished a long time ago. But the idea of race was used during Hitler's regime. He was interested in the purity of the race, of the superior race. So the idea of race can be pure and others are less pure came to dominate the thinking of what we call scientific racism by thinking that there are some people who are not of the superior race. There have been races against them. That's the term we use in anthropological scientific racism. So in 1951 UN Convention on Refugees was created and also a couple of other declarations before that there was the counter-Hitlers expelling a killing of more than six million people in Europe besides the Jews, the people who were killed were also people from Poland, people who were handicapped, people who were gay and people who were not pure, not part of the superior race. So the 1951 Refugee Convention was to really argue that people who were persecuted because of their race should be allowed to have refuge in a different country. So that was how it came about. But since then, biologists and geneticists have been looking at the idea of race. And they say, human beings are all of the same race. There's no gene for race. The difference between, let's say, give you two extremes, a black and a white person, an African-American and a white person in the US. The difference between those two individuals is at the most maybe less than 1% in terms of differences. We share more in common, we share 99.9% in terms of similarity. And what accounts for the differences are just a few things such as skin coloration, hair texture. There are lots of things that we share that we don't see. So there isn't really a gene for race. There's no gene for race. So biologists and geneticists don't study race anymore. It's a non-starter. It's a waste of everybody's time. But in the social sciences, in the everyday world, the race was retained. And it is retained because every nation in the US, for example, in 1790, when the census was first used, the census tried to think about people within the nation. Can they be responsible for taxation? Can they vote based on that kind of criteria? Then some people were given one label or the other. For instance, in 1790, the Chinese were not considered citizens and they were not white, and therefore they couldn't be citizens, and they were not white. In fact, the Chinese were classified once upon a time as Negro in the US. So the US census created all these terminologies for people in the US. We can say that race and later on ethnicity are really social constructions of the US census, of the US government by way of the US Census Bureau. But law was also out there to perpetuate what had created earlier on. So the US Census Bureau, US laws, and social scientists follow the same pattern of using the word race and using the same classification. Let me give you one example that I found very interesting. When Franz Boas, the famous anthropologist who escaped German Nazism, came to the US and became the founder of anthropology at Columbia University. He was asked by the Armenians in the US to define their race, and Franz Boas said that they were white. At the time when the Armenians were classified as white, they were able to own land and they were eventually able to become citizens, and this is really important. The Japanese who were on the West Coast, they didn't consult with Franz Boas. They were not allowed to become citizens. They were not allowed to buy land, own land, and later on, by the Second World Tour, they were interned. How a person is defined has tremendous consequences, and yet this idea of race was socially constructed historically to exclude certain people. But today, we talk about all black, white, and so on. And that's a legacy from this historical period when race was created, and we call that social race. I think we have not done a good job of reflecting on the uselessness of how that term divides us, because if you were to sit two people together, we have a lot more in common than what we are different, and what we are different may be a few minor characteristics, and you and I don't even care whether the person is a shade browner, or darker, or lighter, you know, because that doesn't affect our relationship, our interaction. Their heart and their level of enlightenment is the most important thing. And you give us this macro-level picture of evolution where it comes to a point of oneness, of unity of the species, and then from there then the social constructs of dividing us by differences make it so that then it does, in a sense, make tie it to this point that you made earlier where people in positions of power or when greedy can point people at each other for those differences, create artificial conflict, and then create refuge and asylum-seeking. And you use this word again, help and hospitality. You use these words again. When someone comes knocking in refuge and asylum, I was very surprised when you said that there needs to be some sort of documentation of the person's race, when really it's just another human, and that when the human comes in need of help and hospitality, it's about figuring out how to provide that help and hospitality. And so that's why this example of you going through with this Indonesian seeking refuge in the U.S. and Anaheim, it was very surprising to me no learning about our process. There must be better ways to create help and hospitality in these circumstances around the world. And because it is for the human heart and the human enlightenment to do our best to provide people with a better life towards flourishing in their children. So this is one example, one of many examples. There's a lot more nuance. Yes, we'll give us some more as well. Let me just give you one more example about why anthropological expertise is important in this kind of work. So there are women out there who have claimed that, in fact, in one of my couple of my cases, they claimed that they were victims of horrible sexual violence. When that happens, we don't have weaknesses and we don't have fiscal evidence by the time they come to the legal system to apply for asylum. So how do we deal with something like that? So for me as an anthropologist, the law, of course, requires that she must prove persecution because of the fact that she's a gender woman. That's what we have to do. So for me as an anthropologist, I say we study culture. We study a person's role and position within the society. So I solved the problem of this woman and that case is mentioned in the book. I solved the problem by thinking about her and how she felt so ashamed in her community. She was so ashamed she could not even face her husband. And they didn't have a relationship for a long time. She said every time he tried to touch on her shoulder, she would say, I'm tired. She was so ashamed she ran and escaped and lived in her sister's house where nobody could see her or know her. And she told her daughter, go tell people I've moved to a different country. So on her face, from her physical appearance, it cannot tell that something had happened to her. It was a violation of her sanity in terms of how she sees herself. So when I listened to her stories and the trauma that she had gone through, so I wrote about how she felt so shameful. It was a shame that defined her life, that structured her everyday behavior. And I told that story. I wrote that story for the judge and for the government attorney because they read that document and she was granted asylum. I was so happy. So in other words, the judges and the lawyers, these asylum adjudicators, they are human beings too. They listen, they can relate to those stories as much as people say, oh, they are fraudulent, they are economic migrants, they want to be here because they want to get a piece of the American pie. But how do you account for the fact that they are judges and lawyers who also give them asylum? Not because I did a good job of proving that they were persecuted because of this other. But I think somewhere along the line, they must have opened their heart. Yes. They must have seen that something really horrible happened to her. Yes, it happened, but also the fact that she was wounded as a person and that the adjudicators can relate to that human beings can be wounded and they also want something better. This is why I'm optimistic that the system works as much as I know how difficult it is for asylum seekers to win asylum. I love the focus on healing these traumatic experiences and when in need of help, we provide hospitality towards healing, towards growth and towards evolution and we can build a better future together that way. We give us an idea of some of these numbers. How many asylum adjudicators are there in the U.S.? How many people seek asylum or refuge in the U.S.? Maybe per year, do we have an idea of these numbers? The numbers are out there, but I'm not keeping track of the numbers. I know that we have been emitting fewer and fewer refugees in the U.S. We used to be the biggest refugee takers in the world used to be. How many was that? Do we know approximately? After the Vietnam War, we took over a million refugees from Vietnam. We took in a lot of Haitians and then people from Central America gave them temporary protective statuses, TPS, so we've been taking them in one fashion or the other. But this past two years, our number for refugees have gone down tremendously. I cannot even... I don't want to quote the number because it was so low. It was embarrassing. There's a colleague of mine who has been working with a refugee and she was looking at support for this young man and she had to reach out to different people and she reached out to the presiding bishop's fund all the way to the top. I said, do you have funding for this young man at my university who needs help for besides housing, school fees? They said, yes, we have the funding because we have not been supporting refugees going to the U.S., so it's that kind of level. I want to let you know in terms of repercussions. In this case, this is a good repercussion for this young man, but so we are not taking as many because I don't want to quote the number. The numbers keep changing, the refugee laws keep changing in the U.S. I was going to ask you that next. What are the refugee and asylum-seeking laws in the United States and how do they differ between countries as well? Some countries in the world have signed on to the 1951 Refugee Convention and then they also signed on to the 1987... I'm not sure what's the term... the amendment that updates the 1951 Convention because there was four people escaping Europe and then since then, other countries, people can come to protocol, 1987 protocol. So some countries do and some countries don't. So let me give you one example. In the case of Malaysia. So the U.S. is a member of the Refugee Convention and we accept refugees. Of these protocols? Yes. And how many countries are a part of these protocols? Do we know? I don't know. I mean, most of them are Western European countries. So Germany, France, Italy, UK, Sweden, Norway. And there's some sort of asylum adjudication process that... Within each nation. Within each nation that follows the protocols? Yes. So in the case of Malaysia, Malaysia did not sign on to this protocol. So then you have a large number of Rohingyans and Syrians right now in Malaysia. In fact, there are 170,000 asylum seekers who are Rohingyans, Syrians, Afghans in Malaysia. They are registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR. So they are living in Malaysia. They are not living in refugee camps. They are scattered throughout the community, find housing whenever they can. But because they are not recognized by the Malaysian government, they cannot work legally. So they are big companies that want to hire them but they are afraid to break Malaysian law because they cannot hire them legally because they are not recognized as refugees in Malaysia. So this is a difficult bind for the asylum seekers. It's a difficult situation for the UNHCR. They don't have jurisdiction over Malaysian law. And the Malaysian politicians, I mean, why do politicians do what they do? I don't know. There are many reasons I don't want to explore. I'm looking for Malaysian politicians who say, you know what, they are our neighbors, right? They are here already. They're not in refugee camps. They want to contribute. Unamendment to enable them to work. Why not? Why not? They're already working. It's just that they're working illegally and therefore they're exploited by the employers. Versus legally, yes. Yes, versus legally, they can improve their condition a lot better. The US opened the doors to the Vietnamese 35, 40 years ago. We did that. And look at what happened today to the Vietnamese. They are one of the most successful groups. They are our doctors and optometrists and dentists and teachers and engineers. In our community, the same with the Haitians, right? And the Cubans especially in Florida. So we have done a great job and we think about the other people who came from other countries, from Poland, from the UK, from Ireland, from Italy. They are part of the makeup of the US. And what makes America great is all the people who said the system in my country didn't quite work. I'm coming here to make the system better. So if you think about the asylum seekers and refugees today knocking on our door here, they are doing the same thing. They are the critique of the systems they have not worked elsewhere. And they're saying you want to make things better. So I do want to see them as abstract numbers or in a negative way. I see them as people with such clarity about what's going on and we're able to critique what is wrong in the system. Yeah, if the hospitality is provided at these times of need of help, then it can make it so that all of these unique, this melting pot of creative gifts that can be brought to upgrade the system can actually be actualized and brought forth. And that's a really beautiful way to view it and put it. We are all part of the moral community. Yeah, the other thing that you mentioned there was that you can take these on the individual story by story basis of getting behind the eyes which is extremely important. And we can also do things like take it onto larger numbers also to hopefully entice other people to care more about this. And we were talking about this just a little bit ago but these refugee camps around the planet, we're not even talking about people coming and knocking on the door seeking a refugee or asylum and seeking greater economic flourishing for themselves and their children but we're talking about camps filled with hundreds of thousands of people around the world where it's just stuck in the camp itself. And if you view any of these photos, there's like the Dadaab refugee camp, there's many of these with hundreds of thousands of people where it is like little shanty towns. And it's not, we sit here with the utmost privilege compared to that. And we need to be very aware and respectful to that privilege and then use that privilege to support redesigning the social fabric so that more people can be uplifted faster into greater flourishing. That's the burden that we have on us. That's what I wrote the book for my students. It's the young people who will need to take on that responsibility to help out. Yeah, I love it, I love this one. I wanna ask you another question. This is probably the last question that we can revisit this as we hopefully continue featuring people that are studying specific, such beautiful specific anthropological macro movements like this as well as on a micro level getting behind the perspective of all of the individual's eyes so we can better understand our humanity and how to build the next world. The last question I really like asking our guests is what do you think is most beautiful? That we are able to sit next to each other and talking and having a conversation. It's a privilege. I'm happy about this opportunity. The fact that we are talking about a very difficult human condition. I like to have more opportunities to talk about that. I'm really happy that you answered that way. We can find the peace and harmony and dialogue that happens between humans on how to build the next world. We can make it happen together and enjoy these heart to heart interactions. I love this one, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you very much. I really appreciate all your great work. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Let us know what you're thinking. Check out the links in the bio below to identities on trial in the United States. You can find the link in the bio below and you can find all of Swan's other links in the bio below and also support the American Anthropological Association as well. You can find their links in the bio below. You can also find simulations links in the bio below. You can help support us so we can continue doing cool things like coming on site to great places like AAA's annual meeting to interview their leadership. You can find us on PayPal, Patreon, Cryptocurrency. You can design cool merch. You can pay all those links in the bio below. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace. Hey everyone, before we end this episode with Swan, I would like to introduce Nancy Convalenca. She is a professor of anthropology at the National Distance Education University in Madrid, Spain. And along with her colleague Raul Sanchez, they are editors of the Lexington book series with this theme, Crossing Borders in a Global World, Applying Anthropology to Migration, Displacement and Social Change, who Swan is one of the authors in this book series. And we would like to talk about this book series a little bit, the purpose of it, and what else is going to be released in 2020. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here. We are really excited about this book series because it's not just another book series on migrations. We want to get theoretical methodological approaches, but we also want the books to have a practical nature, as was very obvious in Swan's research, where she is using her research to give expert witness for cases that go before court and actually do things for real people. So that's part of, not all anthropology is applied, but this is one of the areas where applied anthropology can be very interesting. We're also looking in this series at migration in a very broad sense. So we can be talking about economic migration, about people who migrate for all sorts of other reasons that are not necessarily economic, sometimes looking for better situations, sometimes simply pursuing a career that is easier to carry out in one place or another, or even reproductive migration, people who travel from one part of the world to another seeking reproductive services or seeking to provide reproductive services that are not allowed in their own countries or that are too expensive in their own countries. So we're looking at all of these different areas. So we think it's a new series that brings together two kind of different areas in that way, and also has a very strong applied aspect to it. Yeah, I love the focus on the applied anthropological side of it, plus I love how you broke down all of these other reasons for migration. And also just, we were talking about this earlier with Swan on that, so just getting behind the eyes of all these individual cases that are so diverse. This is gonna be a very interesting series. One of the books that's also out with Swans right now in the series is Crux of Refugee Settlement, Rebuilding Social Networks. Exactly, it's an edited volume. The editors are Andrew Nelson from the University of North Texas, Alexander Rudlach from Creighton University, and Ruth Williams of the University of Loyvan. And it's a book that talks about how refugees are resettling in other areas and exactly what processes they go through and implement with their own agency to do this, how people depend on relatives who have already settled there, how they create community centers. And one of the very interesting things about this book is that it has a lot of participant anthropology, meaning in this case that after each author writes his or her chapter, there is a commentary by someone who is a non-anthropologist who was also involved in the research. In some cases, it can be a social scientist who was there, a social worker. In many cases, they're the very community leaders or different people who do participate in the community of the refugees who have resettled, talking about the author's analysis. So we're not just getting an anthropologist's cold analysis of something that's happening, perhaps, but people from the community commenting on what this anthropologist is saying, whether they agree, whether they disagree, whether there are other areas they think should be considered also. So it's another exciting book and again, a little bit different from what is usually just a plain ethnographic analysis. Yeah, I love the application of wanting to study how the formation of social networks happen of a refugee or a migrant, as we were just talking about this on a very recent episode with Augustine Fuentes and when we talked about how the greatest indicator of people's happiness at the end of their lives is how many close friends that they had. Yeah, I thought that was one of the really interesting studies. Exactly. And how those actually formed, those social networks formed in such a migratory, especially having a family myself that came, my mother, at the 25-year point in her life from Armenia to the United States had me here. So I see her doing that exact same process of making a social network at a point in 25, that point in her life. As well as my uncle and grandmother. Exactly. It's so interesting, yes. It's so interesting. Awesome, so the series will have approximately six more books that they're under preparation right now. Right, we have six more authors that have sent us their proposals and they've all been really interesting. They're finishing up writing the chapters now and we hope to get these books out in 2020 and we are always interested in book proposals that are based on ethnographic work because we always insist in anthropology that you can't just speculate about something. You have to have talked and worked with real people who are in that situation in order to be able to give a nuanced detailed analysis of what's really going on and avoid all those big categories that don't really serve people on the ground who need things done. So we're always looking for projects that are ethnographic projects that deal with any aspect at all of migration and we're looking forward to a long life as a book series and to many, many more publications. Wow, okay, so ethnographic publications of migration may also reach out to you. Of course, please do. Those that want to board this series. Okay, so reach out in that context also. The links in the bio will be below for both Swan's book as well as who was the author of The Crooks? There, it's an edited book by three authors, Andrew Nelson, Alexander Rudlach and Ruiz Williams. Okay, great, and so that book link will also be in the bio below and then there is also, is there a main page for the theme as well? There actually is. It's, there's a page on the Lexington web page. I will send you the link so that it can be there too. Excellent, excellent, so all those links in the bio below and thank you very much for tuning in again to the episode with Swan. And do check out this thematic book series again that Nancy was teaching us about. Thank you everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Really, it was nice. Thank you. Thank you.