 Donald Trump won election in 2016, vowing to build a wall, to deport all unauthorized residents, and to massively reduce the number of people welcomed here legally. COVID-19, which has its origins in Wuhan, China, may help the president to deliver fully on those campaign promises. Is the mythology of America as a nation of immigrants coming to an end? I can't point to an incident in American history, at least, where financial and economic collapse led to, you know, a kumbaya feeling where everyone is like, oh, you're different from me. That's okay. A deputy national editor at the New York Times, Gea Lin Yang is the author of the timely new book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924 to 1965. The book begins at another dark moment in American immigration policy when a restrictive law ended a long period of relatively open borders and effectively stopped mass movement to the United States. It tells the story of the decades-long battle that led the U.S. to begin accepting foreigners once again. And yet nobody involved in that fight foresaw the extent to which the 1965 law signed by President Lyndon Johnson would open the door once again to new immigrants, including Yang's family, which came here from Taiwan in the 1970s. Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers from a hundred different places or more. They have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide. I sat down with Yang in our studio in early March and then more recently in May to discuss what her book and personal story can teach us about the current moment. It's a pleasure to talk to you, Gea Lin. Thank you for speaking with reason. You have a personal connection to immigration, particularly the laws of the period that your book covers. What is it? So my family would not be here if not for the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. And when I began working on this whole project, I'd never heard of the law, never been taught in high school or college. I just been told, like I think a lot of American families, the gauzy story of how we ended up here at all. And basically my family's from China. And after the Civil War and the Communist one in 1949, my grandparents all left for Taiwan, like a lot of other refugees. And then my parents grew up there and then came to the U.S. in the 60s and 70s for college and grad school. And that's how we came here. And then we have cousins, aunts, everyone's here. That was always the very pat glowing story of how we ended up here. And we're a nation of immigrants, so everybody ends up here. Yeah. So of course we were allowed to come here, right? And growing up, my friends also, you know, their parents were from Iran, Afghanistan, Poland, all over the world. I just took for granted that if your family wanted to come here, it sounds naive now to say that given, especially right now, how much we're debating who can come and who can't. But for my own family, I just thought, we're immigrants. This country's always wanted immigrants. We're Chinese. There are all these Chinese Americans around. Obviously, we're here. So let's talk about American immigration policy. And, you know, just to let's say, from the beginning of the Republic up through 1882, what was the immigration policy and then what changed right around then? Our immigration policy was quite open. We needed people to come and colonize this land. And so we were very open. If you basically wanted to show up, we didn't have visas. There were no passports. There wasn't border control. If you got here, and this was true until really the 1920s, if you got here and you made it physically, this long, long journey, you could be here. Naturalization, we did have in 1790, the founders lay down, the only people eligible for naturalization were free whites. And so that was one restriction. But really we didn't have people from Asia, the Middle East, the way we do now. So this seemed, it was all European, right? Although in the 1880s, the Chinese Exclusion Act came about. And, you know, this is, I mean, it's disturbing to think about it now, but they certainly were not hiding the ball. What was the function of that? And how did that change immigration? So in 1882, the US has for the first time an immigration law restricting people coming and based on their ethnicity. We had not done that before. And this was fueled by a huge anti-Asian backlash against Chinese laborers in particular. So it was a particular class of immigrants coming. It wasn't diplomats or teachers or educated people. It was workers. And so in 1882, we banned all Chinese laborers. And from that point on, you can see that we're, as a country, slowly but surely adding more and more restrictions. In 1917, a big federal law is passed. But again, it's still a fairly porous situation. You know, we want literacy to some degree. But if you're literate in a language that's not English, that's fine too. You know, very, very few people are turned away from the border. And at this point, you're talking about people flooding into Ellis Island. Again, tons of still more European immigrants, southern Eastern Europe. And that's who's coming. And we're mainly allowing them. But you are seeing from the Chinese Exclusion Act, we're beginning by race to decide if we want you or not. And then there was a later kind of addendum, which I guess was not an official immigration policy, but that excluded Japanese. Yes. So when the Chinese laborers are banned, these rail companies, these farms, they still need people to work these jobs. And so other cheap Asian labor essentially arrives, including a lot of Japanese immigrants. This sets off a whole new wave of kind of anti-Asian backlash, in particular on the West Coast. And so the U.S. and Japan have an agreement that basically it's not so formal, it's not passed to the Senate, but it says it's called the gentleman's agreement. It says, why don't you just do your best to keep people from coming from Hawaii? A lot of Japanese immigrants are going there from coming to the mainland. And that takes hold too. So you just see their efforts to basically, as they see Asian immigrants come, begin to sort of stem that tide. But meanwhile, you know, Eastern and Southern European immigrant people from Italy, Russia, they're pouring into the country. And that's what triggers this massive restriction. So then in 1924, that's when, I mean, there had been, as you were mentioning, there were a couple of other laws leading up to that. But in 1924, what changes in immigration policy? They look at the entire system and they reshape it in ways that change the country forever. They basically say, you know, based on eugenics and other experts who tell them, you know, we're studying all these different ethnicities. In fact, they didn't even have this idea of ethnic is not really how they're working in this time. When they think of race, they think of kind of what we consider an ethnicity or nationality. Right. So Southern Italians were one race, Northern Italians another race. Hebrew is a race. These are all different races of people. And oh, look, we're scientists and we're going to study each of these races. And to tell you, well, this race, you know, is, it's not all bad things. It's, it could be something positive about you. You know, Italians were very good with their hands. I say this because I'm part Italian, so I can. But they were good with their hands and they were dumb but hard laborers if they weren't anarchists and bomb throwers. Right. But then also prone to criminality. And they sort of, you know, they would. Well, that's, well, that one's true, but yeah. They would claim to go into prisons and, you know, mental health institutions and basically say, like, we see a lot of people from Poland here. That tells us that if you're a Polish race. And this is also great. But I mean, where Jews early on, you know, would score, you know, in the idiot range on IQ tests and then somehow, so we didn't let them in. But then, you know, 10 years later, they're, they're flooding Ivy League institutions and we need quotas against them. Yes, yes. It's very inexact. Yes. But everyone is making, I mean, it's a fake science, of course, but they're going through and coming up with these really big, hefty reports saying, we have cataloged all of the entire human, humankind by these races. And we've decided there are some people that just shouldn't be coming into this country because to allow them in would be to change the gene pool of this country and would change our bloodlines. It would threaten our ability to be a democracy, right? What if we're inviting people in who just don't get democracy because their race is not prone to it. I've never heard that argument ever uttered, you know, in recent memories. So in 1924, or as a result of the 24 law, though, and this is also Jerry Wregd where the number of people who are legally led into the country from certain European countries, it's pegged to the 1890 census as a way of keeping out, you know, the Jews and the Italians and the Poles, the Southern and Central Europeans in particular. But you write at one point that in 1925, total arrivals plummeted 58% from the year before from more than 700,000 to fewer than 300,000. So this is like a real gate coming down. Yes, this is transformative. You have steamships coming right before this coming into Ellis Island. Again, these are levels of immigration that are totally historic. New York is just transformed overnight, right? You go from, let's say, 14,000 or so Russian Jews to nearly half a million in the span of just a few decades. So the city is transformed forever. But once these gates come down, all of that really stops. Right. And then a couple years later, the depression hits, which tamps things down. Then there's World War II. Your book is talking about that period from the 1924 act until the 1965 act, which is the first major overhaul of immigration in decades, but with some tinkering that we'll get to. So then what starts happening in 1925 to say like about 1950? What's going on with immigration policy? Because we do have a world war and we have a lot of refugees. We have a lot of displaced people. Suddenly China, which had been kind of this antagonist because we're sending over these coolies who could work like machines. And so we didn't want that. But then after World War II, the communist China is suddenly, that's a bad thing. And we want to be friendly with Taiwan and other China. How do geopolitics change or complicate immigration policy, say from 1925 to about 1950-55? If you imagine that 1920s as being a very isolationist, very pro-America nationalist time, where people are literally closing off borders. It's very inward looking. World War II changes all of that well beyond immigration. The idea of the United States being on the world stage, having these very deep moral obligations to other countries around the world. And so as we're fighting this war, it becomes clear that our immigration laws don't match in many ways our foreign policy. So one very tangible example is in 1882, that Chinese Exclusion Act banned also the naturalization of anyone who's Chinese. So again, something I took for granted. My parents naturalized and became American citizens. That wasn't allowed in starting 1882. But during the war, Chinese are our allies, and it seems embarrassing and downright insulting to signal to our ally, we don't actually think that you're up to snuff to be citizens. And so we allow Chinese immigrants to naturalize. We slowly crack the door open to Chinese immigration. We allow about 100 people of Chinese descent to come in, not very generous. But it's symbolic, right? It's saying, oh, this is actually pretty retrograde. We can't do this. It's in conflict with our foreign policy. And then in addition to that, you see, of course, during the Holocaust, there is this massive refugee crisis. And you have people, Jews in Eastern Europe, all trying to come to the US. And this is where we begin to see, well, you can't really admit any of these people because you've just passed these quotas saying, we don't want anyone from this part of the world. And so there begin to be lawmakers, someone, Manny Seller, Brooklyn Congressman from New York, not well known, but I'd argue just one of the most powerful Democrats and liberal lawmakers ever. We will get to him in a second because he's the hero of your book and virtually all books about immigration in the 20th century. What happened to the racial dogmas? Because this is also, you know, and somebody like Daniel Ocrin in last year's The Guarded Gate talks about how the Nazis actually looked at the race science that was being used to fix American immigration policy in the early 20th century, was adopted by the Nazis. We fight the Nazis. We beat the Nazis. We realize, you know, maybe their race science wasn't such a good idea after all. How does that change the way that we talk about immigration? Because there's still a lot of racism and xenophobia going on. So this whole idea of the 20s where eugenics was this all powerful science, once we begin to fight Nazi Germany becomes clear that they are basing all of their horrors on this terrible race science, we of course begin to very much back away from it. So on the hill when immigration is discussed, people are really saying like, well, I don't, I don't really believe in eugenics, obviously. And Truman, who's president at this time, and I'd argue a kind of a little known figure in the history of immigration, you don't think of him as a big figure at it, but he's an incredibly important lynchpin in this whole thing. Because he's inherited this unfinished war from FDR, right? And he is looking at the refugee crisis at all of this bunk science that's powered these really racist quotas in immigration. He says, none of this makes any sense. And we have to, if we're going to fight this war and we're going to win it on moral terms, our immigration policy isn't, is immoral as well, right? It reflects this race science and it has to be changed. So he is the first one really in the White House in American history to begin saying we need a formal refugee policy, because our immigration policy is so, is so hostile right now to changing these quotas, to letting these people in, we need a separate kind of way of saying, hey, if you have, you know, a political reason that you need safe harbor, we're going to allow you to come. So even this idea that we take for granted now, if you're going to have a sponsor, right, like a lot of Christian groups or nonprofits will sponsor a refugee, this begins under Truman. And in 1948, he signs essentially the first refugee act in federal history. And this is, I mean, he's also thoughtful because geopolitically, a lot of the people that we need as allies in the Cold War are people who come from countries that we were like, we don't like your kind, whether it's Japan, Korea, or parts of Europe. In the early 50s, there's something called the McCarran-Walter Act, which is one of the first, it really is the most significant change in immigration policy since the 20s. What was in that? How did Truman respond and then what happened next? So the 1952 law is this huge, basically, it's a way of redoing potentially the 1920s law, right? So if that was this big country altering law, 1950s is a chance for everyone, all sides of this to come together and say, how do we feel about those laws and how they've worked and how much do we want to change them? And so there's a huge, huge fight, basically, where a lot of these people coming out of the Holocaust, where we're two saying, okay, enough is enough, these laws are clearly racist and then we've got to change them. But you have, during this time as well, it's the Cold War, and McCarthyism is at full, full force. And often in our history, when people are anti-immigrant, it's also mixed up in anti-radical, anti-communist ideas. And so this sense of, well, we don't really want to change our immigration laws too much because we don't want these people coming in who are radicals, who are spies, who are going to undermine us. I'm laughing because it is like when you start to think about it. So it's when the Soviet Union starts pushing into Eastern Europe and say, Polish people want to leave because they're anti-communists. We're like, hey, you know, we're anti-communists, but we really don't want you because you might be a secret communist. That's why you're fleeing from communism to get out. But maybe we gotta, I mean, it just, it's a very complicated kind of set of mental gymnastics that anti-immigrant people are trying to maintain. It's a lot of things coming together once. It's the nativism that we see so much in our American history of just like those people are different, they could be subversive. You know, we have a lot of, it's still very anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic to some degree still during this time. But then you have, yeah, this cross current of, oh, but we're fighting this ideological war. We want people to come who don't want communism. This is the Statue of Liberty. It's been recast not as a monument from France about the Enlightenment, but it's this wretched refuse beacon. Yeah. And this is also during the time. And we also imagine that we've always thought of ourselves as the nation of immigrants. The 1950s is when that mythology actually begins getting born. And it's during these debates, right? So people are fighting against these McCarthyist forces, these sort of continued xenophobia. And they're saying, hey, look, like everyone who's here in this country came because of some immigrant, you know, their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents. Let's begin to celebrate that history. And you see JFK writing a pamphlet called the Nation of Immigrants. You see actually immigration historians. This is a new area of history and study. So let's, well, let's talk first about JFK because I'm half Italian and I'm half Irish I just dislike JFK in general. And he is a minor figure in this in your book, but an interesting one because the Kennedys were Irish. They were Irish Catholic and that was part of their identity. But they kind of fudged that as much as they could because to be Irish and Catholic in the early part of the 20th century wasn't necessarily a social benefit. Yeah. As you were saying, he puts his name on a pamphlet. But he also he voted for the McCarran-Walter Act, which was this anti-communist kind of anti-immigrant act. And then he voted when Truman, Truman vetoed it and Congress over read the veto. What's going on with Jack Kennedy and how does, how does the Kennedy, you know, experience of John F. Kennedy going from being kind of wannabe Boston Brahmin, blue blood, you know, oh, like maybe I came over on the Mayflower to being kind of aggressively Irish Catholic. What does that say about what's going on in post-war America? He's a fat, JFK is fascinating in all this, right? Because he basically. And also because not only did he not write the pamphlet, he probably never even read it. Just like. He may have reviewed it. It's not, it's not clear. But like some of his other works, which I won't get into, you know, there's some questions around how closely he was, you know, the pen, he put the pen to paper. But politically, it's a big moment for him. Because he's launching this career and being a Kennedy, he's got a lot of money, but he's very young. Doesn't actually have a lot of experience. But he launches his career out of Boston. He runs for Congress. And there's this great moment, I remember finding in this oral history of an Italian-American working in this campaign, where he shows up in the district that he wants to represent. He barely knows this district, really. Okay. His, his grandparents grew up in these, you know, tiny streets of the North End, but JFK is from Palm Beach. He's like, he doesn't know his way around North End. He, I think you point out that when he, when he lived in England, when his father was the ambassador to the UK, he didn't even visit. He doesn't even go to Ireland. This idea that they're Irish is like, they've really tried to sort of wasp over the whole thing. So this, this Italian-American is taking him around the North End and JFK clearly just never been there, or barely, barely knows it. But he's got to convince all these people in these working-class Irish-Italian neighborhoods to vote for him. And so suddenly he now, this whole thing that his family has been trying to sort of paper over and sort of, I'd argue, really make as like a minor footnote in who they are, now has to become to the fore. Because if he wants to get elected, he's got to relate to these people. And he does have this incredible family history with his mom's father, Honey Fitz, who is a mayor of Boston, sort of a beloved, you know, Irish-American figure. And so JFK has to sort of bring himself closer to that part of his family, and sort of, I would argue, make himself seem more Irish to attract these people. And one of the best ways that you can signal to ethnic voters that I'm on your side is through immigration policy. And to say, I see your family, these are immigrants, and I'm going to try to change the laws so that more of your relatives can come, more people like you, you all make this country great. And so he begins from that point on to really make immigration part of his platform. And at the early time, so he votes for the McCarran-Walter Act because he also is quite hawkish on communism. You know, his father is friends with McCarthy himself. He is pretty, you know, let's, let's go a little bit deeper. Robert Kennedy worked for Joe McCarthy. Joe McCarthy is the godparent of his. Yes, the family is very tied to McCarthy. And very, I mean, but very anti-communist. Yes. And again, it's these, it's these, it's this Irish Catholic connection that they have. McCarthy, you know, it's funny, you know, obviously Catholic, but I'm kind of like, I don't want him to be an Irish Catholic. He's from the Midwest. But these are like up and coming Irish Catholic politicians, right? And so Joe Kennedy Sr., I would think, probably thinks that McCarthy is just, he's one of them. They're power-hungry Irish Catholics who want, you know, power in Washington. And they're very anti-communist. And JFK's political ideas, I'd also argue at this time are kind of fuzzy. But on this, he's very clear. He's very anti-communist. He's very into foreign policy. But he slowly has to learn about immigration policy. And so this is why he writes this pamphlet. When he gets to the White House, he's run on this as well, that he wants to overturn these quotas. So he begins to actually put forward legislation dealing with this. Now, of course, he's assassinated, but I'd argue that if he had not put forward this legislation and then LBJ doesn't run with it, we wouldn't have had these reforms, too. Before we get to that act, and his brother, then Ted Kennedy, has a big role in the 1965 act. But you mentioned historians in the 50s, kind of remaking America, recasting the American narrative as an immigrant narrative. Oscar Hanlon is one of the historians that you write a lot about or you talk a lot about. What was his role in this? It happens all the time where we think that America has always been this way. The American Renaissance, the supposed flowering of letters in the early 19th century, particularly in Boston, was something that was created in the 1920s and 30s by a couple of literary historians. In a similar way, Oscar Hanlon kind of recreates America, casts it back as an immigrant story. Who was he and how did he transform the way we talk about America? So Oscar Hanlon is Jewish families from Eastern Europe, and he essentially is the father of this whole idea of American immigration history. He writes, I'm paraphrasing, but in the beginning of The Abrooded, which was a very popular book at the time, one of Pulitzer, he basically says, I set out to learn American history, and what I learned is American history is the history of American immigrants, that you can't study American history without looking at the immigrant experience as being core to being American. Before this, I was reading recently, our idea of what that mythology was was the American West, that that was the foundational idea of what we are as a nation. But Oscar Hanlon really makes it into, no, no, it's not just the West, it's immigrants. He writes this book, The Abrooded, which is an unusual book. It's a very strange work of history. It basically is a lyrically written book talking about the experience of immigrants, the very difficult experience that immigrants have when they come to this country that's quite hard to assimilate and to adjust and make a life here. He also, that was not just a historian, he is also politically active. So when Truman is furious that the McCarran-Walter Act passes and starts a commission saying, let's figure out how to get rid of this whole law, it just passed, but let's try to get rid of it, Hanlon is involved in that too. So he's not only studying the history and popularizing the history, he's also involved in discussions of, hey, these 1920s quotas are anti, like they're un-American and we need to change them. And he's part of that effort. So they're fusing a political effort with this mythology. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that is a brilliant rhetorical gesture because in fact, that wasn't un-American. It was kind of the quintessence of America to be restrictionist. And he's saying, no, keeping people out merely because they come from bad countries, that is what's un-American. Yeah. It's like it's new nationalism, right? I think we tend to think of nationalism as closing off the borders, but because of this new idea of a nation of immigrants, this phrase that people like Hanlon and JFK put forward, there's a new nationalism, right, that like what makes us great as a country is that we are, we are descended from immigrants. And, but this idea is only for the 1950s, but it begins to really become politically powerful. So it's deployed, it doesn't quite win the day in the 1952 debate with the McCarran-Walter Act. But by the time you get to 65, the intervening years, this idea takes on greater and greater power and basically propels this reform through. Yeah. So now let's talk about a manual seller because this is a guy who, as a congressman, it's like he was, you know, when the pilgrim showed up, he was already in office and he lasted all the way through the early Watergate period. I mean, I mean, literally he was in office from what, like the 1920s, yeah, so the 20s to the early 70s. Yes. And he is really kind of the hero of this book. He is also, in many ways, the hero of Daniel O'Cranes, the Guarded Gate. I mean, he is, you know, I mean, he's a fascinating figure and talk about him as we move to a discussion of the 1965 reform that really is still the immigration policy, more or less, that we're living with, but a manual seller. Manny Seller is a total product of immigrant America, right? And he is the grandson of German-Jewish immigrants from the mid-1800s. So it's a big wave of German and Irish immigration mid-1800s followed by, you know, again, the Italians, Eastern Europe. And there was also, earlier, there was the kind of Nordic Scandinavian Swedes for a while were like the most popular immigrant group, which is kind of hilarious. Yes. And all these groups, right, successfully assimilate. We just sort of take for granted, but like he's from that wave, right? And what's interesting is that there is a real distinction among Jewish immigrants and children of immigrants between the German Jews and the Eastern European ones who come later. Manny Seller represents this district in Brooklyn that is just filled with immigrants, right? People from all over Europe. When he's elected and someone says, you know, where are your constituents from? He points to a map of Europe and says they're from Europe. It's just from all over. And he loves that. He loves it. That's Brooklyn, it's his family. And so when he gets into Congress right away, these 1920s quotas are passed and he's horrified. He's a very young congressman. He kind of hates Washington at first because, you know, when you join the House at the beginning, you have no power. You're put on these nothing subcommittees. And so he really has to slowly work his way up. But his tenure in Congress, which goes from, you know, he joins when Harding is the president all the way to Nixon. Basically, he sees the entire thing change on immigration from start to finish, right? And he's a big part of it. He actually is the reason, a big reason why the laws change. So through the Holocaust and World War II, he's fighting to open up the borders for refugees. Through the 50s and that big fight, he's fighting. And then through the 60s, he never stops fighting. Because in his mind, it's people like his family, it's his constituents. The laws are basically insulting and unjust because they say your type of people are inferior to the wasps and the Nordics that we want. And he basically spends his entire legislative career trying to change these laws. So what happened in the early 60s? And part of it is Kennedy identifies as an immigrant and then Kennedy gets assassinated. But what are the kind of political steps or the things that have to happen that then we get to a major reform in the mid 60s? So when JFK dies, his entire legislative agenda comes back to life under the hands of LBJ. So imagine it's not just immigration, right? It's really all of the great society reforms that LBJ puts forward. Medicare, Medicaid, Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, it's all kind of swept in through all of that. And essentially, by the time you get to the 60s, the ground work has been laid for these changes. And so in a way, people aren't attending to the details of it that much. It's taken on so much symbolism. It's this idea of we're a nation of immigrants, right? That mythology is established now. And oh, these quotas are so racist. We can't have them. We can't tell Italians and Jews, people who are part of the democratic base, right, at this point. And the GOP wants these, but we can't tell these people that they're in fear. So we have to change these laws. So by the time LBJ comes in and is sort of looking at the unfinished legislative agenda of JFK, immigration is on that list and he gets behind it. It's not his biggest priority. And it doesn't seem to occupy that much mindshare of the population. One of the ways that Ted Kennedy, who ended up being one of the major pushers of the bill, was saying that, okay, we're shifting from country of origin as the big determinant to family reunification. Why is that a better selling point? And then what kind of happens with that? So they're debating the details, right? And one of the things they talk about is, well, when you look at priority of who gets to come in, you're not going to have open borders, you still have to say like, who's ahead in line to get the more sort of anti-immigrant forces on board with this. These people are saying, well, these laws seem a little bit liberal to us. I mean, we don't want people from Asia and Africa and all these other people. So what if we, to restrict that, we just sort of said, if you're already here and you have a family member who's, you know, your sister, your parent who wants to come, that person can come and they have priority. And if we do that, everyone's European here, that will keep the immigrants more or less European. This we now know of as chain migration, right? The Trump administration talks about this all the time, or family reunification. What they don't anticipate is that that is the very mechanism that accelerates non-white immigration. Because it turns out that most of the Europeans who wanted to come here were kind of already here. Right. So it wasn't helping. I mean, I, you know, it wasn't helping that we're going to bring grandma or a great aunt from, you know, County Corkover. It turns into something very different. And you have to remember in 1965, immigration history in the U.S. is European. You know, we can't fathom immigration coming from around the world the way we do. People flying into JFK airports. We can't. That's not our view. If you think of immigration, you think, oh, it's European immigration. What they, what people don't notice is that even already by the mid 1960s, you're seeing more Asian immigration than before. It's very, very low levels compared to now. But, you know, we have refugee laws they're letting people in during the Vietnam War, right? We begin to allow more Asian immigrants during the Cold War. So little by little, there are more Asian immigrants coming in. And once you have family reunification, that number really begins to explode. But a lot of it's just understanding that if you're someone in 1965, immigration is European. We've always been a European country. And so that's why they don't really foresee how these laws are going to just transform American demographics forever. And there's fewer immigrants, right? In 1970, the percentage of foreign-born population is under 5%. It's the lowest amount that it's ever been because immigration was stopped both by world events, but especially by immigration policy. So it seemed like there's more kind of room to give. Because if it's only 5% of the population as opposed to 15, you know, what's a couple more, you know, non-English speaking. Exactly. It's a symbolic idea, right? And it's also that then this idea of a nation of immigrants is a mythology from the past in a way, right? It's not a going concern because when you cut off immigration the way we did in the 20s, I mean, the number is just plummet. And so essentially all these immigrants who come in from Eastern, they almost assimilate more deeply into being white Americans. And right now, right, we don't think of in the 20s, if you're Italian or Jewish, you're considered not quite white. And now we take for granted that people, you know, they're all considered white. But all of that, that sort of consolidation of whiteness is happening during this time too. So there's odd paradoxes going on too. As the percentage of foreign-born shrinks, people feel more comfortable asserting an ethnic identity as being, you know, what makes you American is not that you're on the Mayflower, but it's that, oh, I'm an Italian American, or I'm a black African American, I'm a Native American. After 1970, things start to explode again. The number of immigrants or percentage of the population foreign-born starts growing especially from places like Mexico. Explain where, how does Mexico fit into all of this? Because it is odd, like we talked about Asia and Europe. And Mexico, Mexicans actually had a free reign coming in and out of the country up until the mid-60s. Yeah. Mexican immigration is wildly different from how we think of it today. We essentially had open borders. You know, we had a literacy test on all of our borders. But really, if you could, again, physically make that journey and get your two feet onto US soil, you were fine. Again, no visas, no long waiting lists. People could just come. And again, it's part of our foreign policy. So the idea is in the Western Hemisphere, we have all these neighbors, it would be insulting or not very neighborly to have restrictions. And so there are no quotas. There are no numerical limitations, even through the 1920s, through that, all that restriction on Europe and Asia, Western Hemisphere is just totally open. We don't, we don't have any limits, essentially. And so if you want to, there's no limit on how many people from Mexico can come in the 1960s, come around, and this becomes part of the debate, which is what do we do? We have this whole system in place for outside the Western Hemisphere, right? We have quotas, we have a numerical cap, we're going to get rid of these sort of this racist ranking of people, but we're still going to have a numerical cap. But what about the Western Hemisphere? Why do we treat that differently? And some of the more anti-immigrant people said essentially, well, that seems discriminatory in a funny way to have one set of rules for the Western Hemisphere and another for Europe and the rest of the world. And so they then add a numerical cap for the very first time on immigration from other countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Mexico. And overnight, that changes how we think about immigrants from Mexico, right? Suddenly, there's a numerical cap, which means that there's a lot more room for illegal immigration. So suddenly, things that were considered perfectly legal and normal take on this label of illegal. And May Nye, the historians, and a lot of work on this. So, yeah, one of the things that is kind of hard to understand is that the government can assert a law, but you're talking about a kind of arbitrary border, and people don't stop coming simply because it's within or without the law. So starting in the 70s and into the 80s, because this becomes a big issue under Ronald Reagan, there's a huge influx of Mexicans in particular, as well as Asian immigrants. What happens once the 1965 act in that is put into place, and we start seeing a ramp up again of immigration? How did Ronald Reagan deal with immigration? He basically has the last major truly ambitious reworking of American immigration laws comes under Reagan, and he basically creates a path to citizenship for all these people. He creates amnesty, and that is supposed to basically try to, I mean, everyone was always trying to solve immigration once and for all. This is his pass at that. Of course, that doesn't quite work. I'd argue the next pass at this under Bill Clinton is at least as transformative. I think in the moment, it wasn't considered as ambitious as what Reagan did, but Bill Clinton is the one who really creates this idea of, I would argue, sort of perpetual state of illegal immigration crisis because he both narrows the pathways to citizenship and increases the reasons to deport people. And so you put that all together and you basically keep changing the rules so that fewer people can come and stay and more people can be deported, which, again, if you look at the history, we just weren't deporting people, right? So if you come here and you make a life here, no one is coming into your door and saying you're out of here. That's, again, a very modern concept. Yeah. And to go first Reagan, and then let's talk about Clinton because we're living in the long shadow of that. Reagan, I mean, there's tremendous footage from a 1980 debate between George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan where they're debating in Houston, they're still slugging it out for the Republican nomination. And there's a debate where they are outdoing each other of who would be more welcoming to illegal immigrants who they say are part of, absolutely part of American culture, the workforce, we need to be welcome in then. It's like, you know, I mean, it's like from an alternate timeline, a man in the high castle or something. Reagan overnight signs legislation that ultimately allows millions of illegals to enter the country with some restrictions because that's, you know, it becomes harder for workers, rather employers to employ illegals, like there are sanctions, but against that, but things kind of set there. Then in the mid 90s, and you know, you're talking about Bill Clinton, like illegal immigration becomes a big, big issue. And he responds by making it easier to deport people. Yes. And this whole idea of law enforcement and immigration, you know, it's really just ramping up more and more and more, right? Because again, if we step back, basically an open border with Mexico, no visas, no passports, every successive stage, right? In the last hundred years, we keep adding bureaucracy, paperwork, more and more restrictions. And so not only to who can come in, but we say you can be deported too, right? You even if you show up and you've been here for a long time, you have a family here, we can come in and say, you need to leave right now. And that is all relatively new. And that, you know, that built up under George W. Bush, who was actually rhetorically was extremely friendly to immigrants. And he did, you know, in 2004, he had two big agenda items after winning reelection. One was social security privatization. And the other was immigration reform. He got his ass kicked by everybody, but especially his own party. Barack Obama deported even more people by any measure than George Bush did. Yes. What is going on with that? Like, because not, you know, both, I mean, neither of these guys seem to be like, oh, we're xenophobic. Bush was the first president. And I don't know, like ever who spoke Spanish, he was, as governor of Texas, he welcomed illegal immigrants as part of the workforce. Yeah. What's, what's going on? I mean, I think part of it is that we are not grappling with how much our immigration has changed. I mean, again, if we think about the history, it's all European, it's assimilation, it's the sort of gauzy nation of immigrants. What we haven't, I think really grappled with is the question of race on immigration, just how non-white all this immigration is. And I think that again, when you say non-white, it's, you know, if, if Mexicans aren't considered white in another 20 or 30 years, something is, will be very strange because I mean, but it is true. So the sources of immigration starting to come from Latin America and then from Asia, including India. Yeah. This, this is the issue, you think. I think part of it is that we, we, we don't always understand that the immigration we're seeing now is just, just as in the 20s, the, the Italians who came and the Russian Jews who came seemed really different, right? They didn't just look different. They worshiped differently. They ate different food. They dressed differently. I think they're, when that happens, there's room for a lot of nativists to say, Hey, who are these people? They don't speak English. They're not like us. They're different. Can they assimilate? It's the same question as with assimilation. But unlike previous generations where the assimilation was from Europeans, these are people from around the world. These are many, many more countries coming in. Yeah. And now the, I mean, the main people, main sending countries really are China or from Asia, including India, then, then from even Latin America, much less Europe. Fastest growing racial group right now is Asian-American. And so all of this is happening. And I don't know if, I don't know that people are necessarily sensing that, you know, in a statistical way that they know it. But I think that that, if someone wants to make a xenophobic argument, there's room to do that. Because if you look around, our country is really changing pretty dramatically. And you add, you know, a financial crisis and economic instability, all these things put together, I'd argue, make it easier for there to be anti-immigrant policies. It makes it easier to say we need to deport people. We need to sort of crack down because there is this other, right? These people are coming and they are the other and they need to be treated in a certain way. And we need to be tough on them and tough on crime. And all of that, I think both Democrats and Republicans have embraced. And to your point, like, as recently as the 80s, we were still acting very welcoming. And I'd also add a lot of employers have always wanted immigrants. I mean, they are a huge, I haven't mentioned this, but like in all these debates, the big farms out in the Southwest, all of the companies are always saying, open up the borders, because they want this sort of cheaper labor at all times. We started by talking about your personal connection to this. Let's end with that. So you mentioned that not even everybody in your kind of extended family is pro-immigrant. How does your family talk about American-ness? And is it, how linked is it to being white or not? Where is that conversation going? Because one of the things where in the super woke moment, where in a way, it would seem the cruelest thing you could do, because one noisy rhetoric is that America is the most extremely racist country in the world. Like, why would you ever want to bring somebody from me and Mar here? Because then they would really experience awful repression. But what is the conversation that's playing out in your family discussions of this? I think, I mean, we've always thought of my, so the parents, my parents, and my aunts and uncles who came are, they are like the ones who made the journey, right? And I think, they love this country and we've all kind of adopted this idea that this country took us in, allowed us to really make our lives here. And I think that they look at Trump's rhetoric and they are nervous about it because it seems like we thought that this country wanted immigrants and suddenly we seem to not want them. At the same time, I think, you know, like a lot of immigrant families, I don't know that my family has a very clear sense of, well, who should be allowed after we've come in, right? Like, should people at the border be allowed in? In these circumstances, you know, I think there's also the sense of like, we follow these rules, some people aren't following the rules. For me, what I learned from this book essentially is that the rules keep changing. And so this idea that you follow the rules, or your family followed the rules, your grandparents did, and now this person isn't, I'm not sure that's a fair comparison because if you just look at how much we've transformed the entire sort of government infrastructure around immigration, it doesn't remotely resemble probably what your parents or grandparents or great grandparents went through. And for me, I mean, I've talked to my parents, my parents didn't know any of this history either. And so I think I hope this is a little bit of a wake up call for people whose families have come more recently that essentially, you know, your family was allowed here, but it's only because of these political struggles and these laws and people had to fight for them. And in a way, they're kind of inadvertently allowing your family in because they didn't plan on letting in these many Asian Americans. But all of this is changing all the time. It's subject to change, right? As we learn in Nazi Germany, unfortunately, one day you can be a citizen and the next day you're not a citizen. These are all legal categories and political categories. And then Reagan flips that from one day you're an illegal immigrant to the next day you're a citizen. Right. Who's to say that, you know, you will always be legal permanently, you and your family. And who's to say that you will be illegal, right? So I think we tend to in our debates treat these labels as very fixed and immutable, both historically and just sort of legally like this is the law. But what I learned from doing this book is that the laws are changing all the time. We decide as a democracy who can be a citizen, who can enter the country, and we can rewrite those laws all over again. And we have, right? We've gone from very open borders to not open borders at all. We're in the middle of doing that now with the Trump White House, right? They're trying to produce not just illegal, but legal immigration and green card visas. And we might see demographic changes all over again. But essentially all of this is fluid. None of it is fixed. And we should all, I imagine I think we should think of all of our families as being part of this very changing idea of how much we are a nation of immigrants. In the two months following my conversation with Yang, there have been early signs that the COVID-19 pandemic could have a major effect on U.S. immigration policy, including Trump's executive order temporarily halting legal migration, a delay in asylum hearings on the Mexican border, and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order blocking entry of migrant children that invokes a 1940s era law. I started by asking Yang whether she thinks COVID-19 will have a long lasting impact on immigration policy. Why has the coronavirus lockdown made a book about immigration of all things more relevant than it would have been before? Right, because none of us are traveling anywhere, migrating anywhere. It's quite the opposite. So I think there's at least two reasons. One early on that struck me was, you know, because this virus was being called the Chinese virus by the president, it immediately had this sort of ethnic racial quality to it. And that immediately set off a lot of xenophobia. And in fact, there's xenophobia all around the world from this pandemic, but in the U.S., that version of xenophobia is specifically anti-Asian. And we've seen people, everything from, you know, they're standing in line, Asian Americans standing in line at the grocery store, mining their own business, getting supplies like everybody else needs, and someone saying something racist to them, people being physically attacked, spat on, you know, children being bullied and being called a Chinese virus. So that immediately began happening in March. There were reports of this. So this really, for me, revealed kind of a tenuous political standing of Asian Americans yet again. And this idea of are Asian Americans part of America and this whole story and history of how there came to be so many Asian Americans in this country in the first place. And to me, the missing piece in that conversation, which sort of goes around and around in circles, is you have to understand the history of how all these Asian immigrants came here to begin with to understand, I would argue, why our political position is so tenuous. Because the 1965 law, right, it's almost like a backdoor entry. It wasn't explicitly designed to admit this many Asian immigrants, and yet here all of us are. And everyone feels not everyone, but like many people feel like, Oh, we've assimilated, we fit in, and it takes a xenophobic moment like this to remind everyone, Oh, wait a second, I still look Asian. I still don't really fit in. I'm still considered foreign. What's going on there? And I just think you can't really answer that question without knowing the literal like political history of why there's so many Asian Americans. That's the first reason. Okay. Do you do you think this is calls back to perhaps previous moments of xenophobia, you know, against German Americans or German things in America during it would have been the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, 1919 and World War One. So the closest analogy that I've come across is the bubonic plague scare from the early 1900s. So when this hit this specifically in San Francisco, this was where the fear was concentrated. This was of course after Congress had already passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, but there was still a very, you know, very robust Chinatown community in San Francisco. And the plague immediately became associated with Chinese immigrants. And it played on all these stereotypes about Chinese immigrants being dirty, being unhygienic, unsanitary, and the city responded in an extraordinarily racist way. They basically, you know, forced these communities to be under lockdown. They began to force people to get vaccinations, which during this time were, you know, this is a very early time for vaccinations, they were really terrifying to get. They weren't the way that we get them now, just a simple shot. And they banned people from leaving Chinese immigrants from leaving their communities without getting vaccinated. So there was actually a court case about this and a federal judge said, you can't actually, this violates the 40th Amendment, you can't forcibly vaccinate people and prevent them from leaving their neighborhood. This is this is illegal. But it really unleashed this incredibly specifically anti Asian backlash and it wrapped in all these stereotypes about, you know, these immigrants. And there was already anti immigration laws pertaining to Chinese people, but the plague and the fear of it certainly exacerbated all that. You, do you think that the coronavirus then will have a direct and immediate effect on immigration policy? You're talking about a kind of cultural moment now. Whenever Congress fully gets back to operating and whatnot, do you think it'll it'll be on the the legislative agenda to change immigration policy? I do. And I think, you know, I can't predict that, but I think that there are a lot of reasons to think that that's more possible now. So the first would be, you already see the Trump White House through executive order taking pretty dramatic action, right? Trump has already suspended temporarily for now, family based immigration, they're not issuing you green cards. They haven't tampered with the temporary worker visa situation because, you know, our farms depend on that. Like there's too much effected, but really. And there also seems there also seems to be some interest in having more foreign medical where medical care workers or healthcare workers coming right from certain areas of workers we want, but sort of the core like legal immigration, especially the chain migration that Stephen Miller is really against that that part of our legal immigration system, he's already told conservative supporters, we're using this pandemic as a pretext to advance our broader immigration agenda. And I think that not only is that going to have more traction because of the anti Asian fears, the xenophobia, the fact that this virus originated in Wuhan, but also the economy. So we know from our history that when our economy really takes a turn for the worse, and that is a wild understatement as to what we're going through now, there's an immediate turn to saying, well, how do we protect our American workers? We've got to get rid of immigrants. So if you look at the Great Depression, which, you know, we could, we are already a Great Depression levels, you could argue in some states like Nevada, we're already at 25% unemployment, and there's no sign of it ending. You know, during the Great Depression, Hoover did mass deportations of Mexican immigrants and American born Mexican Americans. And that was, you know, it didn't didn't do anything to help the economy. There's no, you know, deporting people is not going to bring back jobs. We have a pandemic. That's why people don't have jobs. But that was an easy thing to argue for politically, because if you're worried about your job, if you're worried about competition, you know, the administration can clearly argue and Republicans can argue anyone who wants to anti-immigration can say, look, it's not race. It's the economy. We can't, we can't spare, you know, we can't have this competition here. We need to help Americans get jobs again and look at those immigrants. You know, they pose an economic threat. So I just think between just the, the like, you know, the inherent xenophobia that a global pandemic can unleash, there's the economic argument that you could make now too, saying our economy simply can't afford to have as many immigrants. Could you perhaps compare and contrast the current moment to that moment in the early 20s, when the restrictionists after decades of working hard to, you know, lock down the borders, finally we're able to pass it in the, in the teens and twenties, people were much less timid about being openly racist, but they also oftentimes did try to make larger arguments than simple basic kind of xenophobia or racism. Now it's, you know, it's hard to do that. Do you think we'll see a return to kind of open racism as a result of this? I think actually the people in the twenties who argued for it were in some ways quite sophisticated in how they, you know, supported conservative arguments supporting these ethnic quotas. They already in the twenties knew that they would be called racist and were called racist and took offense to that. And so their argument, which I think you see white nationalists try out all the time. And I think it's a very again, sophisticated argument or more sophisticated than just saying I'm racist would be to say, I'm not racist. I'm not saying that some races are inferior or superior to others. I just want to keep America, America implication being I want to keep America white and Anglo-Saxon. So, you know, Jews, Jews are fine. Chinese people are fine. I don't have anything wrong with them, but they need to stay with their people and we need to keep our people a certain way. So I think if you look over the years, every time there's a nativist, you know, debate around, you know, should we allow people of this ethnicity here or not, there is this way that the people who support the nativists will say like, I'm not, I'm not racist. I'm just saying let's keep things homogeneous. Let's keep stability. Right. That's another word that comes up. We have to keep our democracy stable. Introducing foreign elements is a destabilizing force. And we shouldn't do that. And so I think in a moment like this, again, you could argue, we can't just imagine you can make this nativist argument, right, and not sound quite as overtly racist. You could say, well, we've got a pandemic, our economy is in free fall, our society is coming apart, the seams. We simply just can't afford to take in people who, you know, they could say these people don't speak English. They don't have money when they come. They're going to be a burden on social welfare. So, you know, you can make, you can imagine making all these arguments that don't, you know, again, don't sound overtly racist. And when society is under pressure the way we are now, you could imagine a lot of Americans sort of nodding along saying, yeah, now is not the time for more immigrants. Do you think that labor and some elements of the Democratic Party, you know, I wouldn't say that the Republican Party is openly racist and it's when it is anti-immigrant. And obviously there's a section of the Republican Party that has always been very pro-immigrant. But does the economic argument now or the economic reality, you're right, you know, that the economy is shrinking, we don't know how far we know, you know, we're looking at conceivably 10 or 20% unemployment nationally. Do you think that's going to embolden, you know, maybe more Democratic Party or left-wing populace to flex against immigration? I don't really know, honestly. I mean, it's a good question because I think the Democratic Party generally has just been incredibly muddled on immigration. I could not tell you what Joe Biden's platform is on this. I mean, I think the Democratic Party for a while has just, under Trump, has just said, we don't want to separate families that's inhumane, we love immigrants, we're not racist. That's kind of a pitch. I don't see them. I mean, you saw Julian Castro, you know, in his short-lived campaign, I think actually put forward a pretty ambitious, full-throated immigration policy platform. But I haven't really seen that from the Biden campaign or the Democratic Party leadership in Congress. So I don't really know and I think, I think the left-wing populace, I mean, I think they're going to, you know, what they've been arguing for for a while now, right, is a New Deal-style policy platform. And they were already arguing for that before the pandemic. You're hearing it again. I don't know, none of that is gaining traction on the Hill for all the dollar amounts of these stimulus packages. Yeah, we've got like $3 trillion in new spending and nobody really quite knows where it's going, right? Exactly. This is not, whatever it is, it's not the New Deal coming back to life. So I imagine the left is going to keep arguing for a return to the New Deal just as they were already doing. People like, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, people who are trying to sort of revive that part of the Democratic Party tradition. And I just, I don't think they've thought through how to deal with immigration too. I mean, again, Hoover, you know, infamously failed to help the country during the Great Depression, right? He deported Mexicans that did nothing, obviously, to help the economy. What the economy needed was, you know, Keynesian stimulus of money. Well, we'll argue about whether it needed Keynesian stimulus. But definitely, definitely it needed more in terms of demand. And you're not going to grow demand by getting rid of people. Exactly. So again, here we are and the demand that's coming is not real demand. It appears to be something of a giveaway that's sort of slipping for everyone's fingers. No one who needs the money is getting there. We're very few are, which is the great small businesses. And then immigration, you know, they can turn to that as a boogeyman. So it does feel a little bit like the earlier moments of the Great Depression where no one quite knew how to respond. One of the, one of the large points of your book and in our, you know, in our original interview, which wasn't that long ago, but it does seem like it took place on another planet. Really. But you noted that the changing of the immigration rules and laws in 1965 was primarily a function of elites. It wasn't, there was no groundswell of, you know, we, you know, among the people demanding politicians change this. And there wasn't even much discussion or understanding or, or kind of fisking of what the implications would be. Do you think any changes to immigration policy now, will those be driven by populist, you know, will it, will it be bottom up or will it be top down? That's a good question. I think, you know, one reason why it used to be more top down, I'd argue is because foreign policy was much, was a much bigger part of it. So during the Cold War, presidents, one president after another, both Democrats and Republicans, you know, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, LBJ, JFT, they all felt like during the Cold War, in an ideological battle where the US was supposed to be, you know, a greater moral force than the Soviet Union, this immigration law, the quota system was just immoral and indefensible, and therefore a foreign policy liability. And you could see all the refugee laws, right, that were passed and the car amounts from executive orders for certain, you know, like the Cuban refugees, right? Those were all, those were all immigration steps taken to advance American foreign policy ideas. And now that foreign policy, I rarely hear about it as part of our domestic debate. It feels very driven by, you know, domestic racial politics, economic fears. You don't really hear someone saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can't offend, you know, Latin America, because that is against our foreign policy. But I don't even hear Democrats making that argument. I mean, Julian Castro, again, actually did kind of bring foreign policy into it, but I haven't heard anyone do that in a long time, otherwise. So I do think because of that, I imagine the forces shaping our immigration policy have already felt to me more bottom up, because even though Trump is the one kind of exerting it through executive order, to me, he's reading the cues of his supporters, right? He's playing to his rally crowds. He's playing to, I think, an environment of fear around immigration, around our economy and the stability of our society. So I don't think that there is a groundstall of anti-immigration feeling in this country. If you look at polling, actually most Americans feel like immigrants make the country better. But I think there's just enough of an element from the bottom up, kind of egging on Trump that he feeds off of two that he's responding to that versus, you know, a sense of diplomacy or America's place in the world, which is, you know, in my reading in the 20th century, that's a lot of what presidents were responding to. For the immigrants who stay here, how does that affect their sense of Americanness? And do they, you know, is there a predictable response, kind of a large response to that? Do they become more American? Do they try to be super American? Or do they become kind of exiles in their new home country? This has come up in the whole debate about how to respond to the anti-Asians xenophobia. So I'll just take off that piece of it. I mean, Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that was widely criticized. But the argument basically was we are now held under suspicion by our fellow citizens. And the best way to deal with that is to become more American, essentially, to show that we're really American by being part of the solution to the pandemic, you know, really just showing that we love this country. We're not foreign and strange. We're not a threat. We're here to, we're here to help. And I think there's a, there's a long history of Asian Americans trying to do that. To me, the most fascinating would be after the Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps during World War II, people literally volunteered to die in World War II to prove that they belonged. And that moment actually dovetails with immigration history oddly enough. So when they come back, you know, this was a time when Asian Americans, Japanese Americans could not naturalize and become citizens. They were also practically all but banned from entering the country. And so people leveraged activists, Asian activists leveraged the sacrifices of World War II to win naturalization rights for all Asian immigrants, which, you know, was a huge watershed moment for Asian Americans and to secure more immigration slots for Asians than had existed before. So that moment happened. But I do feel like once you get on the road of we're going to prove that we're more American, I think that's a never-ending kind of path to go down. And I do think what's interesting now about our country and our demographics is that you could argue that Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, every European immigrant group that comes, right? Everyone whose family is from Europe, every ethnic group at some point assimilated, right? Into, to be specific what that means, into being considered white Americans. Yet most of the immigrants we have now are not European. You know, they really don't look white. Like my family, we don't look white. That's not what we look like. So what does assimilation look like then? And I think we were already wrestling with that. It's still a very new phenomenon that we have this many non-European immigrants. I don't know how far we were with that, but I can't imagine that a pandemic and the threat of social collapse is going to make, going to make that easier. Although it's true that in moments of crisis and disaster, communities do come together. So I think there are these cross currents, and it's just really to say. I, you know, and I think when I look back on it, and I think about my own parents who were children of immigrants who grew up during the depression. My father fought in World War II as an Irish immigrant. There's no question that participating in large numbers in World War II helps kind of make, you know, Irish and Italian. My, my old, one of my uncles fought, who was a first born generation, born in America, fought in the invasion of Italy. And so he's able to come back and say, look, I, you know, I'm an American, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of that, so you have that kind of traumatic moment that actually allows people to, you know, put their life on the line to become American. And then you have a basically uninterrupted economic boom, so that the pie is getting bigger for everybody. And I don't think we have either of those situations right now. Yeah. And right, we are literally socially isolated. So I don't see, you know, I can see virtually that people are trying to help each other. People are, you know, knocking their horns and coming out and banging in a pot. But I don't, I'm not like shoulder to shoulder with fellow Americans in the trenches of fighting the pandemic. And I think to come back to my earlier point, I mean, we have just a total economic collapse on our hands. I mean, people are already going hungry. I just don't think we can overstate just how catastrophic that side of it is. I mean, we are living through the Great Depression of some kind. The only question is, will it be worse than the Great Depression of the 30s? And I don't think, I can't point to an incident in American history at least where financial and economic collapse led to, you know, a kumbaya feeling where everyone is like, Oh, you're different from me. That's okay. You know, we can roll in it together. Yeah. That's, I mean, once you remove certainty and stability, and you introduce a sense that, you know, essentially with this economic collapse, to me, what's striking is how sudden it was, right? It's like everyone is going about their business and then the sky just falls and nothing could be more, I think just sort of destabilizing. I mean, your sense of the sun will come up every day. Like that is just taken away. And I think once people have that fear that they're not in control, that no one is in control, right? They're not in control. The government has not been their leaders have not stepped in to make them feel like things are under control. I just think when there's that sense of uncertainty, fear, just, you know, the idea that we don't know what tomorrow will bring. I think that those are conditions that in my mind seem very ripe for more xenophobia, not less. Well, I am, let's hate to end on that kind of note, but I think it's a powerful punctuation point. We've been talking with Geo Lin Yang. She is a deputy national editor at the New York Times and the author of the new book and even more relevant book than it was when, I guess, when you delivered the manuscript, Geo Lin, one mighty and irresistible tide, the epic struggle over American immigration 1924 to 1965. Thanks for talking with me for an addendum to the original interview we did. It was my pleasure. Thanks, Nick.