 Hi, my name is Ernesto Castañera. I'm an associate professor in the department of sociology at American University in Washington DC. And I also direct the immigration lab. Hi, professor, thanks for taking some time to speak with the conversation today. Can you explain to me why your research matters and why you continue to study it? Yes, I mean, immigration is not an issue per se. It's something that has been with us for a long, long time. It's something that is gonna keep happening. It's something that not one state can fully stop forever. But unfortunately, since as long as I can remember, it's something that has been politicized. There's a lot of misunderstandings by people in the public, sometimes legitimately so misconceptions from interactions everyday life. But politicians have for a long time in different places used this for their political advantage on this short term. So it's something that when I, in this country, I meet immigrants every day and the realities of their lives and what they are here are very different from what you hear from the mass of politicians and even in a lot of media. Despite immigration always being in the headlines and often discussed, what's something about immigration that might surprise some people? There's many things. Something that is important for people to know is that most people do not want to leave their home towns or the home places. Most people wanna stick around because that's where they have their love members, their friends where they know they have an attachment to place. It takes a lot like an invasion or hunger to want to leave or to be forced to leave. It's another thing that it's important to know it's that only around 3% of the world population lives in a different country that they were born in. So this is important for the immigrants. We're talking about big numbers, but in terms of the global population of the billions that we have, it's a very small number of people. And there are as many people moving within China than in the international, that international migrants. So we're talking about an exception. Unfortunately, politicians don't people make it sound like it's the main problem, one of the main problems that we face today. And Professor, could you talk about the immigration crisis that we're seeing in Europe because of the Russian invasion in Ukraine? It is more similar than different. One of the main reasons historically for people moving out of their homelands is because of war, civil war, or in this case, an invasion by a third party. So that's very common, big important population movements we're seeing around World War II because of war. Millions of Jews had to escape, but also many other people had to move around. The important thing with the Ukrainian situation is that moving, leaving cities that have been bombarded, for many people it means staying alive. So opening borders like Poland is doing is saving millions of lives. And we should say that and openly. And when we cross the borders to Syria and so any other people escape in violence, we are condemning people, some of them will die out of the violence. When they are civilians and they shouldn't.