Latest / The Overlap / People For Rent: America has always treated foreign workers as a resource, not as people.

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People For Rent: America has always treated foreign workers as a resource, not as people. · The Overlap

• 0:00
  Summerville, Massachusetts, March, 2025. Plainclothes DHS agents are waiting on the sidewalk,
• 0:08
  not at a courthouse, not at a detention facility, on a sidewalk in Summerville. And Rumecia Azturk,
• 0:16
  a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, walks into that. No warning, no prior notice that
• 0:24
  her F1 visa had already been revoked. She finds out her legal status in the United States has been
• 0:30
  canceled the same way you find out your debit card got declined, in the moment, in public,
• 0:36
  with strangers watching. All because she wrote an op-ed for the student newspaper? She co-wrote an
• 0:42
  op-ed for the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts University's response to the conflict in Gaza.
• 0:49
  That's the whole file. Like, that's the national security threat. A graduate student with a pen
• 0:53
  and just a co-author listing inside of a newspaper. For which they transferred her to a detention
• 1:01
  facility in all of all places, Louisiana, which we know can be a pleasant place to spend some time,
• 1:07
  or an unpleasant place. But from Massachusetts, they sent her to Louisiana, like, she's some
• 1:12
  kind of package being rerouted. Yeah, a federal judge in Vermont eventually issued an emergency
• 1:18
  order. As of April 2025, she was still in the detention facility while the litigation was
• 1:25
  moving through the court system. And here's the thing that I need you to sit with before we go
• 1:29
  any further. Mesa Ozturk did not come to the United States to protest. She came here because
• 1:36
  the United States spent 70 years building a system specifically designed to recruit people
• 1:43
  exactly like her. Brilliant, ambitious, academically elite, and plug them into American institutions.
• 1:51
  She followed every rule of a system that was never actually designed to protect her.
• 1:59
  It was designed to use her. And when she stopped being useful in the way that they wanted?
• 2:03
  The system showed her exactly what she was to it, to the system that is the whole time.
• 2:26
  All right, welcome back overlap listeners. Thanks so much for being here. I am Joshua.
• 2:30
  And I'm Will, welcome back. Yes, we are genuinely glad you're here this week, because this one,
• 2:36
  Will, this one has been sitting under the desk on my chest, but and on my mind and heart for a while,
• 2:43
  but still sitting underneath there. And I think we're finally going to go ahead and dig it up.
• 2:46
  Same. I've been thinking about some of this and how to say it for weeks, honestly, but there's a
• 2:51
  version of this story that gets told as an immigration debate. And I want to clear it
• 2:54
  right up front. That is not what this is. This is not an immigration debate. That is not what this is.
• 2:59
  Not even close. So what this is, and I want I want you, dear listener, to hear this before we go
• 3:05
  any further is a labor story. It's a story about who gets to work, who gets to stay, who gets to
• 3:11
  speak, and who gets to decide all three of those things. And it has a very long paper trail.
• 3:17
  And the paper trail goes farther back than most people realize.
• 3:20
  1954. Like everything in the boomer generation. J. William Fulbright is helping frame international
• 3:28
  student exchange explicitly. Not implicitly, explicitly as a cold war soft power tool.
• 3:36
  The idea was pretty straightforward, right? Recruit the world's best minds
• 3:40
  into American institutions. You win their ideological loyalty, and send them home as
• 3:47
  ambassadors for the American project. An outreach, if you will, an evangelization
• 3:54
  of the American system. That was the architecture. That was the purpose of the program.
• 3:59
  And if they didn't go home? And if they didn't go home, by 1965,
• 4:04
  Emanuel Seller and Philip Hart and Lyndon B. Johnson had already built you a visa category
• 4:11
  that made sure the university controlled your legal status. You are not a student.
• 4:17
  You are a sponsored dependent. There's a very big difference.
• 4:21
  You serve at the pleasure of the university, in a sense. I keep thinking about the migrant
• 4:25
  farm worker parallels here. And I know we're going to get into this a little bit deeper in
• 4:29
  the episode, but the structure is almost identical. You bring someone in, you tie their legal right to
• 4:34
  exist in this country to a single institutional sponsor, and then you call it opportunity.
• 4:39
  Yeah, you call it opportunity and you charge them for it. You actually have a line item right there.
• 4:44
  Foreign students generated $40 billion in tuition revenue in 2022 alone. $40 billion, right. And in
• 4:54
  2001, after September 11th, John Ashcroft and George W. Bush mandated a surveillance system called
• 5:01
  SEVIS. They made the students pay the $200 fee to fund their entire monitoring infrastructure.
• 5:09
  So you're paying to be watched?
• 5:11
  You are paying to be watched. And if the government decides tomorrow that your op-ed is a foreign
• 5:17
  policy threat, currently Marco Rubio can sign a piece of paper and Todd Lyons will send someone
• 5:25
  to your sidewalk, to your house, to your university.
• 5:28
  So here's what we're going to do today, listeners. We're walking you through the full architecture
• 5:32
  of the system, how it was built, why it was built, who benefits from it. I think we all know who that's
• 5:37
  going to be, but what it looks like now in 2025 when that architecture is being used as a weapon.
• 5:42
  By the end of this episode, you'll never hear the phrase international student the same way again.
• 5:47
  All right, so let's go. I want to start in a specific room. It's 1954, Washington, DC.
• 5:54
  Close your eyes, feel the ambiance of the cigarette smoke thick in every room. J. William Fulbright is
• 6:02
  a Senator from Arkansas. You know, there was some cigars in there as well. And look, J. William
• 6:08
  Fulbright is not naive, right? He fought in World War II. He watched the Marshall Plan work. He
• 6:15
  understands some things that the people around him are still kind of tripping over and tripping
• 6:22
  toward, which is that you don't win a cold war with missiles, literally. You win it with mines.
• 6:29
  And the program he's building, hearts and minds. That wasn't until later. That was Iraq, Iraqi
• 6:36
  freedom. But the program he's building, what will essentially become the framework for the international
• 6:42
  educational exchange program is very explicitly in the documents, in the stated policy rationale,
• 6:48
  a soft power operation. Right. And I think it sort of goes without saying, not to point out the
• 6:53
  obvious here, but it's not a cold war if you're winning it with missiles. That's a hot war.
• 6:58
  That's just a war. But yeah. So I mean, this is not, you know, not what we're talking about here is
• 7:04
  this policy rationale is not dressed up as something else, right? Not even adjacent to it, right? So
• 7:09
  the State Department's own Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs will tell you this, if you read
• 7:15
  their historical records. But the goal is to bring foreign students to American universities,
• 7:20
  let them through osmosis or telepathy, absorb American values, American institutions,
• 7:28
  American prosperity and send them home as ideological allies, as ambassadors,
• 7:34
  but really as converts to America's specifically ranch flavored democracy.
• 7:41
  Soterios Johnson And that monster truck version of the plan there from the late 80s is that
• 7:48
  cultural context. But let's take us back to the 50s, where everybody talked like this. And they
• 7:52
  were all, you know, making big plans for America, you believed in American institutions. That's,
• 7:59
  that's that's how it was to me. I mean, it wasn't how Beaver Cleaver or whatever talked. I don't
• 8:04
  know. Apparently everybody was from a Chicago suburb in the 90s. That's right. That's right,
• 8:08
  Joshua. We all were. That's how it was. That's the way it was. All right. Let's see if we can
• 8:12
  recover if we can find the thread again here. But let's sit with that for a second. Okay. At least
• 8:16
  Fulbright says the quiet part out loud. And I mean, it's the quiet part these days, right? It sounds
• 8:21
  very propaganda brainwashy. But also back in those days, they really may have believed and I know many
• 8:27
  people did believe that they were sort of the I mean, obviously, America had been proven to be the
• 8:31
  greatest country ever, of all time, hands down, no fire, no arguments, no debates, the goats,
• 8:37
  because we won World War Two, right? That was our claim to fame. People thought that they were
• 8:42
  going to then export American values and institutions and save the rest of the world that way. So, you
• 8:48
  know, but at the same time, Fulbright's like, hey, we're not giving it away for free. We also want
• 8:52
  something from you. We want your mind. We want to reshape it. We want you to go back and tell everybody
• 8:56
  that America has the right answer when you go back home. Yeah. Which, look, I mean, compared to kind
• 9:01
  of what comes later and what we're seeing today, that's almost refreshingly transactional, right?
• 9:06
  I mean, the problem is what gets built on top of that foundation. We talk about building on the
• 9:11
  shoulders of giants, but there is a scenario where it becomes topsy-turvy at the top, right? Because
• 9:16
  Fulbright's program is the first brick in this wall, and every brick that comes after it sort of
• 9:23
  assumes the same thing, right? It assumes that a foreign student is a resource to be managed
• 9:29
  toward American strategic ends. This is the sort of the operating assumption baked into every piece
• 9:37
  of legislation that follows these beliefs and ideas. And the students themselves are not part
• 9:43
  of that conversation. Yeah, they're not even, I mean, they're not even adjacent to it, right? So,
• 9:47
  fast forward 11 years, like we talked about in '65, Emmanuel Celler is in the House, right? Philip
• 9:53
  Hart is in the Senate, and obviously, LBJ was in the White House. And so, they're passing this
• 9:58
  Immigration and Nationality Act, right? So, most people know this law for what it did to family
• 10:05
  based immigrations, for abolishing the national origins quota system. And that was the headline,
• 10:11
  that was what was sort of in the newspaper at the time, but buried inside of that legislation,
• 10:16
  earmarked in all the pork, is the architecture of the F-1 student visa system. And what that
• 10:22
  architecture does is extraordinarily specific. It makes the university the gatekeeper, man. See
• 10:28
  how we went moving to the '60s there? Okay. Yes, it does make them the police
• 10:33
  of the institution. It makes the university the gatekeeper of your legal existence in the
• 10:38
  United States, right? So, your visa is not tied to you as a person. And I think sometimes we forget
• 10:43
  that, right? Like, we see it as being tied to a person who has to apply and, you know,
• 10:48
  re-up at every year. But it's tied to your institutional sponsor. You're not a student
• 10:53
  in the sense that an American student is a student, right? You're a sponsored dependent.
• 10:58
  And that distinction matters only because if you fall out of favor with that institution,
• 11:04
  right? If you drop below full time because you just need an extra break because you're working
• 11:09
  two jobs to keep the rent paid in addition to going to school, if you switch programs,
• 11:14
  right, to a different major, just decide you're going to change your major without getting it
• 11:18
  approved. If you do anything that the sponsor, in this case, the institution, deems non-compliant,
• 11:25
  your legal right to be in our country evaporates. Not a process, not a hearing.
• 11:30
  It's gone in the blink of an eye. If you'd like to dig deeper into this subject, listeners,
• 11:34
  and this may be the only time we ever sponsor or promote this book, Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
• 11:40
  actually has these experiences as an exchange student. Alright, alright, alright. That's right.
• 11:46
  You know what that sounds like to me though, honestly, it sounds like, well, on the one hand,
• 11:49
  it's kind of like a chaperone system or nanny system where they assign the university to like
• 11:54
  make sure you're following the right procedures or else you're gone. But it also sounds like a
• 12:00
  lease agreement where the landlord can change the terms at any time and your only option is to move
• 12:04
  out. You don't like the terms. Yeah. It's like a shitty parent or a job where your employer holds
• 12:11
  your work authorization, which, spoiler alert, is exactly what comes next because the H-1B visa,
• 12:18
  which Congress then creates through the immigration act of 1990 and doesn't take full effect until
• 12:24
  1992, is the next layer. It's the next brick of the architecture that we're building. So Ted Kennedy
• 12:30
  and Bruce Morrison built you a pipeline that takes the foreign student who's just graduated
• 12:35
  from the American university and converts them into a temporary worker who is again bound to an
• 12:42
  employer sponsor. You can't change jobs without risking your status. You can't start a company
• 12:49
  without risking your status. The Economic Policy Institute has documented extensively how this
• 12:56
  actually suppresses wages, how employers use the threat of status revocation as a labor control
• 13:02
  mechanism. I saw this quite a bit working in the technology industry where specifically Indian
• 13:08
  American or Indian and Pakistani employees I would work with every day. When the actual topic of
• 13:16
  salary came up, they were making sometimes 50% of what the going rate was in America because they
• 13:22
  said, "Oh, well, they also sponsor our visa," which is something like $20,000. It is. It costs about
• 13:29
  $20,000 for a company to sponsor a visa, but that's once. Once it costs $20,000 and then it's just
• 13:36
  re-upped every year and there's no additional cost to the employer from what I understand.
• 13:41
  They say, "Well, we're going to dock your pay by 50% for a one-time payment of $20,000 and we're
• 13:48
  going to keep that updated for you." But I saw it happen consistently with my fellow employees
• 13:57
  working in the trenches doing the same work, same tools, same life, same cost of living,
• 14:03
  but they were making half of what we were. Wow. That is awful. Joshua, you said this took full
• 14:09
  effect in 1992? Yes. Each one visa? Okay. So in that case, read my lips, not going to do it.
• 14:17
  That's your 1990s voice because this is not a conspiracy theory.
• 14:22
  Uh, read my lips. This is documented. This mechanism is not subtle. You tell someone if
• 14:27
  they ask for a raise or try to leave for a competitor, they might lose the legal right to
• 14:30
  be in the country and you've created a compliance structure that no American worker faces.
• 14:34
  That is not opportunity, that's leverage. That's indentured servitude is what it is.
• 14:38
  That is exactly what it is. It's leverage. And here's the part that makes sort of the part of me
• 14:44
  genuinely angry. You're looking at a, a two stage trap, right? So stage one, the F1 visa
• 14:51
  ties you to the university. Step two is the H1B ties you to your employer and in between those
• 14:59
  stages, there is a very small mechanism called optional practical training, O P T, which the
• 15:07
  department of Homeland security expanded in 2008 under Michael Chertoff. And this one,
• 15:14
  dear listener, this one I need you to really hear. Tell him Joshua. Chertoff's DHS extends O P T for
• 15:21
  STEM graduates from 12 months to 29 months. That sounds like a gift, more time to work,
• 15:29
  more time to transition, but here's what it actually is. It's an interim rule, not passed
• 15:36
  by Congress, not authorized by statute or law, an administrative rule that allows universities and
• 15:43
  corporations to use foreign graduate labor at below market rates while those graduates sit
• 15:51
  in a legal limbo waiting for green cards that might or might not come. And in 2024, a federal
• 15:58
  judge named Amit Mehta would vacate that rule entirely, finding it was improperly used without
• 16:04
  congressional authorization, potentially throwing hundreds of thousands of people's work authorization
• 16:10
  into question overnight. Wait a second, how long? So a rule that affected hundreds of thousands of
• 16:15
  people's ability to legally work in the U S was issued without Congress ever voting on it. What
• 16:20
  is this 2025? Right. Or 26, without Congress ever voting on it. Michael Chertoff signed it as an
• 16:27
  interim final rule. It actually went into the Federal Register on April 8th, 2008. We were
• 16:32
  probably distracted by other things at the time. It affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of
• 16:37
  people. There wasn't a floor vote. Nobody debated it. It was not a democratic authorization and it
• 16:42
  held for 16 years until a district court judge said, actually, no. I don't know why I'm still
• 16:48
  surprised by things like that. Wait, I'm not. I'm not. Right. Exactly. It's not a feature. It's a
• 16:54
  bug, right? And the ambiguity is useful, right? If your legal status is always contingent on this
• 17:02
  administrative rule that can be vacated or rewritten, you're really never secure.
• 17:09
  And people who are never secure are people who don't make waves. They don't cause trouble. They
• 17:15
  don't rabble-rous and they certainly don't show up to protest. Can I take us back to a different
• 17:20
  decade for a second, Joshua? Because I keep coming back to 1979 and I think it's the moment
• 17:25
  that clarifies what all of this infrastructure is actually for. Okay. November 1979, to be specific.
• 17:31
  I don't have a seventies voice for you all, so you'll have to deal with my regular one. Yeah.
• 17:37
  There you go. November 1979. Iranian students have taken American hostages in Tehran.
• 17:45
  Jimmy Carter's in the White House. Cyrus Vance is at State and Carter issues presidential proclamation
• 17:51
  4702. He orders a review of every Iranian student visa in the U.S. Not Iranian students who had done
• 17:58
  anything. Not Iranian students with any connection to the hostage takers. Every Iranian student
• 18:04
  because they were Iranian. And this is the reveal, right? Like everything we've been describing,
• 18:09
  the institutional sponsorship, the visa dependency, the surveillance structure that comes later,
• 18:17
  all of it really only makes sense when you understand that the foreign student was never
• 18:21
  really a person under this system, right? They were always also a diplomatic chip.
• 18:28
  Carter at the time needed leverage. And look, I look at Carter with reverence. I wish we had
• 18:34
  a president that was more like Jimmy Carter, but that doesn't make him immune from mistakes.
• 18:40
  And this is one of his mistakes because he needed leverage. He had 52 Americans in captivity and he
• 18:46
  reached for the closest available lever, which was 14,000 Iranian students who were here studying
• 18:54
  engineering and medicine and literature and had nothing to do with any of them. 14,000 people who
• 19:00
  built lives here who were enrolled in academic programs, who had friends, apartments, routines.
• 19:06
  And the president could say by proclamation that their status was now under review
• 19:10
  because of where they were born. And the legal infrastructure to do it had been sitting there
• 19:14
  since 1965, right? Carter didn't build anything new. He just used it in a way that was already
• 19:23
  in place. And that's the thing about these systems, right? We don't design them to be weapons from the
• 19:30
  start. We didn't design all of these levers currently in the existing presidency in a way
• 19:36
  that they were meant to be exploited. You don't have to design them to be weapons from the start.
• 19:40
  You just have to build them in a way that makes them easy to weaponize later, which is exactly
• 19:45
  what we're seeing right now. That's really the TLDR of this portion of the episode of listeners.
• 19:52
  You don't have to design them to be weapons from the start. You just have to be able to use them as
• 19:56
  weapons later. Because Fulbright wasn't thinking about deportation orders when he was building
• 20:00
  his exchange program in 1954, right? Johnson wasn't thinking about mass visa revocations when he
• 20:06
  signed the Immigration Act in '65. But they built a system in which a foreign student's presence in
• 20:11
  this country is always conditional, always contingent, always subject to the political needs
• 20:18
  of whoever's in power. And once you build a system like that, you can't be surprised when someone uses
• 20:23
  it. That's why we used to hear in the 90s all the time, "I don't think they should have that power,
• 20:30
  because I don't want the next guy to have that power." Even if we know that this guy's not going
• 20:35
  to use it, it's why this system has been ever so slowly creeping in the... We talk about the law
• 20:42
  not going fast enough, and I'm guilty of it myself, but it doesn't go fast this way so that we can have
• 20:47
  time to think about the possible ramifications and fix them before it becomes law.
• 20:52
  Yeah. That's the backdrop. And then 2001 happens, right? John Ashgrost and George W. Bush need this
• 20:59
  surveillance system we talked about before. They build Sevice, and then make the students pay for
• 21:04
  it, right? $200 to have the government watch you, right? To basically pay some government agent
• 21:11
  or government worker to watch you do whatever you do. And I just want to say out loud one more time,
• 21:16
  because the audacity of this is genuinely shocking. You're paying for your own monitoring
• 21:21
  infrastructure. Yeah. The Sevice fee is actually documented. It's in the Enhanced Border Security
• 21:27
  and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002. Now, I was 18. It's not a conspiracy, right? It's a line item.
• 21:34
  We're not a conspiracy podcast. If that's what you were thinking that this was, sorry, you showed up
• 21:38
  on the wrong one. Go to the other overlap. Foreign students basically pay this fee when they arrive.
• 21:45
  They fund the database that tracks every enrollment change, every address update, every deviation
• 21:52
  from their approved status. And if someone in a federal building just has an inkling that your
• 21:58
  record should disappear, they can click a button and you are legally speaking disappeared. Right.
• 22:04
  If that sounds like, oh, like probation. It's because it is essentially. But for people who've
• 22:08
  done nothing wrong, we're going to show you exactly what that button looks like when someone presses
• 22:11
  it in 2025. But I need people to understand before we get there, the button existed because
• 22:17
  the decision was made in 1954, 1965, 1979, 2001, 2008. This is not new. This weapon was manufactured
• 22:27
  over 70 years by people who told themselves they were building opportunity. Yeah, they were building
• 22:33
  opportunity, right, for American universities, for American corporations, for American foreign policy.
• 22:39
  The foreign student was the raw material. And in 2025, the raw material is being reminded exactly
• 22:46
  of what it is. So let's talk about March, 2025, because that is when our current president pressed
• 22:54
  the button and not metaphorically, not as a, as a policy shift announced in a press briefing with
• 22:59
  talking points and a Q and a period, right. Students checked a government database and found
• 23:05
  out that they don't exist anymore. That's the sentence. They logged into Sevus, the system that
• 23:11
  they paid to build and their records said terminated. And I think we need to be precise here
• 23:16
  about what terminated means in this context, because the word does a lot of work. It does not
• 23:20
  mean your visa application was denied. It does not mean you received a letter with a process attached
• 23:25
  to it. It means your legal basis for being in the U S was erased with no, often no stated cause and
• 23:31
  often overnight. So you wake up the next morning and you're done, you're out. The American immigration
• 23:37
  lawyers association was sending emergency alerts in March and April of 25 while Reuters was still
• 23:43
  reporting on it. So the ACLU litigation tracker was filling up in real time and the stated
• 23:48
  justifications when there were any, if they were lucky, had things like minor traffic infractions,
• 23:55
  speeding, left turn without signaling, dismissed charges, charges that had been expunged. And in
• 24:01
  some cases, the justification was that the student had attended a protest attended, did not participate
• 24:08
  necessarily, was present at a protest on a university campus. Which brings us back around
• 24:14
  to Ms. Osterk. And I want to say her name correctly and fully because the way these cases get processed
• 24:20
  in the new cycle, the name's blur and that blurring is itself a mechanism of the system.
• 24:26
  Mesa Osterk, Turkish doctoral student, Tufts University, detained in Somerville, Massachusetts
• 24:33
  by plainclothes DHS agents in March 2025, excuse me, March 2025, and transferred to a detention
• 24:39
  facility in Louisiana. Louisiana. She was at Tufts in Massachusetts and they flew her to Louisiana.
• 24:47
  There is a geography to this that is not accidental. You move someone far enough from their institution,
• 24:55
  from their legal support network, from their community, and the logistics of fighting back
• 25:01
  become a significant portion of the fight itself. And we all know that news travels by
• 25:05
  Piro in Louisiana. So, you know, I mean, the chances of getting back to your institution
• 25:10
  are slim to none. We don't need you spreading any of these stereotypes.
• 25:16
  To the stated basis for her detention. And it was a co-authored op-ed, right,
• 25:20
  in the student newspapers. I mean, does it get more American than that,
• 25:23
  writing a protest piece in the student newspaper? But like the definition for the first amendment?
• 25:28
  Right. But Tufts' response, her article is about Tufts' response to the Gaza conflict. So she's not
• 25:34
  even criticizing the US. She's criticizing her own institution, which remember, had been set up
• 25:39
  to basically control her access to continue existence in the US. The next thing you know,
• 25:44
  her F1 visa has been revoked without notice. And I keep her turning to this 1979 parallel here,
• 25:49
  because Carter did not give the Iranian students notice either. This is like a review. It's being
• 25:54
  ordered. It's done before they even find out about it, right? And then you're subject to
• 25:58
  deportation without even knowing why. This is just a new target, but it's the same architecture being
• 26:04
  utilized here. Yeah. Kristi Noem, you know, dog killer, Barbie, was still running this in 2025.
• 26:12
  The Secretary of Homeland Security, who's now Mark Wayne Mullen, you have to say it really fast
• 26:17
  because his first name is two names, but it's really just one name. Mark Wayne. Mark Wayne.
• 26:23
  The DHS budget for immigration enforcement in 2025 last year was requested at $25.3 billion.
• 26:32
  $25 billion. Part of what that money is doing is paying ICE agents to put doctoral students
• 26:41
  in vans and drive them across state lines because of newspaper editorials.
• 26:47
  And most of them probably can't even read. But then there's Mahmoud Khalil. And this one I need
• 26:52
  people to sit with because this is not an F1 visa case. Mahmoud Khalil was a lawful permanent
• 26:58
  resident. Here are those two modifiers there, lawful permanent. He had a green card. He was
• 27:04
  a graduate student in Columbia, and the Trump administration arrested him in March 2025 and
• 27:09
  invoked a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows deportation of
• 27:13
  non-citizens deemed, deemed, again, that's a key word there, deemed adverse to U.S. foreign policy
• 27:19
  interests. No criminal charges, no conviction, which means no appeal. It's just a foreign policy
• 27:26
  certification. Signed by Mark Rubio. Secretary of State personally signed that certification.
• 27:32
  And the provision they use, section 237A4C of the INA, is not a new law. It's been sitting
• 27:42
  in the statute for years, and it's rarely, if ever, actually invoked for any reason.
• 27:47
  Because the implications of evoking it are ginormous. They're saying that the executive
• 27:53
  branch can deport a lawful permanent resident for political speech by certifying unilaterally
• 28:03
  that their presence is contrary to foreign policy. Folks, it's not a huge step from lawful permanent
• 28:08
  resident to citizen, just in case you're wondering. But regardless, this is not a legal standard.
• 28:14
  It's like an oath, the pledge, and a pay for the driver's license.
• 28:18
  It's a ceremony with some pictures taken of the judge and, you know,
• 28:22
  your family dressed up next to the American flag. Yeah. But this whole idea of deportation under
• 28:28
  this particular section of the INA is not a legal standard. Let's be clear about that. It is not a
• 28:34
  legal standard. It's a preference. It's a feeling dressed up in statutory language. We deem you to
• 28:39
  be a risk, right. We deem you to be contrary to American interests. And the courts are fighting
• 28:44
  about it right now. As of April 2025, while Mahmoud Khalil sits in a detention facility in, wait for
• 28:50
  it, Louisiana, same facility, different name, same state. There's apparently one facility in Louisiana
• 28:55
  doing a lot of work this past two years. Dark thought, but yes. And then there's Yoon Seo Chung,
• 29:02
  and this is one that I think people need to hear most clearly in terms of what the system is
• 29:06
  actually capable of. We have a South Korean permanent resident again. Legal permanent resident.
• 29:16
  Exactly. Columbia University student. She's lived in the United States since she was seven years old.
• 29:22
  Seven. And the government moved to revoke her green card using the same foreign policy provision
• 29:27
  used against Mahmoud Khalil because she attended campus protests. Attended campus protests.
• 29:34
  The federal judge actually issued a temporary restraining order. She was not deported,
• 29:39
  but they made the attempt. They tried. And the attempt is the point because you don't have to
• 29:44
  succeed at deporting someone who's lived here since seven to send the message, right? The message is,
• 29:50
  this can happen to you. The message is your presence is conditional. And that message is
• 29:56
  worth more to this enforcement apparatus than any individual deportation out.
• 30:01
  Right. And I want to say this to anybody listening now. If you're an international
• 30:04
  student, you already know this. You've known it your whole time here. You've been read in by the
• 30:09
  other students for the one before you. You check your service status the way other people check
• 30:13
  their bank balance, right? You're always watching to see what's happened because you won't get any
• 30:16
  advanced warning necessarily. You know which professors are safe to talk to about politics.
• 30:21
  You know which protests you can attend and which ones you can't. Not because you don't
• 30:24
  have opinions, but because your legal existence is a variable that can be adjusted by someone
• 30:28
  you'll never meet. Think about that. Think about living that way. And where does that sound like
• 30:32
  you are? Does it sound like you're in a free democracy? Or does it sound like the old horrors
• 30:36
  of communism that we used to hear about all the time? I mean, this is not a free country. This
• 30:40
  is a managed population we're talking about. If you are a domestic student listening to this
• 30:46
  and you're thinking that, you know, this doesn't really affect me. It's not going to touch me. It
• 30:50
  doesn't bother me. I want to walk you through the $40 billion because that's what universities
• 30:55
  collected in tuition from international students in 2022. 40 billion. The NSF reported that same
• 31:02
  year that foreign students earned 40%, 40% of all doctoral degrees in science, engineering,
• 31:11
  technology, and math, the big STEM in the United States. 40%. Those are people building the
• 31:17
  research infrastructure of American universities. Those are graduate students running labs that get
• 31:23
  grants to fund the institutions that your tuition dollars also support. And when you revoke their
• 31:29
  visas in bulk without notice, without cause, they're not the only ones harmed by it. You
• 31:35
  destabilize entire research programs. They're part of the system. They're part of the machine of
• 31:40
  research in America. And when you breach their contracts, implicit or explicit, the universities
• 31:46
  made when they recruited them. I mean, these are all consequences of what happens here. You take
• 31:50
  the $40 billion revenue model and you introduce a variable that no admissions office can manage.
• 31:55
  Why would a family in India or China or Turkey pay full international tuition to send their child
• 32:00
  to a country that might detain them for writing an op-ed, co-writing, sorry, co-writing an op-ed?
• 32:06
  Yeah. This is the part that connects directly back to what we talked about at the beginning,
• 32:09
  right? The system was always built on extraction. Come here, bring your talent, pay full freight,
• 32:15
  no financial aid, take the OPT extension at below market wages, wait in the green card backlog for a
• 32:23
  decade, fund your own surveillance through SEVIS. And that was the deal. And the deal worked from
• 32:29
  the institution's perspective because the students kept coming because the alternative staying home
• 32:35
  often was worse. And now the administration is breaking the deal, right? Not by offering
• 32:39
  better terms, but by removing the pretense that there were terms at all. Todd Lyons,
• 32:44
  I think director of ICE, publicly stated that students who did not self-deport after visa
• 32:49
  revocation would be detained. So if they don't self-deport, meaning you check your service status
• 32:55
  and you find out you're out, you have to go buy a plane ticket and get back home because you can't
• 32:59
  stay here. That phrase, the self-deport has a history as well. But the point is that again,
• 33:04
  Todd Lyons says it out loud. He announces the coercion.
• 33:07
  The ICE detention budget for 2025 was $3.4 billion, $3.4 billion to detain people.
• 33:17
  And some portion of that money is now being used to detain doctoral students and lawful
• 33:21
  permanent residents who attended protests or just co-wrote newspaper articles. I want you to think
• 33:27
  of what that money could do if it were directed at, I don't know, anything else, like anything at all,
• 33:34
  if it could be directed toward helping in any reasonable way the rest of our country and the
• 33:40
  things that we're actively hurting from. Yeah. What else could we do with that money? Well,
• 33:45
  let's, I'll tell you who's not getting that money. And this is a comparison that doesn't get made
• 33:49
  often enough. It's migrant workers in agricultural labor or construction or in physical work
• 33:54
  industries, cleaning office buildings, doing all these sorts of hard physical jobs. The migrant
• 34:00
  workers have been exploited for a century since they've been recognized by the system, right?
• 34:07
  The conversation about those workers, the H2A visa holders, the undocumented laborers,
• 34:12
  involves a lot of appropriate moral clarity about the power differential.
• 34:16
  The employer holds the status, the worker cannot leave without losing everything.
• 34:20
  Yeah. So we don't often hear H2A. You know, the news has been pretty
• 34:27
  prevalently talking about the H1Bs. And look, I'll be honest, I have some issues with the way
• 34:33
  that we currently handle H1B visas in our country. I don't think that we're properly utilizing our
• 34:39
  workforce to the extent that we currently need H1B visa recipients, but that doesn't mean that they
• 34:46
  don't deserve the same protections that we do, right? That American citizens do. So we don't apply
• 34:53
  the same moral clarity to intellectual labor. The H1B visa worker at a tech company is in the same
• 35:00
  structural position as the agricultural worker on an H2A because it's the same system. Their employer
• 35:07
  is their sponsor, and they can't freely change jobs without risking their status or their legal
• 35:12
  ability to be inside the US. And they can't really advocate for better pay without actually risking
• 35:18
  their status. They're functionally bound to the employer the way a migrant farm worker is bound
• 35:24
  to the farm. The work looks different, the suit costs more, the structural dependency is identical.
• 35:31
  And those are the permanent employed workers. The F1 student is upstream of all that. The F1
• 35:38
  immigrant student is the one, there's a raw material, right, before it enters the pipeline.
• 35:42
  They're paying for the privilege of being processed into our system. In the Washington
• 35:46
  Alliance of Technology workers case, the ruling in April 2024, where a federal court vacated the DHS
• 35:52
  ruling expanding the OPT STEM extensions, that case was brought by American tech workers arguing
• 35:58
  that OPT programs suppress their wages. So again, this is for different reasons, but they're attacking
• 36:03
  the program as well, basically saying, "Hey, if you let them stay as indentured servants for
• 36:08
  this many months longer, this many years longer, it's lowering our wages, right, because they're
• 36:14
  competing with us for jobs." And they're right, but the foreign students were also being exploited.
• 36:19
  Both things are true. The system is designed to extract from everyone while appearing to benefit
• 36:23
  everyone. So Judge Amit Mehta vacated the rule, right? DHS issued a new rule to preserve the
• 36:31
  existing program, which was deemed to be unconstitutional because the program is too
• 36:36
  valuable to the industry, the entire industry of technology world, to let a court ruling stop it.
• 36:44
  40% of STEM doctors, 40 billion in tuition, 25 billion in enforcement spending. That's not
• 36:51
  a coincidence. Those are budget lines in a system that has been running continuously since 1954,
• 36:58
  when Fulbright framed exchange students as Cold War assets.
• 37:04
  -I mean, they learned everything. That's the answer to the question we asked at the top.
• 37:08
  They didn't fail to learn the lesson, they mastered it. They built the system so thorough,
• 37:12
  so well-documented, so bipartisan in its authorship that you can revoke the status of a woman who has
• 37:17
  lived here since she was seven years old, point to a statute, a certification, or a database entry,
• 37:22
  and say, "We followed the process." -Process is the point though, right? The process was always
• 37:27
  the point. And Rumeyska Ozterk is in Louisiana because 70 years of process made it possible.
• 37:35
  So let's talk about Rumeysa because we've been talking about systems and budget lines and
• 37:39
  statutes and I think sometimes, well, I think most times that's necessary, right? You have to
• 37:44
  understand the system and the architecture and the history before you can really understand what it
• 37:49
  actually does to people. I want to talk about what it does do to people. Rumeysa Ozterk is
• 37:55
  a Turkish doctoral student. She is studying at Tufts University, but as of March 2025,
• 38:01
  she is walking in Somerville in the plane, close, surrounded, and detained. No warning, no prior
• 38:07
  notice. She's not been charged with a crime. It's not a flight risk. She was a doctoral student
• 38:12
  walking down a street in Massachusetts. -Let's take a second with that image. I mean,
• 38:19
  plane close agents, she wouldn't have known she was under arrest until suddenly she's free. Like,
• 38:23
  she's walking to class or walking wherever she's going free like anybody else entitled to be there.
• 38:29
  The next thing you know, you're being deported. -So the stated basis for her detention,
• 38:33
  the reason the government gave for revoking her visa, it was the op-ed, right? She was
• 38:38
  writing a newspaper article in Gaza. That was the documented basis, a student newspaper opinion piece.
• 38:45
  -She wrote some words in a student newspaper about a university's institutional response to
• 38:50
  a geopolitical crisis. The government of the United States of America revoked her legal status
• 38:56
  in Florida, Louisiana. -Of course, like we talked about previously, they transferred her to an
• 39:01
  immigration facility in Louisiana, not in Massachusetts, not near her university,
• 39:04
  not near her legal representation. She found out her visa had been revoked from a letter, not a
• 39:09
  phone call, not from any official notification. The way students were finding their status had
• 39:13
  been canceled in this period was by checking government databases. You log in, you look at
• 39:17
  your record, it says terminated. That is how you learn that your life in this country has been
• 39:22
  revoked. -I keep thinking about what that moment is like. You're a doctoral student, you've built
• 39:29
  something here, you've got years of work at dissertation. I mean, you're building a research
• 39:33
  plan, you're contributing to this great nation. You got a department that you work in, you have
• 39:37
  colleagues that you see every day, a neighborhood that you walk through in the morning, and you open
• 39:42
  up a database and it says terminated. That word terminated, applied to a life. -Here's the thing I
• 39:47
  want to connect with this, because I think it's important. Rumeysa Ozturk is an intellectual
• 39:52
  laborer. She's a doctoral student, a researcher, a writer. Her labor is cognitive, her product is
• 39:57
  ideas, and her visa, her F1 status, and the legal instrument that bound her to the institution,
• 40:04
  just like an H2A visa, binds a migrant farm worker to a specific agriculture employer, the farm
• 40:10
  worker can't leave the farm without losing status. Ozturk could not leave the university
• 40:14
  sponsorship without losing status. The work looks completely different, the legal dependency is
• 40:20
  structurally identical. -And that's what it comes back to really, is that this is not about deporting
• 40:24
  people, it's not about getting rid of people. The idea is to keep the other ones under control.
• 40:28
  The people that are picked up and deported are just examples being made of people who speak out.
• 40:34
  So if you talk in the wrong, if you show up at the wrong protest, or you write a paper or an op-ed
• 40:39
  in the wrong newspaper or the wrong topic, they're coming for you. -Yes. So that same farm worker who
• 40:45
  speaks up and organizes the one who protest conditions faces retaliation from the same
• 40:50
  mechanism, the visa, the status, the threat of removal. We treat it as two separate systems
• 40:55
  because one involves fields and one involves, you know, academia. But the control mechanism is the
• 41:01
  same. You're here because we allow you to be here and we'll stop allowing you to be here if you cause
• 41:07
  problems. Which leads us to Mahmoud Kamil. He was Palestinian, Algerian, graduate at Columbia,
• 41:14
  lawful permanent resident, not an F1 visa, not a temporary status, green card holder,
• 41:20
  which green means go, right? ICE agents arrested him following his visible role in a pro-Palestinian
• 41:26
  campus protest at Columbia. -And we already talked about what it means that he had a green card,
• 41:29
  right? It means the next closest thing to a citizen. Like Joshua said, there's only another
• 41:33
  standing between him and citizenship. -And the Trump administration, of course, invoked a rarely
• 41:37
  used provision of the immigration nationality act, which allows deportation of non-citizens deemed
• 41:42
  adverse to the United States foreign policy interests. No criminal charges, no conviction,
• 41:46
  no allegation of violence or fraud or any specific unlawful act. The basis was his political activity,
• 41:52
  his presence at protest, his speech. A federal judge blocked his immediate deportation and then
• 41:56
  a secretary of state Marco Rubio personally signed a certification. A formal state department
• 42:01
  document stating that Mahmoud Kalil's presence in the United States was contrary to foreign policy
• 42:05
  interests. -Say what you will about the Trump administration, but they do have some, a deep
• 42:09
  bench when it comes to legal history, right? And they can dig through some statutes and some
• 42:13
  case law and find some context. -God, can they? They just keep quoting 17th and 18th century stuff.
• 42:18
  And I'm like, is our country even alive then? -It's a never ending found of that sort of stuff. Yeah.
• 42:25
  -Yeah. So we talked as well about Yoon-Seo Chung and we, I'll go through it briefly. South Korean
• 42:34
  student at Columbia University, came to the United States when she was seven. She lived here for the
• 42:38
  majority of her life. She's a permanent resident green card holder. And the government sought to
• 42:43
  revoke her green card to deport her. Same foreign policy provision used against Mahmoud Kalil.
• 42:48
  The basis was her participation in campus protests, just seven. -Seven years old when she gets here.
• 42:53
  This is not a place she chose as an adult with full understanding of why she was here or what
• 42:57
  the consequences could be if she spoke up. This is a country she grew up in. This is home to her,
• 43:03
  right? In every sense of the word can mean this is home to her. And she shows up at a campus protest.
• 43:07
  And she was lucky, you know, a federal judge issued that restraining order blocking her deportation.
• 43:13
  But the case established something that is genuinely important for people to hear.
• 43:18
  It established that long-term permanent residents, people with deep roots, people who have spent
• 43:23
  their entire adult lives here, who are culturally as American as anybody else, who arrived as children
• 43:30
  are not protected. Their status can be targeted. Their green card can be challenged. Their home can
• 43:35
  be taken because of political speech, because of what they said at a protest. -So we have three
• 43:39
  people, three very similar stories. A doctoral student detained for an op-ed, a grad student
• 43:44
  detained for protesting, and a woman who's lived here since childhood targeted for the same reason.
• 43:50
  All three of them discover what so many migrant workers already know. What people pick crops and
• 43:55
  clean hotels and work and meat processing plants have always known. Your status here is conditional.
• 44:00
  That condition is compliance. And the moment you become visible, the moment you use your voice,
• 44:06
  like we all tell every American they have the right to do, the system that invited you here
• 44:10
  will remind you exactly how temporary its welcome has always been. -And like always,
• 44:14
  these are not edge cases. These are the system working exactly as it was designed.
• 44:18
  So let's just say it plainly. What we've been documenting for the last, I don't know, 45 minutes
• 44:23
  or so is not a series of policy errors. It's not an overcorrection. It's not a bureaucratic confusion.
• 44:30
  The evidence points in one very specific direction. The United States has built a system that imports
• 44:35
  human capital, extracts all of the value from it, and then reserves the right to expel it the moment
• 44:42
  that capital becomes inconvenient. That's true for the doctoral student writing an op-ed. It's true
• 44:47
  for a graduate student at a protest. It's true for a woman who arrived at seven years old. And that
• 44:53
  has been true for decades longer for the person picking strawberries and salinas, the person
• 44:57
  cleaning rooms in Las Vegas, the person cleaning a processing line at a meatpack and plant in Iowa.
• 45:03
  The mechanism is different. The visa category is different. The paperwork is different,
• 45:08
  but the vulnerability of that between both is identical. -You have students tied to institutions,
• 45:16
  workers tied to their employers. In every case, the mechanism is the same.
• 45:21
  Your presence here is contingent on your usefulness and your silence and your cooperation.
• 45:25
  So I guess the question is, what do you do with that, right? If you're listening to this and you're
• 45:29
  angry, good, stay angry. I mean, touch grass a little bit, but it's okay to be angry about
• 45:34
  this kind of stuff. So let's get specific about where to put that anger. Here's what I would do
• 45:39
  first. I would go to the National Immigration Law Center at NILC.org. They're not a petition
• 45:45
  organization. They're not a change.org sort of a thing. They are in court right now. They have been
• 45:51
  litigating the legal challenges to executive orders that created the conditions we've been describing.
• 45:57
  If you donate, your money is going to go directly to legal infrastructure that has been
• 46:01
  actively blocking deportations. If you're not in a position to donate, they publish plain language,
• 46:06
  Know Your Rights materials that you can share. Print out a couple of copies, give them to your
• 46:10
  friends that you know are concerned about these sorts of things. Put them in a group chat, get them
• 46:15
  in signal, send them to the international students at your local university, send them to the workers
• 46:20
  at the restaurants where you eat lunch. That information is a form of protection. And the legal
• 46:24
  path matters enormously here. And I want to add something specific to that. The ACLU's Immigrants
• 46:30
  Rights Project, which is at ACLU.org/immigrants-rights is currently tracking litigation across
• 46:40
  multiple federal districts. The Chung case, the Kaleel case, the cases we haven't even covered,
• 46:45
  because there are many more of them. Those are being monitored and in some cases actively
• 46:49
  supported by this project. So what litigation does, the direct pressure alone cannot always do,
• 46:54
  is create precedent. But that's what the ACLU is in the courtroom. The court ruling says that you
• 46:59
  cannot revoke a green card for protected speech. It does not just protect one person, it protects
• 47:03
  the whole framework. It's slow. I know it's slow, but it's durable in a way that a single
• 47:10
  news cycle is not. So the second thing I'd do is I'd get connected to something local. And I mean
• 47:14
  that like genuinely local, right? Like not like a national organization with a local chapter that
• 47:19
  sends you emails. I mean, find out who is doing sanctuary work in your city. Find out which labor
• 47:26
  organizations are actively working with migrant workers in your region. For agricultural workers,
• 47:32
  specifically the United Farm Workers Foundation runs the UFW Foundation Citizenship Project
• 47:37
  at ufwfoundation.org. They do direct legal assistance. They do know your rights outreach
• 47:43
  in the fields. There are people who have been living inside of this vulnerability for generations.
• 47:49
  And they've built infrastructure for it. Connecting to that infrastructure, volunteering, showing up,
• 47:54
  translating if you have that ability, driving people to appointments. That's just what's needed.
• 48:00
  It's not glamorous work. It's not fun. Sometimes it's literally just being an uber when a person
• 48:06
  can't really afford an uber. But that is the work. Now, for the intellectual labor side of this,
• 48:11
  specifically for international students and researchers, I want to name the National
• 48:15
  Postdoctoral Association at nationalpostdoc.org. They've been pushing for structural reforms to
• 48:21
  OPT and H-1B dependency for years. That's a longer game, but here's the specific ask.
• 48:27
  Contact your congressional representative, and I mean specifically go to house.gov/representatives/findyourrepresentative,
• 48:34
  put in your zip code, find the name, and ask them specifically where they stand on OPT reform.
• 48:39
  Whether they support legislation that decouples immigration status from single employer
• 48:44
  sponsorship, because that's a concrete and nameable ask. It's not vague. It gives the staffers who
• 48:50
  answer the phone something to actually log. Yeah. And this week, specifically this week,
• 48:55
  go to the Immigrant Defense Project at immigrantdefenseproject.org. They have a
• 49:00
  rapid response network. So if you live near a detention facility, if you live in a city with
• 49:05
  a significant immigrant population, you can actually be trained to respond when someone is detained.
• 49:11
  So that's something that you can do with your body and your time, not just your money.
• 49:14
  And here again, we completely agree, without any daylight between us, every single person
• 49:19
  we talked about today, Mahmood Khalil, Yun-Seo Chung, the unnamed H-2A worker, the OPT graduate
• 49:25
  afraid to report wage theft. I mean they were invited here by the US government.
• 49:29
  They were told their labor, their minds, their presence had value. They built lives inside that
• 49:34
  invitation. And the moment they became inconvenient, the welcome was revealed to be a lease agreement
• 49:39
  with conditions buried in the fine print. And the condition was always the same. Be useful,
• 49:44
  shut up, and disappear when we tell you to. Again, we started this new segment at the end
• 49:51
  where we talk a little bit about what sort of surprised us from the research, what sort of
• 49:55
  surprised us from our findings. So what got me is the $200. After September 11th, the government
• 50:02
  looked at a foreign student and said, "We need to build a surveillance system that tracks you."
• 50:08
  And then they made the students pay for it. $200. I mean, it doesn't seem like a lot in the grander
• 50:12
  scheme of things, but this is to basically pay for the infrastructure of their own monitoring.
• 50:17
  It's like with no crime, forcing someone to wear an ankle monitor and force them to pay for the
• 50:22
  ankle monitoring service, right? That's not bureaucratic oversight. That's a hostage paying
• 50:28
  for the lock on the door and nobody blinked. It passed. It became policy. It became normal.
• 50:33
  That is the specific thing that followed me, I think from all of the research we did for this
• 50:37
  week's episode. I think the thing that stuck with me was the Fulbright Framing back in 1954. The
• 50:43
  rationale for bringing people here, win ideological allies, recruit talent, and it was never dressed
• 50:47
  up as a generous, as a gift to humanity. It was always about benefiting the US government.
• 50:54
  Basically, like I said, they said the quiet parts out loud. And then 70 years later, we collectively
• 50:59
  acted surprised when the system treats people like instruments, right? The surprise is the part I
• 51:03
  don't understand. The blueprint was always public. I mean, these people were essentially wards.
• 51:07
  It's not a free people who are here to contribute to the system. They were here to be extracted,
• 51:16
  to have their information and knowledge, their work were extracted from them and then told that,
• 51:21
  "Hey, you're going to stick around. You better mind your Ps and Qs."
• 51:25
  Yeah. So look, we told you the three things that you could do right now. A couple of other things,
• 51:30
  if you want first, you can go to the Student Barrier Protection Center. That's been documenting the
• 51:34
  financial exploitation of international students specifically, the way tuition dependency and visa
• 51:39
  dependency kind of compound in each other. That's at studentbarrierproject.org. They have a reporting
• 51:46
  portal. So if you know an international student who's been financially exploited by their
• 51:49
  extitute, that story needs to be in a database somewhere. So please do put it there.
• 51:53
  Second, Detention Watch Network at detentionwatchnetwork.org is specifically focused
• 51:58
  on conditions inside immigration detention facilities. And given that Ramesa Azturk was
• 52:03
  transferred from Massachusetts to Louisiana, given that Mahmood Khalil has been sitting in a detention
• 52:08
  facility in Louisiana for weeks, the geographic isolation of the detention is part of the
• 52:13
  punishment. The detention watch has a map of facilities in a community visitation program.
• 52:18
  So showing up in person at a detention facility as a community member changes the calculus for
• 52:22
  what gets done to people inside. Again, it's documented, it's real.
• 52:27
  Third, you can go to the Economic Policy Institute at EPI.org. It has a wage tracker specifically for
• 52:32
  H-1B employees, sorry, employers. So you can look up the companies. You can see what they're paying
• 52:36
  versus the prevailing wage. And if you work in tech, if you work adjacent to tech, if you know
• 52:42
  someone who is navigating an H-1B situation, that tool exists and most people don't know it's there.
• 52:47
  So use it, share it, name the companies that are suppressing wages under the program's legal cover.
• 52:52
  And here's what I keep winding on. The students in these cases did not come here
• 52:55
  knowing the risks. Most of them came before these risks were even visible. They came because they
• 53:00
  believed the invitation was real. And I think that that belief is worth protecting. Not because it
• 53:05
  was always honored, but because the alternative, a world in which nobody believes the invitation
• 53:08
  anymore, is just a much darker place to live. I mean, this could be a program that benefits
• 53:14
  everybody. We can still make that true. We can still bring about that reality. And that part
• 53:18
  is actually going to be up to us. And you can find everything we've talked about across these
• 53:22
  episodes now at fof.foundation. We're on Castapod, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Leave a review if you
• 53:29
  have something to say and five stars to offer. We read them. Yes, we do. Also, I want to make sure
• 53:35
  that you tell one friend about this podcast and make sure to rate us wherever you're listening to
• 53:39
  this. Five stars or seriously GTFO? No, just kidding. If you do have some feedback on how we
• 53:44
  might be able to improve this, if you have a topic that you think would be interesting that you'd like
• 53:48
  us to cover, we'd be happy to give that a look over. You can email us at the overlap@fof.foundation.
• 53:56
  That's the overlap one word at fof.foundation. So I guess with that, I want to say something to
• 54:03
  everyone who listened to this whole thing. You sat with it, that matters. This country is built
• 54:08
  on a pipeline that starts with a recruitment brochure and ends with a detention facility
• 54:12
  in Louisiana. And it's been running continuously since most of us were even born. And the least we
• 54:19
  can do is sort of look at it directly. Well, Will, thanks again for being here with me today.
• 54:25
  Will G (Guest): Thank you for having me, Joshua.
• 54:26
  Josh Birk (Guest): Just, I didn't have you. You signed in just like I did.
• 54:30
  Will G (Guest): It's your studio, Joshua. It's your studio.
• 54:32
  Josh Birk (Guest): It is technically my studio. It's only because I pay for the subscription.
• 54:36
  Anyway, thanks so much listeners and we will see you next week.
• 54:39
  Will G (Guest): Thanks, everyone. Have a good week. Bye-bye now.
• 54:42
  Josh Birk (Guest): That's the overlap.
• 54:48
  [Music]