All My Friends Are Immigrants

It’s Thanksgiving in the US and I’m feeling a bit sentimental.

Thank you to everyone who has been listening along for the past two months. This is the penultimate episode of the first season of the podcast.

That’s right, I said first season.

When I started back in September, I called All My Friends Are Immigrants "a limited series."

10 episodes felt right at the time, and they still do... for a first season.

I’m in the planning stages of season two, to be released in January, after the Christmas/Chanukah/generic holiday period.

If you’re thinking of giving me a gift, consider subscribing to the podcast on Spotify, following on Apple Podcasts, and giving it a favorable review. It helps the algorithm and my ego immensely.

In addition to my listeners, I’m also thankful for my friend Gleb, one of the previous guests on this podcast, for introducing me to today’s guest, Katia.

The title of the episode doesn't do justice to Katia's journey. Born in Paris, and raised in Japan and San Francisco, Katia made her way to Southeast Asia and now resides in Amsterdam with her partner. Katia is a successful entrepreneur; having started and scaled a sustainable fashion brand from the ground up.

Get to know Katia in the 9th episode of the podcast, where we discuss her winding path to Amsterdam, the philosophy behind her business, and what being third-culture has meant to her.

My guest today is Jihan Aziz, or Jiji. We’re former colleagues and current LinkedIn friends. Along with her parents and older sister, Jihan immigrated to Toronto, Canada, from Baghdad in Iraq.

I talked to her about her experiences growing up Iraqi in Toronto, representations of Arabs in the media and how she’s perceived by Canadians, and whether she feels connected to her homeland and the region.

Single women and Black men voting in New Jersey's elections until 1807. Scandinavian immigrants favoring literacy tests to prevent Italian immigrants from registering to vote.

Welcome to the complicated history of voting rights in the United States!

Today’s episode is a little different. We’re just two days after the US Presidential Election and the results remain unknown. I don’t know about you, but I can’t focus on anything except for refreshing New York Times’s website and calculating electoral votes.

The word of the day is “doom scrolling.”

So, today’s episode is shorter and doesn’t have a guest. Instead, let’s talk about immigration and voting in the United States, particularly how immigration and voting are inextricably linked in the US, the immigration policies that each of the two presidential candidates in 2020 would enact, and the idea of extending the right to vote to non-citizen residents.

If you’d rather wait to hear from someone other than me, next week’s guest is Jihan Aziz. Together with her parents and sister, Jihan immigrated from Iraq to Canada in the 90s. It's a great episode and it'll be out next Thursday, November 12th.

Until then, follow along the winding (and long-winded) brief history of US Voting Rights and immigration.

Immigration is a multigenerational story. While Yama is not an immigrant herself, she is the daughter of immigrants from Kenya and The Gambia who met in New York.

It’s important to hear from the children of immigrants for several reasons.

A report from the OECD showed that over 25% of children in the US under the age of 18 have at least one immigrant parent. In Canada, the number is 37.5%.

The same report showed that two-thirds of kids in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague schools come from immigrant homes.

The children of immigrants will undoubtedly change the ways that our society functions. Our workforce, cuisines, laws - even social contracts; everything will change over time, in ways that I think will be for the greater benefit of all people who call our multi-cultural countries home.

I’ll let you hear directly from Yama on the ways that being a child of immigrants impacted her life, her movement around the country and the world, if she is proud to call herself American, and how she feels about immigration in the US today.

My guest today is Isabel Mejia and this episode is a bit different. For the first time, I gave my guest a preview of parts of the episode with the final right of refusal on what is being published.

Look, I’m not a journalist, so I don’t necessarily have to subscribe to a set of journalistic ethics if I want this show to be nothing more than entertaining. But as I mentioned on a previous episode, I feel that I owe my guests a few things.

I owe it to them to be informed and to not misrepresent or decontextualize what they are telling me. Immigrant stories are personal. The information that I’m given is often sensitive. And each situation is unique.

I felt as if Isabel needed more room to have a say in the final product because she has lived in New York City for five years as an Asylee with a pending asylum application before the US government.

I talked to Isabel about her experiences moving to the US, applying for Asylum, being apart from her husband (something that my spouse and I also went through in our immigration process), and finding community in New York.

This episode will also help raise money for the City Bar Justice Center in New York City.

The City Bar Justice Center and its Immigrant Justice Project assists asylum seekers fleeing persecution in their home countries, survivors of violent crimes and trafficking here in the United States, and individuals seeking humanitarian protection and other forms of relief. The project helps immigrants by matching them with pro bono attorneys, provides representation before USCIS and the Executive Office for Immigration Review and other free legal services.

I'll be donating $1 for every play that this episode receives between today and November 3, 2020, up to $500 plus all ad revenue from every episode of All My Friends Are Immigrants.

Please share this episode with your friends and families to help get me to my goal. If you want to support the City Bar Justice Center directly, you can donate on their website at www.citybarjusticecenter.org/donate.

This is a big one!

My guest on the fourth episode of All My Friends Are Immigrants is a former colleague and current friend, Nakita Austin.

Nakita was born in New York to immigrant parents, one from Haiti and the other from the Philippines. From there, she moved to the South of the US, a move that could be considered immigration for the stark difference in cultures alone, and eventually made her way to her current home in London, UK.

I talked to Nakita about her experiences in both worlds as a Black woman and child of immigrants, how this affects her at work and in her travels, and the life she plans to give to her daughter.

Before our conversation, I spend a bit of time talking about my own immigration experience, procedurally and remind everyone that the upcoming US election is, in many ways, important to the millions of immigrants who call the country their home, along with their families who feel like they are a world away.

I've known Gleb since freshman year of high school. That's nearly 20 years for those doing the math (something we were never very good at).

Like me, Gleb immigrated to Canada from a former Soviet nation. In my case, it was Russia, and in his, it was Kazakhstan.

By the time Gleb arrived in Toronto, I had already become a fully-fledged "Canadian;" he even described me as his Canadian friend, which is a perspective I never even considered. After all, in my mind, I'm a Russian immigrant. Canadians are the other people who lived around me.

I talked to Gleb about his experiences moving to Canada as a teen and then picking up and moving several more times. Whether for school and work, or love and family, Gleb was never a one-directional migrant.

Listen to him tell his story, in his own words.

Today just so happens to be Mexico’s Independence Day. It’s either a coincidence or perhaps serendipity that my guest today is a gentleman of Mexican descent, Caleb Williams.

Caleb and I are former colleagues and our paths crossed only a handful of times. Once when we were both in New York City and another time when we were both in Bengaluru, India, for a hackathon event which, if I recall correctly, he actually won.

Caleb is not an immigrant, but he is part of the immigrant story.  Since his childhood, Caleb has been grappling with what his heritage means to him, how he stays connected to it, and how he will pass it on to his kids who are now three generations removed from his family's story of immigration.

I’ll let you listen to him tell his story in his own words.

I met Charlie while we were both living and working in South Korea. For an entire year, we navigated the country’s culture and values together, but in different ways. Charlie was born in South Korea and immigrated to the United States when he was little. I spoke to him about changing his name, growing up Korean in the US, how he felt going back, and it means for him to straddle east and west.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized, nearly all of my friends were immigrants or the children of immigrants. I wanted to get to know them again purely through the lens of migration to see where our similarities are and how we see ourselves in a world that is grappling with the idea of borders and immigration.

This trailer introduces you to my first five guests: Charlie Lim, Lex Flores, Yama Rongomas, Sabine Tait, and Gleb Nam.

Each one of my guests has a special story to tell, whether they arrived somewhere new as kids, made the choice to relocate as adults, or grew up in a household where they were the first ones to be born in a new land.

You can learn more about my guests and this limited series at www.michaelfil.com/podcast. Follow me on Instagram for previews and behind-the-scenes clips of All My Friends Are Immigrants at @michaelfil.