The American Fabric 1: A Love Story

Despite all the extremist disinformation, suburban women aren’t afraid of immigrants. They’re our friends, our neighbors, our spouses. They’re us. Immigration isn’t a story about fear… it’s a story about love.

And no one knows this better than our own Suburban Women Problem co-host Rachel Vindman. Her husband Alex came here as a refugee from the Soviet Union when he was only 4 years old. Alex says his immigration story has a lot to do with his patriotism and optimism about The United States. It even made it into the speech he made while testifying in Donald Trump's 2019 impeachment case. "Because this is America," he said. "And here right matters."

This week, we have a special 3-episode miniseries to share with you called The American Fabric. It's hosted by Rachel and features conversations with Alex and other immigrants along with a historian, a political science professor, a psychologist, a Congresswoman, and more. We'll have new episodes on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week.

The way we think and talk about immigration in the next month and a half could determine the future of American democracy. We're so pleased to share this special series with you and hope it helps you talk about immigration with the folks in your life.

Stay tuned for Episode 2 tomorrow!

To learn more about our guests:
Lt. Colonel (retired) Alexander Vindman
Congresswoman Delia Ramirez
Dr. Sara Sadhwani, professor of politics and immigration
Sonal Jain, owner of Chamak Dhamak in Akron OH

For a transcript of this episode, please email comms@redwine.blue.

You can learn more about us at www.redwine.blue or follow us on social media!

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Transcript

The American Fabric
Episode 1: A Love Story

Narrator: Hi. I’m Rachel Vindman and I’m one of the co-hosts of The Suburban Women Problem podcast. 

A few months ago, I called up our producer because I really wanted to do something around immigration. It’s a personal topic for me because my husband Alex is an immigrant.

Rachel: So when we met, I was a flight attendant and you were a young army officer and I had plans to move back to Oklahoma and live there forever. You're really one of the first immigrants that I ever got to know. And I sometimes marvel at the differences in our backgrounds and how we made it work, how we kind of brought those, the different cultures, different backgrounds, even though on the surface, people wouldn't see us and think we were that different. 

Alex: How did a girl from like, you know, a little town in Oklahoma land an army officer from cosmopolitan New York? 

Rachel: I mean, it's a tale as old as time, I guess.

Alex: That's right. It's, it's a, it's a Hallmark movie, you know, in which the country girl, you know, meets a successful kind of city boy or something like that, right?

Rachel: Uh huh. Yeah. You should pitch that. You should definitely pitch it.

When I see the anti-immigration rhetoric, it really upsets me. Because this is what America is. We’re all threads in the American fabric. The differences between each of our threads don't make us weaker. They make us stronger.

So I wanted to talk about this now, because immigration is one of the top issues for voters this year. The way we think about and talk about immigration in the next few months could have a huge effect on the future of America.

News clip 1: A new ABC poll shows that immigration is at the top of a priority list for Americans around the country. 

Trump: We are going to start the largest mass deportation in the history of our country because we have no choice. 

Kamala: We know our immigration system is broken, and we know what it takes to fix it. 

News clip 2: So very much, this is an immigration election, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

Narrator: But let’s start a little closer to home, with Alex’s story of immigrating from Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union.

Alex: My family came here as refugees in 1979. We arrived in the U.S. when I was just over four years old. So yeah, I, I spoke Russian in the home. We fled from the Soviet Union and Russian was kind of the language that was encouraged or demanded by the communist regime. I didn't even know Ukrainian at the time. But I don't really remember the transition to English. It kind of seemed like it just happened. I vaguely recall learning that my first word was a curse word, but other than that, everything seemed to come very, very quickly. 

It was my dad, the three boys, my older brother, who's six and a half years older, my twin brother, and he, he brought his mother in law, who he had quite a difficult relationship with.

Rachel: It seems like it was as dicey as it sounds. 

Alex: Yeah. So, um and that was, that was the package that came to the US on we believe it was Christmas Day 1979. So a Merry Christmas present for the U.S. 

I think there were, there were probably a couple of primary reasons. First of all, my mother, biological mother, was dying of cancer and she didn't make it. Uh, she passed away in 1978, in November of 78, I guess just about her 40th birthday, give or take you know, days or weeks. He started the process months before to try to see if he could save her. She was dying from a form of cancer called lymphoma. And he had read somewhere along the way that the Shah of Iran was receiving treatment in New York for the same illness and had extended his life. So I think that, you know, the prosperity of America brings so many different immigrants or calls so many different immigrants.

But we also came here as refugees and that's because the Soviet Union was persecuting and oppressing the Jewish population. And the level of prosperity that he achieved wouldn't be something that would be accessible to his children. And he was disenchanted with the corruption and the different ills of communism and authoritarianism. And I think all those uh, compelled him to make a really courageous decision at an, as an older, older man to pick up his kids and his mother in law and start completely from scratch, which is pretty, pretty darn amazing.

What about other immigrants? Where do they come from? And why do they come to the United States?

Dr. Sara: You know, the two primary drivers of immigration to the United States tend to be either work or family. Um, and our immigration system is set up that way, right? The predominant two ways of, of entering the United States is through work visas or through a family visa because some other family member has already come to the United States, probably from a work perspective.

Narrator: That’s Dr. Sara Sadhwani. She’s a professor of politics at Pomona College and specializes in immigration, voting behavior, and representation. 

Dr. Sara: And so over the course of the last 20 some odd years, we've seen incredible backlogs in the wait time, particularly on that family visa side, which is often that's the way that many immigrants from Asia will immigrate to the United States. 

So often across the United States, there's this perception in the minds of many that when we say the word immigrant, we're talking about low income migrants that are crossing the U.S. Mexico border. And, you know, that image so often is referenced and it pops into people's minds, but the reality is that the US is home to immigrants from all over the world. Yes indeed from Latin America, but also from Asia, Africa, from Europe, Russia, Canada, and while that image that people often have in their minds is typically of that recent arrival, let's not forget that immigrants are anyone who is foreign born.

Narrator: In fact, if you go back far enough, almost all of us are immigrants.

Alex: Everybody, almost everybody that lives in America is an immigrant from somewhere. 

Narrator: It’s true that this is a nation of immigrants. Most of the rhetoric we hear comes from politicians who are the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants. Trump himself is only a 2nd generation immigrant - his mother came here from Scotland in 1930. 

But it’s also important to point out that not every American is an immigrant. 9.7 million people in the United States are Native American, whose ancestors lived here long before European colonizers arrived. 

And although it’s difficult to estimate how many Americans are the direct descendents of enslaved people, because records were destroyed and families were forcibly separated, genealogists estimate that 90 percent of Black Americans can trace their ancestry back to the slave trade.

That’s a different kind of immigration story: one not of departing your homeland for a better life, but of violence and cruelty. It’s true that we are a nation of immigrants, but we cannot forget that Black and Indigenous Americans have a different story, one that also deserves to be told.

But that’s not the kind of story that’s been making it into stump speeches or political polls. So why are recent immigrants coming to the United States?

Rep. Ramirez: What I hear from people oftentimes is that they're coming here fleeing civil wars, fleeing human rights violations, democratic backsliding, economic exclusion, absolute deep poverty, climate instability, generalized violence, and the list goes on. I mean, it, it, it is so bad back home that people are willing to risk and maybe even die in this journey for a better life for themselves and their loved ones. 

Narrator: That’s Delia Ramirez, a US Congresswoman in Illinois. She’s the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, so this issue is personal for her.

Rep. Ramirez: It's one of those moments where if you're willing to leave everything you know and everything you love to go through a horrifying journey of migration, right? Because we have a broken immigration system in this country. Because we don't have our legal pathways. But it means that people are in desperate, desperate situations. 

Nuvia: Usually I, I don't do a lot of talking about it because, you know, like writing it's easier, but talking it's harder just because you go back to those memories.

Narrator: This is Nuvia, a young woman who grew up in Honduras. She was living in a rural town with her mother when a local gang of young men started harassing her. They demanded that she steal money from her uncle’s business. When she said no, they demanded a monthly “protection” fee instead, and tried to recruit her to help them commit other crimes.

Nuvia kept all of this secret, fearing that her family would intervene and get hurt or killed. She was only 13 years old when one night, the gang came knocking at her mother’s door.

Nuvia: The night I, we were just going to bed, like normally we were going to sleep, but suddenly I heard kind of like someone running down the street and my mom and I were kind of like concerned because usually that's not what you hear in a calm night. And usually when we go to sleep, our neighborhood was really quiet. And so I had a feeling like something was going to happen. But I try to ignore it and just try to fall asleep. 

When all of a sudden I heard kind of like someone forcing our back door trying to come in and then when that happened I told my mom do you hear that and then she was like yes I do but I said, okay, maybe it's the cat. It's the neighbor's cat trying to do that. But when all of a sudden I started to hear all this kicking and punching the doors and then it was becoming like a more like a serious situation for us. And so my mom was panicking and I was too. I kind of like couldn't think about anything else, just that they were coming for me.

And in that moment, I think I just froze and my mom was kind of like just talking to me, but I just, I just felt like I was, I was looking at my mom. She was talking, but I, I couldn't understand what she was saying. I was just like, just waiting. And I remember that I kind of like sat down on the floor next to my bed and I started to kind of like put my hands over my head and just looking down and I was closing. I was closing up. My mom was talking to me. She was maybe like pulling my shirt. I don't know. Um, then she made phone calls, but I, like I said, it's just like it looks so blurred in my memories because I was just feeling the fear that my life was going to end that night.

Narrator: Nuvia’s mom called the police, but they didn’t keep the gang away for long.

Nuvia: So, when it was safe for us to come out of the house, because the police was there, then my mom started talking to the police officers. So, um my mom filed a police report after that, but I was still seeing them. I, I, I, I was still seeing that they were following me wherever I went. And it was so bad for me that I was even afraid to go out, go to school, like having a normal life, like going out with my friends. Like, it was so difficult because whenever the night was coming, I was always afraid that something was going to happen. They even kind of went into my school. They used to write things on the, on the school walls for me. And then the school was involved. They were aware of the situations. 

That's when we thought that nowhere I was safe. There was not a place where I was safe. And I was afraid that if they did that in my own house, what is the difference between maybe like my uncle's house or my grandma's house? And meanwhile, the police was just not giving us answers and the answers we needed and the protection that we needed. So that led us to make the decision to come here and find security.

Narrator: Delia Ramirez’s mother had to be brave for her family too. She’d traveled to Chicago at the age of 19 and met Delia’s father, but she soon went back home to Guatemala to help with some family matters.

Rep. Ramirez: And it wasn't until she went back to our village that she realized that she was pregnant with me. And so she came back, she made the journey for the second time at the age of 21, this time carrying me in her womb. And so my mom crossed all of Guatemala and through Mexico and came to the southern border in Texas, Brownsville Texas, in her first trimester. And so growing up, I heard much of the experience that she had and how much she had to do to make sure that I had an opportunity that she never did. And certainly that we both survived that really horrific, painful, long journey of crossing borders and deserts and nearly drowning in the Rio Grande so that I could be born here.

And, you know, I think about that a lot because now as a vice ranking member of Homeland Security… the second time I ever went through Brownsville, Texas, which was last April, was as a vice ranking member of Homeland Security. Prior to that, I was in my mother's womb. So it feels really full circle.

There are lots of good reasons for immigrants to come to the United States – from economic prosperity to a matter of life and death. But why are so many people coming here illegally? That’s a talking point we hear all the time. “Just get documented,” “just do it legally.” But the people who say that have no idea how difficult the process is.

Dr. Sara: It's incredibly difficult to get authorization to be in this country and to stay in this country. There are a number of pathways that people can enter this country with legal documentation. Typically, that's going to be through either a work visa or a family connection in which a family member who's here in the United States is sponsoring them to come into the United States, they could, there's also a handful of student visas. There's a handful of things for people that are victims of crime, etc. That's much smaller and typically temporary, especially in the case of students. 

So often, people think that you can just go down to the local post office, fill out a form, and become quote unquote legal. That is absolutely not true and not the case. People in these backlogs have waited 10, 15, sometimes up to 20 years in their home countries waiting to come to the United States. Work visas we've seen in, you know, from time to time each year, the number of work visas that are authorized will shift and change. So sometimes it's even hard for businesses to know whether or not they're going to be able to continue to sponsor their workers. 

So there's an incredible number of hurdles and difficulties that immigrants face trying to come in this so-called right way. And what we find is that when people come without authorization, they're still able to find jobs. They may not be jobs with full pay or with full benefits or with full protections that other Americans would receive, unfortunately, they end up being in a shadow economy. But very often we find that there is demand to bring in more immigrants than we're actually allowing in, in any given fiscal year.

Narrator: Sonal Jain is a mom and a small business owner in the suburbs of Akron Ohio. She immigrated to the United States 19 years ago from India and remembers just how long it took to get documented.

Sonal: It's a long process. It's just very challenging to just understand this part of navigating through this visa where you just have to accept the fact that you are helpless. You just cannot do anything. It's just a matter of waiting and waiting and waiting. And when your time comes, when your application gets active after that, there are certain steps that need to be gone through. Like, I remember we had to go do our blood work. We had to do a lot of other things before it came to a step where our EADs, which you know, it gives me a chance to at least work, not start my business, but I was in a position where I could at least go and work, but it wasn't even like I got a green card at that point. It was just a step towards that.

Rep. Ramirez: I am the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants. I'm also the spouse of Boris Hernandez, who's still undocumented today. Who came to this country at the age of 3 years of age. And every single day he refreshes the USCIS webpage waiting to see if there's a notification of his adjustment. This idea that if you marry a U.S. citizen you become an automatic citizen is wrong. 

And every single day I look into my husband's eyes as he becomes hopeless, waiting for that day and remind him that as I have a breathing opportunity to advocate for him and the millions waiting for status change, I will do everything in my power not to just fight for Boris and for my family, and for the fear that we have of separation, but for every single young person, every single family who is living still today in fear of being separated because of this broken immigration system. I have a responsibility to speak truth to power and I have a responsibility to make sure that for every couple that comes after us, that they not have to live in fear. They not have to live every single week feeling more and more hopeless. Live in a world where they can find hope and that we can have the kind of policies that are fair and policies that make it possible for couples like Boris and I to be able to live in the country we love without the fear of separation.

Narrator: But immigrants are much more than their migration story. They contribute so much to this country. Not just by serving in their communities or as elected representatives, but also in the US military. My husband Alex served in the Army for 21 years. He received a Purple Heart for wounds he received in an IED attack in Iraq.

There are actually an estimated 45,000 non-citizens serving in the U.S. military, and far more than that who are foreign-born citizens. But new policies are making naturalization increasingly harder. Federal law allows immigrants who serve in active duty to naturalize and secure U.S. citizenship, but in 2017, the Trump Administration restricted this by implementing new mandatory wait times.

I hear Alex talk often about how his immigration story is at the heart of his patriotism and his sense of duty toward the United States. It not only inspired his Army service, it was also why he felt the responsibility to report a call between Donald Trump and the President of Ukraine.

Congressman: You realize when you came forward out of a sense of duty that you were putting yourself in direct opposition to the most powerful person in the world. Do you realize that, sir? 

Alex (testimony): I knew I was assuming a lot of risk. 

Congressman: And I'm struck by that word, “don't worry,” that phrase, “do not worry” you addressed to your dad. Was your dad a worrier?

Alex (testimony): He deeply worried about it, because in his context, there was, there was the ultimate risk. And why do you have confidence that you can do that and tell your dad not to worry? Congressman, because this is America. This is the country I've served and defended, that all of my brothers have served. And here right matters.

Alex (current): Trump was engaging in extortion, which is what it was. You know, he was holding back money to get the Ukrainians to deliver an investigation to taint Joe Biden, but it was extortion to basically steal an election. To me, it was about, about internal kind of domestic threat to elections, free and fair elections. 

But as you, once you, you frame out that, that component of it, you also have to talk about it, think through strategically about, you know, what, how you could be criticized and attacked. And I thought it would be important to talk about my family's background as refugees and uh, why that may have instilled a kind of a deep, a deep sense of loyalty and patriotism. And I thought it was important to talk about the context of the difference between me being an American citizen and what it would have been like in, in many other countries as a, as a whistleblower reporting presidential abuse of power. So I thought that these were important facets to kind of communicate to the American public.

I'd say the, the, the national security component probably wouldn't have resonated so much if it wasn't for the fact that I talked about the immigration background and how, how this country is different than, than so many other countries. And I think the component that I included in there, speaking directly to my father, who's, who was really acutely concerned about the threats that I would face, drawing on his, his deep experience in a Soviet authoritarian regime. And his fears of being targeted and pursued by Donald Trump and his henchmen. I wanted to address those. 

Rachel: I mean, but we were, it was a concern. It was a valid concern, but I guess it's not in the same context. 

Alex: No, certainly not. But you know, it's not the same context as in, let's say, Venezuela. Or Russia. So I think that's the part that he was concerned about more than anything else that, you know, I'd be targeted for assassination or imprisonment as a best case scenario. And then I think maybe some of the patriotism and my optimism and, and uh, belief in this country came through with the here right matters comment. Cause that's still the way I think about this country.

Narrator: Immigrants like Alex don’t take the freedoms of the United States for granted. They actively chose to come here and become a part of the American fabric. And that’s not an easy thing to do. It takes bravery.

Dr. Sara: Even if you are able to come as an immigrant to the United States, there's a thousand different systems that an immigrant is going to have to navigate that are likely unfamiliar. Think about if you move from one apartment to another or one home to another. You got to set up your water service, electricity, maybe cable, maybe wifi. All of those things are things that immigrants are going to have enough money to do and B are going to have to navigate. Who do I call? How do I call? How do I set this up? Can my child attend the local school and how do I get them enrolled? How do I support my child once they're in the U S school? In a system that I, I don't necessarily know how to navigate or perhaps if my English is not at the level where I can really talk to the teacher to find out how my child is doing or to support them with their homework. 

How do you navigate the healthcare system in the United States? Even if you're fortunate enough to have health care insurance, still navigating how HMO works is incredibly complicated. And I was born here. So I think there's a host of barriers that immigrants face when they come. 

I also want to focus, like we often nowadays have so many people that are working various kinds of contracts. Um, I have a friend right now who is a professor and. Is not in a tenured position. And so she has year to year contracts. They didn't give her enough advance notice to let her know her contract was going to be renewed. So she, her visa expired and she has to go home and await that contract to be renewed and hope that the visa paperwork all can get turned around in time for her to come back for fall semester. These kinds of pieces that employers ultimately have to figure out for their employees often slip through the cracks, not because employers are necessarily bad actors, but because there's, there's a lot of administrative paperwork that goes into it.

Sonal: This is all new to us. You know, as an immigrant, everything is new, as simple as lawn mowing, you know, that's not something we were growing up being able to lawn mow, like, you know, we didn't know, we, that's something we had to learn. Just, just the simple things in life that, you know, is everyday things for people living and growing up here. It's, it's hard for us, but we are willing to learn and figure things out. Just, it's challenging too, because we don't know how it works. 

As an immigrant, when you come to this country, just the whole fact that it's all new and you have to put yourself out there to ask questions, ask for help. That itself is a very big step to take. It takes, you have to be very brave to just do that because it's totally different from what we have been in India raised as. The language is definitely a learning curve. Uh, just the culture is definitely starting to like, you know, it's how you perceive it. So just putting yourself out there, getting out of your comfort zone is challenging. But if you do it, it's good for you.

Narrator: And for refugees, it’s even harder.

Alex: People that go through a kind of standard immigration process can come with, with some material goods. You know, if they win a lottery, they could transfer and take whatever accumulated wealth they have. Uh, if they go through the process of being a family of American citizens, they could come here with some sort of resources.

Refugees, asylum seekers, folks that are fleeing from some sort of oppression have a completely different lot. What people don't realize is they come with pretty much what's on their back. We came with a small number of suitcases that, things that we could carry. Uh, I think it was a two suitcases per person with whatever 

Rachel: I’m breaking out in hives just thinking about that. 

Alex: Yeah. That's not for, like, a two week trip for the family. Like, you know, we would pack, this would be, yeah, this would be, you know, everything that you possess. And I think in this case, actually, it's not even things that you want to take the most important things. You take things that could be sold.

My, my dad made a decision to really kind of prioritize things that could be sold. At markets and bazaars to get some hard currency. And that I think he managed to get enough to come to the U S land in the U S with 750 in, in, in, in his pocket. And, you know, start from, from there.

Narrator: At the end of the day, we’re not that different. Whether we’re an immigrant or we’re native born, we all want to make a better life for ourselves, our families, and our communities. 

After escaping Honduras at the age of 13, Nuvia is now a college student in Virginia, studying Behavioral Analysis. Her dream is to help other people, particularly children, with the kind of support she wishes she’d had when she first came to this country.

Nuvia: I find so rewarding helping children with autism or maybe ADHD, because sometimes I feel like that was me, you know, because I came into this country and had a massive cultural shock because I didn't know what was it about, how people behaves in here. So learning all of that, all about that on my own was really hard. So what I'm trying to achieve now through what I do is teaching these children, you know, like, so that's what I try to do. I try to help people, help children learn how to speak, how to build relationships, friendships, and also social skills. 

The duty that we have is to help others. It's to give them the knowledge that we have so we can make others' journeys a little bit more easy. Because in those times, when you're in the middle of the storm, when you don't know what's going on, those are the times when you need somebody to take your hand and tell you it's going to be okay. You're going to be fine. And that's what I, what I try to do with the people around me and in my community. 

Rep. Ramirez: And, you know, I think this is really a reminder that in so many ways, our migration stories are not, you know, migration stories of fear or, you know, fear of the unknown. In my case, this was a story of love and my mother reconnecting with my father and going through hell and back to get back to him and get back to him in a broken system through the only way she knew, which was through tunnels and deserts and walks and trucks and nearly dying that were so that her daughter can have an opportunity of something she never did. 

My mother grew up in a tiny village, one of nine siblings, and didn't wear her first pair of shoes until she was seven years of age. And so coming from that deep poverty and today in just one generation, her daughter being the very first Latina in the entire Midwestern Congress just really, I think, speaks to the resilience of our immigrant community and the contributions that they're making every single day in this country - truthfully, around the globe.

Narrator: Immigrants are our friends, our neighbors, our spouses. They’re us - they’re suburban women. Immigration isn’t a story about fear… it’s a story about love. Love for family, love for country, and love for community. 

But extremists are trying hard to convince us otherwise and they’re spreading dangerous amounts of misinformation. On the next episode of The American Fabric, we’ll correct the record on some myths about immigration and tackle the fear-mongering head on.