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CONTENT WARNING

Descriptions of incarceration, the treatment of detainees

SYNOPSIS

Human rights lawyer and immigration attorney Qasim Rashid joins Rachel and Dan to dismantle the myth of a clear, consistent "legal way" to immigrate. The conversation moves between misinformation about the immigration system itself and misinformation about immigrants as people, ultimately examining the bipartisan failure to counter demonizing narratives. Rachel and Dan close with the lenses of Law-Abiding Citizen and Zero-Sum Framing.

INTERVIEW WITH QASIM RASHID

• Qasim Rashid — human rights lawyer, author, and former U.S. congressional candidate
• Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl — referenced on rural white communities opposing Medicaid expansion
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander — referenced on sophisticated modern expressions of racism
• Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi — referenced on racism and education
• Cato Institute research on immigration and wages — cited on immigrants' effect on native-born wages
• ProPublica report on wrongly detained U.S. citizens — cited on citizens arrested on suspicion of being immigrants

LENSES

Lens 1: Law-Abiding Citizen Systems often assume users can simply intuit and follow their rules, without asking whether those rules are clearly communicated in the first place. This lens asks whether a system's apparent simplicity is real or assumed — and whether confusion or noncompliance is a design failure being  blamed on the individual.

• How does the system communicate its rules, and can a user reasonably be expected to understand them without interpretation?
• How easy does the system make it to be a "law-abiding citizen" within it?
• If the system isn't communicating its rules well, is that a byproduct of messiness — or intentional?

Lens 2: Zero-Sum Framing Many systems, and the narratives built around them, implicitly frame resources, opportunity, or belonging as finite — where one group's gain necessarily means another's loss. This lens looks for where that zero-sum framing is being applied, whether it reflects reality, and who benefits from convincing people to see the world that way.

• Where does the system (or the discourse around it) frame things in terms of scarce, competing resources?
• Is the zero-sum trade-off actually true, or is it a rhetorical or negotiating tactic?
• Who benefits from people believing a situation is zero-sum when it may not be?

Episode edited by Jared Landis https://www.landispodcastediting.com/

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Personnel

• Dan Brown, Host
• Rachel Price, Host

Music

• Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot

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Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid

Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design