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The Opinions
The World’s Best and Brightest Are Moving, but Not to America
00:32:22
Immigration isn’t a crisis. It’s the future.
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- [00:01]
Noah Chestnut
Hey, it's Noah Chestnut from the Athletic. If you're into games and sports, pay attention. I'm gonna give you four sports terms. You tell me the common thread. Ready?
- [00:11]
Carlos Lozada
Game.
- [00:12]
Noah Chestnut
Match point.
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Lydia Polgreen
Set.
- [00:16]
Noah Chestnut
This one's kind of a gimme. The answer is how tennis is scored. Do you want more of a challenge? Check out Connections Sports Edition. It's a new daily game for sports fans to play. Now go to theathletic.com connection.
- [00:34]
Unknown
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
- [00:49]
Carlos Lozada
I'm Carlos Lozada. I'm an opinion columnist here at the New York Times. And I am delighted to be joined by Lydia Polgreen, fellow columnist and my former partner on the late great Matter of Opinion podcast. Lydia, it's so good to be with you again.
- [01:06]
Lydia Polgreen
R.I.P. matter of opinion. And it's so great to be with you again. Glad that we have a chance to hop on the mic and talk like old times.
- [01:16]
Carlos Lozada
So we're here together because in a sort of serendipitous way, we've been working on parallel tracks for the last few months. You wrote a terrific series in which you explored why and how and where people are moving in great numbers, from the places where they were born to new countries, new regions, new lives. And you've gone around the world for this, not really focusing on the United States, where the immigration debate seems to be all encompassing. In the meantime, I've been writing some columns a lot less systematically than you on the role of immigration in the US Looking in part on some policy questions, whether, you know, birthright citizenship or English as the official language that surround this debate, and also just exploring some of the rhetoric on immigration during the Trump era. So in our infinite wisdom and that of our producers, really, we thought we should get together and compare notes on this issue that has become one of the defining forces and trends and debates of this moment. Why did you take the approach that you took in writing this series? It could have been so tempting and so kind of easy and obvious to focus on immigration in the United States. But you went around the world.
- [02:35]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah, well, obviously my background is a foreign correspondent, and I think just as a kind of matter of habit, I find it very useful and interesting to try to understand the United States, a country that I frankly barely lived in as a child, refracted through my experiences as a native born citizen of this country who spent much of my life outside of the United States and sometimes looking At a subject, particularly a subject that's very much the hot topic of debate, is a little bit like staring at the sun. If you look directly at it, you can't really understand it. And so it seemed to make sense to think a little bit about how this was playing out in the rest of the world. The other reason was that it seemed clear that what was happening in the United States was in some ways an echo of what had happened, particularly in Europe, 10 years earlier, and that there was this shock that had happened in Europe connected to the Syria crisis and, you know, that was building on top of other crises that were kind of right at Europe's borders. And it sort of seemed like this is a movie that we've seen before. And I think that, you know, one of my kind of bugaboos, I guess, in the way that we talk about migration, is that there is just this kind of bedrock assumption that people from poorer countries are always going to want to move to richer countries, and that basically anyone from a, you know, poor country, if they had the opportunity, would leap at the chance to come to a rich country. And that core assumption just felt so misguided to me and didn't really kind of chime with my experience as someone who's lived outside of the United States and who's traveled widely and also who is the child of an immigrant who frankly came to the United States quite reluctantly.
- [04:29]
Carlos Lozada
That was one of the things that really struck me here, reading your series. And, you know, we're used to having countries compete for, say, foreign direct investment, for money, for businesses to open up. Right. But when we think of immigration, we often think of immigrants mainly as supplicants, as one sort of begging to get in rather than being induced or incentivized to come by the host country. But one of the early points you make in the series is that precisely some of the countries that are closing themselves off from immigration are the ones that are. That have the most need of it. Right. That actually we're starting to face a world where the scarcest resource is going to be people. And so that means that countries end up competing for migrants rather than having immigrants be these sort of supplicants begging to get in. You saw that come alive in some of the places that you visited. Can you show us what that competition looks like?
- [05:29]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the early themes that emerged when I started reporting on this series was that far from there being too many migrants, we may actually be facing a world. And in fact, in a lot of Ways already are facing a world in which countries are going to have to compete with one another in order to attract not just the most qualified doctors, engineers and things like that, but workers, kind of, of all kinds. On the one hand, we're living in a world where there are more people on the move than ever, right? There's, you know, something like a quarter of a billion people living outside of their home country. It's, you know, the highest percentage in recorded human. Still, if you look at it another way, only 4% of the population of the globe, right.
- [06:17]
Carlos Lozada
So 96% of us are where we were born, 96% of people are living.
- [06:21]
Lydia Polgreen
In the country where they were born.
- [06:22]
Unknown
Right.
- [06:23]
Lydia Polgreen
And as the shape of the global population changes, the needs for actual human beings, it's really unevenly distributed, right. So that inevitably sets up a world in which many more people are going to have to move from where they live to places where there's opportunity and there's need for their skills. And I think a piece of that is again going back to this assumption that people are always gonna wanna come to the west, they're always gonna wanna come to the United States, they're always gonna wanna come to Europe. But one of the things that I discovered in my reporting was that there are actually these new destinations that have emerged and places that we who live in the west might not expect as being desirable locations for someone to build a life have actually become places that are attracting some of the so called particularly from the developing world. But not only from the developing world. You know, we're seeing Europeans migrate, for example, because their economies are not doing so well. And some of them are going to Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates that I visited in the course of this reporting. And it was really fascinating to see this stew of different folks from all kinds of places who were clearly drawn to a country that they saw as a sort of entrepot of opportunity. And the piece that I wrote from that trip really focused on middle class and upper middle class Africans who in a previous time might have tried to come to the United States or gone to Europe to build careers and you know, build lives there, but had actively chosen instead to go to Dubai. And there are real trade offs in that choice. But the thing that I heard consistently from people was we don't want to be treated like, you know, supplicants going hat in hand and treated like dirt at the embassies of these western countries, which if you've ever been to any of these, you know, can be a very unpleasant and degrading experience, and B, that they felt that in Dubai there was the opportunity for them to actually use their skills and be treated as, you know, professionals and pursue their dreams in a way that didn't discount their qualifications.
- [08:48]
Carlos Lozada
My parents were both lawyers when they came here from Peru, but they couldn't work as lawyers. They had to find other kinds of ways to make a living.
- [08:57]
Lydia Polgreen
Exactly. And I think your family story is really illustrative of this. And I think that notion that you could go to another place and even if that place doesn't offer you the rights of citizenship, that doesn't offer you the ability to truly kind of belong in the same way that if you came and kind of worked your way up in the United States, that that's a bargain that frankly, you would prefer to take. But I think it just ill illustrates this theme of competition, but also the theme of agency.
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Unknown
Right.
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Lydia Polgreen
Like people who are moving from one country or to another, they're making a choice about their lives and they're gonna look at the world and say, where is the place where I can kind of tap into the most opportunity to live the kind of life that I want to live? And we've assumed that that's always gonna be the United States. We're number one. But I think that's changing. And with the current occupant of the White House, I think that's gon even more quickly.
- [09:53]
Carlos Lozada
The question of agency is so important and so interesting. One of the things you write about is you call moving, you call immigration a risky bet. And here I'm going to quote you, you say that having the will to leave, to seek out something new and leave everything and everyone you know behind is a profound act of self creation. It's so easy to think of these tides of immigration as people being pushed and pulled in different directions, but that that sort of individual agency really comes alive in what you're writing about here.
- [10:27]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah, I mean, it's funny, I think a lot of that thinking was frankly shaped by you and things that you and I talked about on Matter of Opinion.
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Unknown
Right.
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Lydia Polgreen
On our podcast. I remember you in one of the early conversations that we had about the Trump campaign and the way that Trump talked about immigrants. And you later, I think, wrote very eloquently about this, really objecting to the idea that countries were, quote, unquote, not sending their best. And this idea of sending this idea, I mean, frankly, it's a kind of fever dream fantasy, right? That there is some force out there that is gathering up an invasion of Foreigners who are gonna, you know, come marauding over our borders just is such a fundamental misunderstanding of how migration works. And I think that in a lot of ways, the story of your family is exemplary of how misguided that notion is. Right. I mean, nobody sent your family here.
- [11:27]
Carlos Lozada
That. That was from Trump's opening speech, his very first speech when he launched his campaign back in 2015. What he said is, when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. He said that twice. They're not sending you. And he physically pointed at his audience. Right. Immediately creating this us versus them. Right. The sending reflects not just how President Trump views immigration, but how he sees the world. Right. These all powerful leaders are making decisions unquestioned, unreviewable over other people's lives. But that sending robs you of agency over your own fate. It makes you just not a potentially unwanted immigrant, but a submissive one. You know, speaking of the agency issue, I want to stay with that for a second, but take it back to your story about Dubai. You have this Ugandan lawyer, I believe, who built a successful life away from her home country, first as a flight attendant and then as a top lawyer.
- [12:25]
Lydia Polgreen
And.
- [12:25]
Carlos Lozada
And you talk to her about sort of attachment and returning. And it was this amazing quote that she has at the end where she says, maybe the future is just participation, not belonging. Maybe we're done putting down roots and we'll just keep moving. So what does it mean when immigration in some cases ceases to be about belonging, but instead is this kind of transactional participating?
- [12:54]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah. Gosh, you know, that was one of those moments. You know, Laureen Frieda, I met her by chance. She just happened to come along to this lunch, and when she said that line, I just about fell out of my chair. You know, it was one of those great reporting moments where you're just like, well, that's it. That's the quote. You know, this person that I did not expect to meet actually becomes the center of the story that I write. It's interesting. I think, you know, I'm often, in that kind of solipsistic way, drawn to people whose experiences have a lot in common with my own. And that feeling that you don't quite belong in the place that you're from and you seek something out in a different place and have a relationship of ambivalence kind of across the board all around is one that I relate to on a very profound level. And I think for someone like Laureen, it's interesting. She, you know, Comes from a kind of privileged, affluent background in Uganda. She took the New York bar exam, but like, ultimately decided to make a life in her career in Dubai, but kind of sees her, you know, her options as being open. And it was just this idea of participation, which is essentially what a country like the United Arab Emirates offers. You can't really become a citizen, but you can get these kind of long term visas that, you know, where you can stay as long as you kind of stay on the good side of. Of the authorities and so on. In this essentially absolute monarchy with limited free speech and all those kinds of things, you would assume someone like Laureen would ultimately prefer to become a citizen of a country like the United States, that there are just more options and more. But I think that her somewhat studied indifference to that notion, I think bespeaks this reality that we now have, which is that a lot of people are thinking about what the world might look like in an era where all of these kind of fundamental assumptions about human rights, about the rights of citizens, the right to asylum, all of these kind of bedrock things that built the era in which we live. That if you move to a country and you start contributing to it, that ultimately you'll become a citizen, that maybe those are going away. And that ultimately we need to make ourselves comfortable with a world in which a lot more people are gonna be moving from place to place, looking for a kind of contingent sense of belonging, a contingent sense of home that really lacks permanence. And that's unsettling.
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Unknown
Right.
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Lydia Polgreen
It's not how I think about citizenship. It's not how you think about citizenship?
- [15:42]
Carlos Lozada
No, it's. That really struck me because it felt so alienating to be in that transactional mode all the time. I mean, I understood it reading. Reading the story and reading the experience of this one person, but I feel that my instinct is to seek out that belonging. Even if it's made fairly clear to you sometimes that you may be needed but not wanted. Right. You may be taken in, but not exactly welcomed. Always. But I honestly wonder if that's part of why I end up writing so much about the United States and American identity and American history and literature in some ways is because I'm sort of craving that. I'm trying to justify my presence here.
- [16:32]
Lydia Polgreen
You're talking about something that's really, really important.
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Unknown
Right.
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Lydia Polgreen
And that is what does it actually mean to belong.
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Unknown
Right.
- [16:39]
Lydia Polgreen
And I think that in the United States we have a story that we tell ourselves about how someone becomes an. But I do wonder if that is Going away as other countries move to these more transactional modes of bringing in people by necessity. You know, for example, there was a news report that Giorgia Maloney in Europe, who's, you know, been at the forefront of anti migration politics in Europe, she just announced that they're going to bring in half a million new people on work visas, people from outside of the European Union. And it seems that the goal is to kind of half have more of these sort of transactional migrants, you know, people who are coming in on a temporary basis, who are there to work and then ultimately lengthen the path to citizenship so that it's harder for people who come in on that basis to become citizens and to belong. And it seems like that's kind of the way that much of the world is going. I think even in the United States, we're starting to see that, you know, talking about creating these kind of passes for people to come over the border to work in farms and things like that. And so there is this kind of push pull of the American idea of citizenship and belonging and an experimentation that's happening with a sort of Persian Gulf style, really transactional system of letting people come and this kind of mutual interest in if it's good for me and it's good for you, then you can be here. But I'm just curious, I mean, what do you think is lost in a world where we think about participation rather than belonging to.
- [18:18]
Carlos Lozada
I wonder if there's a moment when you need, even from a selfish point of view, when the nation needs its residents, needs the people within its borders to feel a sense of belonging. If there's moments of crisis, moments of tension, when the country has to pull together in some way, and if you've deliberately cultivated a world in which that belonging is optional, is minimized, then that becomes more difficult. I mean, my mind is drawn toward wartime, but there have to be other kinds of crises, kinds of moments. When being in and of America, for example, has to mean something. Yeah. And if immigration becomes purely transactional because of its efficiencies, and I see the efficiencies, I think there's a risk. You referred to the risky bet that immigrants make when they move. I think we engage in a different kind of risky bet if we make immigration purely a sort of transaction that fits all sides.
- [19:30]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah, I think that's so well put. And I think that that really kind of gets at the heart of the conundrum. I mean, I sort of feel like I spent so much time in my reporting on this series talking to economists who talk about immigration in this very kind of, you know, when you have more immigrants, you have, you know, these positive effects when you have, you know, fewer. And I had to keep reminding myself that migration is such a human phenomenon, Right. And you know, the United Arab Emirates is such a strange place and there's something sort of fundamentally unstable about the idea that it's a country where just 10% of the people who live there are, are citizens.
- [20:10]
Carlos Lozada
I was completely struck by that number, by the way. I did, I did not real. It was that small.
- [20:16]
Lydia Polgreen
It's so small. And what that says to me, just to put it in your language, is it's a very risky one sided bet.
- [20:23]
Unknown
Right.
- [20:24]
Lydia Polgreen
And that the bet on the part of the Emiratis that they're always going to be able to set the terms of those relationships is risky. And then also the risk that at a moment when you find yourself altogether in a crisis and don't have glue that holds you together in some, that you won't know how to move forward.
- [20:48]
Carlos Lozada
You know, I guess I'm just gonna stick with this kind of theme of agency because it seems like what we keep coming back to. You write in this series about how the civil war in Syria was this hinge moment in history. How it didn't just propel mass migration of people, particularly into Europe, but also was the impetus behind the sort of visceral response, you know, backlash, if you want to call it that, against the. The movement of people into Europe. And it's kind of something that has become emblematic of so much of the anti immigrant animus right now in the world. But you end with this story about people who left at the height of the civil war, built lives elsewhere, and are now returning, trying to rebuild their country, their lives, their identities as Syrians. I think the title of that piece was something like People say I'm crazy for coming back or something to that effect. And it's a quote from a Syrian woman who remade her life in Germany, in Berlin, and now wants to return. Right. This compulsion about going back is so fascinating to me and runs into the difficulty of, as they say, ever going home again. What did you learn about this desire to return even when what you're going back to may be so difficult and when you've kind of built a life someplace else?
- [22:15]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, it was really important to me to write about Syria in some way because it did sort of feel like this moment that really kind of broke the world in a lot of ways. And it sort of Underscores a couple of different things. One is that, you know, when we think about people who leave home and migrate, people who leave home and migrate tend to not go very far if they're being forced to leave under duress. And then there's a sort of smaller handful of them who ultimately will make often a kind of hopscotch journey from Syria to Turkey, from Turkey to, you know, ultimately to Berlin, which was the story of this woman, Wafa Mustafa, who I. Who I met in Damascus. And, you know, she had, I think, a very human desire to just live and be in the place that you're from and to spend your life around the people and speaking the language and participating in the culture of the place that made you. And it's funny, I have my own strange relationship with this notion.
- [23:16]
Unknown
Right.
- [23:17]
Lydia Polgreen
Like, I have always been very curious about people's sense of rootedness because of my own rootlessness. You know, my mother is from Ethiopia, my father is American, and most of my life I lived in neither country. And so I ended up having this sort of strange, peripatetic childhood. And I think that in place of a sense of rootedness, I think I got an ease in the world and a kind of cosmopolitan identity that has enabled me to live an extraordinary life. I wouldn't trade that life for anything.
- [23:48]
Carlos Lozada
Not bad training for a foreign correspondent.
- [23:50]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah.
- [23:51]
Carlos Lozada
Let it be said. Right?
- [23:52]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah. And I think, you know, journalists tend to sort of stand in borderlands. You know, it gives you a kind of perspective and a place to look at things. But I've always been drawn to the stories of people who have that sense of deep rootedness. And it was just remarkable in the context of Syria to see that put into such high relief. Whether it was, you know, the guy that owned a car wash or this young journalist, activist, Wafa Mustafa. These were stories of people who just retained this deep, deep, deep sense of belonging to this particular place. It's just so powerful as to override what we assume is the undying attraction of having a life of safety and comfort in another place. And it just. It's funny that that seems novel to people because it seems like literally the most common human impulse in the world.
- [24:50]
Unknown
Right.
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Lydia Polgreen
I mean, in the modern world, we really do think that being confined and not being able to move is the most serious form of punishment. But going back to the Bible and, you know, ancient epics, exile, that's the most profound form of punishment. It's almost a kind of social death to be cast out. Whether it's. It's Dante or Odysseus or the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It's everywhere. It's all through human history.
- [25:19]
Carlos Lozada
For me, when I think about going back, it's slightly different. I don't think as much about going back to live in Peru now. I think about going back in time, going back to the moment when my family decided to leave or when I then chose to come here myself. And that easily could have been different. Different. We easily could have made a different choice. And, you know, I've always been jealous of Americans who don't just claim, like a country, they claim a hometown. Right. Like an American is from. Like, I'm from Chicago, I'm from, you know, Dallas. I'm from New Orleans. And, you know, they, they instinctively know the streets and the rhythms and the smells and the sights. Right. And. And I don't have the. That anymore. Right. When I, When I go back to, to Lima, I, I feel out of place. I don't get the jokes. Yeah, not quite as well, you know, and so I, I long for this place. But as with the immigrant experience, you always, you long for a place that no longer exists because to you, it's captured at the moment in time when you departed and everything's changed.
- [26:31]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah, I mean, I think that was. It's funny, I, I, you know, even though my mother really had only came to the United States because she married my father and that was, you know, he needed to come back and finish college. And when she first got here, she didn't like it. They were in Minnesota. It was very cold. She found the people very cold.
- [26:48]
Carlos Lozada
No, Minnesota, nice.
- [26:50]
Lydia Polgreen
Minnesota, nice. It's a carapace. It's not what it seems, but, you know, I think she felt it was a strange and unwelcoming place. And my father very much wanted to go back to Ethiopia and live there, even though he was an American. But over time, my mom came to really admire and love the United States. And so the story that I got of Ethiopia was one of kind of almost having dodged a bullet.
- [27:14]
Unknown
Right.
- [27:15]
Lydia Polgreen
Like, I was so lucky to have been born in the United States. And if you think about the history of Ethiopia over the course of my lifetime.
- [27:21]
Unknown
Right.
- [27:21]
Lydia Polgreen
I was born in 1975, you know, Marxist dictatorship.
- [27:26]
Carlos Lozada
You kind of were lucky.
- [27:28]
Lydia Polgreen
No, absolutely. You know, and I think that there's a part of me that has always taken that for granted and that suppressed the curiosity of, and frankly discounted the, the value of, you know, even in the most painful of circumstances, being of and rooted in a particular place.
- [27:47]
Carlos Lozada
And the outcome of that Life, the one that your parents didn't initially plan, but the one you ended up living is, as you put it. You say, I have always stood ambivalently at the psychic borders of American belonging. I just, I don't have a question there. I just, like, I just sort of stared at that. I just stared at that sentence for so long. And I wanted to know more about. About those borders. Because it's interest even that you use borders. Yeah, because. And I'm sure that was not, not accidental, but so much of the debate over immigration has become a debate about borders and not a conversation about the way that immigrants are enriching, reshaping, remaking, sometimes challenging life inside those borders. And maybe your ability to stand ambivalently at the psychic borders of American belonging helps you glimpse that a little more clearly than most. So, Lydia, at the beginning of this conversation, you said you were drawn to this subject and this approach to it because it's the topic of our time, of our. Of our moment. What have you learned elsewhere that you think informs what is happening here now in the United States?
- [29:01]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think that so many of the sort of trends and political innovations, to put it in a neutral way, driven by anti migration politics, have come home to roost here in the United States in a way that feels in some ways like just almost outlandishly cruel and just sort of unbelievably crude. And I guess I was struck that, you know, when J.D. vance was trying to kind of rally the troops in the Senate to vote for the President's one big beautiful bill, and he tweeted, the thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The OBBB fixes this problem, and therefore it must pass. I mean, this is absurd, right? If, If Trump wanted to do a border security bill, chances are he could probably get a majority and quite a few Democrats to go along with him. But it felt to me really telling, and I think of a p. With the reporting that I've done around the world, that this force of using immigration as a cudgel, as a way to kind of pull even a plurality together around a very radical political program is a thing that has come to the United States. And how. But I also take away that this is not a very powerful instrument and that it changes quickly.
- [30:31]
Unknown
Right.
- [30:32]
Lydia Polgreen
We are in the process of an experiment that will just reshape America in ways that we can't even possibly fathom. You know, for the first time in 50 years, we're likely to have net negative migration in the United States in 2025. This is just, I think people don't even, can't even grasp the level of profound change this represents for us as a country. And I think that people are not going to like it when that becomes clear. And this is something that we've seen play out in many other countries. When people see what life is like without immigrants, they realize it's not necessarily a life that they want to live. So, yeah, I think that that's where we're headed and we'll see how we respond.
- [31:19]
Carlos Lozada
Well, I think we can not stop there but pause there because I hope we can continue getting together to talk about this in the months and years to come.
- [31:30]
Lydia Polgreen
Yeah, something tells me it's not going to stop being a story and I know that you are going to keep writing about it, too. So we'll reconvene.
- [31:36]
Carlos Lozada
Excellent. Good to see you, Lydia.
- [31:38]
Lydia Polgreen
Bye, Carlos.
- [31:56]
Unknown
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