The Dig Folgen

Donald Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and pledged to build a “a big, fat, beautiful wall” on the southern border that, of course, Mexico is going to pay for. It’s no surprise that Trump’s message struck a chord: right-wing nativism has been rising for decades and hardcore xenophobes had long since taken over the Republican Party. Worse yet, so-called immigration moderates on both sides of the aisle—including Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama—have sought to placate those reactionary forces by militarizing the border and orchestrating mass deportations. Now that Trump has won the presidency, undocumented immigrants are rightly worried and mobilizing to defend their communities. Today, we are joined by two guests who can help us understand where immigration politics are heading in the months to come and how we got here. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law and the author of the blog “Crimmigration.” Chris Newman, Legal Director at the National Day Labor Organizing Network.  

Journalist Sarah Jaffe’s new book Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt chronicles the movements for economic and racial justice that will be at the forefront of the fight against Trump. Daniel interviewed Sarah before a live audience at AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Donald Trump’s election was shocking, if actually not so surprising, and has prompted widespread protests against a cresting right-wing reaction taking shape as a strange and potent combination of white nationalism, make-believe economic populism, libertarian orthodoxy, America-first isolationism and War on Terror extremism. It has also prompted us to relaunch this podcast. Today, we’ll be discussing why Trump won and what that says about the political moment in the United States. Many apologies for the crappy quality of some of the audio. We had some technical difficulties that have been figured out for future episodes. Our guests are: Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College, and is the author of books including “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s” and “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.” Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard and the author “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.” Matt Karp is an historian at Princeton University, contributing editor at Jacobin, and the author of “This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy.” Thanks for listening. Please subscribe, leave a review and spread the word.