In the early years, when immigrants first arrived in Albertville, the things that bothered the locals weren’t the things you usually hear about when people talk about immigration. Not jobs or wages or crime.
Latino residents decided to organize a peaceful march in support of a path to legal status, and their white neighbors were shocked when 5,000 people poured into the streets.
Suddenly realizing just how many Latinos had moved to town, longtime residents jumped into action, fueled by a wave of national and statewide anti-immigration fever. Then in 2011, Alabama adopted the most extreme anti-immigrant law in the country.
One of the things we were excited to investigate when we went to Alabama was to answer the question at the heart of the immigration debate: what does it cost taxpayers when we let in millions of immigrants, documented and undocumented? In Albertville, how much was it? We asked economist Kim Rueben and her colleague Erin Huffer to run the numbers.
In 2012, the fever broke, and the Albertville city council stopped targeting Latino residents. The mayor says he and the council are taking a cue from the public schools.
We’ve visited Albertville, Alabama many times now, to figure out exactly what happened when the population shifted from 98% white in 1990, to a fourth Latino twenty years later.
We hear the companies’ side—they have a totally different story to tell than the workers. We also go to one of the leading researchers on the economic effects of immigrants, Giovanni Peri, who chairs the economics department at UC Davis. He and researcher Justin Wiltshire did a study for us on what happened to wages and jobs in Albertville.
Ira Glass' friend Lucy used to love listening to the radio psychologist Joy Browne, who she thought always had the best advice. But is it possible for someone's advice to just be too good? Ira Glass talks to Lucy to find out.
Ira with two magicians who take the premise of magic – that it’s all about deception – and try to stand that on its head to get to something utterly real, unfaked and emotional. (16 minutes) David Blaine is on tour for the summer.
Magicians say it can take years to create and polish a new magic trick. Teller (of Penn and Teller) shows host Ira Glass how he invented one of his most beautiful and puzzling routines.
Ira discusses James Comey’s Senate testimony this week, testimony that called the president a liar. And producer Sean Cole talks with Theo Greenly about a lie that bothered him for a while, a lie involving his cousin, an artist named Kenny Scharf.
If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, why haven’t we heard from the extraterrestrials yet? Producer David Kestenbaum explains The Fermi Paradox to host Ira Glass. The possibility that we are alone in the universe makes David sad.
We turn now to one of the loneliest experiences a person can have: marriage. Ira listens to two people trying to break through what’s going wrong in their marriage, an excerpt from a new podcast in which real couples have a real therapy session with a real therapist, Esther Perel.
Ira talks to producer Elna Baker about Stede Bonnet, a nobleman who woke up one day and decided that his new life goal was to become a pirate. You can read the trials of Stede Bonnet online.
Vice News producer Reid Cherlin tells Ira about a party he attended in Washington in 2014. At the time he thought everyone there was on the fringe of the right wing, largely irrelevant.
Ira talks to Russian reporter Anna Nemtsova in Moscow about the recent subway bombing in St. Petersburg and the conspiracy theories she heard from Russians as soon as news about the bombing started to spread. Anna Nemtsova is a correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek.
Vladmir Putin’s approval rating is a seemingly unreal 84%. Ira talks to reporter Charles Maynes to find out if that number is real and how it could be that high.
The anti-government protests last month in Russia were surprising for a few reasons – including the fact that they included tons of young people. After the protests, teenagers started posting videos to the internet of their teachers lecturing them about the protests and the kids arguing back.