An NPR Correspondent's Immigrant Experience: 'American Dreams, American Nightmares'
With Meghna Chakrabarti
Who belongs in America? NPR correspondent Aarti Namdev Shahani asks the question in a new memoir about her immigrant experience.
Guests
Aarti Namdev Shahani, author of the memoir “Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares.” NPR business correspondent based in Silicon Valley. (@aarti411)
From The Reading List
Excerpt from Here We Are by Aarti Shahani
Publishers Weekly: “Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares” — “In this tragedy-tinged debut memoir, NPR technology correspondent Shahani discusses her father’s 1996 arrest for selling electronics to the Cali cartel of Colombia and the ways in which these events shaped Shahani’s life. Shahani’s family immigrated from India to New York City in 1981, where her father opened a wholesale electronics store and began selling such items as calculators and watches to customers who he later learned were cartel members. His arrest set in motion a legal nightmare that sent the author on a mission to prevent her father, who wasn’t a U.S. citizen, from being deported and to help other families in similar predicaments. Shahani discovers years after her father accepted a plea bargain and served eight months at Rikers Island that he may not have had to serve time at all had his lawyer worked harder to show that the case was thin. In a conversational tone, the book exposes the ugliness of the criminal justice system, which pressures defendants to take plea bargains. The author discusses becoming a journalist and building the kind of successful career her father never had and ends with a letter to her father, who eventually became a U.S. citizen and ‘whose ups and down taught me how the world really works.’ This timely, bittersweet immigration story will resonate powerfully with readers.”
Vox: “The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today’s immigration problem” — “Both sides of the aisle agree that the current US immigration system is broken. It’s why immigration’s stayed a hot-button political issue and policy debate, and part of what has made Donald Trump the likely 2016 Republican nominee for president.
“But the system hasn’t always been broken. Or rather, it hasn’t always been broken in this particular way.
“Everyone remembers that in 1986, President Ronald Reagan passed an ‘amnesty’ law. But what most people don’t know is that in 1996 — fresh off the heels of signing welfare reform, and two years after signing the ‘crime bill’ — President Bill Clinton signed a bill that overhauled immigration enforcement in the US and laid the groundwork for the massive deportation machine that exists today.
“Both welfare reform and the crime bills Clinton signed have been relitigated during a contentious Democratic primary, but the 1996 immigration bill — the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act — hasn’t.”
From Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares by Aarti Shahani. Copyright (c) 2019 by the author and reprinted with permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
Anna Bauman produced this hour for broadcast.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org. [Copyright 2019 NPR]
