581. What Both Parties Get Wrong About Immigr...

New York City’s mayor called them “public enemy number one.” History books say they caused the Black Death — although recent scientific evidence disputes that claim. In an updated episode from 2025, we ask: Is the rat a scapegoat? And what does our rat hatred say about us? SOURCE ...  Show more

One possibility: a leading hypothesis pursued by researchers (and funders) was built on science that now appears to be fraudulent. Stephen Dubner speaks with the scientist and the journalist who blew the whistle. SOURCES: Charles Piller, investigative journalist for Science, auth ...  Show more

Allison B. Wolf's Just Immigration in the Americas: A Feminist Account (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) proposes a pioneering, interdisciplinary, feminist approach to immigration justice, which defines immigration justice as being about identifying and resisting global oppression i ...  Show more

Supporters of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act pledged it wouldn’t radically change immigration. David Leonhardt, author of Ours Was the Shining Future, explains how it instead led to what might be the largest wave of immigration in human history. This episode was produce ...  Show more

Decades of failed compromise and stalled deals in Washington have led to a broken immigration system with a tremendous human cost. With roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the US, and more in search of a better life, immigration is one of the biggest policy ch ...  Show more

Today’s book is: We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States. The “Dreamer narrative” celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship, and has promoted the idea that access ...  Show more