Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National

Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation,

and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explores the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

I'm Brian Ballot, and I'm Nathan Connolly.

Now, if you're new to the podcast, Brian, Nathan and I are all historians,

and every week we take a topic in the news and explore it across American history.

So this week we have the second in our series on immigration,

and basically we're going to pick up where we left off in the early 1900s.

Now, at that point, US officials were at their wit's end.

Illegal immigrants were sneaking into the United States from Mexico,

as one government official complained.

We couldn't stop them.

If we had the Navy on the waterfront, we couldn't stop them.

Not even a Chinese wall, 9,000 miles in length, and built over rivers and deserts and mountains,

and along the seashores would seem to permit a permanent solution.

This is a story in Erika Lee.

Now, guys, this all sounds pretty familiar, right?

Sadly, yeah. That sounds huge to me, Joanne.

Huge and familiar.

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