Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashik, and I'm here, as always, with Vecchipper, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.

If you like what you hear today, please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We also publish all of our transcripts on Substack.

Today, we are so happy to be talking with Susie Lee.

Susie is a member of the Catalyst editorial board and the director of the Human Rights Program

in the Human Development Department of Binghamton University. She's also the author of several

Catalyst articles on immigration, including her most recent piece, The Logic of Mass Deportation. Thank you so much

for joining us today, Susie. Hi. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great having you, Susie. Susie and I

have known each other for a very, very long time. And she's not only contributed to Catalyst many times.

She's also regularly written for Jacobin. In fact, she's kind of the go-to person on

immigration now for Jacobin and Catalyst.

So it's a long-time contributor and also dear friend. So it's very good to have you around, Susie.

It's great to be here. I'm very happy. Can you tell the listeners about your research and where

they can find your work? Sure. I'm primarily an immigration scholar, so I research immigration policy. And I'll just say,

apart from Catalyst and Jacobin, you can find a book I wrote last year called Temporary Measures,

Migrant Workers and the Developmental State in the Philippines and South Korea, wherever books are sold.

But I don't do Twitter or any of that stuff. So if you haven't already guessed, today we're going to be talking about immigration.

And we're going to talk mostly about the modern American immigration system and look at the

question of whether or not there was actually an immigration crisis.

Spoiler, there was. And we're also going to talk about

how Trump capitalized on that crisis and whether or not he has actually effectively responded to it.

So, Susie, maybe to start us off, can you explain what the different components of the American

...