Red State refugees

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

President Trump has dramatically reduced the numbers of refugees arriving in the United States, vowing to protect native-born Americans’ interests. But there’s a catch - some of the nation’s reddest communities may not survive without them. Katy Long telsl the story of one small, poor, conservative town — Cactus, Texas — where hundreds of refugees have settled, drawn by the well-paid jobs in meatpacking, shifting the demographics of the community, shaping the refugees’ perspective and saving the town from disaster. Cactus is a town which would have died altogether, taking the meatpacking plant and the jobs there with it, had it not been for these refugees. And so this story begs the question: if you drastically reduce immigration and stop refugee resettlement – as the Governor of Texas has recently announce – what happens to these towns, to the meatpacking industry, and to the idea of beef-and-oil-Texas?

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to BBC World Service. I'm Katie Long and this is Red State refugees.
0:07.0	Oh, say, can you sing?
0:11.0	Welcome to Morning Assembly at Cactus Elementary.
0:15.0	Cactus, Texas is a dusty end of the road town in one of the most conservative corners of the United States.
0:25.0	This is oil and beef country, America's heartlands.
0:30.0	But this school assembly looks nothing like you might imagine it would.
0:35.0	Because Cactus is a small town in a red state that's largely filled with and sustained by refugees.
0:47.0	In Cactus there's probably 40 languages represented in 21 people groups.
0:52.0	When you think that Cactus is a town of about... just represented in 21 people groups.
0:53.0	When you think that Cactus is a town of about 3,000 people, that's a lot of diversity,
0:59.0	such as smallplex.
1:00.0	Yes, ma'am.
1:01.0	I've never lived anywhere or heard of any other place that is as diverse in two square miles as cactus. And now for our pledge.
1:14.0	I pledge
1:15.0	pledge allegiance to the flag.
1:18.0	Every morning all across America,
1:21.0	school children pledge allegiance to the flag. But here in Cactus, those
1:26.4	words have added meaning because for many, most of Cactus's families, America was never just a given. For many of these children,
1:36.0	cactus is their lucky break, the first wrong on the American dream, and a world away from where their lives began.
1:45.0	I knew there was a country named Myanmar and then it was Burma,
1:48.0	but I didn't realize just alone in that country that's about the size of Texas,
1:52.0	there's about five different languages.
	...

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