Hey, everyone, Mary here. The What Next Team is on vacation for the rest of the week, so we're re-airing some relevant episodes you might have missed the first time around.

Today's episode, it's about immigration policy. We wanted to re-air it after the Trump administration announced last week that they're going to put in place more visa restrictions. They're set to

affect hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers. And the reason the president gave for these new

rules was the coronavirus. But the episode you'll hear today traces the kinds of anti-immigrant

policies and rhetoric Trump espouses to work that has been going on for years.

Work that started thanks to one man, a small town eye doctor in Michigan,

with a very specific, very racist set of ideas about how to keep America white.

One note, this episode originally aired back in July 2019.

That's when this man died.

Okay, here we go.

Hassan Ahmad likes figuring things out, solving puzzles.

Yeah, I guess I'm a bit of a fixer.

You know, I like to try to figure out what the reason is behind

something and understand, like, the patterns. I mean, at the end of the day, I think...

He speaks eight languages, like French and Spanish, but also Urdu, Mandarin, a little Cantonese on the

side. I am, I can do business in them, yeah. If you can recognize the patterns, then you can speak the language.

Looking for patterns helps to sign out in his day job as an immigration lawyer.

He says, getting people into this country, making sure they can stay, it's gotten harder over the last few years.

It started decades ago.

Got much worse after 9-11.

Worse again after Donald Trump's election.

And it was that election that made Hassan want to figure out why his job was getting so hard.

...