This week, we’re proud to share the pilot season of a new podcast made by students at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. It’s called The Stakes Explained. Each episode tries to make sense of the executive orders that continue to flood out of the Oval Office.
All week long, our guests have mentioned belonging and how so many of the executive orders and actions coming from the Oval Office have an othering effect. They're making so many people feel like they don't belong and they're not wanted in the place they call home… or hope to call home. And that's what today's show is about: belonging.
In this episode:
- Reporter and Berkeley journalism grad student Andrés Larios interviews UC Berkeley law professor Sarah Song, whose research areas include democratic theory and issues of immigration and citizenship. They talk more about President Trump's executive order suspending the refugee admissions program.
- Reporter and Berkeley journalism graduate student NeEddra James interviews John powell who has made his life's work studying the significance of belonging. He's the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute. He's also a law professor at UC Berkeley. He has a new book out, The Power of Bridging.
THE STAKES EXPLAINED ON BAY MADE: EPISODE 4
David Boyer: You're listening to Bay Made, a mix of local stories and storytellers from the Bay Area, only on KALW.
Hello and welcome to Bay Made. I'm David Boyer. Each week on the show, we spotlight a different Bay Area producer or podcast. You may hear things you totally agree with and some stuff that you don't. That is the point of the show to share a range of perspectives, ideas and stories that reflect the diversity of the Bay Area. This week, we are proud to share the pilot season of a podcast made by the students at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. It's called The Stakes Explained. Each episode tries to make sense of the executive orders and actions that continue to flood out of the Oval Office.
Shereen Marisol Meraji: Thanks David, I'm going take it from here. I'm Shereen Marisol Meraji. I'm a journalism professor at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. And The Stakes Explained is a podcast series that came out of my race and journalism seminar this past spring.
When President Trump issued a wave of executive orders, many of them touching on race and civil rights, I encouraged my students to talk to experts here at UC Berkeley to better understand what those orders could mean for our democracy.
If you want to hear the full Stakes Explained origin story, you should check out Monday's show. You can find it by going to kalw.org slash bay made. And later in that same episode, we discussed President Trump's anti-DEI executive orders and how they're affecting educators like Eric Greenwald who works at the Lawrence Hall of Science.
Eric Greenwald: We need to position youth for success in future STEM careers. We need to broaden the pool of people who can participate in those careers. These attacks on science education, you know, focusing on DEI and stuff like that, like I think that it's an attack on all of science.
Shereen Marisol Meraji: Tuesday's Stakes Explained focused on the Trump administration's immigration orders and actions with UC Berkeley law professor David Hausman.
David Hausman:I would say it was always a false promise that President Trump could conduct mass deportations of people convicted of crimes. There just aren't very many non-citizens convicted of crimes in the United States. So this idea that you could have mass deportation of criminals is nonsense.
Shereen Marisol Meraji: And also on Tuesday's show, we heard from Berkeley Journalism alum and the founder of El Tímpano, Madeline Baer. El Tímpano is a nonprofit news organization serving Latino immigrants in Oakland.
Madeleine Bair: Listening to a lot of immigrants themselves to hear what they want to see in local media one of the most common responses that we heard from people was, I just avoid news because it just covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can actually use to take action.
Shereen Marisol Meraji: In case you missed yesterday's show, we went deep into deregulation with labor historian Michael Mark Cohen. Why? Because that's how a Trump administration executive order says it wants to unleash prosperity.
Michael Mark Cohen: Things like the minimum wage, child labor laws, environmental protection laws, the rights of workers to organize and form unions do indeed impose limits on a business's capacity to accumulate endless amounts of money. Now, those regulations, from the point of view of the public, of ordinary people, are often, in many respects, necessary for the survival of communities.
Shereen Marisol Meraji: Education, immigration, deregulation -- you can go back and listen to all those interviews by visiting kalw.org slash bay made.
Music up and under
Which brings us to today, Thursday, our very last episode of The Stakes Explained on Bay Made. All week long, our guests have mentioned belonging and how so many of the executive orders and actions coming from the Oval Office have an othering effect. They're making so many people feel like they don't belong and they're not wanted in the place they call home… or hope to call home.
And when you're a refugee, That feeling of othering, that feeling of displacement, that feeling that you don't belong, it's heightened. Imagine being forced to leave home because you fear persecution, you fear for your life, hoping to find safety, to find refuge in a place that no longer wants you. You may not have to imagine it. I can be talking about you. In light of all of this, reporter and Berkeley journalism grad student, Andrés Larios, wanted to learn more about President Trump's executive order suspending the refugee admissions program. So he invited UC Berkeley law professor Sarah Song into the Stakes studio. Her research areas include democratic theory and issues of immigration and citizenship.
Andrés Larios:Welcome to the Stakes Explained. Professor Song, thank you for being with me.
Sarah Song:Pleasure to be here. Please call me Sarah.
Andrés Larios:Of course. So Sarah, to get started, I would really love to understand a little bit why you decided to go into immigration law and study this very complex field.
Sarah Song: So I am an immigrant. I immigrated to the U.S. When I was six from South Korea. And my dad had come to study theology in Chicago. And a year later, he got a green card. And he sponsored my mom, my brother, and me. And we moved to Kansas City, Missouri. And I always wondered, why were we able to move? And how did my dad even get the idea to migrate?
So I think those were always in the back of my mind. But also... Intellectually, pedagogically, I think immigration touches on such important questions about the legitimacy of state power, the boundaries of justice, who belongs, citizenship, all of that. So I think it was something that was really calling to me.
Andrés Larios: There are so many terms that refer to people trying to enter the United States. In our conversation today, you have the terms refugee, asylee, parolee. Under U.S. Law, what do these terms mean?
Sarah Song: [00:06:31] Refugee is often a term that's used in everyday language colloquially to mean migrants who are fleeing danger, persecution. In the law, refugee, has a very specific definition. It's a definition that goes back in international law to the UN convention on refugees in the 1950s. And that was incorporated into American law in 1980 with the Refugee Act. And so the definition is a person who is outside of their country of origin. So they're no longer in their country of origin and who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin because of a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, political affiliation, or membership in a social group. Asylum seeker: So similar, someone who is fleeing persecution, but the critical difference between an overseas refugee and an asylum seeker is an asylum seeker has set foot in the territory of the United States or has presented themselves at a port of entry. And they are seeking to undergo the asylum process to show that they have a well-founded fear of persecution. And so I think that's the key difference. And parolee, you know, there's a kind of long history, but basically it gives the president a lot of discretion to admit migrants who are fleeing violent circumstances, but may not fit the definition of refugee. And so in response to particular refugee crises, but sometimes people have been paroled into the United States.
Andrés Larios: What's the process for becoming a refugee?
Sarah Song: The process involves applying for asylum, undergoing interviews, and depending on the complexity of the case, especially for asylum seekers who arrive at a port of entry wanting to undergo the process, they may have to participate in legal proceedings. If the asylum officer who interviews them says, nope, you don't qualify, they can appeal, and they're supposed to have a hearing in front of an immigration judge. And the immigration judge makes the final determination. That process can take years. There are enormous backlogs, especially in the asylum seeker process. In the meantime, people are waiting in legal limbo.
Andrés Larios: Where are these refugees coming from?
Sarah Song: About 85% of the world's refugees are residing in a neighboring country from their country of origin that they fled because it was the first place they could get to. So if the UNHCR, the High Commissioner for Refugees or a designated NGO, non-governmental organization, if they make a referral and recommend to a particular government, like the United States, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, and says, we recommend these aspiring refugees, then a U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Service official, whose job it is, is to do these interviews. So they will go abroad to any number of places, to refugee camps, to countries where there are many people waiting to be interviewed, and then they will make a determination.
Andrés Larios:Give us a little bit about the history of refugee admission into the United States, the reception, and where many of these refugees to the United States are coming from.
Sarah Song: So the history of refugee admissions in the U.S. Have been marked by periods of large resettlement and admissions and also by periods of strict limits. So just to give you some examples, after World War II and during the Cold War, the U S admitted large numbers of refugees from Europe. So for example, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 allowed for the admission of over 350,000 refugees from Europe. During the Cold War, the U.S. admitted refugees fleeing communist regimes, this is the Cold war, not only from Europe, but also from Cuba and from Southeast Asia. And so some of the factors influencing where refugees are coming from are where are their international conflicts? Because refugee crises are often the result of war and conflict. In 2023, The top countries of origin for refugees who were admitted to the United States were the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Andrés Larios: [00:11:18] You had mentioned that the Refugee Act of 1980 codified refugee admission into the United States. But currently, we have President Donald Trump who is challenging these refugee admission norms and practices. Can you tell me why it is that even though it's written into law, the president is able to challenge these refugee admissions practices?
Sarah Song: Good question. Refugee and asylum policy is just one part of overall immigration policy and when it comes to the priorities of who can get a green card, should it be employment based, should be family based, a lot of that is set by Congress. Congress is the admissions committee and there's this law called the immigration and nationality statute that has all these priorities. That said... In the area of refugee and asylum law, the president has considerable discretionary power.
Under the 1980 Refugee Act, the president has the power to set the annual number of refugees that can be admitted. They can also establish ceilings for refugee admissions from different parts of the world. The president can also suspend refugee admissions altogether. And that's what the executive order that President Trump signed in February does.
And it can go either way. A president can reduce or entirely suspend refugee emissions in a particular year, or they can increase. And so for example, I'll give you some numbers. In 2008, President Obama raised the annual cap to 80,000. And his administration admitted between 55,000 and 75,000 refugees per year during his administrations. Under President Trump's first term, annual admissions, he lowered them. They dropped to 22,000 per year, and then in his final year to 11,000, per year. President Biden came in, he raised the ceiling to higher than what it was under Obama. He raised it to 125,000 per year but it took time to increase the capacity to ramp back up. So in President Biden's first year, only about 11,000 refugees were admitted. But by the end of President Biden's term, the number of refugees admitted was about 100,000.
Andrés Larios: Well, speaking of presidential power, the Trump administration under the first 100 days signed the re-evaluating and redefining the refugee admissions program. But alongside that, they also signed an executive order designating Afrikaners as an oppressed group of people that have refugee status. Can you comment a little bit about this, how this came about…and why?
Sarah Song:So the executive order says it is US policy to promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation. So think about this, the South African government is trying to rectify the legacy of apartheid. And President Trump is saying, Well, that's a kind of reverse discrimination against white Afrikaners.
Andrés Larios: Why? Why is he sympathetic to Afrikaners and their plight?
Sarah Song: This is such an important question. And I think we have to go back to the first Trump administration. You may remember early in his first administration, he met with a bipartisan group of US senators to talk about immigration policy. When he learned, right, that there are Haitians coming into the country, he referred to Haiti and African countries as —---hole countries. And he said, why do we have to take people in from those countries? And he says, could we just take Haiti off the list? And someone in the room said, well, if you did, it would be obvious why, that Haitians are not white. In referencing Haiti and African countries as —---hole countries, right, he's saying, we don't want migrants or refugees from those countries, why can't we take people from Norway? So. Some of Trump supporters are self-identified white nationalists and they have bought into, you may have heard of the conspiracy theory, the great replacement theory. Okay, tell me more. Yes, so it's part through immigration policy in part and maybe low birthrate among white members of the population that white people may eventually be outnumbered. By people of color in the United States, or in other countries. Great replacement theory has adherence in Europe and other parts of the world. So I think there is this concern that the U.S., through refugee admissions, through immigration policy, have opened its doors to too many people who are not white.
Andrés Larios: And finally, for those who might not be following the issue of refugee admissions closely, why should they care? Why should someone care about the redefining and reevaluation of a refugee resettlement program in the United States?
Sarah Song: I think we all have a stake in standing up for an inclusive vision of what it means to be an American. And so, even if, you know, you don't think every day about the refugee admissions program and how it's been suspended, if you think about the motivations for why it's been suspended and a privileging of a particular group of people as the ideal American, I think it implies. That all of the current citizens who are not white are not fully included. So that's why. We should all care, even those of us who are privileged to already have the legal status of U.S. Citizenship.
Andrés Larios: Thank you one more time, Sarah, for joining us on The Stakes Explained. It was a pleasure speaking with you today.
Sarah Song:Thank you so much, Andrés. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Shereen Marisol Meraji:That was UC Berkeley Professor of Law, Sarah Song, speaking with reporter, Andrés Larios. You're listening to The Stakes Explained, a series from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, where reporters interview campus experts, journalists, and community members to unpack President Trump's executive orders to see what's at stake for our democracy. This episode's theme is belonging.
And our last guest has made his life's work studying the significance of belonging. He's the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute. He's also a law professor at UC Berkeley. He has a new book out, The Power of Bridging, and he's in conversation with reporter NeEddra James.
john powell: Hi, my name is john powell. Good to be here.
NeEddra James: In your work, you focus on bridging communities. Can you explain for people who are new to your work what bridging means?
john powell: So bridging, the concept has been around a long time, and it takes on different expressions. In the United States, it's popularized by Putnam in a book he wrote called Bowling Along. But the idea is that we have these social cleavages. We live in separate neighborhoods, we go to separate places to worship, we go to separate schools, and we have ideas about each other, but not from lived experience, from ideas, from movies, from books, from propaganda. And this is really what the nature of prejudice is about. Prejudice, prejudging.
The one way you deal with that is that you bridge. You actually deliberately develop a relationship with people who are socially considered the other. And I say socially considered because there really is no other.
I was teaching at a university where the chancellor of the university said it wasn't until he went off to college that he met someone who was not the same religion and the same race. But he had ideas about them.
So bridging is saying, can we come together and really see each other as human beings? Can we listen to each other? Not to agree with each other, but just to acknowledge our shared humanity. So we live in stories and bridging is: listen to another person's story. We all know our own story. We all our own suffering. We don't know the suffering and burden of other people. And what bridging invites us to do is to listen.
Just listen to other person's pain, suffering, and aspirations. And to suffer with another person is what compassion means. Compassion means to suffer with. So that's what Bridgen invites. When that happens, the other person becomes humanized.
NeEddra James: I can see myself in you and you can see yourself in me. It seems to be where you're going with that. So if we have folks being educated kind of in silos in some instances and developing ideas about others who may not live in their neighborhood or that don't go to their schools, for example, how do they even come to have these kinds of conversations if we see each other as so radically different?
john powell: Yeah, I think empathy is not necessarily hard to achieve. I think in some ways it's the opposite, is that we have to teach people to hate, we have teach people to be racist. And the injury is not just to the target, the injury's also to us, because if every major religion, and certainly Christianity, one of the radical teachings of Christianity was that we all are God's children. And 2000 years ago, and maybe even today, that's a radical concept. Well, if you're rich, you're God's child. Or if you are white, you are God's Child. Or if you're this, it's like everybody. And so, it is not a new idea. And I think it's more than an idea.
I mean, human comes from the word human, so this means of the Earth. We're part of the earth. We're connected to the earth and now people play with quantum physics saying, yeah, we are part of each other. It's not just an idea and so we have to work really hard to keep the lie alive that we're separate. And certainly they were separate by race and by ethnicity. And it's not to say we're all the same, but we're expressions of something very powerful.
NeEddra James: How would you respond to someone who says, well, it's nice to have people sit together and talk about their stories and get to know each other, but that's not gonna change structures. It's not going to change institutions. How do you respond to that critique?
john powell: Well you work on multiple levels. Structures are powerful, but in the last few years what people have found out is that stories may even be more powerful than structures. That what we believe call those structures into being. And so it's not either or, it's both and. What we think is affected by structures and culture, and what the structures and cultures are is a reflection of our collective thinking.
NeEddra James: Right, so they're interconnected. What kind of stories or narratives does this moment need?
john powell: Well, one of the things, because stories and narratives are really subtle and operate on many different levels, one of things is that we shouldn't have someone telling somebody else's story in the absence of that group. In other words, we should co-create.
So we don't want men being the sole storytellers of women, even before you know what they say. It's not saying men can't participate. But if you silence one group, and a lot of these executive orders is nothing but pure and simple, censoring thought and speech, it's like I have an ideology, I'm powerful, I'm rich, I have whatever, the organ of government behind me.
If you say certain words… I mean, how obscene is it in this country when we have a list of words that are suspect, a list of words? How is it that we're banning books? That's the bedrock of a liberal democracy, for people to be able to have an exchange of ideas. Nope, not that idea. So we're not in search of the truth right now. We're in the midst of a deep ideological war with people who are very powerful and offering something to America that's as un-American as it could possibly be.
NeEddra James:How do you explain to our listeners, for example, how someone as anti-democratic as Trump is turning out to be is able to ascend to power through democratic means?
john powell: Sure, you know, our democracy has never been a full democracy. We're still in process. But the thing that actually motivates people a lot is fear. And we're in a very fearful time. And one of the things that actually creates that anxiety, that fear, is change that's happening very rapidly, change that we feel like we can't control. And that's happened all around the world. Economy, globalization, technology, and of course demographics. And so the world is changing and no one really feels in control. And what you have is what Amanda Ripley calls conflict entrepreneurs. What they do is trade in conflicts. You're afraid, I'll tell you, you should be afraid. And this is why you should afraid.
First of all, they excite the fear and then they say, I'm the only one that can protect you. They point to the other as being the problem. The reason you're afraid, the reason you are losing your religion, your house, your job, is because of the other.
One of the things that's interesting though, this may be a silver lining, othering is being weaponized, but the thing that's driving a lot of it is people's desire to belong. I mentioned Putnam earlier, people feel alone, people are feeling lost, and then it says come together, you can be part of this group. Now, the price of the ticket, as Baldwin would say, is you have to hate those other people. But in this group, in this place, you can belong. And the need to belong is actually quite powerful.
But we say you have to have belonging without othering. We've actually been trading in belonging for thousands of years, but not without other. So we said, if you're a Christian, you're great, but if you are not a Christian you're sinner. If you're Muslim, you are great, but if not a Muslim, your infidel. If you're European, it's great. If you are not European, you're uncivilized. So we've constantly been saying that one group belongs at the expense of another group.
NeEddra James: Some would argue that identity formation necessarily happens that way. I know I'm me because I'm not you. What do you say to that… if the idea is that, well, in-group formation happens because we share, we share some things, so we identify with each other and we're different from those other people.
john powell: We, as sapiens, can imagine things, can tell stories, and those stories can become quite powerful. So, for example, money, money is a story. Google, that's a story, we can tell stories about things that we haven't seen, that we can imagine. Christianity is a story that 2.2 billion people adhere to in some way.
NeEddra James: So by that logic, democracy is a story. Democracy is a And how far can we go in that story? So imagination's not limited. That's the beauty of it, our ability to cooperate is because we can imagine. How far can we imagine? So we can't imagine a world where, in some ways, racism doesn't exist. Yet, racism has a history and history's not that old. So for most of human history, it didn't exist.
Someone had to create it. Convince people of it. Tell a story, then build structures and edifice to make it just have real consequences. But we're not done. We can tell different stories.
Shereen Marisol Meraji: That was NeEddra James, reporter and grad student at Berkeley Journalism, speaking with Cal Law Professor john powell, whose most recent book is called The Power of Bridging.
Big thanks to the KALW audience for listening to the pilot season of The Stakes Explained, where students at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism ask Berkeley professors to help make sense of the new orders, actions, and policies flooding out of the White House. I'm Shereen Marisol Meraji, executive producer, assistant professor, and I run the audio program at UC Berkeley's journalism school. Special thanks to my race and journalism class from spring of 2025 for helping me get this off the ground. Amaray Alvarez, Jasmine Ascencio, Alicia Chiang, Nia Coates, NeEddra James, Andrés Larios, Chelsea Long, Daniela Sandoval, Meg Tanaka, José Velazquez, Erica Zaro, and Anna Zou.
Big thanks to all the professors at UC Berkeley who put yourselves out there at a time when academia is under so much pressure and scrutiny. And a big, big shout out to the Stakes Explained production crew, Hallie Applebaum, Alicia Chiang, Paul Ghusar, and Winnie Yao.
David Boyer: Thanks for listening to today's BayMaid, and thanks to Shereen Marisol Meraji and her students for sharing your new series. And tune into Bay Made all next week at 11.30 a.m. We'll be sharing stories produced by KALW's Audio Academy, which is our nine-month radio journalism training program for adults. That's right here on 91.7 FM, KALW San Francisco, Bay Area.