Immigrantly

At this year's UN General Assembly, whole delegations walked out as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium. Two days earlier, President Trump told the world he could make a deal with Iran or "annihilate the Islamic Republic," and called on countries to quit the International Criminal Court. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, denied a U.S. visa for the second year in a row, had...

This is a rerun of Saadia's conversation with Mory Fontanez. Saadia found Mory on Instagram after Mory posted a video about her family in Iran during the June 2025 strikes. With the US now seven months into a new war with Iran, we're bringing this episode back. Mory is an intuitive life and leadership coach, a former crisis manager, and the author of Higher Self: Reclaiming the Power of Your Intui...

This week Saadia Khan brings back one of her favorite conversations of the year. Ramzi Fawaz has just relaunched his podcast, Nerd From the Future, for a second season, and the first new episode is out now. Ramzi is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of The New Mutants and Queer Forms. His next book argues that the humanities can work like psychedelic ther...

Three days before the 25th anniversary of September 11th, New York City released 170,000 pages of its own 9/11 records, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani made September 11th an official citywide day of remembrance and service. The first Muslim mayor of New York is doing more 9/11 accountability work than any mayor before him. Does that protect Muslims, or put them on trial again? In the final episode of Im...

More than 95,000 people have signed a petition asking the organizers of the 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero to reconsider whether Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York City, should attend. Liz Miller's answer has traveled further than most: "Mayor Mamdani is not a terrorist." Elizabeth Miller (Liz) was six when her father, FDNY firefighter Douglas Miller of Rescue 5, went int...

Twenty-five years after September 11th, Guantánamo Bay is still open. Fifteen men are still held there. Six have never been charged with anything at all. And on August 26, 2026, a military judge finally set a trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three co-defendants: June 5, 2028, nearly 27 years after the attacks. In the first episode of Immigrantly's three-part 9/11 at 25 series, Saadia Khan...

Erika Lucas spent years inside private equity and venture capital, the rooms that decide who gets funded in America. Then she left to build what goes around them. In this episode, she tells Saadia Khan exactly what investors say about founders once they’ve walked out. Erika was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and came to rural Oklahoma at 13 with her mother and sister, speaking no English. She went bac...

This week, we're sharing an episode from Pehchaan, hosted by Bilal Lakhani with co-host Ambreen Ali, a show about the Pakistani diaspora in the US, told by the people living it. Their guest is Noorain Khan, who joined the Girl Scouts as a second grader in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and three decades later became the first Muslim American to lead the organization as National Board President. She's now...

There's a question on the U.S. citizenship test, question 74, that asks you to name one cause of the Civil War. The Government accepts three answers: slavery, economic reasons, states' rights. Saadia memorized all three. She passed. She became a citizen. And she never felt a single one of them. Then, on a detour from a wedding in Maryland, she spent an afternoon at the Gettysburg museum in ninety-...

UNRWA USA CEO Mara Kronenfeld is a Jewish American woman and the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor — and she leads the American nonprofit supporting the UN agency for Palestine refugees. In this episode of Immigrantly, Saadia Khan asks her what it costs to break the script. Mara traces her path from Riverside, California to a Fulbright year in Damascus, where friendships built in Yarmouk refug...

In 2011, a handful of skeptical New Yorkers answer a call to Occupy Wall Street. What they find feels less like a protest and more like a glimpse of a different world—one where people openly share stories of debt, hardship, and frustration. They start to build an anti-capitalist village in a tiny Manhattan park — under the watchful eyes of police. This is the first episode of Future Hindsight’s br...

Seven years ago, Sahar Saleem was the first-ever guest on Immigrantly, talking about her creative marketing career at PepsiCo. She's back, and everything has changed. In this episode, we talk about leaving a corporate "dream job," breaking into screenwriting in LA right as the writers' strike hit, the quiet blacklisting of pro-Palestinian voices in Hollywood, and her pilot Cash, about a Pakistani...

"No one fits into these types of boxes." Darializa Avila Chevalier has spent her whole life being asked to pick one: Black or Latina, Dominican or American, organizer or politician. Two weeks ago, the 32-year-old from Harlem broke the biggest box of all, defeating a five-term incumbent to win the Democratic nomination in New York's 13th Congressional District, with no corporate money and no party...

The Supreme Court just upheld birthright citizenship, striking down Trump's executive order in a 6-3 ruling that leans directly on a case 130 years in the making. We're re-releasing our deep dive into Wong Kim Ark — the Chinese American son of immigrants who won this exact fight at the Supreme Court in 1898 — because Chief Justice Roberts built this week's decision on Wong's story, by name. In thi...

Sharing a special episode this week from the More Muslim podcast. Reporter Tanita Rahmani realizes a small detail—blue ink instead of black on a marriage contract—means her marriage was never legally registered. That revelation sends her on a personal and investigative journey into the legal gray zone where many Muslim marriages exist: recognized by faith, but invisible to the law. From overlooked...

There's a voting bloc large enough to decide 126 congressional races and most of it isn't showing up. In this episode, Saadia Khan breaks down data on naturalized citizens, immigrant voter turnout, and civic participation in America, and makes the case that the ballot is one of the most powerful tools immigrants have but aren't using. From New York's 2026 primary to the $383 billion immigrants pay...

What does it really mean to belong, and what happens when belonging feels like betrayal? Beatriz Nour has lived this question. Born in France, raised between Brazil and Egypt, and based in Dubai for nearly a decade, she's the creator of the podcast InBetweenish and someone who knows firsthand what it costs to reject your heritage, and what it takes to slowly find your way back to it. In this conve...

Saadia Khan sits down with Raj Goyle, whose parents came from India with a few dollars and a medical degree. His mom was the only female OB in Wichita shut out by the establishment, so she built her own referral network with Filipino and Vietnamese immigrant doctors. Raj took a different path: civil rights lawyer, ACLU after 9/11, state legislator, tech founder. Now he's in New York challenging a...

His Instagram bio says it all: "Just a dude working on political stuff." Charlie Goldensohn grew up in San Francisco's Mission District with a Marxist activist father and a Planned Parenthood director for a mother. He went on to work for Senator Dianne Feinstein, became Dr. Jill Biden's digital director, served in the White House, and worked on the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign. Then Democrats lost,...

On the eve of Eid ul-Adha, host Saadia Khan reflects on the San Diego mosque shooting that killed three men during prayer — and the Instagram comment calling Islam a "bloody demonic cult" that followed. In this raw narration episode, Saadia connects the dots between normalized anti-Muslim rhetoric, political silence, and the violence it enables. From her daughter being called "queen of Taliban" in...

Your favorite museum might be built on stolen goods. Nicole Dowd works inside the Smithsonian,  and she's not here to defend it. Saadia Khan sits down with Nicole to break it all down.  As Head of Public Programs at the National Museum of Asian Art, she's sitting with the uncomfortable truth: Western museums have a colonial problem, and a fresh coat of "inclusivity" paint won't fix it. We get into...

What does it look like when someone walks away from a prestigious career, on principle, and comes back fighting? Chuck Park did exactly that. A son of Korean immigrants who sold T-shirts on Canal Street, he rose to become a U.S. diplomat, then resigned in 2019 after the El Paso mass shooting and published his letter in  The Washington Post . Now he's running a 100% grassroots campaign for Congress...

Immigrant life in New York City looks glamorous from the outside, but what happens when you arrive in January with snow up to your knees, no work permit, and no roadmap for who you're supposed to become? In this episode, host Saadia sits down with Laura Peruchi, a Brazilian journalist, content creator, podcaster, and one of New York City's most trusted voices for immigrants navigating life in a ne...

Apply for the Vilcek Foundation Creative Promise Awards in Culinary Arts to win $50,000 in unrestricted grant money. Click on ⁠⁠ Vilcek.org ⁠⁠ for more information. When we first sat down with Zainab Hasnain — DJ, producer, and writer FKA ZEEMUFFIN — back in 2022, she was already doing something remarkable: carving out space as a Pakistani immigrant woman in one of the most male-dominated creative...

Apply for the Vilcek Foundation Creative Promise Awards in Culinary Arts to win $50,000 in unrestricted grant money. Click on ⁠ Vilcek.org ⁠ for more information. What does it feel like to leave your faith at the door, not because you're ashamed, but because you're exhausted? In this episode of Immigrantly, host Saadia Khan sits down with Salman Khan, a journalist, composer, and Executive Producer...