The Immigrant Experience in America (TIEIA)

Twelve weeks ago, Simone started this series with a number most of us never write down or even talk about. In week twelve, the last of this stretch, she does three things: walks you back through where the series has been, widens the circle, and extends an invitation. She gives you the thread in case you joined late: the number that is never written down, honoring your mother and funding your futur...

  In 2023, Simone decided to stop: the doing, the chasing, the traveling, the fixing, the rescuing, and the saving. She opens week eleven of the Black Tax series there because she owes you a plain answer to a plain question. You have heard her talk for ten weeks about the number, the conversations, and the cost of waiting. At some point you are allowed to ask, and then what? This week she takes yo...

Sara Fashandi left Tehran, Iran, in 1977 as a teenager to study in the United States. Her mother, a seamstress who had married at fourteen, had a vision of educating all seven of her children. Sara's oldest brother, Mohsen, went first in 1973 with $300 and very little English, and he eventually brought five of his siblings to the U.S. In this episode, Sara tells me how that family story became two...

For five years, the idea of writing a book for immigrants sat at the back of Simone's mind, nudging. She didn't write it. Nothing was broken enough to force the question. She tells you that because she knows what five years can hold when nothing looks wrong. Staying stuck rarely arrives as a crisis. It arrives as a normal month, repeated sixty times. This week, Simone talks about what it costs to...

On June 27, about twenty of us sat in a room in Alpharetta and asked each other one question all evening: are you lost in translation? Simone had run the event in her head a dozen times, the panel questions, the timing, the logistics. What she hadn't planned for was how the room would answer back. On the panel, Dalkeith Thomas talked about something a lot of the room recognized, walking into the U...

There is a difference between giving and being drained, and for a long time Simone could not tell you where one ended and the other began. In week eight of the Black Tax series, she draws the line. She opens with the image she's returned to throughout this series, two cups, one pouring into the other, running dry if nothing ever pours back. In collectivist cultures that's supposed to be the whole...

You have the number now. In week seven, Simone moves from the math to the words, the actual language for the conversations that come up again and again once someone starts trying to live differently with what they've learned. Simone is direct about the gap between knowing and doing: having the number does not automatically give you the sentences, and she's held a real number in her own head while...

Jason DeSouza, Esq. is the founder and lead trial attorney of D'Souza Injury Lawyers in San Antonio, Texas — an intentionally lean, thirty-person practice focused on oilfield, trucking, and serious-injury cases in the smaller South Texas communities that bigger firms often overlook. Born and raised in Toronto to Indian immigrant parents, Jason moved to the U.S. for law school, met his wife (and no...

Last week's question was whether anything was flowing back into your cup. This week, Simone gets specific about the number underneath that question, the one most of us have never actually written down in full. Simone draws a clear line between a starting number and a real one. The Black Tax Boundary Kit gave listeners a rough sense of what leaves and what stays, real and enough to begin with, but...

Dr. Lynda Charles is a former UNICEF public health leader, a leadership development coach certified through John Maxwell, and the author of the memoir  Not Just an IMMIGRANT . In this conversation, she traces her journey between Haiti and the United States across two distinct chapters of her life — the first as a young woman fleeing a death threat after returning from medical training in France, a...

Picture two cups. One is yours. In the opening episode of the second month of the series, Simone offers a single image to hold everything discussed so far, and opens the paid next step for anyone ready to build the actual plan. Simone ties the first month together in one picture: every dollar sent home is water poured from one cup into another, and if the pouring only moves in one direction, the f...

Nobody sat down and explained a credit score. In the closing episode of the first month of the Black Tax series, Simone names a second, quieter system running underneath everything discussed so far, the financial architecture nobody hands new arrivals on the way in, and makes the case for why it matters just as much as the family side of the equation. Simone traces her own credit history back to l...

Dr. Danuta Charland is a Pre-Health Academic Advisor at Boston University's Sargent College, and in 2026 she marks 40 years of living in the United States. Danuta grew up in Kashubia, an ethnic region in northern Poland with its own language and identity distinct from the broader Polish culture — a heritage she carried through a childhood under the Iron Curtain and into an American life that began...

Honoring your roots and funding your future can feel like a choice between two competing instructions. In week three of the 90-day black tax series, Simone makes the case that they were never actually in competition, even though it can feel that way when the phone rings and the math does not add up. Simone traces the belief back to something nobody taught her directly, a feeling absorbed in the sp...

Has anyone ever called you that? In week two of the 90-day black tax series, Simone unpacks what happens the moment you try to change a pattern you have already named, and the specific word that tends to show up right when you do. Simone traces the accusation back to a clash she names directly, the collision between a collectivist, communal cultural dynamic and the individualistic boundaries neede...

First of the 90-Day Black Tax Series There is a number most of us have never written down. Not because we cannot do the math, but because writing it down makes it real. In this solo episode, Simone opens the first installment of a ninety-day series with a topic she has carried personally: the black tax, the ongoing financial responsibility so many of us hold for family and community back home, or...

I recently sat down with Sharon Thompson and Dr. Sharon Reid on the Speak Harmony Podcast to talk about something most of us carry quietly — the self we translate away just to feel acceptable in a new place. We got into what "lost in translation" actually means. It is not the word that gets lost. It is the self. The version of you that was shaped by a particular soil, a particular faith, a particu...

In this episode of The Immigrant Experience in America, Simone W. Johnson-Smith joins Rosa Bel and the Cafecito Cultural community of educators for a conversation on what actually gets lost when we cross a border: "Are You Lost in Translation? How Culture Shock Shapes the Core of Our Identities." Drawing from her own journey as a Jamaican immigrant and 15 years in U.S. federal service, Simone unpa...

Before she ever stepped onto the world stage with Pink Floyd, Sting, Foreigner, Pat Benatar, George Benson, Michael Jackson and more,  Machan Taylor  was a little girl relocated from Japan to suburban America, carrying the lifelong ache of not fully belonging anywhere.   That experience of being wrenched from the life and culture that was familiar to her, growing up in a deeply dysfunctional famil...

    The Immigrant Experience in America Subscribe to our YouTube Channel:   https://www.youtube.com/@theimmigrantexperience Listen to more episodes on:  💼 Apple Podcast:  https://apple.co/3OK7xCN 💼 Spotify:  https://spoti.fi/3DKXsiE 💼 Amazon:  https://amzn.to/43VG4Cn 📱Support our Patreon:  https://bit.ly/3KwUiTz 📱Connect with Simone! 💼 Website:  https://www.thebridgeconcepts.org 📱  Follow u...

The Immigrant Experience in America Subscribe to our YouTube Channel:   https://www.youtube.com/@theimmigrantexperience Listen to more episodes on:  💼 Apple Podcast:  https://apple.co/3OK7xCN 💼 Spotify:  https://spoti.fi/3DKXsiE 💼 Amazon:  https://amzn.to/43VG4Cn 📱Support our Patreon:  https://bit.ly/3KwUiTz 📱Connect with Simone! 💼 Website:  https://www.thebridgeconcepts.org 📱  Follow us on...

  The Immigrant Experience in America Subscribe to our YouTube Channel:   https://www.youtube.com/@theimmigrantexperience Listen to more episodes on:  💼 Apple Podcast:  https://apple.co/3OK7xCN 💼 Spotify:  https://spoti.fi/3DKXsiE 💼 Amazon:  https://amzn.to/43VG4Cn 📱Support our Patreon:  https://bit.ly/3KwUiTz 📱Connect with Simone! 💼 Website:  https://www.thebridgeconcepts.org 📱  Follow us...

In this powerful episode of The Immigrant Experience in America , Simone speaks with Ukrainian immigrant Dima Negojuk about his family's extraordinary journey from war-torn Ukraine to rebuilding their lives in New York. Just days before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Dima's young son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. When war broke out and hospitals shut down, the family faced two battles at once:...

In this powerful episode of The Immigrant Experience in America, Simone W. Johnson sits down with Dr. Leide Porcu, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and author of Neither Here Nor There: A Guide for Immigrants and the Therapists Who Walk With Them. Drawing from her own lived experience as an immigrant and decades of clinical practice, Dr. Porcu unpacks the emotional and psychological realities many...

In this powerful episode of The Immigrant Experience in America, Simone W. Johnson sits down with Dr. Leide Porcu, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and author of Neither Here Nor There: A Guide for Immigrants and the Therapists Who Walk With Them. Drawing from her own lived experience as an immigrant and decades of clinical practice, Dr. Porcu unpacks the emotional and psychological realities many...