The Immigrant Perspective

Negin Farsad is a comedian, filmmaker, author, and podcaster based in New York City. She's a regular panelist on NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, the creator and star of The Muslims Are Coming!, and the author of How to Make White People Laugh. She also hosts the political comedy podcast Fake the Nation. In this conversation, Negin shares the story of how her father, a surgeon detained by the Sh...

Frank is the only American-born member of our family, and the one who had to figure out how to become an immigrant in reverse. A conversation about names, leaving, and what home really means.

What does home mean when you've lived in two countries, moved around a lot, and built a life far from where you started? For my younger sister, Laurie, the answer is simple: home is just where she is. Laurie was seven when the Mangan family left Kilkee, a small beach town on the west coast of Ireland, and landed in Southeast Tennessee. She is the youngest of five siblings, and her immigrant experi...

Siobhan Duff didn't choose to leave Newfoundland. The economy made that decision for her. When Canada closed the cod fishery in the early 1990s, an entire province's livelihood disappeared overnight. Siobhan, a newly minted physician, and her husband Jim, a residential builder, found themselves with no viable path forward at home. So they left. Thirty years later, they're still in Chattanooga. Lea...

Laura Contreras-Alanis arrived in the United States in 1974 - a little girl from Michoacán, Mexico, told she was going to Disneyland. What followed was anything but a fairy tale: migrant farm work in Central California, multiple moves as a teenager, dropping out of high school, a painful estrangement from her family, and eventually - decades later - a U-Haul headed to Knoxville, Tennessee, with fi...

Hugh and Kathleen MacMenamin have lived in the United States for over 55 years, but ask them where home is, and they'll tell you Ireland. In this episode, we trace their journey from post-war Belgium to Dublin to Duluth, through medical school, internships, residencies, five children, and 14 grandchildren. Kathleen shares what it was like to grow up Flemish in Dublin, including the time she was ca...

Horacio grew up in Sonsonate, El Salvador during a civil war. When his mother left for the US in 1981, he was six years old, and he wouldn't live with her again for eleven years. In the silence she left behind, he found the Beatles. In this episode, Horacio shares how music became his refuge, what it was like to land in Miami as a teenager who didn't speak English, the surprising prejudice he enco...

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Episode 3 takes me to the living room of two people I'm genuinely lucky to know. Ben Zimunya was born in Zimbabwe in 1985, navigated a nomadic childhood through Kenya and Tanzania, attended boarding school in a different country than his parents for all of high school, and landed in Chattanooga, Tennessee in the summer of 2003 with $800 and a plan that stretched maybe one semester ahead. Cara, who...

Forty years ago, my parents traded the West Coast of Ireland for the rolling hills of Tennessee. But what does that journey look like from the other side of the couch? In this inaugural episode, I sit down with my wife, Lois, a Michigan native who has spent our marriage watching me navigate life between two worlds. We talk about why I still cry when the plane touches down in Shannon, the dark humo...

Music featured in this episode: "Talitha" by China Kent (used with permission). This trailer sets the stage for our upcoming season of stories on identity, belonging, and the immigrant perspective.