Re:Work presents "Who Gets To Be a Citizen of the United States (with Ramtin Arablouei)"

Re:Work by the UCLA Labor Center

We've partnered with Immigrantly and are excited to share an episode from their show! Immigrantly is a weekly podcast hosted by rights activist and social entrepreneur Saadia Khan that bears witness to the extraordinariness of the immigrant experience Today we have a fellow podcaster in our midst. Ramtin Arablouei is the co-host and co-producer of NPR's podcast Throughline. This show explores history through creative, immersive storytelling designed to reintroduce history to new audiences. Ramtin embodies this perspective personally and professionally. Born in Iran, he immigrated to the U.S. with his family as a child and later graduated from St. Mary's College of Maryland with a B.A. in psychology and history. Along with hosting and producing, Ramtin is also a trained audio engineer and has written and mixed music for many award-winning podcasts, including TED Radio Hour and Hidden Brain. Ramtin generously offered his time to us to talk about an episode he reported back in early June this year called "By Accident of Birth." It's about the story of Wong Kim Ark, who, after returning from a trip to China in 1895, was barred from re-entering the country according to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants. His subsequent legal battles culminated in the 1897 Supreme Court case, the United States. v. Wong Kim Ark: the case that would forever change the path of American immigration law and play a pivotal role in the ongoing battle over who gets to be a citizen of the United States.