People For Rent: America has always treated foreign workers as a resource, not as people.

Summerville, Massachusetts, March, 2025. Plainclothes DHS agents are waiting on the sidewalk,

not at a courthouse, not at a detention facility, on a sidewalk in Summerville. And Rumecia Azturk,

a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, walks into that. No warning, no prior notice that

her F1 visa had already been revoked. She finds out her legal status in the United States has been

canceled the same way you find out your debit card got declined, in the moment, in public,

with strangers watching. All because she wrote an op-ed for the student newspaper? She co-wrote an

op-ed for the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts University's response to the conflict in Gaza.

That's the whole file. Like, that's the national security threat. A graduate student with a pen

and just a co-author listing inside of a newspaper. For which they transferred her to a detention

facility in all of all places, Louisiana, which we know can be a pleasant place to spend some time,

or an unpleasant place. But from Massachusetts, they sent her to Louisiana, like, she's some

kind of package being rerouted. Yeah, a federal judge in Vermont eventually issued an emergency

order. As of April 2025, she was still in the detention facility while the litigation was

moving through the court system. And here's the thing that I need you to sit with before we go

any further. Mesa Ozturk did not come to the United States to protest. She came here because

the United States spent 70 years building a system specifically designed to recruit people

exactly like her. Brilliant, ambitious, academically elite, and plug them into American institutions.

She followed every rule of a system that was never actually designed to protect her.

It was designed to use her. And when she stopped being useful in the way that they wanted?

The system showed her exactly what she was to it, to the system that is the whole time.

All right, welcome back overlap listeners. Thanks so much for being here. I am Joshua.

And I'm Will, welcome back. Yes, we are genuinely glad you're here this week, because this one,

Will, this one has been sitting under the desk on my chest, but and on my mind and heart for a while,

but still sitting underneath there. And I think we're finally going to go ahead and dig it up.

Same. I've been thinking about some of this and how to say it for weeks, honestly, but there's a

version of this story that gets told as an immigration debate. And I want to clear it

right up front. That is not what this is. This is not an immigration debate. That is not what this is.

Not even close. So what this is, and I want I want you, dear listener, to hear this before we go

any further is a labor story. It's a story about who gets to work, who gets to stay, who gets to

speak, and who gets to decide all three of those things. And it has a very long paper trail.

And the paper trail goes farther back than most people realize.

1954. Like everything in the boomer generation. J. William Fulbright is helping frame international

student exchange explicitly. Not implicitly, explicitly as a cold war soft power tool.

The idea was pretty straightforward, right? Recruit the world's best minds

into American institutions. You win their ideological loyalty, and send them home as

ambassadors for the American project. An outreach, if you will, an evangelization

of the American system. That was the architecture. That was the purpose of the program.

And if they didn't go home? And if they didn't go home, by 1965,

Emanuel Seller and Philip Hart and Lyndon B. Johnson had already built you a visa category

that made sure the university controlled your legal status. You are not a student.

You are a sponsored dependent. There's a very big difference.

You serve at the pleasure of the university, in a sense. I keep thinking about the migrant

farm worker parallels here. And I know we're going to get into this a little bit deeper in

the episode, but the structure is almost identical. You bring someone in, you tie their legal right to

exist in this country to a single institutional sponsor, and then you call it opportunity.

Yeah, you call it opportunity and you charge them for it. You actually have a line item right there.

Foreign students generated $40 billion in tuition revenue in 2022 alone. $40 billion, right. And in

2001, after September 11th, John Ashcroft and George W. Bush mandated a surveillance system called

SEVIS. They made the students pay the $200 fee to fund their entire monitoring infrastructure.

So you're paying to be watched?

You are paying to be watched. And if the government decides tomorrow that your op-ed is a foreign

policy threat, currently Marco Rubio can sign a piece of paper and Todd Lyons will send someone

to your sidewalk, to your house, to your university.

So here's what we're going to do today, listeners. We're walking you through the full architecture

of the system, how it was built, why it was built, who benefits from it. I think we all know who that's

going to be, but what it looks like now in 2025 when that architecture is being used as a weapon.

By the end of this episode, you'll never hear the phrase international student the same way again.

All right, so let's go. I want to start in a specific room. It's 1954, Washington, DC.

Close your eyes, feel the ambiance of the cigarette smoke thick in every room. J. William Fulbright is

a Senator from Arkansas. You know, there was some cigars in there as well. And look, J. William

Fulbright is not naive, right? He fought in World War II. He watched the Marshall Plan work. He

understands some things that the people around him are still kind of tripping over and tripping

toward, which is that you don't win a cold war with missiles, literally. You win it with mines.

And the program he's building, hearts and minds. That wasn't until later. That was Iraq, Iraqi

freedom. But the program he's building, what will essentially become the framework for the international

educational exchange program is very explicitly in the documents, in the stated policy rationale,

a soft power operation. Right. And I think it sort of goes without saying, not to point out the

obvious here, but it's not a cold war if you're winning it with missiles. That's a hot war.

That's just a war. But yeah. So I mean, this is not, you know, not what we're talking about here is

this policy rationale is not dressed up as something else, right? Not even adjacent to it, right? So

the State Department's own Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs will tell you this, if you read

their historical records. But the goal is to bring foreign students to American universities,

let them through osmosis or telepathy, absorb American values, American institutions,

American prosperity and send them home as ideological allies, as ambassadors,

but really as converts to America's specifically ranch flavored democracy.

Soterios Johnson And that monster truck version of the plan there from the late 80s is that

cultural context. But let's take us back to the 50s, where everybody talked like this. And they

were all, you know, making big plans for America, you believed in American institutions. That's,

that's that's how it was to me. I mean, it wasn't how Beaver Cleaver or whatever talked. I don't

know. Apparently everybody was from a Chicago suburb in the 90s. That's right. That's right,

Joshua. We all were. That's how it was. That's the way it was. All right. Let's see if we can

recover if we can find the thread again here. But let's sit with that for a second. Okay. At least

Fulbright says the quiet part out loud. And I mean, it's the quiet part these days, right? It sounds

very propaganda brainwashy. But also back in those days, they really may have believed and I know many

people did believe that they were sort of the I mean, obviously, America had been proven to be the

greatest country ever, of all time, hands down, no fire, no arguments, no debates, the goats,

because we won World War Two, right? That was our claim to fame. People thought that they were

going to then export American values and institutions and save the rest of the world that way. So, you

know, but at the same time, Fulbright's like, hey, we're not giving it away for free. We also want

something from you. We want your mind. We want to reshape it. We want you to go back and tell everybody

that America has the right answer when you go back home. Yeah. Which, look, I mean, compared to kind

of what comes later and what we're seeing today, that's almost refreshingly transactional, right?

I mean, the problem is what gets built on top of that foundation. We talk about building on the

shoulders of giants, but there is a scenario where it becomes topsy-turvy at the top, right? Because

Fulbright's program is the first brick in this wall, and every brick that comes after it sort of

assumes the same thing, right? It assumes that a foreign student is a resource to be managed

toward American strategic ends. This is the sort of the operating assumption baked into every piece

of legislation that follows these beliefs and ideas. And the students themselves are not part

of that conversation. Yeah, they're not even, I mean, they're not even adjacent to it, right? So,

fast forward 11 years, like we talked about in '65, Emmanuel Celler is in the House, right? Philip

Hart is in the Senate, and obviously, LBJ was in the White House. And so, they're passing this

Immigration and Nationality Act, right? So, most people know this law for what it did to family

based immigrations, for abolishing the national origins quota system. And that was the headline,

that was what was sort of in the newspaper at the time, but buried inside of that legislation,

earmarked in all the pork, is the architecture of the F-1 student visa system. And what that

architecture does is extraordinarily specific. It makes the university the gatekeeper, man. See

how we went moving to the '60s there? Okay. Yes, it does make them the police

of the institution. It makes the university the gatekeeper of your legal existence in the

United States, right? So, your visa is not tied to you as a person. And I think sometimes we forget

that, right? Like, we see it as being tied to a person who has to apply and, you know,

re-up at every year. But it's tied to your institutional sponsor. You're not a student

in the sense that an American student is a student, right? You're a sponsored dependent.

And that distinction matters only because if you fall out of favor with that institution,

right? If you drop below full time because you just need an extra break because you're working

two jobs to keep the rent paid in addition to going to school, if you switch programs,

right, to a different major, just decide you're going to change your major without getting it

approved. If you do anything that the sponsor, in this case, the institution, deems non-compliant,

your legal right to be in our country evaporates. Not a process, not a hearing.

It's gone in the blink of an eye. If you'd like to dig deeper into this subject, listeners,

and this may be the only time we ever sponsor or promote this book, Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

actually has these experiences as an exchange student. Alright, alright, alright. That's right.

You know what that sounds like to me though, honestly, it sounds like, well, on the one hand,

it's kind of like a chaperone system or nanny system where they assign the university to like

make sure you're following the right procedures or else you're gone. But it also sounds like a

lease agreement where the landlord can change the terms at any time and your only option is to move

out. You don't like the terms. Yeah. It's like a shitty parent or a job where your employer holds

your work authorization, which, spoiler alert, is exactly what comes next because the H-1B visa,

which Congress then creates through the immigration act of 1990 and doesn't take full effect until

1992, is the next layer. It's the next brick of the architecture that we're building. So Ted Kennedy

and Bruce Morrison built you a pipeline that takes the foreign student who's just graduated

from the American university and converts them into a temporary worker who is again bound to an

employer sponsor. You can't change jobs without risking your status. You can't start a company

without risking your status. The Economic Policy Institute has documented extensively how this

actually suppresses wages, how employers use the threat of status revocation as a labor control

mechanism. I saw this quite a bit working in the technology industry where specifically Indian

American or Indian and Pakistani employees I would work with every day. When the actual topic of

salary came up, they were making sometimes 50% of what the going rate was in America because they

said, "Oh, well, they also sponsor our visa," which is something like $20,000. It is. It costs about

$20,000 for a company to sponsor a visa, but that's once. Once it costs $20,000 and then it's just

re-upped every year and there's no additional cost to the employer from what I understand.

They say, "Well, we're going to dock your pay by 50% for a one-time payment of $20,000 and we're

going to keep that updated for you." But I saw it happen consistently with my fellow employees

working in the trenches doing the same work, same tools, same life, same cost of living,

but they were making half of what we were. Wow. That is awful. Joshua, you said this took full

effect in 1992? Yes. Each one visa? Okay. So in that case, read my lips, not going to do it.

That's your 1990s voice because this is not a conspiracy theory.

Uh, read my lips. This is documented. This mechanism is not subtle. You tell someone if

they ask for a raise or try to leave for a competitor, they might lose the legal right to

be in the country and you've created a compliance structure that no American worker faces.

That is not opportunity, that's leverage. That's indentured servitude is what it is.

That is exactly what it is. It's leverage. And here's the part that makes sort of the part of me

genuinely angry. You're looking at a, a two stage trap, right? So stage one, the F1 visa

ties you to the university. Step two is the H1B ties you to your employer and in between those

stages, there is a very small mechanism called optional practical training, O P T, which the

department of Homeland security expanded in 2008 under Michael Chertoff. And this one,

dear listener, this one I need you to really hear. Tell him Joshua. Chertoff's DHS extends O P T for

STEM graduates from 12 months to 29 months. That sounds like a gift, more time to work,

more time to transition, but here's what it actually is. It's an interim rule, not passed

by Congress, not authorized by statute or law, an administrative rule that allows universities and

corporations to use foreign graduate labor at below market rates while those graduates sit

in a legal limbo waiting for green cards that might or might not come. And in 2024, a federal

judge named Amit Mehta would vacate that rule entirely, finding it was improperly used without

congressional authorization, potentially throwing hundreds of thousands of people's work authorization

into question overnight. Wait a second, how long? So a rule that affected hundreds of thousands of

people's ability to legally work in the U S was issued without Congress ever voting on it. What

is this 2025? Right. Or 26, without Congress ever voting on it. Michael Chertoff signed it as an

interim final rule. It actually went into the Federal Register on April 8th, 2008. We were

probably distracted by other things at the time. It affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of

people. There wasn't a floor vote. Nobody debated it. It was not a democratic authorization and it

held for 16 years until a district court judge said, actually, no. I don't know why I'm still

surprised by things like that. Wait, I'm not. I'm not. Right. Exactly. It's not a feature. It's a

bug, right? And the ambiguity is useful, right? If your legal status is always contingent on this

administrative rule that can be vacated or rewritten, you're really never secure.

And people who are never secure are people who don't make waves. They don't cause trouble. They

don't rabble-rous and they certainly don't show up to protest. Can I take us back to a different

decade for a second, Joshua? Because I keep coming back to 1979 and I think it's the moment

that clarifies what all of this infrastructure is actually for. Okay. November 1979, to be specific.

I don't have a seventies voice for you all, so you'll have to deal with my regular one. Yeah.

There you go. November 1979. Iranian students have taken American hostages in Tehran.

Jimmy Carter's in the White House. Cyrus Vance is at State and Carter issues presidential proclamation

4702. He orders a review of every Iranian student visa in the U.S. Not Iranian students who had done

anything. Not Iranian students with any connection to the hostage takers. Every Iranian student

because they were Iranian. And this is the reveal, right? Like everything we've been describing,

the institutional sponsorship, the visa dependency, the surveillance structure that comes later,

all of it really only makes sense when you understand that the foreign student was never

really a person under this system, right? They were always also a diplomatic chip.

Carter at the time needed leverage. And look, I look at Carter with reverence. I wish we had

a president that was more like Jimmy Carter, but that doesn't make him immune from mistakes.

And this is one of his mistakes because he needed leverage. He had 52 Americans in captivity and he

reached for the closest available lever, which was 14,000 Iranian students who were here studying

engineering and medicine and literature and had nothing to do with any of them. 14,000 people who

built lives here who were enrolled in academic programs, who had friends, apartments, routines.

And the president could say by proclamation that their status was now under review

because of where they were born. And the legal infrastructure to do it had been sitting there

since 1965, right? Carter didn't build anything new. He just used it in a way that was already

in place. And that's the thing about these systems, right? We don't design them to be weapons from the

start. We didn't design all of these levers currently in the existing presidency in a way

that they were meant to be exploited. You don't have to design them to be weapons from the start.

You just have to build them in a way that makes them easy to weaponize later, which is exactly

what we're seeing right now. That's really the TLDR of this portion of the episode of listeners.

You don't have to design them to be weapons from the start. You just have to be able to use them as

weapons later. Because Fulbright wasn't thinking about deportation orders when he was building

his exchange program in 1954, right? Johnson wasn't thinking about mass visa revocations when he

signed the Immigration Act in '65. But they built a system in which a foreign student's presence in

this country is always conditional, always contingent, always subject to the political needs

of whoever's in power. And once you build a system like that, you can't be surprised when someone uses

it. That's why we used to hear in the 90s all the time, "I don't think they should have that power,

because I don't want the next guy to have that power." Even if we know that this guy's not going

to use it, it's why this system has been ever so slowly creeping in the... We talk about the law

not going fast enough, and I'm guilty of it myself, but it doesn't go fast this way so that we can have

time to think about the possible ramifications and fix them before it becomes law.

Yeah. That's the backdrop. And then 2001 happens, right? John Ashgrost and George W. Bush need this

surveillance system we talked about before. They build Sevice, and then make the students pay for

it, right? $200 to have the government watch you, right? To basically pay some government agent

or government worker to watch you do whatever you do. And I just want to say out loud one more time,

because the audacity of this is genuinely shocking. You're paying for your own monitoring

infrastructure. Yeah. The Sevice fee is actually documented. It's in the Enhanced Border Security

and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002. Now, I was 18. It's not a conspiracy, right? It's a line item.

We're not a conspiracy podcast. If that's what you were thinking that this was, sorry, you showed up

on the wrong one. Go to the other overlap. Foreign students basically pay this fee when they arrive.

They fund the database that tracks every enrollment change, every address update, every deviation

from their approved status. And if someone in a federal building just has an inkling that your

record should disappear, they can click a button and you are legally speaking disappeared. Right.

If that sounds like, oh, like probation. It's because it is essentially. But for people who've

done nothing wrong, we're going to show you exactly what that button looks like when someone presses

it in 2025. But I need people to understand before we get there, the button existed because

the decision was made in 1954, 1965, 1979, 2001, 2008. This is not new. This weapon was manufactured

over 70 years by people who told themselves they were building opportunity. Yeah, they were building

opportunity, right, for American universities, for American corporations, for American foreign policy.

The foreign student was the raw material. And in 2025, the raw material is being reminded exactly

of what it is. So let's talk about March, 2025, because that is when our current president pressed

the button and not metaphorically, not as a, as a policy shift announced in a press briefing with

talking points and a Q and a period, right. Students checked a government database and found

out that they don't exist anymore. That's the sentence. They logged into Sevus, the system that

they paid to build and their records said terminated. And I think we need to be precise here

about what terminated means in this context, because the word does a lot of work. It does not

mean your visa application was denied. It does not mean you received a letter with a process attached

to it. It means your legal basis for being in the U S was erased with no, often no stated cause and

often overnight. So you wake up the next morning and you're done, you're out. The American immigration

lawyers association was sending emergency alerts in March and April of 25 while Reuters was still

reporting on it. So the ACLU litigation tracker was filling up in real time and the stated

justifications when there were any, if they were lucky, had things like minor traffic infractions,

speeding, left turn without signaling, dismissed charges, charges that had been expunged. And in

some cases, the justification was that the student had attended a protest attended, did not participate

necessarily, was present at a protest on a university campus. Which brings us back around

to Ms. Osterk. And I want to say her name correctly and fully because the way these cases get processed

in the new cycle, the name's blur and that blurring is itself a mechanism of the system.

Mesa Osterk, Turkish doctoral student, Tufts University, detained in Somerville, Massachusetts

by plainclothes DHS agents in March 2025, excuse me, March 2025, and transferred to a detention

facility in Louisiana. Louisiana. She was at Tufts in Massachusetts and they flew her to Louisiana.

There is a geography to this that is not accidental. You move someone far enough from their institution,

from their legal support network, from their community, and the logistics of fighting back

become a significant portion of the fight itself. And we all know that news travels by

Piro in Louisiana. So, you know, I mean, the chances of getting back to your institution

are slim to none. We don't need you spreading any of these stereotypes.

To the stated basis for her detention. And it was a co-authored op-ed, right,

in the student newspapers. I mean, does it get more American than that,

writing a protest piece in the student newspaper? But like the definition for the first amendment?

Right. But Tufts' response, her article is about Tufts' response to the Gaza conflict. So she's not

even criticizing the US. She's criticizing her own institution, which remember, had been set up

to basically control her access to continue existence in the US. The next thing you know,

her F1 visa has been revoked without notice. And I keep her turning to this 1979 parallel here,

because Carter did not give the Iranian students notice either. This is like a review. It's being

ordered. It's done before they even find out about it, right? And then you're subject to

deportation without even knowing why. This is just a new target, but it's the same architecture being

utilized here. Yeah. Kristi Noem, you know, dog killer, Barbie, was still running this in 2025.

The Secretary of Homeland Security, who's now Mark Wayne Mullen, you have to say it really fast

because his first name is two names, but it's really just one name. Mark Wayne. Mark Wayne.

The DHS budget for immigration enforcement in 2025 last year was requested at $25.3 billion.

$25 billion. Part of what that money is doing is paying ICE agents to put doctoral students

in vans and drive them across state lines because of newspaper editorials.

And most of them probably can't even read. But then there's Mahmoud Khalil. And this one I need

people to sit with because this is not an F1 visa case. Mahmoud Khalil was a lawful permanent

resident. Here are those two modifiers there, lawful permanent. He had a green card. He was

a graduate student in Columbia, and the Trump administration arrested him in March 2025 and

invoked a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows deportation of

non-citizens deemed, deemed, again, that's a key word there, deemed adverse to U.S. foreign policy

interests. No criminal charges, no conviction, which means no appeal. It's just a foreign policy

certification. Signed by Mark Rubio. Secretary of State personally signed that certification.

And the provision they use, section 237A4C of the INA, is not a new law. It's been sitting

in the statute for years, and it's rarely, if ever, actually invoked for any reason.

Because the implications of evoking it are ginormous. They're saying that the executive

branch can deport a lawful permanent resident for political speech by certifying unilaterally

that their presence is contrary to foreign policy. Folks, it's not a huge step from lawful permanent

resident to citizen, just in case you're wondering. But regardless, this is not a legal standard.

It's like an oath, the pledge, and a pay for the driver's license.

It's a ceremony with some pictures taken of the judge and, you know,

your family dressed up next to the American flag. Yeah. But this whole idea of deportation under

this particular section of the INA is not a legal standard. Let's be clear about that. It is not a

legal standard. It's a preference. It's a feeling dressed up in statutory language. We deem you to

be a risk, right. We deem you to be contrary to American interests. And the courts are fighting

about it right now. As of April 2025, while Mahmoud Khalil sits in a detention facility in, wait for

it, Louisiana, same facility, different name, same state. There's apparently one facility in Louisiana

doing a lot of work this past two years. Dark thought, but yes. And then there's Yoon Seo Chung,

and this is one that I think people need to hear most clearly in terms of what the system is

actually capable of. We have a South Korean permanent resident again. Legal permanent resident.

Exactly. Columbia University student. She's lived in the United States since she was seven years old.

Seven. And the government moved to revoke her green card using the same foreign policy provision

used against Mahmoud Khalil because she attended campus protests. Attended campus protests.

The federal judge actually issued a temporary restraining order. She was not deported,

but they made the attempt. They tried. And the attempt is the point because you don't have to

succeed at deporting someone who's lived here since seven to send the message, right? The message is,

this can happen to you. The message is your presence is conditional. And that message is

worth more to this enforcement apparatus than any individual deportation out.

Right. And I want to say this to anybody listening now. If you're an international

student, you already know this. You've known it your whole time here. You've been read in by the

other students for the one before you. You check your service status the way other people check

their bank balance, right? You're always watching to see what's happened because you won't get any

advanced warning necessarily. You know which professors are safe to talk to about politics.

You know which protests you can attend and which ones you can't. Not because you don't

have opinions, but because your legal existence is a variable that can be adjusted by someone

you'll never meet. Think about that. Think about living that way. And where does that sound like

you are? Does it sound like you're in a free democracy? Or does it sound like the old horrors

of communism that we used to hear about all the time? I mean, this is not a free country. This

is a managed population we're talking about. If you are a domestic student listening to this

and you're thinking that, you know, this doesn't really affect me. It's not going to touch me. It

doesn't bother me. I want to walk you through the $40 billion because that's what universities

collected in tuition from international students in 2022. 40 billion. The NSF reported that same

year that foreign students earned 40%, 40% of all doctoral degrees in science, engineering,

technology, and math, the big STEM in the United States. 40%. Those are people building the

research infrastructure of American universities. Those are graduate students running labs that get

grants to fund the institutions that your tuition dollars also support. And when you revoke their

visas in bulk without notice, without cause, they're not the only ones harmed by it. You

destabilize entire research programs. They're part of the system. They're part of the machine of

research in America. And when you breach their contracts, implicit or explicit, the universities

made when they recruited them. I mean, these are all consequences of what happens here. You take

the $40 billion revenue model and you introduce a variable that no admissions office can manage.

Why would a family in India or China or Turkey pay full international tuition to send their child

to a country that might detain them for writing an op-ed, co-writing, sorry, co-writing an op-ed?

Yeah. This is the part that connects directly back to what we talked about at the beginning,

right? The system was always built on extraction. Come here, bring your talent, pay full freight,

no financial aid, take the OPT extension at below market wages, wait in the green card backlog for a

decade, fund your own surveillance through SEVIS. And that was the deal. And the deal worked from

the institution's perspective because the students kept coming because the alternative staying home

often was worse. And now the administration is breaking the deal, right? Not by offering

better terms, but by removing the pretense that there were terms at all. Todd Lyons,

I think director of ICE, publicly stated that students who did not self-deport after visa

revocation would be detained. So if they don't self-deport, meaning you check your service status

and you find out you're out, you have to go buy a plane ticket and get back home because you can't

stay here. That phrase, the self-deport has a history as well. But the point is that again,

Todd Lyons says it out loud. He announces the coercion.

The ICE detention budget for 2025 was $3.4 billion, $3.4 billion to detain people.

And some portion of that money is now being used to detain doctoral students and lawful

permanent residents who attended protests or just co-wrote newspaper articles. I want you to think

of what that money could do if it were directed at, I don't know, anything else, like anything at all,

if it could be directed toward helping in any reasonable way the rest of our country and the

things that we're actively hurting from. Yeah. What else could we do with that money? Well,

let's, I'll tell you who's not getting that money. And this is a comparison that doesn't get made

often enough. It's migrant workers in agricultural labor or construction or in physical work

industries, cleaning office buildings, doing all these sorts of hard physical jobs. The migrant

workers have been exploited for a century since they've been recognized by the system, right?

The conversation about those workers, the H2A visa holders, the undocumented laborers,

involves a lot of appropriate moral clarity about the power differential.

The employer holds the status, the worker cannot leave without losing everything.

Yeah. So we don't often hear H2A. You know, the news has been pretty

prevalently talking about the H1Bs. And look, I'll be honest, I have some issues with the way

that we currently handle H1B visas in our country. I don't think that we're properly utilizing our

workforce to the extent that we currently need H1B visa recipients, but that doesn't mean that they

don't deserve the same protections that we do, right? That American citizens do. So we don't apply

the same moral clarity to intellectual labor. The H1B visa worker at a tech company is in the same

structural position as the agricultural worker on an H2A because it's the same system. Their employer

is their sponsor, and they can't freely change jobs without risking their status or their legal

ability to be inside the US. And they can't really advocate for better pay without actually risking

their status. They're functionally bound to the employer the way a migrant farm worker is bound

to the farm. The work looks different, the suit costs more, the structural dependency is identical.

And those are the permanent employed workers. The F1 student is upstream of all that. The F1

immigrant student is the one, there's a raw material, right, before it enters the pipeline.

They're paying for the privilege of being processed into our system. In the Washington

Alliance of Technology workers case, the ruling in April 2024, where a federal court vacated the DHS

ruling expanding the OPT STEM extensions, that case was brought by American tech workers arguing

that OPT programs suppress their wages. So again, this is for different reasons, but they're attacking

the program as well, basically saying, "Hey, if you let them stay as indentured servants for

this many months longer, this many years longer, it's lowering our wages, right, because they're

competing with us for jobs." And they're right, but the foreign students were also being exploited.

Both things are true. The system is designed to extract from everyone while appearing to benefit

everyone. So Judge Amit Mehta vacated the rule, right? DHS issued a new rule to preserve the

existing program, which was deemed to be unconstitutional because the program is too

valuable to the industry, the entire industry of technology world, to let a court ruling stop it.

40% of STEM doctors, 40 billion in tuition, 25 billion in enforcement spending. That's not

a coincidence. Those are budget lines in a system that has been running continuously since 1954,

when Fulbright framed exchange students as Cold War assets.

-I mean, they learned everything. That's the answer to the question we asked at the top.

They didn't fail to learn the lesson, they mastered it. They built the system so thorough,

so well-documented, so bipartisan in its authorship that you can revoke the status of a woman who has

lived here since she was seven years old, point to a statute, a certification, or a database entry,

and say, "We followed the process." -Process is the point though, right? The process was always

the point. And Rumeyska Ozterk is in Louisiana because 70 years of process made it possible.

So let's talk about Rumeysa because we've been talking about systems and budget lines and

statutes and I think sometimes, well, I think most times that's necessary, right? You have to

understand the system and the architecture and the history before you can really understand what it

actually does to people. I want to talk about what it does do to people. Rumeysa Ozterk is

a Turkish doctoral student. She is studying at Tufts University, but as of March 2025,

she is walking in Somerville in the plane, close, surrounded, and detained. No warning, no prior

notice. She's not been charged with a crime. It's not a flight risk. She was a doctoral student

walking down a street in Massachusetts. -Let's take a second with that image. I mean,

plane close agents, she wouldn't have known she was under arrest until suddenly she's free. Like,

she's walking to class or walking wherever she's going free like anybody else entitled to be there.

The next thing you know, you're being deported. -So the stated basis for her detention,

the reason the government gave for revoking her visa, it was the op-ed, right? She was

writing a newspaper article in Gaza. That was the documented basis, a student newspaper opinion piece.

-She wrote some words in a student newspaper about a university's institutional response to

a geopolitical crisis. The government of the United States of America revoked her legal status

in Florida, Louisiana. -Of course, like we talked about previously, they transferred her to an

immigration facility in Louisiana, not in Massachusetts, not near her university,

not near her legal representation. She found out her visa had been revoked from a letter, not a

phone call, not from any official notification. The way students were finding their status had

been canceled in this period was by checking government databases. You log in, you look at

your record, it says terminated. That is how you learn that your life in this country has been

revoked. -I keep thinking about what that moment is like. You're a doctoral student, you've built

something here, you've got years of work at dissertation. I mean, you're building a research

plan, you're contributing to this great nation. You got a department that you work in, you have

colleagues that you see every day, a neighborhood that you walk through in the morning, and you open

up a database and it says terminated. That word terminated, applied to a life. -Here's the thing I

want to connect with this, because I think it's important. Rumeysa Ozturk is an intellectual

laborer. She's a doctoral student, a researcher, a writer. Her labor is cognitive, her product is

ideas, and her visa, her F1 status, and the legal instrument that bound her to the institution,

just like an H2A visa, binds a migrant farm worker to a specific agriculture employer, the farm

worker can't leave the farm without losing status. Ozturk could not leave the university

sponsorship without losing status. The work looks completely different, the legal dependency is

structurally identical. -And that's what it comes back to really, is that this is not about deporting

people, it's not about getting rid of people. The idea is to keep the other ones under control.

The people that are picked up and deported are just examples being made of people who speak out.

So if you talk in the wrong, if you show up at the wrong protest, or you write a paper or an op-ed

in the wrong newspaper or the wrong topic, they're coming for you. -Yes. So that same farm worker who

speaks up and organizes the one who protest conditions faces retaliation from the same

mechanism, the visa, the status, the threat of removal. We treat it as two separate systems

because one involves fields and one involves, you know, academia. But the control mechanism is the

same. You're here because we allow you to be here and we'll stop allowing you to be here if you cause

problems. Which leads us to Mahmoud Kamil. He was Palestinian, Algerian, graduate at Columbia,

lawful permanent resident, not an F1 visa, not a temporary status, green card holder,

which green means go, right? ICE agents arrested him following his visible role in a pro-Palestinian

campus protest at Columbia. -And we already talked about what it means that he had a green card,

right? It means the next closest thing to a citizen. Like Joshua said, there's only another

standing between him and citizenship. -And the Trump administration, of course, invoked a rarely

used provision of the immigration nationality act, which allows deportation of non-citizens deemed

adverse to the United States foreign policy interests. No criminal charges, no conviction,

no allegation of violence or fraud or any specific unlawful act. The basis was his political activity,

his presence at protest, his speech. A federal judge blocked his immediate deportation and then

a secretary of state Marco Rubio personally signed a certification. A formal state department

document stating that Mahmoud Kalil's presence in the United States was contrary to foreign policy

interests. -Say what you will about the Trump administration, but they do have some, a deep

bench when it comes to legal history, right? And they can dig through some statutes and some

case law and find some context. -God, can they? They just keep quoting 17th and 18th century stuff.

And I'm like, is our country even alive then? -It's a never ending found of that sort of stuff. Yeah.

-Yeah. So we talked as well about Yoon-Seo Chung and we, I'll go through it briefly. South Korean

student at Columbia University, came to the United States when she was seven. She lived here for the

majority of her life. She's a permanent resident green card holder. And the government sought to

revoke her green card to deport her. Same foreign policy provision used against Mahmoud Kalil.

The basis was her participation in campus protests, just seven. -Seven years old when she gets here.

This is not a place she chose as an adult with full understanding of why she was here or what

the consequences could be if she spoke up. This is a country she grew up in. This is home to her,

right? In every sense of the word can mean this is home to her. And she shows up at a campus protest.

And she was lucky, you know, a federal judge issued that restraining order blocking her deportation.

But the case established something that is genuinely important for people to hear.

It established that long-term permanent residents, people with deep roots, people who have spent

their entire adult lives here, who are culturally as American as anybody else, who arrived as children

are not protected. Their status can be targeted. Their green card can be challenged. Their home can

be taken because of political speech, because of what they said at a protest. -So we have three

people, three very similar stories. A doctoral student detained for an op-ed, a grad student

detained for protesting, and a woman who's lived here since childhood targeted for the same reason.

All three of them discover what so many migrant workers already know. What people pick crops and

clean hotels and work and meat processing plants have always known. Your status here is conditional.

That condition is compliance. And the moment you become visible, the moment you use your voice,

like we all tell every American they have the right to do, the system that invited you here

will remind you exactly how temporary its welcome has always been. -And like always,

these are not edge cases. These are the system working exactly as it was designed.

So let's just say it plainly. What we've been documenting for the last, I don't know, 45 minutes

or so is not a series of policy errors. It's not an overcorrection. It's not a bureaucratic confusion.

The evidence points in one very specific direction. The United States has built a system that imports

human capital, extracts all of the value from it, and then reserves the right to expel it the moment

that capital becomes inconvenient. That's true for the doctoral student writing an op-ed. It's true

for a graduate student at a protest. It's true for a woman who arrived at seven years old. And that

has been true for decades longer for the person picking strawberries and salinas, the person

cleaning rooms in Las Vegas, the person cleaning a processing line at a meatpack and plant in Iowa.

The mechanism is different. The visa category is different. The paperwork is different,

but the vulnerability of that between both is identical. -You have students tied to institutions,

workers tied to their employers. In every case, the mechanism is the same.

Your presence here is contingent on your usefulness and your silence and your cooperation.

So I guess the question is, what do you do with that, right? If you're listening to this and you're

angry, good, stay angry. I mean, touch grass a little bit, but it's okay to be angry about

this kind of stuff. So let's get specific about where to put that anger. Here's what I would do

first. I would go to the National Immigration Law Center at NILC.org. They're not a petition

organization. They're not a change.org sort of a thing. They are in court right now. They have been

litigating the legal challenges to executive orders that created the conditions we've been describing.

If you donate, your money is going to go directly to legal infrastructure that has been

actively blocking deportations. If you're not in a position to donate, they publish plain language,

Know Your Rights materials that you can share. Print out a couple of copies, give them to your

friends that you know are concerned about these sorts of things. Put them in a group chat, get them

in signal, send them to the international students at your local university, send them to the workers

at the restaurants where you eat lunch. That information is a form of protection. And the legal

path matters enormously here. And I want to add something specific to that. The ACLU's Immigrants

Rights Project, which is at ACLU.org/immigrants-rights is currently tracking litigation across

multiple federal districts. The Chung case, the Kaleel case, the cases we haven't even covered,

because there are many more of them. Those are being monitored and in some cases actively

supported by this project. So what litigation does, the direct pressure alone cannot always do,

is create precedent. But that's what the ACLU is in the courtroom. The court ruling says that you

cannot revoke a green card for protected speech. It does not just protect one person, it protects

the whole framework. It's slow. I know it's slow, but it's durable in a way that a single

news cycle is not. So the second thing I'd do is I'd get connected to something local. And I mean

that like genuinely local, right? Like not like a national organization with a local chapter that

sends you emails. I mean, find out who is doing sanctuary work in your city. Find out which labor

organizations are actively working with migrant workers in your region. For agricultural workers,

specifically the United Farm Workers Foundation runs the UFW Foundation Citizenship Project

at ufwfoundation.org. They do direct legal assistance. They do know your rights outreach

in the fields. There are people who have been living inside of this vulnerability for generations.

And they've built infrastructure for it. Connecting to that infrastructure, volunteering, showing up,

translating if you have that ability, driving people to appointments. That's just what's needed.

It's not glamorous work. It's not fun. Sometimes it's literally just being an uber when a person

can't really afford an uber. But that is the work. Now, for the intellectual labor side of this,

specifically for international students and researchers, I want to name the National

Postdoctoral Association at nationalpostdoc.org. They've been pushing for structural reforms to

OPT and H-1B dependency for years. That's a longer game, but here's the specific ask.

Contact your congressional representative, and I mean specifically go to house.gov/representatives/findyourrepresentative,

put in your zip code, find the name, and ask them specifically where they stand on OPT reform.

Whether they support legislation that decouples immigration status from single employer

sponsorship, because that's a concrete and nameable ask. It's not vague. It gives the staffers who

answer the phone something to actually log. Yeah. And this week, specifically this week,

go to the Immigrant Defense Project at immigrantdefenseproject.org. They have a

rapid response network. So if you live near a detention facility, if you live in a city with

a significant immigrant population, you can actually be trained to respond when someone is detained.

So that's something that you can do with your body and your time, not just your money.

And here again, we completely agree, without any daylight between us, every single person

we talked about today, Mahmood Khalil, Yun-Seo Chung, the unnamed H-2A worker, the OPT graduate

afraid to report wage theft. I mean they were invited here by the US government.

They were told their labor, their minds, their presence had value. They built lives inside that

invitation. And the moment they became inconvenient, the welcome was revealed to be a lease agreement

with conditions buried in the fine print. And the condition was always the same. Be useful,

shut up, and disappear when we tell you to. Again, we started this new segment at the end

where we talk a little bit about what sort of surprised us from the research, what sort of

surprised us from our findings. So what got me is the $200. After September 11th, the government

looked at a foreign student and said, "We need to build a surveillance system that tracks you."

And then they made the students pay for it. $200. I mean, it doesn't seem like a lot in the grander

scheme of things, but this is to basically pay for the infrastructure of their own monitoring.

It's like with no crime, forcing someone to wear an ankle monitor and force them to pay for the

ankle monitoring service, right? That's not bureaucratic oversight. That's a hostage paying

for the lock on the door and nobody blinked. It passed. It became policy. It became normal.

That is the specific thing that followed me, I think from all of the research we did for this

week's episode. I think the thing that stuck with me was the Fulbright Framing back in 1954. The

rationale for bringing people here, win ideological allies, recruit talent, and it was never dressed

up as a generous, as a gift to humanity. It was always about benefiting the US government.

Basically, like I said, they said the quiet parts out loud. And then 70 years later, we collectively

acted surprised when the system treats people like instruments, right? The surprise is the part I

don't understand. The blueprint was always public. I mean, these people were essentially wards.

It's not a free people who are here to contribute to the system. They were here to be extracted,

to have their information and knowledge, their work were extracted from them and then told that,

"Hey, you're going to stick around. You better mind your Ps and Qs."

Yeah. So look, we told you the three things that you could do right now. A couple of other things,

if you want first, you can go to the Student Barrier Protection Center. That's been documenting the

financial exploitation of international students specifically, the way tuition dependency and visa

dependency kind of compound in each other. That's at studentbarrierproject.org. They have a reporting

portal. So if you know an international student who's been financially exploited by their

extitute, that story needs to be in a database somewhere. So please do put it there.

Second, Detention Watch Network at detentionwatchnetwork.org is specifically focused

on conditions inside immigration detention facilities. And given that Ramesa Azturk was

transferred from Massachusetts to Louisiana, given that Mahmood Khalil has been sitting in a detention

facility in Louisiana for weeks, the geographic isolation of the detention is part of the

punishment. The detention watch has a map of facilities in a community visitation program.

So showing up in person at a detention facility as a community member changes the calculus for

what gets done to people inside. Again, it's documented, it's real.

Third, you can go to the Economic Policy Institute at EPI.org. It has a wage tracker specifically for

H-1B employees, sorry, employers. So you can look up the companies. You can see what they're paying

versus the prevailing wage. And if you work in tech, if you work adjacent to tech, if you know

someone who is navigating an H-1B situation, that tool exists and most people don't know it's there.

So use it, share it, name the companies that are suppressing wages under the program's legal cover.

And here's what I keep winding on. The students in these cases did not come here

knowing the risks. Most of them came before these risks were even visible. They came because they

believed the invitation was real. And I think that that belief is worth protecting. Not because it

was always honored, but because the alternative, a world in which nobody believes the invitation

anymore, is just a much darker place to live. I mean, this could be a program that benefits

everybody. We can still make that true. We can still bring about that reality. And that part

is actually going to be up to us. And you can find everything we've talked about across these

episodes now at fof.foundation. We're on Castapod, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Leave a review if you

have something to say and five stars to offer. We read them. Yes, we do. Also, I want to make sure

that you tell one friend about this podcast and make sure to rate us wherever you're listening to

this. Five stars or seriously GTFO? No, just kidding. If you do have some feedback on how we

might be able to improve this, if you have a topic that you think would be interesting that you'd like

us to cover, we'd be happy to give that a look over. You can email us at the overlap@fof.foundation.

That's the overlap one word at fof.foundation. So I guess with that, I want to say something to

everyone who listened to this whole thing. You sat with it, that matters. This country is built

on a pipeline that starts with a recruitment brochure and ends with a detention facility

in Louisiana. And it's been running continuously since most of us were even born. And the least we

can do is sort of look at it directly. Well, Will, thanks again for being here with me today.

Will G (Guest): Thank you for having me, Joshua.

Josh Birk (Guest): Just, I didn't have you. You signed in just like I did.

Will G (Guest): It's your studio, Joshua. It's your studio.

Josh Birk (Guest): It is technically my studio. It's only because I pay for the subscription.

Anyway, thanks so much listeners and we will see you next week.

Will G (Guest): Thanks, everyone. Have a good week. Bye-bye now.

Josh Birk (Guest): That's the overlap.

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