Ernesto Castañeda Transcript: May 22, 2025
Anne Godlasky/NPF (00:00:00):
Ernesto Castañeda is the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab at my alma mater American University. He’s a professor there as well as an author of a number of books on immigration misperceptions, family reunification, immigrants in urban cultures. And so he is called in and referred to from a number of different media organizations from CNN and Espanol, Univision Telemundo, as well as some of your own publications, Washington Post, U.S.A today, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, BBC, NPR. The list obviously goes on and on. So he’s a great source to know, and he’s going to talk to us today about how immigration and immigration status factors into what we’re all talking about. So how does that factor into workplace mental health? Obviously, Dr. Jason Wang touched on it just a little bit, but Mr. Castañeda is going to get even deeper into it. So please join me in welcoming Ernesto.
Ernesto Castañeda/American University (00:01:24):
Thank you everyone. Thank you so much and for the invitation to speak today. It’s a pleasure to be here with you today. I hope you had a good lunch and we’ll keep it interactive. So if I get dull or boring or something is not clear and I’m speaking too fast or you have a question, feel free to interrupt me at any moment. But obviously we’ll leave a lot of time at the end for Q&A, but when I start going into how we cover immigration, I can see how you will have a lot of questions. So feel free. Alright, so thank you for the introduction. So we’ll get started with a case study, which happens to be one of my latest books that I wrote with a former student of mine who’s now in Philly at U. Penn doing his PhD, their PhD, but there are a number of students involved.
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So what we did in this study was look at a number of issues that I think are relevant to mental health. One of it is these dualities. On the one side we have family separations and obviously the counter to that is family reunification. Historically, the emphasis on the media for obvious reasons and good reasons has been on the separations forcefully at the border or voluntary by families that the mom or the father come and work in the U.S. or to Europe and family members stay behind. The reunification part I think is less discussed, but it also has a lot of challenges that I can talk about. Then there is the distinctions that for the community members are very important between people that just arrived from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Venezuela, Ecuador, or people that have been here for a while who see themselves differently. People that have been living in Chicago for 20 years, even if they don’t have documents, they have a sense of belonging and pride and community that they stand guarding their own spaces against newcomers.
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So there’s a tension there that even being from Latin America, being Latinos, even being Catholic, whatever you want, a migrant, undocumented, there’s important differences in the day-to-day life and has implications for mental health. The other one is, again, a very simple duality, but in one case we have legal exclusions. So the border as a place of gatekeeping literally, or having papers or not. And then social inclusion, which I think is what is important for a lot of you or the purpose of this workshop is the role that cities at large having incorporated immigrants, they’re the more and the successful place where integration happens and it’s been happening for centuries in the U.S. and other countries, but also it’s kind of hard to cover and write about. Another one is schools. In this book, we talk a lot to minors, so schools become very important, but the place where integration or exclusion happens for most working adults, as you know, is the working place.
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So this is the same for immigrants, is the place where they become American or they stay as authorized. And I think in the U.S. also the labor market has been very successful in integrating immigrants by providing a source of income, by providing means to learn English little by little for the ones that don’t speak it, to make friendships across racial, ethnic, and citizenship status, but it’s at a slower rate that for younger people that go to school and then they can integrate really, really quickly and unfortunately they’re disconnected, right? The miners that were coming from Central America, if they were coming and they were 14, but especially 16 years old, they saw themselves as adults that they need support their family members. So there were a lot of incentives for them in their family dynamics to drop out of school, to not finish high school and to go into the labor force, which is going to have repercussions for the rest of their life in the U.S. in terms of income, education levels and vice versa.
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For the people that come and work as adults, it is very hard for them to find the time raising a family, working one or two jobs, three jobs, three shifts, to have the time to study English, to study civics, to learn about American history, and unfortunately also the world of the second generation of the children or the dreamers and the world of the parents in terms of the know-how of the community. Again, there’s not enough time and resources for them to learn from each other as much as they could if the state or society or schools put more emphasis in making that cultural translation. So again, the mental health marketplace or workforce inclusion and exclusion. So the study real quickly, I’m not going to go into all the details, but it’s about the DMVs, very Washington disease specific. Particularly we interview people in Maryland and Northern Virginia and we spoke to 58 immigrant youth, younger than 18, and their sponsors, which most of the time are their parents, and we also talk to some experts, some teachers, counselors, et cetera.
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So it took a long time to do the work. So again, this is not an example of reporting, it’s overly repetitive. People were like, we reached a duration really quickly, but it’s kind of what is included in the book. Just quick demographics. People were around 14 when they arrived, 16 when we interviewed them, we happened to have a little bit more males than females. It was very important for us to interview people that were undocumented or asking for asylum, and people were documented because contrary, obviously it’s better to have papers, it’s easier, one will think less fear, but actually no, in terms of the everyday experiences, in terms of the way that teachers think and talk to them in the middle school in Northern Virginia or in Maryland is very similar. Where the person is coming from the Salvador for a teacher, they’re not going to ask, are you documented?
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Are you not? They’re going to assume that everybody’s undocumented. So the lead experience is very similar. Same with interactions with the police and all that. So even though papers matter, they don’t make somebody completely different from the other person, from the hometown, the same age. They have more similarities even if they have that difference. So it’s important in stories to talk about, to take the immigration status seriously, but not as a category that defines everything else because in reality it’s not that, right? It’s more complicated. We interviewed people from Honduras, SU, and Guatemala because those were the countries where people were coming from. You probably you may remember from 2014 when there were a lot of news stories, it’s already 11 years ago, but it was a big deal. There were a lot of on accompanied minor coming from Central America, arriving at the border.
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Many of them ended up in the Washington region because the parents were working and living here since the 1980s. And also some went to California, some went to Chicago, Los Angeles, Long Island places where they were established central American communities. So I think something that politicians, some people in the media missed is that this shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was because the main motivation were the gangs. Some of them were recruited. There were some issues that have changed on the ground in El Salvador, but the main reason they were coming here then is because their parents were living here. So this was a story of family reunification, a family story that became a story about border security, about invaders of military service, age, and all these kind of racializing and gendering tropes about the central American young men when there were children that were left behind for a decade by parents working in our communities. Yes, please.
Candace Montague/Independent (00:08:52):
My name is Candace Montague. I’m the freelance journalist. Quick question. Yes. Why were their parents coming here?
Ernesto Castañeda/American University (00:08:58):
Great question. So in the case of Central America, it’s relatively easy. There were a lot of civil wars in the 1980s as part of the Cold War. There were peasant movements, worker movements, centuries governments or governments that were threatening to take away some of the privileges of the United Fruit Company, for example, in Guatemala. And they were cool, that supported by CIA supported by the us. So it was geopolitics, it was international relations. Those brothers were very engaged in central America in democracy and supporting dictatorships, military regimes that were more friendly to U.S. business interests. So there was a civil war where the U.S. really had was on the side of the regimes that were committing genocide against indigenous peoples in Guatemala, which meant that people were displaced and where did they go? They went to Mexico. A lot of Guatemalans established themselves in refugee camps in the southern part of Mexico.
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Later they became Mexican citizens. Many, they stayed and became Mexican. Some of them came back after the war was over. But there were a lot of nuns, priests, foreign eight personnel, U.S. diplomats, staff members in Central America that were, they created a underground railroad to bring people that were being persecuted by the government for being journalists, for being human rights defenders. And they brought them to Washington DC to Columbia Heights. That’s what they are here, because they were escaping for their lives in a civil war situation. When the U.S. government couldn’t accept that these were refugees or asylum seekers because then it would be to accept that we’re complicit in the catastrophes going on in Central America. So it was the U.S. Civil Society was really good providing solidarity and refuge. That was kind of the rebirth of the sanctuary movement. Housing people in churches in places, so they couldn’t be removed by the state in that situation that if they were to stay behind in Central America, they will be killed. Some went to Mexico, some went to networking countries, but a number of them came to the U.S. and then they made a life here, and then they had children here, or they had children that they left there. So in the 19 20 14, right now we’re talking about the third generation of people that have family members here. So again, it’s connected to U.S. interventions abroad. There’s a great book by journalists from the New Yorker.
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Wow, I’m lacking on his name right now. No, he has his book. No one else left. Wow. I’ll come back to me. I’ll come back to me. The book is really good, and he goes really into detail about that. But there’s a reason why the people are here that, again, a lot of politicians or people that provide asylum don’t take too much into account. So that’s one reason. The reason that happens more internationally in the case of Mexico was more common or Philippines for people going to Saudi Arabia or parts of the world, is that there’s a recruitment and people are told, OK, if you come and work in Los Angeles, there’ll be a job for you in restaurants, in service industry, in agriculture and all that, and we’re going to hire you as a worker. So I’m going to take you who you are. I’m going to give you a contract for a year. That still happens, but you cannot bring your wife, you cannot come with your kids. It’s not vacation, you are not relocating you. We just want you as a worker. That’s what the word ERO became a thing. You just want your arm, your labor force, but they don’t see the immigrant as part of a family unit. So that’s a big problem that we have with immigration.
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If one is a diplomat, like many colleagues in DC or hopefully if you were sent to the bureau in Tokyo or London or Baghdad or wherever your newspaper or your news agency sent you, if you had a family, you will be allowed to get visas and big papers and the full family will decide, OK, are we moving to this country or not? In the case of low-skilled immigrants, it’s only the guest worker that is allowed to move as a worker, men from Algeria, from Morocco, from Mexico, or women from the Philippines, nurses and other people to do childcare, that they do it with permission, with guest worker visas or increasingly undocumented. But again, it’s very risky to bring your kids with you if you don’t have papers, and it’s very expensive to raise a child in Washington DC or LA or San Francisco. It’s more cheaper to raise them in rural Mexico, in Central America, in the Philippines.
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So then the grandmother takes care of them, but the grandmothers don’t last forever. So once they pass, then the kid is literally left orphaned for the second time, which again creates all these mental health issues. And then they may be, well, they’re trying to recruit me in the gang here in El Salvador 2012 as I turned 14, and I can start working for them. I don’t want to do that. But if you don’t want to do that, they may kill your sister or they may threaten your mother or they know where you live. They know who you are. So for the lucky people that have family members in the U.S. that can send them some money to afford the expensive trip across Mexico, very dangerous and all that, but death is not certain. But for many of them that don’t want to recruit and will be killed, their lives are at risk in their hometowns.
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Again, it’s not all of Central America, but in particular areas in particular times, if they have the family members here, well is the time to come north. And then is the time. I haven’t seen a lot of kids were telling us, I haven’t seen my mom since I was two years old. I would say, I don’t remember. Yes, she sends me money. I see her over Skype or whatever, but we don’t live together. So then they reunify in Montgomery County or Fairfax and the families together, but they don’t know what they like for breakfast. They don’t know what type of music they like. So why we call them family of strangers, they are biologically related, but they have not lived together. And there was the resentment of for the moment that dad does it so they can send more resources and they can send more money.
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They can go to school with a new backpack, with new books, have more access to resources because they have dollars coming from the us. But for a minor, if you’re five years old, eight years old, you just see my mom suddenly disappeared and she didn’t even say goodbye because she will have cried having really hard. So they literally leave in the middle of the night without saying goodbye. So sometimes it’s a surprise for the family members. So it felt as an abandonment of the parent. It’s almost like your mom or your dad died, but they didn’t die. They were not fighting in World War II and they happened to die in the battle. They’re alive, but they are somewhere else. So it’s called ambiguous loss you grief, but the grief is continues because it doesn’t end and you don’t get over it because they’re alive.
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They’re not part of your daily life. All these dramatic mental health family dynamics is behind there on a companion minor story and helps us understand it. That’s what we try to do in the book. Some of the reasons for migration are gang violence, extortion, recruitment from the gang members, and many of them also want to have better opportunities for education, have a better life. The American dream is well alive even now, many of them because of this context of where a lot of immigrants come from, civil war, violence, genocide, people already probably had mental health issues before coming to the us. Then the trip migration itself also can be very traumatic. They can experience a lot of, you can experience a very hard event and you can suffer trauma from it or not, but if you suffer trauma from that, you can have PTSD from that.
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It doesn’t mean that every immigrant is mentally ill. That’s not what I’m saying, but the likelihood increases. Now for this book, we did a study and we asked people about, there’s a number of questions that nons, psychologists, non psychiatrists can use to diagnose depression, anxiety, PTSD, and we asked the questions of them and what we saw with central American minors is that just the fact of migrating, just the fact of being in the U.S. for this group of people, we interviewed them at the beginning of the first Trump administration, so that was already in the air, that anxiety of deportation, of uncertainty, but they felt safer and they felt less stressed and less anxious just being in the U.S. than being back in their communities when they were persecuted and forcefully recruited by the gangs. So just the act of migration was intervention in improving the mental health of these youth.
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Again, something that often we don’t think about it and we were surprised. And again, it’s not that the reason for migration wasn’t difficult. It’s not that the trip not difficult. It’s not that coming here doesn’t have its challenges. Learning a new culture, a new language, getting to know your family, all these feelings of abandonment coming to the fore, but still they felt better than before. And what we see and having the cupboard, they’re playing soccer in a field. So they’re playing in Arlington with other kids from different backgrounds, third generation Americans, fourth generation, different races and all that, and they just do kid things. They regain that youth of that childhood that they were losing in their countries of origin. Again, the same will be applicable for people from Afghanistan, from Ukraine that have interviewed, and these things are very similar. So as I said, many respondents, many people interviewed have not seen their parents since they were very young, and the family separation in this case was because of immigration laws that we have.
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As I was saying, if you are low skilled, you are not allowed to come with your mind, your family. So the family separations that we discussed and we covered during the first Trump administration that were, I say forcibly removing mothers and parents from children and putting them in different detention facilities and then separated, some of them are still separated. That was horrifying. But that happens all the time inside family units, but we just don’t know it because the parents decide to live on their own. But again, they’re deciding because a lot of the neighbors have moved and in order to have a better house in order to the rents and the cost of food goes high in the towns when there’s a lot of immigration. So then there’s a lot of pressure for a man of the house to be man, to be a good man to leave or a good provider is the one that leaves is the book of another journalist from New York Times that in the Philippines, to be a good mother means to leave your children behind and go work in the Emirates and send money.
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So it’s not really a personal decision. There’s a lot of pressures, but it produces this other type of family separation. This is a long quote, but it’s from somebody that tells us that when they, in El Salvador, when you talk to somebody friendly, in a friendly fashion appear, you use both as another form of two, which is informal. So as you know in French and Spanish, there’s two registers, one informal and one more formal. So normally for parents, you would use Ted to show more respect, but in this case, this immigrant talks to his mother or her mother as an older sister, as a sibling, as a peer. So they use both to talk to the biological mother because they were not raised by them. They were raised by the grandma who has this figure of authority who can’t send the limits and be like, OK, you can go to that party on Friday, we’ll come back by midnight or something like that.
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But that happens in El Salvador. But if the biological mother says that in Virginia, they may be like, who are you to tell me that you were not there for me? You’re nobody to tell me what to do. So these issues of authority and all that are there. They get fixed. There were a lot of programs, particularly in Maryland that they will have mothers gathering a group like this, and they will talk about the issues they were facing at home, and they will see that it’s not that they particularly were bad mothers, but that the children of many other people in similar circumstances that they have to leave them behind had just been reunited. They were going through the same thing. So you have adolescents, which is difficult, adapting to a new school and the reunification of a family is very hard. But then when you see that it’s something that is happening to a lot of people in your community, it helped them a lot with their own mental health and it also with the youth, the youth that felt that they were particularly left behind because they were not good enough, because their parents didn’t love them, all these personalized feelings.
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When they met other people in their same condition, then they realized that it’s just something that happened a lot in the country, in the community at the time. So it helps them digest and process these long, long-term separations. But again, there has to be programs. They have to be conscious moderators and efforts and workshops to talk about these issues because undocumented people or people that were left behind or mothers suffering missing their children, they’re unlikely to talk about that with coworkers because they think that the coworker knows that and they went through that. So I don’t have to say anything, or they may be ashamed or they don’t want to share too much, or they may be afraid of if they work with a lot of citizens, they don’t want to know that they may have a family member that is undocumented. So they keep that to themselves. And as you know, it’s very hard to access mental health services in Spanish and to pay up a provider. So something that you can do is this group therapy sessions are very effective.
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This is another one about a lot of people in Central America, and again, it’s changed. We can talk about that. It’s safer now, but in Guatemala and Honduras, a lot of people didn’t want to go to the school or couldn’t go to school because there was no local high school or college, but also there was a distance. So different issues. And then they say they want to come to the U.S. to study more, and then they’re very happy about the educational opportunities they have in the U.S. and then obviously everybody else is how do I afford college? How do I apply the things that any American faces, they face that, but also as they’re learning the system, as they’re learning English, et cetera. A very powerful quote that I should have included here is in the book, but there was a very good student from a Salvador who said in Spanish, I’m smart, but in English I’m stupid because they’re struggling and all that.
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So they’re not doing so well in the classes, and it’s not because they’re not smart, but they cannot communicate in the effectiveness that they can in their mother tongue. That’s also, again, that some teachers in the Washington area really understand and they do a lot in programs, but in other classes that are not immersion or bilingual, the teachers may just think that that’s a lazy student or they’re not doing their homework and it doesn’t help them. Challenges in the school system that these central American youth face is at the beginning language virus. Many of them had interrupted schooling because of distance education, security reasons. They stopped studying in fifth grade or seventh grade, and then they may be 24 and then they come back and they’re put in school when their classmates are much younger because they continue studying. But these people took a lot of years off school.
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So do I want to be with much people that are much younger than me and stand out, or do I want to stop studying? So that’s a tough decision for many of them, cultural changes in schools, but it easy to solve these issues. And there’s great group programs again in the DMB, but in California and other states, there’s English as a second language, the different names, different philosophies about it, but that’s obviously a big help. Newcomer programs are not really expensive and make a big sense. There was a beautiful ceremony that they conduct in Barcelona when the major goes to big theater and they have a beginning population. There’s processes for legal family reunification. So I’m from Colombia, I’ve been living in Spain for a long time, and I got my papers and then I ask the government to bring my children from Columbia. So then the government knows that.
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So it’s like, OK, all these youth or children are going to arrive into Barcelona in June. So they do a ceremony for them when they arrive. They don’t know the well, they may or not may know the Spanish depending who they’re from, the language. And then the mayor goes and says, welcome to Barcelona, this is your city now. And gives them a certificate of a new resident. So it costs them very little, it’s just one event free. They own the auditorium. It’s like a couple hours of the time of the major, but it’s literally a welcome to the children, to the youth of workers and citizens of the city that now brought their children with them. And then for the children, it makes them feel at home. It makes them feel belonging. It goes a long way, something that is so gimmicky, but it’s a big deal.
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You’re not waiting for them to become citizen to then welcome them in a ceremony, but they’re welcome when they arrive, not at the airport, but as a collective, as a lot of people joining their parents. So if American cities did that, it also goes a long way. Refugee services and all that do that. But all that is being caught right now. The funding has been caught. Trauma-informed counseling is super important because again, a lot of these youth and immigrants have suffered a lot of trauma. So they need particular interventions and obviously the concern always hiring new staff, new administrative pathways for people to get papers and more personnel in schools, in HR departments that are bilingual, that know about all different educational systems, other marketplaces is very useful. We talk a lot already about, not a lot, but we talk a lot about family separations.
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So let me continue, but what are the consequences of family separation due to enforcement at the border or due to deportation? One thing that I’m going to ask you to put yourselves in the shoes of, imagine it’s very hard, but imagine you are six years old. You have been walking for a month or two across Latin America, that they’re in jungle Mexico. There’s all types of different ecosystems. You arrive at the border and then you are walking, you’ve been walking for a long time, somebody stops you, but it’s not enough to just pay a few bucks and they let you go. They stop you and the group you’re traveling with, and then some people dress in. Military fatigues or green uniforms literally take away your mom or your dad as you’re traveling with both or the ones you’re traveling with in front of you and you and your younger siblings stays behind.
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So first of all, it’s like, what’s happening? Who are they? And then whenever you see your parents taken away by a police or an authority, state authority, anybody’s going to think that, oh, my parents are criminals. My parents broke the law. My parents are bad people, which is heartbreaking for any child or any type, but again, in this case, they’re just coming without a visa or they’re asking for asylum. In the last, since the pandemic, most people were turning themselves in, that’s the wrong word, because they haven’t committed any crime, but they’re saying, Hey, I’m going to apply for asylum. Where do I fill the paperwork? And at one point, the Trump administration was removing the family members. So again, this forceful removal by authorities already in the sole subconscious of the children questions, the morality of the parents in a criminal sense, yes, they’re breaking.
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Maybe if they’re asking for asylum, they’re not breaking any law. It’s part of international law since World War II and the Holocaust. But if they are passing, trying to pass without detection through the desert, they’re breaking immigration law, which is a civil law. It’s not criminal law. And there could be consequences for that, that’s fine. But again, this separation is suffered as dramatic by the minors. And also as a child, your parents, your mom, your dad, both are the ones that provide safety in this world. They’re the ones that you see them as superheroes. They can do everything. They know everything. They have kept you alive for all your life. So the fact that they take them away, you cannot do anything about it because you’re just minor. You don’t speak the language. You dunno what’s happening. But also your father or your mother, both who are super powerful in your eyes, they’re also impotent.
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They cannot resist the rest. They cannot do anything. They’re willingly going to go with the authorities. They have no option. And even worse, they’re leaving you behind. They’re not taking them with them because again, the kids that are detained together with the parents, the detention is traumatic and all that, but at least they’re in the family members. It’s like waiting in the lounge of a hotel or airport. It’s bad, but you are with your family so you withstand it. But when your parents taking away and literally leave you in the street, that is triply traumatic. And we see that happening right now in Massachusetts, in many places that ICE comes, they remove the mother and a youth, young woman or a child is literally left orphaned in the streets. So that’s very heavy for any person. So that’s going to have mental health consequences for a long time.
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When the parents are removed and the family already is living here, some of these children are going to have to be taken over by the state and going to foster care, which then taxpayers have to pay for that, right? It’s dramatic. It’s a difference. But that cost a lot of money if the father is deported. But the moment the children can stay or decide to stay, well, they don’t have the breadwinner. And as we know, men make more money than women in the workforce. It’s unfair, but that’s a reality. So the woman may have to work two shifts to make ends meet. So it’s harder for her to help the children with homework and all that. They won’t do as well in school. They may drop out earlier, they may go into workforce. So it’s going to have a big economic and social and emotional impact in the U.S. overall. Any one deportation children that have been separated from their parents in the literature we see that they suffer from lower self-esteem in general and lower self-efficacy. They don’t believe they can do what they set themselves to do. And then migration sometimes can itself be traumatic, not all the time, but it can be traumatic. When there’s more border fences, more border walls, more policing, it is dangerous, more expensive and can be more traumatic, then people can suffer from disease or toxic stress.
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So already I told you this about the parental illumination in front of you is very heavy. Children that experience separation feel it as abandonment already explained this. Alright, real quick. So we’re running out of time. This is not new. It happens for a lot of guest workers and low status people. It’s something that’s been happening for decades across the world and maybe was under the radar for a lot of the public, but there’s been a lot of stories. So I had my book that I explained, but there’s been a lot of books with Vietnamese, with Filipinos, Mexicans, Salvadorians of this happening in different contexts in different years. There’s a good literature, me and my colleague called these transnational families when they are family members in one country and the children in another.
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I can share the PowerPoint, but I’m going to keep moving. And then Sophie, that is very difficult is that yet you tell a parent you are in a country and then you are trying to provide parenting from afar, from WhatsApp or it’s very hard and you won’t have all the information. Another thing that happens in these transnational families is that you have a lot of the, so you have two farmers in central Mexico. They’re old, they’re still working in the fields, but a lot of their children have migrated in this case to New York City. So they’re taking care of one or two grandchildren, but 2, 4, 6, 7, they just had a Coke to celebrate. All the kids are very happy and all that. But imagine, I mean, that’d be hard. I coach a soccer team of 13 year olds and it’s exhausting with 20 kids, but it’s just like a couple hours, a couple times a week.
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Imagine having all the kids the same age in your household and you’re already in your sixties or seventies and you’re working the field and preparing the food and making handmade tortillas. It is not that they don’t love the kids, they love them, but it’s very hard to do an intensive party. It’s tiring. And then happens is that the older siblings very young have to become the mothers of the younger sibling, which again, it’s happened before and all that, but it is an interrupted childhood. And then you have a lot of dynamics when in some cases all the men are abroad working in the U.S. and the women of different generations stay behind. So you have the mixed families and the mother-in-law moves with the grandma and the sister-in-law and then they start fighting about what to do with the money they get from no, should we open a restaurant?
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No, should we do this? Should we build a house? Should we use it for the kids? And it’s not sustainable. So then in this case, they were leaving for remittances from the person in New York. At one point there were some conflicts and then the two kids, now they’re studying in New York City and the wife left and the grandmas stayed behind, but they did a lot of child wearing for many years they were improving their housing, but now they receive very little money because now they have to pay for the whole family in New York. So they’re left also not provided by and not taken care of by the children or the grandchildren, which was happening to our families that didn’t migrate in those hometowns.
(00:34:23):
So for children left behind back in the country, it’s like a loss that they could never be repaired even after reunification, that psychological injury may never go away. They may feel, and the problem is that it happens between the child and the parent, but then it gets predicted to others. So my wife, my coauthor, Leslie B, she had a lot of clients in therapy and a lot of them, there was this Dominican woman in the Bronx. She was having a very hard time building a strong relationship with her spouse because she didn’t trust people because she had been abandoned by the mother. Then it was very hard for her to be fully emotional in the marriage. So it didn’t translate to other types of relationships.
(00:35:11):
So the fixed Islam suppression, again, are suppression, anxiety, continued grief, the feeling of abandonment then also creates all these economic issues that make it hard for those places to develop. I can go more into this in Q and A if you are interested, but yes, people receive remittances, but that’s not enough to get out of poverty. So yes, the money from abroad comes at a cost of keeping families separated across national borders, and then it’s something that just perpetuates immigration. The next generations are going to try to do the same. And we don’t have to get into this now and again, it’s very easy. During the Biden administration, there was a law passed and nobody noticed. And that was great that for example, if you were Salvador, and there were a number of countries, not everybody, but some countries, even if you were living in the U.S. undocumented, you could file paperwork to bring your family members to reunite with you in the U.S. and they could come legally to an airplane, much cheaper, a couple hundred dollars, and you can buy a ticket from France, Salvador here. So you don’t have to pay that to a coyote agent, corrupt officials. You can use that to pay your rent and your food once you get here. So it was a way for people to not have to put their family members through all these challenges, but the Trump administration got rid of those provisions.
(00:36:36):
And the other positive thing is that although on the front desk schools affect everybody, if we get more money for public schools, it’ll help citizens and locals, but it also helps immigrants. And that’s the best way to help integrate immigrants is to put money in public libraries, public spaces, parks that helps everybody. And it’s a universal policy and law. So it is harder to take it away because everybody benefits. So again, I’m not asking for things that are particular for immigrants, things that are public help everybody. But again, I talk a lot about the negatives. But once the children are here, they’re here in the field playing soccer, and it doesn’t matter, they’re from Morocco, from Ethiopia, from El Salvador, they’re born and raised in Virginia. They are all players in the soccer field. And whoever plays better is the better player. It doesn’t matter they have papers or the status of their parents, which is mixed.
(00:37:28):
So that’s the beauty that they just become these guys in 2015 years, they’re going to be American like everybody else. Be very hard to distinguish the kids that they go to college or that they don’t, what type of jobs they get into. And that’s a challenge that Europe has had for a long time of creating these kind of two class citizens by color and nationalities. But in the U.S. we actually have been very successful in overcoming that to be Irish, to be Italian, to be Turkish or things. It is not a big deal right now just to celebrate St. Patrick’s or not, but you have the same opportunities. So it’s the same that could happen with many other different groups in the future. So we have a couple of papers that you can check out with more information about it. This is online for free, but from the point of view of the parents, which is also very interesting.
(00:38:10):
But let me stop here and jump real quick and then we’ll do it more interactive to a couple of suggestions that I would have on how to cover immigration as journalists. Sounds good. Yeah, excellent. So I share a piece, so I’m going to summarize it, but what is the fact is that many widespread misconceptions about immigration that most people have. So if you can help us as journalists to dispel, to educate the public a little bit about this, it goes a long way. It’s a big, big contribution. A problem with migration is that many members of the public think they are experts on immigration because, oh, I see immigrants in the street, I hear people speaking another language in the store, I don’t like it. And then they give you an opinion. If you interview them, they’ll tell you what, they’ll talk for hours about their views on immigration.
(00:38:57):
And yes, some people may ask them what their views are on the bond market and things like that, but they cannot be expressed about everything, but they will have an explanation. And also immigrants, some immigrants have gone to the immigration experience themselves, but that doesn’t mean they understand immigration law. That doesn’t mean that they understand immigration from other places and the different historical periods. So immigrants themselves, they can be experts. You don’t have to be an immigrant to be expert and vice versa. But not only immigrants are experts in immigration. Another mistake that I see a lot of journalists doing is that immigration, lawyers know immigration law, which is important, but it’s just a particular part of the immigration experience. So maybe an analogy that I’ll try to do for the first time here. If you are moving into a house and you’re going to a new city and you’re going to buy a house and you’re going to live in that and integrate into a community, yes, you’re going to need a real estate agent to help you.
(00:39:52):
You don’t have to, but you’re probably going to use a real estate agent to help you find a place to rent or to buy. But would you summarize the experience of moving to a new place, a new relocation to the real estate agent? Or does it include more like finding a school for your kids, finding a job finding? So I think the immigration as a phenomena is much, much wider than what immigration law covers. Again, nothing. Immigration lawyers are very important and they do a role, but we cannot equate the immigration experience says to what immigration lawyers call, because a lot of immigration action happens outside of the law because the law is like 34 years behind the reality that we live. So again, the expertise here is tricky. It’s not everybody that may seem as an expert. Be careful.
(00:40:43):
I’ll say it again later, but please, please, please do not cite the Center for Immigration Studies, CIS or the numbers U.S.A, or I’ll tell you more about them in a minute. But they’re literally eugenic kind of white supremacist groups that’ve been working for years to try to reduce immigration in the U.S. for racial reasons. And they say it out loud. So the Southern Poverty Law Center calls them hate groups, but for decades it’s gotten much better in the last few years. But for decades, generations of journalists will have a story and they have a pro-immigrant activists and they’ll outside those folks. So that helped shape really public opinion towards anti-immigrant stance. So again, the experts that you pick are extremely important. I know you know it, but when experts or immigrants read this, who is quoted, it carries a lot of importance.
(00:41:40):
Yes, the Center for Immigration Studies, CIS, there’s another place in New York called the Center for Migration Studies that’s completely legit. But the Center for Immigration Studies, my students, they’re in class, we grant a paper about immigration, they Google, this is going to come at the top, it’s going to be in the top three things. There’s Immigration Policy Institute here in DC, completely legit. They look at the data, they talk about it from different angles. The pew is respectable, but these are centers that all they do is produce fake information about immigration and they’re very successful spreading. And it’s a network of people. And again, it’s not a conspiracy. I’ll show you a couple of sources where you can learn more about that. And the other one was numbers, U.S.A. And the funny thing is that they have a number of have immersive groups, but it’s the same fund. There’s a lot of the same messages and they retweet each other, but it’s particular groups.
(00:42:34):
When you cover migration, because it’s so political and it’s so personal for so many people, it’s important that journalists are aware of it. And I think you are. But also when I talk to my fellow academics who write about migration, sometimes they think that because they’re stating the facts, they don’t have to worry about it. But you have to worry as you know about how you’re going to be read, how you could be understood or misunderstood. A lot of people that want to use news stories or news articles or data to advance a certain agenda. And again, if you have political agenda, that’s fine. Everybody has a political agenda or when the agenda impacts negatively human beings that we have to be worried. So again, when you write a story, I think you can just do it. There’s no question that the immigration is important because some years ago for academics, they thought they had to justify why they grind up immigration.
(00:43:22):
So they had to make huge claims about this being unprecedented or this being new. But nowadays, you can just go and discuss the topic. You don’t have to excuse yourself. And I think that’s clear. Now, something that is very important, and tell me if I’m not clear, year immigration is not a problem. Immigration is like it’s happened for a long time. It’s going to continue happening. How many people live in a country different from the one country they were born in? So I’m an international migrant, immigrated when I was 19. So I’m an international American. But how many people are in that situation in the world? Anybody? Any guesses? Yes, yes. There’s billions of people. It’s a lot of people. But something that is very important when covering or understanding these issues is not the wrong number, which is going to be, yes, millions of people, hundreds of millions.
(00:44:18):
I don’t know about billions, but a lot of people bought a proportion of when we compare it to. So what proportion of the population, what percentage of the world population is international migrant? It’s only 3.5%. And this is coming from the un, from IOM, from many sources, from many days between three and 4%. And that’s been the case for the last 20 years. So people like me, were an exception. We’re everywhere in Washington DC probably 30% of the population is foreign born. But as a country in the us, if you go to the Midwest, it’s not that common. They are there, but it’s a small percentage of the population. Well then you can say, well, how about the us? Yes, in the U.S. right now we have around 14% of the population being foreign born. But that’s exactly the same number in Spain, which has right now the highest foreign born population in Europe, the fastest growing economy, the strongest economy, the only one with growth thanks to immigration.
(00:45:11):
It has been growing down in Germany the last few years in uk, but still the far more population in France, Germany, rich countries is around that. And the rich, richer, richer countries, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, they have much larger proportion of their population that is foreign born. The problem with those countries is that they don’t have birthright citizenship. So even if you are born and raised in Abu Dhabi, but your parents are from India, you are always going to be a foreigner. So you don’t have access to the oil, money and the wealth. So it creates is really a caste system, but they couldn’t be who they are without these millions of people coming from Philippines, India, sorry, down Bangladesh. So it happens, and it’s very interesting. You can write tons of stories about it, but there’s nothing to solve. Or if you think that’s the case, you can say numbers.
(00:46:02):
U.S.AID thinks that they won’t stop their work until there’s zero immigration to the U.S. that nobody from Africa, Asia or Latin America ever migrates again to the us. That’s their goal. They say that otherwise going to face overpopulation and ecological, but it’s just literally a very racist understanding. They want to keep America white. That’s the goal of these think tanks. That’s what they are trying to do. I’ve been trying to do for a while, this predates MAGA by the way. And again, it’s not a conspiracy theory. You can find the data and it’s very clear. Obviously they don’t say it upright as a soften or as to journalists, but that’s their goal. And just NP said that, oh, this group is in favor of immigration restriction. But that’s not enough to justify a quotation I think. But again, so migration is not a problem, it’s an issue.
(00:46:54):
But housing, it’s an issue about education. It’s an issue. There’s a lot of things to cover. But again, it’s not like, OK, in the ideal world, we will have no migration. Where in a world that we have a lot of immigration, we have to solve it. What are the politicians doing about it? That’s the wrong framework. And it’s something that really started in 1923 with some regulations before in the U.S. it was basically open borders for anybody coming from around the world. A couple of examples from the media, this is actually an article that I was reviewing an academic article, and it said, today, the going war in Ukraine has resulted in the largest refugee search in Europe since World War II with more than 7.4 million refugees. So again, every time you can, so this is true, but rather than focusing on how many is with what percentage or what.
(00:47:43):
So another way too. So I provide some feedback as a reviewer, and then you don’t need to say that. You just say there’s more legacy in the months between the review, the numbers went up, which is fine. So there were more than 8 million Ukrainians seeking refuge across the us. So that’s a true fact. That was a true fact. But you don’t have to scandalize the reader and say, oh, this is the biggest problem ever. Also, whenever you see in academic, my colleagues do it a lot, this is the most immigrant or the most refugees in history.
(00:48:17):
Do we know who was the percentage? People are foreign born in the 17 hundreds or soon after the revolution. We don’t have numbers for how many people left Europe to come to the Americas. What percentage, how would that compare to today’s numbers? We really have no idea. It was larger, that’s for sure. How much larger, we don’t really know. So when Europeans were into the world wasn’t an issue. When people from there, other parts of the world are coming into Europe and the us, that’s an issue. And we have better numbers so we can make, but again, whenever you see graphs about something growing up exponentially, be very careful and think, OK, what is this trying to do? When does it start? What does it end? How is it measured? Because even the board apprehensions is extremely problematic. I’ll get into that in a minute. So this is the same beginning of an academic paper, but just with a few edits, it’s saying the same thing, but it’s not problematizing, immigration stay in effect. The problem is the war in Ukraine, that’s an issue. People are leaving. That’s a fact. We don’t need to say if it’s the worst ever or the best ever, or it’s in the middle, it doesn’t matter. Still story, right?
(00:49:16):
So this another one, they’re saying, OK, more than 40 million today are refugees, asylum seekers. It sounds like a lot of people, 40 million is a lot of lives, a lot of souls, that’s for sure. But again, it would be better if it was a percentage or you can say how much it changed. So in Chile, they went really quickly from 2% of the population being born, born to 7.6. So that’s a fact. So they, there’s no need to problematize it or say this never happened before in Chile, because again, Chileans, most of them are not native. So it’s happened before. They just don’t have the numbers for that, right?
(00:49:52):
There’s a question of whether you use the word illegal or not. In this case, they’re saying illegal crossings, so that’s fine. You can keep it like that. But you heard this before. But yeah, try to avoid using illegal to talk about people because nobody’s illegal, right? As y sell used to say, you can cross illegally, you can come undocumented, but to be legal is a big criminalizing statement when law. Alright, so let me keep moving real quick. Yes. Sometimes academics, if you’re reading, which I encourage you to read, there’s a lot of great academic work on migration and articles. Sometimes there’s a pay, which is a problem. But more and more we’re try to write in open sources. And anybody can read without an internet, but sometimes the colleagues start with saying that’s nothing never happened before anywhere else. Again, they’re trying to justify their funding or applying for a grant or define the publication of their article.
(00:50:51):
So they have to make these prompts. They tend to underline uniqueness and represent the approach. And I think in the media, the headlines also have decision. I know the headlines sometimes depend on your editors more than you, but if the headline is really very far away from what you’re trying to say in your story, I’ll encourage you to push back and be like, Hey, can we instead use this deadline and tone it down? People are going to still read the story, but sometimes the headlines are really, really alarming and then the story is much more nuanced and you grow the story and you know what you’re doing. But sometimes there’s more and more these incentive to grade these scandals guidelines. But I dunno if there’s evidence that they actually attract that many more readers than if it was something more toned down.
(00:51:34):
Alright, so let me keep moving. So example, I asked to share this with you. I don’t know if you had a chance to look at it or not, it doesn’t matter, but it’s an article’s very well written in The Guardian, and then it talks about how Spain has the largest immigration rates and how they had the fastest economy. That’s a fact. I’ve seen stories about this by academics, by journalists for the last two years. It’s very, it’s true. But unfortunately, the article says, they quote a guy, Rafael Domini, the head of economic analysis at Space Bend Bank v va, and then he closes the article and then he goes into too long quotes, but then he says he ends, I think we’re just getting started here. It would be good to have this conversation in five or 10 years from now so that we can evaluate how well Spain is done.
(00:52:28):
Although in the previous quote he says that immigration to Spain really started in the late nineties. So it’s been already almost 30 years of immigration. Spain has done nothing but grow with a little economic crisis. But me as a reader, as an expert, I have a couple of issues. He’s a banker. Is he an expert on immigration? He’s not, right? Yeah, he’s Hispanic. He’s based in Spain. Good for him. He’s in Barcelona. I know that sometimes the hell doesn’t that, but he doesn’t know anything about immigration. Economic growth, yes, but most economies don’t think into about immigration for economic growth, which is a big blinder in economics. So first of all, he’s not really an expert. And then he’s saying, well I dunno, give me 10 more years, but you already have 30 years. And then the story is very matter of fact. You could say positive story about immigration, but then he closed like, oh, well we don’t really know Mark, when I think the evidence is good to just end up much earlier.
(00:53:19):
So don’t do that again. It’s an example. Sometimes it’s just unconscious. You just want to, I know you’re supposed to give the two sides of the story and you learn that in journalism school. I learned that in classes I’ve taken in communications. But that is itself very problematic because sometimes things are not equivalent. So another story that I shared is from an economist from England, so the UK discussion. So we can see it with more distance. It’s nothing about the us although he’s saying, and these are words that I take from the article, taken away the UK examples. And he says, the playbook is simple, meaning the anti-immigrant playbook, flood. The song with a mixture of lies have truths, misleading claims and statistics taken out of context and some journalists fall into the Trump of balancing the facts or evidence against opinion. So evidence not the same as opinion, right?
(00:54:08):
There are two different things. Opinion is important, but you cannot put evidence on one side versus opinion. And they say that they truth is in between. Giving equal credence to facts and fiction or to unique researchers and charlatans is a problem. And I know you’re super aware of that. You will never do it when it’s something about the stock market or health indicators or medical experts who is a doctor and who’s not a doctor, medical doctor. But when it comes to immigration, there’s a lot of people whose job is to spread lives about immigration and they make a living a very good living doing that. But they’re not in the field. They’re not interviewing immigrants, they’re not looking at the data or they’re looking at the data tenaciously. So unfortunately, the New York Times, the Washington Post for decades, they have given these unproportionate voice to the anti-immigrant proportion of the U.S. population, which essentially the minority is very small.
(00:55:01):
It’s less than 30% of people that are truly anti-immigrant, but they’re louder boys. And then these team tanks that have anti-immigration as the main cause, they’re very loud and very influential. While most people are very tolerant or ambivalent about immigration or skeptical, and they have a group that is very pro-immigrant, but there is not their main cause, it’s not the main thing. They don’t have the think tanks and the communication apparatus of the anti-immigration thing. So therefore, for decades, the immigration discourse have moving through the right further and further or to the exclusionist perspective. That’s why he provided a very good ground swell for Trump to win and to make these claims that immigration equals crime. And the convince people that if he was president, he will deport people and he will deport so many criminals. But he’s already run out of criminals to deport, right?
(00:55:51):
Because he’s going for mothers and children and refugees and recent arrivals. They have the number, but they haven’t committed any crime international students. So that’s a fact. So this is an article in ProPublica. It’s very long, you can hear it. It’s half an hour where he talks about this guy ton John Tanton, who started that center for immigration studies around environmentalist type of thing. But he’s connected to Neo naia, Genesis and all these groups for a number of years. I think he died. But the people, the network he created is still very influential. And then he goes into detail and it’s not the first article to appear for this. I’ve seen this for over 20 years now. And again, it’s in a way, well you can read more from him, but again, don’t cite SIS because bad data is bad arguments, et cetera. Alright, to moving to get close to the end, I circulated this chapter, I dunno if you have a chance to read it or not, but a couple of more takeaways on what to do and what not to do.
(00:56:52):
So try not to start a story with just talking about how many they are, because that already is going to sound like a lot. And again, it can put the reader in a fear mentality and a threat mentality when maybe it’s this not necessary. So the U.S. population, how many people live in the us? 348 million, more or less.
So we had what would be too many? Sometimes people ask me that, but let’s say if they were 300 million Chinese that wanted to live here next year, yes, then that would be very, very difficult. But most of the time we’re talking about one or 2 million people a year is negligible. Another way to put this in perspective, what proportion of the U.S. population is undocumented? Anybody knows? So we’re talking 11, even if you say 14 million people with now, a lot of people that had the prior politic status becoming undocumented, thanks to this administration, we’re talking about 3.3, 3.5% of the U.S. population.
(00:57:51):
So again, a lot of lives, a lot of drama, a lot of important stories, a lot of mental health consequences, a lot of fear, a lot of suffering for a lot of people. But in terms of the American population, it’s really a minority. Should we spend all this energy? And right now the budget, right? The big beautiful bill has a big chunk of that taken away from Medicaid, from Medicare, from social parents, from research, you name it, to go for border enforcement at a time that border crossings are very low. To build a world that is completely useless is wasteful. When we’re talking about 3% of the population where most of them are not, the crime rates of immigrants are much lower than the ones born in the us. So again, numbers, raw numbers can be misleading by accident, you’re not lying, you’re telling a fact.
(00:58:35):
But it’s always better to put it in proportion. So a percentage goes much better, much further. My colleagues in academia tend to do a lot of the era of Trump or the time off. And it sounds good and it’s a good title for a book or an article, but what does that mean? What is the era, the ice age? You can say, OK, this happened and in this year, so the geologists used it in the long term and it kind of makes sense. But to talk about the era in terms of a politician or something, it’s giving too much power and too much credence to any one individual because what happened with Biden, part of the Trump era or there was the violent era, now it’s stopped and it ended or back in the Trump era. For me, it doesn’t make a lot of logical sense and you don’t need it for a title.
(00:59:18):
Another thing that is very easy to not see my students well all the time, and I try to explain it to them, most of them I don’t think understand me, that’s my fault, but don’t use the termination. Again, nation would sometimes use it as an analogous, a synonym for country for the U.S. and it’s completely innocuous and common sense. And the dictionary probably will give us a very healthy explanation of this, but in the term or the history of the term nation, nation state, is the idea that there’s a people with a common language, a common culture, common blood, a common race that should be represented by a government. So again, when we have tried to do that in real life Germany before World War ii, that’s very dangerous because then everybody that is not that it has to be gone. So you can take country, say the us, which is always been multi. I think we’re out of time.
Anne Godlasky/NPF (01:00:18):
We are, yeah. I’m sorry. We’re pretty tight for this afternoon. So I would encourage everyone to, we’re not going to have time for Q&A in this session, but I would encourage everyone to reach out to Ernesto. Thank you so much. Sorry for that.
Ernesto Castañeda/American University (01:00:32):
Yes, I had too much material. Let me just plug real quick. I have a book that just came out that is all about immigration reality. So it’s a myth, every chapter is a myth and a lot of research from a lot of people of why the border is safe, why it wasn’t war, why immigrants committ this crime. And it’s a lot summarized research that can be very useful for an article that is all handy in one place. But happy to answer your questions that I didn’t have time for today in my email. Lemme just put the email in my screen and I’ll go, where did we go? OK, here. So you can find me. All right, thank you guys for your time.
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