America, ‘nation of immigrants,’ turns on immigrants: A conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Real News Podcast

For generations, the Statue of Liberty has stood as a beacon representing the promise of America as a land of freedom and opportunity for immigrants from all over the world. But in 2025, as immigrant communities are being vilified and terrorized across the US, as people of color are being kidnapped off the street by armed, masked agents of the state, as immigrants are kidnapped and disappeared to prisons in foreign countries like El Salvador, as billions of taxpayer dollars are allocated to erect migrant concentration camps and a giant wall on the US-Mexico border, it should be horrifyingly clear that the promised America embodied in the Statue of Liberty is not the America we live in today. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen about the reality immigrant families face in the US today and about the critical relationship between the rise of authoritarianism at home and the violent expansion of American imperialism abroad.

Guest:

• Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His latest feature piece for The Nation Magazine is titled “Greater America has been exporting disunion for decades”

Additional resources:

• Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Nation, “Greater America has been exporting disunion for decades”
• Michael Fox, The Real News Network, “Families of the detained see echoes of dictatorial past in El Salvador's gang crackdown”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “A dangerous myth: The US has never been 'a nation of immigrants'”

Credits:

• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

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