Podcasts about Naturalization

Hello to you listening in Olympia, Washington! Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds (and a bit more) for Wednesdays on Whidbey and your host, Diane Wyzga. I am a storyteller of the old school. What do I mean? For over 30 years I've taught (and continue to teach) my clients and students the same thing: “Put down the paper and nobody gets hurt!” Why? Because storytellers have something to say that comes from their aliveness, which is what people most want to feel and connect with. Sharing our stories out loud brings them to light and life, and  encourages us to do what most folks fear more than snakes: stand up and speak up in public.   Story spoken aloud is what we leave of ourselves in another person. A story is an intimate lasting legacy, a permanent inheritance much like a vow or an oath. When we share our stories out loud, we connect with each other, we belong to each other. We might not realize it but we are creating a verbal promise, a vow, an oath of belonging. Think about how many times we've heard  someone say, "Repeat after me: I solemnly swear..." Marrying couples pledge faithfulness through the challenges and joys of marriage. Lawyers uphold the law, maintain client confidentiality, and act as an officer of the court. Doctors focus on ethics, patient care and societal responsibilities. Politicians preserve and defend the Constitution. US military support and defend the Constitution against all enemies. Immigrants becoming US citizens swear the Oath of Allegiance to the United States during a formal naturalization ceremony. From the time we are children in school we recite The Pledge of Allegiance, a patriotic promise of loyalty to the United States flag and the republic for which it stands. What happens when we share our stories out loud? They become real. We say what we mean, we mean what we say. We—and those hearing us—know what we stand for and what we won't stand for. Yes, you might write a story but it needs to be shared out loud to enrich and include the wider world. That's the legacy of the stories we leave in those who have heard them spoken aloud. CTA:  If you'd like to learn more, email me at info@quartermoonstoryarts.net for a no obligation Discovery Call. And thank you for listening!  You're always welcome: "Come for the stories - Stay for the magic!" Speaking of magic, I hope you'll subscribe, share a 5-star rating and nice review on your social media or podcast channel of choice, bring your friends and rellies, and join us! You will have wonderful company as we continue to walk our lives together. Be sure to stop by my Quarter Moon Story Arts website, email me to arrange a no-obligation Discovery Call, and stay current with me as "Wyzga on Words" on Substack. Stories From Women Who Walk Production Team Podcaster: Diane F Wyzga & Quarter Moon Story Arts Music: Mer's Waltz from Crossing the Waters by Steve Schuch & Night Heron Music ALL content and image © 2019 to Present Quarter Moon Story Arts. All rights reserved.  If you found this podcast episode helpful, please consider sharing and attributing it to Diane Wyzga of Stories From Women Who Walk podcast with a link back to the original source.

On this episode, my guest is Leslie Kern, PhD, the author of three books about cities, including Gentrification Is Inevitable And Other Lies and Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. Her work provokes new ways of thinking about and creating cities that are more just, equitable, caring, and sustainable. Leslie was an associate professor of geography and environment and women's and gender studies at Mount Allison University from 2009-2024. Today, she is a public speaker, writer, and career coach for authors and academics.Show Notes* Gentrification and touristification* Naturalization of gentrification* The new colonialism* Intersectionality* Who's to blame: renter or landlord?* The hipster and the safety net* The invisible face behind gentrification and touristifcation* Transactionality or hospitality? The case of Airbnb* Commercial gentrification* The right to stay putHomeworkLeslie Kern - Website - InstagramGentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies - USA - Canada Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World - USA - CanadaHigher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the UniversityThe Tenant Class by Ricardo TranjanTranscriptChris: [00:00:00] Welcome, Leslie, to the End of Tourism Podcast. Thank you for taking time out of your day, to speak with me. Thank you. To begin, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to tell us where you find yourself today and what the world looks like there, for you.Leslie: Sure. I find myself in Cambridge, Ontario.It's a city of about 130,000 people. If I looked out my window right now, I would see a lot of blowing snow. It's about minus 27 Celsius with the windchill, or something hideous like that today, so taking the time to talk to you this morning means I don't have to go out and shovel anything just yet. So.Chris: Well, thank you. Thank you for joining us. it's a great honour and I'm really looking forward to this conversation that bears a great deal of complexity. So, I had invited you on the pod in part to explore your book, Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies. And [00:01:00] in it, Leslie, you write that“Gentrification has come to be used as a metaphor for processes of mainstreaming, commodification, appropriation, and upscaling that are not necessarily or directly connected to cities. In this story about gentrification, gentrification stands in for any sort of change that pulls a thing or a practice out of its original context and increases its popularity, priciness, and profit-making potential.”Given that some of our listeners might not have heard of the term “gentrification” before, although I doubt it, but given that those who have heard it might understand it also to be what you and others refer to as a “chaotic concept,” I'm wondering if you'd be willing to take a stab at defining it for us today?Leslie: Yeah, absolutely. If we [00:02:00] look to, I guess, a kind of typical scholarly definition of gentrification, it would be describing an urban process in which middle or upper class, or in some other way, privileged households start to move into a neighbourhood or area of the city that has historically been more working class, or perhaps an immigrant neighbourhood, perhaps more industrial, and begin to remake that neighbourhood, kind of in their own image, thus driving up housing prices both in the rental and ownership markets, driving up the cost of living in the area, and critically, as part of the definition, resulting in some level of displacement of the older inhabitants of that neighbourhood. “Displacement” meaning they've been kind of priced out or otherwise pushed directly or indirectly to leave and [00:03:00] move to some other neighbourhood.So, typically with gentrification, the definition is centred around it being a class-based process, but in more recent decades, many scholars, myself included, have wanted to broaden that and to acknowledge that other axes of power and privilege, for example, race, gender, ability, age, sexuality, and so on, also play a role in contributing to the kinds of forces that propel gentrification. And we can maybe get into some of that later.So for myself, in the book, I talk about gentrification as “any kind of process of taking over claiming space and remaking it in the image and for the interests and benefit of a more powerful group of people, or perhaps even corporations, to some extent.” So, [00:04:00] gentrification is really the process of taking and claiming space. And I also do include displacement as part of that process, although I also acknowledge that sometimes people can be kind of psychologically displaced, even if they aren't necessarily physically pushed out of their neighbourhoods.Chris: Mean it's something that I was noticing in Toronto before I left and moved and migrated here to Oaxaca. It's something that I think in the last five or ten years has become an unfortunate mainstay of city life in the vast majority of places, of urban places in the world.And this is also something that I've seen quite a bit here in Oaxaca, Mexico in a somewhat prolific tourist destination. And so, in places that have [00:05:00] been deemed “destinations” in this way, there's often a kind of reductionism, here anyways, and in other tourist destinations in which gentrification and what's sometimes called touristification is confused.And so one definition of “touristification” is simply “the process of transformation of a place into a tourist space and its associated effects.” So a kind of very vague and broad definition. But we also understand that gentrification can happen in places that aren't necessarily tourist destinations.And so, we've also discussed in the pod the possibility that a place doesn't necessarily need tourists in it to have touristic qualities or context what we might say. [00:06:00] And so I'm curious for you, do you think it's important to distinguish the two concepts, gentrification and touristification? And if so, why?Leslie: Yeah, great question. I think a distinction, to some extent, is important in that, yeah, there may be elements of touristification, for example, that are somewhat unique to that process, especially in terms of the kind of impact that it might have on local inhabitants who may not necessarily be displaced, but who may see their everyday lives kind of radically altered by the touristification of an area.And as you say, gentrification happens in all kinds of areas, many of which are not geared to tourism, although sometimes that is a kind of later effect of gentrification, is that tourists might be drawn to certain neighbourhoods or places that they would not have otherwise gone to in the past.As [00:07:00] you mentioned in your earlier question, there's been some concern in the gentrification literature that it's a bit of a chaotic concept, by which it is meant that it's maybe too broad of an umbrella [term], and so many different kinds of processes are kind of lumped together under that umbrella. I think it's a useful umbrella, but under that umbrella, we can try to be clear about what we're talking about when we look at particular locations, and try to articulate the impacts that these processes are having on the local community, economy, environment, and so on.Chris: Thank you, Leslie. Thank you for that. So your book is broken up into chapters that reveal the deeper realities behind the tropes or lies sometimes spouted about gentrification. And there are often many. And so I'm curious if after having done the research and writing for this book, and it was published in [00:08:00] 2022, so perhaps there's been some deeper reflection in that regard, I'm curious what you feel might be the most important lie about gentrification that requires our attention and why?Leslie: Ooh, really putting me on the hook to like pick a favorite child there. No, I'm joking. Ultimately, I mean, I guess the most straightforward answer would be the first one that I discuss in the book, which is right there in the book's title, which is the idea that gentrification is inevitable. And we can kind of unpack that a little bit further, as I do in the kind of first main chapter of the book, which is to say that in some accounts of gentrification, it's presented as a sort of natural process, right? As something that is just akin to evolution, for example. So there's this idea that if you kind of start with, for example, a working class or immigrant [00:09:00] neighbourhood, lower income community, with some other kinds of attributes that might not make it seem wealthy or desirable, that over time, just through, I don't know, a kind of mystical series of properties, the way that species evolve or human beings develop from fetus and baby to an adult through this series of difficult to trace impacts, that somehow it just happens. Right. And of course, the problem with that, again, is that if we think it's natural, then we don't really think there's any way to stop it.And also when we describe something as “natural,” we often imbue it with positive qualities. Well, if it's “natural,” it's just meant to happen. It's just the way things are. And why would we want to stand in the way of that process? From a kind of political standpoint, it becomes very problematic, because it means that there's not really a [00:10:00] willingness perhaps on the part of those who have some power and influence to slow down gentrification, to pause it, to use whatever tools they might have in their kind of legislative toolbox to create guardrails around the process happening or to try to prevent it altogether. And from a kind of community response standpoint, it can be very disempowering to believe that gentrification is inevitable, unstoppable, that once you see those first, white, middle-class families move into your neighbourhood, “boom, you're done. It's over. The clock is counting down to the time when it's not your neighbourhood anymore and you'll just have to leave, so why bother to do anything about it?”And as I also try to show in the book, you know, it's hard to fight gentrification, but there are examples around the world of communities that have pushed back and kind of “pumped the brakes on gentrification,” as one [00:11:00] activist described it to me. So, we, I think, don't want to fall into this trap of believing that communities themselves are powerless, or that our politicians and policy-makers have absolutely no tools that they can use to change this.So I would say that is probably the most important kind of first line myth or lie that we need to challenge. And then we can kind of go down the line and pick apart some of the other ones, which is how I've structured the book as you point out. Yeah.Chris: Thank you, Leslie. Yeah, I mean, that was a really jarring chapter for me, in part because of this notion that not only is quote gentrification inevitable or natural, but that the city is, according to different philosophers and thinkers, imbued with this kind of biological life and [00:12:00] and that it follows as you were mentioning certain processes that are “ natural” as far as evolution is concerned.And imediately, this brought me back to my research on what's often referred to as 19th century social evolutionist thought, these notions that were often created or maintained by kind of, elite, wealthy, white men in the 19th century, not all of whom were academics, some of them were bankers, for example, among other things, but essentially promoting this notion that certain races or genders or types of people had evolved along the natural processes of evolution either faster than others or got ahead in certain ways, and that, of course, this was a way for those people, not only the non-academics, but those in academia [00:13:00] to employ hypotheses theories as a way of justifying colonial histories and the ongoing conquests of different people around the world. And so, in that context, I'm curious if you imagine or think that gentrification understood or described as “natural” in this way is a kind of extension, a historical extension of that kind of colonial power play of the 19th century.Leslie: Yeah, I absolutely do. And there are many ways in which the power dynamics and even the language or the vocabulary around gentrification mirrors that around colonialism with all of the problematic tropes there of neighbourhoods or areas of the city being taken over where “there's really nothing there,” right?[It's the] same kind of justification for colonialism. “There's nothing there. [00:14:00] There's nobody there that we need to care about,” so European colonizers are entitled to this land. Similarly, with the way that many developers, for example, I think, rationalize or justify the kind of projects they engage in.“Oh, there's nothing really happening in that part of the city. There's not really a community there. It's just a space of problems or deviation from the norm or disorder. And so we, as developers, as city planners, we're going to bring order and light and civilization, quite frankly, to these neighbourhoods.”So I'm sure you're hearing in this, all those echoes around colonialism. And this point around the social evolution part of it, I think that is the kind of darker, maybe less acknowledged side of gentrification, is that when we start to talk about neighbourhoods as “nothing's happening there, there's nobody there.” [00:15:00] Who's “nobody,” right? Who falls into that category of “nobody,” right? It's poor people. It might be unhoused people, working-class people, people of colour, queer people, disabled people, sex workers, right?“All people who we don't really think of as kind of counting as citizens, people who we don't think have a legitimate voice in the city, people who we don't think have a right to the city or a claim on the city.” And they're just seen as disposable, as easily displaceable, as not really contributing anything to the community or to the city at large. So I think there's definitely a sense of kind of hierarchy in terms of, “who are the seemingly new people who are coming in, right?” And they're viewed as “bringing all of these kind of gifts and benefits to the neighbourhood, and in some ways, perhaps even uplifting the poor [00:16:00] or downtrodden inhabitants of the ghetto or the barrio or whatever. And the locals should somehow be grateful to receive gentrification similarly to the way that people were, say, ‘oh, you should be grateful to receive an education if you're from the lower-classes or working-classes.'”So, yeah, I think there's definitely echoes and traces of that same kind of logic, right? It's a logic of superiority, a logic of dominance, a logic of control that resonates, whether it's colonialism or social evolutionism. Um, yeah.Chris: Wow. Fascinating. Fascinating stuff. I mean, this is, I think, to a large degree culture or what we call culture or what culture might be is made on the tongue, and that the, the kind of unacknowledged ways in which we speak the world into being [00:17:00] is something that's been direly overlooked in our time. So thank you for speaking to that in that way. And I think it's something that we would properly kind of continue to wonder about as we speak and as we think, and perhaps before we speak as well.You know, you mentioned in there the different types of people that are often displaced as a result of gentrification. And this shows up quite a bit in your book. So I wanted to ask you about what you refer to as “intersectionality,” an intersectional approach to gentrification.Some of the conventional critiques that you mentioned in the book, including the economic critique (kind of follow the money), the aesthetic critique (the kind of clean lines and fancy bakeries that show up), as well as the class critique, which you mentioned kind of upward mobility, among others.That said, you focus a good portion of the book, I think, on this neglected importance of intersectionality. And so I'm curious, why do you think an intersectional approach has been ignored in the [00:18:00] past, and why might it be crucial for a cohesive or integral analysis of gentrification?Leslie: Hmm. I think an intersectional approach has been kind of sidelined, if you will, in part because most of the key kind of prominent gentrification scholars of the late 20th century and into the 21st century have been, honestly, white men probably themselves from middle-class backgrounds, or obviously university educated scholars and they've been, like neo-Marxist, or Marxist. That's their theoretical perspective. That's their training. They come from a kind of Marxist, political economy, background. That's the lens of analysis that they bring to whatever kind of problem they're looking at in the world, including gentrification.And they've done brilliant work, right, and created a lot of really foundational [00:19:00] concepts, gone and done really important empirical work so that we can actually see what the impacts of these processes are. And there's nothing I want to take away from that being a key voice within the field of gentrification studies, but I think too often either there's been kind of minimal lip service paid or kind of outright pushing to the side of feminist perspectives, anti-racist perspective, anti-colonial perspectives and more, because it's sort of seemed like, well, “class is the main driver and anything that maybe disproportionately impacts women or people of colour, or queer folks or elderly people, that's like a side effect, right? Like the main driver is class and those people are simply impacted because they also happen to fall into lower income brackets.”So it's a pretty neat and tidy [00:20:00] story and you can kind of see why it has some appeal. So I think, you know, those political economy, neo-Marxist scholars is not that they don't care about race or gender or other factors. They're just like, “well, it's all really rolled up under the umbrella of ‘class.' And if we just figure out the ‘class' piece, then those other things will kind of fall into place.” But for feminist scholars, critical race scholars, anti-colonial scholars and so on, they've wanted to point out that assuming that class is the primary driver behind things is maybe an assumption that we've held onto for too long without questioning it. And instead of seeing racial impacts and so on as something that's just happening off to the side through a class process, maybe we want to also look, especially in something like an American context, but in other places as well, at the deeply foundational layer of race to the development of cities, to the development of the [00:21:00] nation, and we can't kind of sideline the impacts of racial discrimination and the kind of hierarchy of race that has developed over many centuries in these locations and say, “oh, well it's a secondary factor.”For myself, I'm a feminist scholar. My background is in women's and gender studies before I kind of accidentally stumbled into being an urban geographer. And to me it was always kind of obvious, but I think I've had to argue this point so often that processes like gentrification, neoliberalism, urban revitalization, as it's called, doesn't just kind of impact women as a tangential side effect, but that gender inequality or assumptions about gender roles and so on are like part of what drives the process. And so I try to bring that out in the book by looking at different kinds of examples of the ways in which different sorts of [00:22:00] communities or people are impacted to hopefully show, to hopefully make a case for this idea that taking an intersectional perspective doesn't deny the class factor at all, but that it allows us to look at gentrification through a more nuanced lens and one that respects the fact that class is not the only, and not always the most salient marker of hierarchy and status in our societies.Chris: Hmm, hmm. Yeah, I did go to university a long time ago, and it seemed that what was offered up on the proverbial, kind of conceptual, bill, politically speaking was, here are your five major theories or perspectives and kind of like choose one and decide what you like the best and then argue for it or against it.But it does seem that the more apertures that we have onto the world, without necessarily needing [00:23:00] to collapse our considerations into a single one can broaden our understanding of the world deeply, right? Deeply, deeply. And it's something that I see anyways less and less of.I think there's more and more possibilities for experiencing that in our time, but I think there's a lot of processes that are happening in which there's less and less of it that's actually occurring - a kind of collapse of maybe ontological diversity or philosophical diversity.I don't know what to call it, but seems prevalent and at least from this little aperture. So.Leslie: Yeah, I would agree with that, as someone who, just in my own little brief lifetime here on this earth has been peddling my little feminist arguments for 30-plus years. And then we add on to that, the 30 years before that and 30 years before all of the previous generations. It seems like we are, [00:24:00] not just from a feminist perspective, but we are kind of constantly having to make these arguments for that ontological diversity, as you put it, or even just the idea that, oh, you can view things through different lenses and learn different things about whatever kind of process or force or issue that you're interested in.Chris: Hmm. Well, thank you for that. I'd like to, if I can, Leslie, there was something I've been wrestling with for a while and it was very much front and centre, this kind of inner wrestling when I was reading your book.And so, I'd like to share that with you at the moment if I can, and we'll see where it takes us. So part of the reason that I left Toronto a decade ago was that the housing crises, that perhaps for some wasn't yet a crisis in Toronto, has of course ballooned. But in the past five years I've watched that same housing crisis play out here in Oaxaca.[00:25:00] And what arose almost immediately in the, we'll say media sphere, the online world and certainly on the streets as well, was a kind of xenophobic campaign or campaigns blaming tourists, digital nomads, and “expats” for the rising cost of rentals and housing. Now, while not entirely misguided, the percentage of such people is insignificant in comparison to the total population of renters and homeowners here.And then I ask myself, well, “why isn't anyone questioning the role of homeowners and landlords, those who actually decide the price of rental units, those who decide to turn long-term rentals into Airbnbs, and those who are, some of them anyways, more often than not, part and parcel of the political ruling class in many places?” Why not blame them?And so, if you think about this enough, you can [00:26:00] begin to imagine that the willingness to blame specific people, types, classes, races, et cetera, can ignore the cultural, economic and structural elements of society that allow and encourage such dynamics to emerge. And it seems to me that you speak to this, to some degree, in your book writing, how“it is not helpful in a critique of gentrification to get overly stuck on the styles and preferences of a group, when, for many decades now, gentrification has been propelled by much stronger forces than aesthetic trends.”And in another part of the book, you write that “cultural factors cannot be hastily dismissed, not when their power is easily co-opted by capital. Trends in denim and facial hair are not responsible for gentrification, but when large groups of people are redefined as a class based on their tastes, occupations, and aesthetics, they become a market and a justification for urban [00:27:00] interventions.”And so my question has to do with what I might call, I don't know if this is something that shows up in your work or in your research, but a kind of “ecological analysis,” one that doesn't necessarily separate people into essentialist categories, but contends with how maybe the rules of the game produce the player's behaviour and beliefs.And so I'm wondering, you know, in your research, is that something that is tended to, a way of, “okay so, we're not going to only blame or ask the tourists to take responsibility or the digital nomads, et cetera, and we're not only gonna blame or ask the landlords to take responsibility, but understand that they live and inhabit a kind of web of relations that has, for a long time, created the context that allows them or even [00:28:00] encourages them to proceed in a particular way?Leslie: Yes, a hundred percent. I really love the way that you put that there and giving it that kind of label of like an ecological perspective there. I think it's so important to do in the book. You know, the first quote that you read there, I think has to do with this idea that, “oh, you know, hipsters were causing gentrification” kind of thing.And I wanted to kind of, not defend the hipster per se, but to just say, well, in a city like New York, for example, the takeover of midtown Manhattan and the absolute sort of pricing out of regular people, well, from Manhattan as a whole in many cases is not to do with artists and yoga teachers moving into those neighborhoods. It has to do with massive multinational corporations buying up housing, developing condos, like all of these other things that [00:29:00] are going on. And as you say, I mean, I think it is useful to question and critique landlordism for example, and even home ownership itself, but there's a reason why people engage in these practices and as you say, it's because of these all sorts of other like prior sort of conditions and causes this kind of web of possibilities that so much of our... the policy, the legislative world, our national context shapes for us.Like in Canada for example, home ownership is, as you well know, sort of seen as the ultimate goal in the housing market. Renting is seen as very much a kind of transitional stage for people. And the idea is to eventually, sooner rather than later, own your own home.And of course there's all kinds of cultural myths around that, of homeowners being like responsible people and better citizens and all this kind of stuff that is, maybe like [00:30:00] largely nonsense. But why, in this context, do people become homeowners? Well, this is the way that we've been told “you secure your retirement in the absence of a truly kind of robust old age security net.” Yes, we have some. We have pension, old age pension, but for many people, the home is ultimately their social safety net, and government policy has very much been set up to encourage us to treat our homes in that way and to rely on paying off a mortgage and having that home to be the basis of survival into our old age.Right. And there are many other things. That's just one example. So I think, as you say, it's really important to kind of look at that whole ecosystem. And that doesn't mean that we don't say, “well, okay, what are homeowners doing that might be potentially problematic and contributing to the problem?”Well, that could include things like turning units into Airbnbs or acting in NIMBY-ish (Not In My Backyard), kind of ways that limit, for example, the amount of affordable housing that might go up in their neighbourhood and other things. Of course, all of those dynamics have to be critiqued, challenged, pushed back against. But, keeping, at the same time that kind of zoomed out perspective of like what's going on on a larger scale, in the kind of corporate and investment world and the government policy-making world, I think at least helps us to understand why these different groups are kind of positioned in the way that they do and the kind of range of possibilities that they see for themselves within that web.Chris: Mm mm Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me of a moment that I had here in Oaxaca, maybe three or four years ago. There was a student group that had come down from a Canadian university, and they were here for a couple weeks, and I was having dinner with them. Not all of them, but there was maybe four of the women from the student group that I was having dinner with.And one of them was probably in her, I would say [00:32:00] mid-fifties, an indigenous woman from Ontario. And the other three were much younger, probably in their early twenties. And they were suddenly talking about the sudden or at least recent kind of housing crisis in their university town, we'll call it, maybe a small city, but big town. And how in previous years they could afford the rent, but suddenly, and of course this was 2021-2022, when a lot of these dynamics started changing extremely rapidly. And I was kind of moderating the conversation at first. And then it turned out, she wasn't so quick to out herself as a landlord. But the indigenous woman, the 55-year-old kind of alluded to it and then said, “well, you know, for a lot of people, it's a pension plan. “It's my retirement plan, essentially.” And it was this really interesting dynamic about how these four women, who had come to this place and were in the same program, studying the [00:33:00] same thing, that one of them had to perhaps, unbeknownst to her, undermine the economic life and possibilities of those younger women by virtue of requiring a retirement plan.Right. And I think at least in Canada, in countries that are very much still welfare states, that it speaks to a, the incredible degree in which the care that's offered, especially to the elderly, is almost entirely top-down. There's so little, if any, community care.And, you know, of course this is a very kind of small example, a very kind of minute example. I think maybe a common one. But of course you also have other examples of, as you mentioned before, corporations... is it BlackRock this massive mutual fund that I know in, in Europe and places like Barcelona and the major cities there end up buying entire apartment buildings or blocks even, and evicting [00:34:00] the residents and then setting up Airbnb buildings, essentially. So, I mean, there's this incredible kind of degree of difference and diversity in terms of how, as you mentioned landlordism and rent is affecting people.But I just wanted to mention that. It was a really kind of interesting moment for me to see this dynamic and the young women kind of complaining about, you know, I guess the future, the present and the future of their economic lives. And then, this older woman also not necessarily complaining, but very much concerned about her ability to live as well, economically and to thrive economically into her older age.Leslie: Yeah. And there's these kind of ironic situations popping up all over the place where so for example, someone might have a public pension. And as you point out, many public pensions are deeply invested in real estate income trusts. This is like a huge piece for example, in Ontario, of [00:35:00] Ontario public workers' pensions, but around the world as well, and I don't have the details, but a story that was in the news several years ago about a man somewhere in Europe who was being evicted from his apartment because that one of these real estate investment corporations was taking it over and was gonna redevelop it in some way. But his public pension was invested in that very same company. Right?So many people are kind of caught in these loops where it's like, we would very much like to not be like, displacing ourselves or our neighbours or community members, but we don't necessarily have control over how our pension funds are invested, right? Like you might have a choice like, “oh, I'd like to divest from fossil fuels, for example, or from tobacco or military, like arms deals.” Like, sometimes, you can opt out of those things in your pension funds, but there's not really a way to like opt out of real estate investment.My substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.It's such a huge part of those things now. So I think that's an area where there's increasing kind of research and critical perspectives on that in gentrification scholarship and so on that I think is really important to look at, because it's also very hidden, right? This is another aspect I think of contemporary kind of gentrification touristification even, is that there's no face to it, right? There's no face to this process. And maybe that's why it's tempting to take, as you put it a minute ago, that kind of like xenophobic perspective or to blame “expats” in the case of Oaxaca and touristification or in cities to be like, “oh, it's these urban hipsters, maybe these like trust fund kids” or whatever label people might want to put on someone, because there's a face, right? There you can look and be like, “that's the problem.” But the reality is there is no face, right? There's no individual or even group of individuals that's easy to identify. And people doing [00:37:00] research into some of this pension fund stuff that I'm talking about, they hit very opaque walls, even just trying to get the information about how these companies work, the kinds of decisions they make, what their rubrics are around what they call “socially responsible investing.”So it's very deliberately mystified and hidden from us, and I think that is part of the challenge now is like, how do you fight this monster that you can't see, that you can barely name?So yeah, that is I think one of the kind of frightening things, if you will, about, whether we call it “gentrification,” or we think about it in this broader sense of the housing crisis, who's the face of that, the cause of that crisis? Very hard to say in many cases.Chris: Wow. Yeah, I know that these mutual fund companies that end up buying, you know, whole city blocks or buildings, apartment buildings, and then tending to renovictions or whatever they [00:38:00] might use in order to get people out. Once the buildings are “ renovated” as Airbnbs, what happens is those corporations end up outsourcing all of the operational and cleaning duties to companies that they're not involved with at all. So, again, you could have this person who's in front of you, who might be a cleaner or who comes ou in and out of the building or who might run the reservation books or something like that, but they've never met anyone from that mutual fund company. Right. They just get a paycheck.Leslie: Yeah. And it's happening on this kind of global level. The people behind the company that's investing in that building in Oaxaca, like they may have never set foot there, and they may never set foot there. Right? So it's happening from around the world, from thousands of kilometers away from behind these kind of screens of, as you said, these kind of shell companies and these subcontracted, property management companies.I mean the story you were just telling about the woman who's a landlord, like on that small scale, not that [00:39:00] there's nothing problematic about it, but it is also like, you know, she's probably met her tenants, right? She probably occasionally sets foot in the property that she owns and that she rents out, and there's like some aspect of a relationship there. It's still, you know, a problematic power dynamic and all of that, but it's on a very different scale than the investor from London who's has a stake in a condo in Oaxaca. Like, it's a very different web of of relations that goes into that.Chris: Yeah. And even if someone like that, and I've had many, many landlords over the years and I've been blessed to have a number of them who are really incredible people and really incredible in terms of showing up when they're needed in that regard. But it's something, I discussed on a previous episode regarding the Airbnb-ization of the world, a couple years ago. And one of the themes that came up was around hospitality, right? [00:40:00] And even if you have people who are kind of really engaged and really excited and responsible about having a tenant in their home or in a particular building, the kind of transactional nature of that rent almost (and then of course the history of it) precludes, almost by default, the possibility of there being a kind of host-guest relationship, right? Instead of that we are “clients” and and, and “salespeople,” businesspeople to some degree.Right. So another layer of it is this question of like, “well, is it even possible within the dynamic or structure that renting implies and incurs, is it even possible to create a dynamic wherein a person can be understood as a guest in another person's home, and another person can be understood as a host to people who are coming to live in their home? Right? That that same [00:41:00] woman, the 55-year-old landlord said that she had tenants who refused to leave for, I dunno, a year and a half or two years, and once they finally did, left her with a $40,000 damage bill. So, I think there's just layers and layers that are extremely difficult to kind of get into, I shouldn't say in terms of dialogue, in terms of investigation, but in terms of the possibility of creating different dynamics that would maybe represent or produce the kinds of dynamics and worlds that, I think, a lot of people would want to live in.Leslie: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think in a lot of cases, and you honestly don't have to dig very deep, you can open up CBC News and see some poor, sad landlord story most days of the week or listen to kind of corporate or larger scale landlords talk and they often see tenants as a nuisance.“The tenants themselves are a problem,” and if they could invest in real estate and still make [00:42:00] these returns without actually having tenants, that would probably be ideal. And I think that is also part of the push to an Airbnb is that with a temporary guest, you know, a week, a weekend or whatever, you don't have the same responsibility to them as you do to someone with a year lease or perhaps the right to stay there for a longer period of time. So, all you have to do is kind of provide this very basic amenity of the space. You can even impose all these rules on them that you maybe otherwise wouldn't be able to do if it was a longer-term rental.You know, the people who check-in have many fewer rights than actual tenants do. And so in some ways it makes that relationship even more transactional and even more hands off in many cases. And of course there's the quicker profit motive is really the main driving force behind that. But I think there's also this piece of it where it's like, “well, how can I maximize the profit potential of this space with as little actually dealing with other human beings and their needs [00:43:00] as human beings as possible.And yeah, I think that is really, again, from my kind of feminist perspective, that is also interested in thinking about how do we create systems of care in our cities, and what does “care” mean, and what are our responsibilities to one another that, when we look at something like Airbnbification and the touristification and gentrification more generally, those things, in many cases kind of act against the possibility of creating more caring and careful spaces.Chris: Hmm, hmm. Yeah. Thank you for that, Leslie. I have a couple more questions for you, if that's all right?Leslie: Yes, go ahead. Yeah.Chris: All right. Wonderful. So this next question maybe requires a bit of imagination, which I think you have a good amount of, and it has to do with rent.And so one of the lies that you highlight in your book is the belief that gentrification is natural and hence forth inevitable. [00:44:00] And of course, as we've been discussing, nothing is natural nor inevitable and you make an excellent case for that throughout the book. And I feel that there is an equally and perhaps more subtle incarnation of this myth, of this inevitability, in regards to rent, that we as urban people or modern people who grow up in contemporary societies often reinforce and even naturalize a kind of rent slavery that most people rarely see, that most people rarely see their lives as indentured to their landlords.And so, when we talk about gentrification, does this show up at all? Should it? You know, this notion that, “well, if we can come to gentrification and understand that it's in fact not natural and it's not inevitable, can we do the same thing for rent? Because, maybe I haven't read much of the research, but it doesn't seem to be something that [00:45:00] people are so quick to aim their arrows at, we'll say.Leslie: Yeah. I love that question. And I think A, you're right that there hasn't been enough conversation about that. There has not been nearly enough attempts to kind of denaturalize this and B, that that perspective is emerging and growing. If I could recommend a book called The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan. It's also a Toronto-based author, and he does an amazing job in this very short book of basically laying out the case against landlordism, and it totally, as you say, kind of denaturalizing and pushes back on this idea that it's inevitable that there are a class of people that own property and a class of people that rent property, and that this is not inherently a deeply problematic relation. You know, this idea that it's not in some way akin to some kind of indentureship. And he really asks us to look deeply again at this [00:46:00] idea that, if you're a landlord, “well, I have a mortgage to pay, so it's somehow natural that this other person will pay my mortgage for me,” which, when you start to think about it, like it's really messed up in a way. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. So yeah, I think looking more closely at some of these ideas, these kind of statements that come out, and again, you can see it in news articles, these kind of horror stories, and not to diminish, I'm sure, what are very real, like economic and psychological impacts of the so-called kind of nightmare tenant and all of those kinds of things.But you'll hear those kinds of statements: “you know, I have a mortgage to pay.”Well, why is this other person paying your mortgage, then?And then we could probably take a step back and be like, “why do we have mortgages to pay?” But that's maybe another conversation.But yeah, so I definitely recommend that book, The Tenant Class, as a really quick, easy to read, and kind of unforgettable primer on this question. And [00:47:00] I really appreciate you asking it, and I hope your listeners will be like, “oh, yeah, I gotta dig into that a bit more too.”Chris: Yeah.Yeah. I mean, you know, in part because, as prices have risen in most western countries in the last four or five years, there's of course, of course, protests and backlash among people, and “oh, this bakery raised their prices” or “ my rent's going up,” and all these things. But specifically in terms of products and services, you know, people complain or they just accept the fact that prices have risen to a degree that's pricing a lot of people out of their lives, really. But, you know, in the conversations I've had with people and in the literature that I've read, there's no consideration, I think, that the businesses who are raising their prices have had their rents raised, that so much of a business' costs include rent, right? And that very few businesses actually [00:48:00] own the building that they're working out of.Leslie: Yeah, commercial rent is a whole other story because, you know, the protections on residential rent are not what they could be in most places around the world, but there's no protections on commercial rent, like no limitations there. So it's entirely possible that local bakery, their rent could go up by, like double. It could go up from $20,000 a year to $60,000 a year. There's no restrictions on that. There's nowhere to appeal that. There's nothing. So, they are, in some ways, even those small businesses, especially, independent businesses and so on, are very at risk of this. And there's a whole branch of kind of retail gentrification studies as well that kind of looks at the impacts on the local economic landscape of things like this as well. Yeah.Chris: Hmm. Wow. Thank you for unveiling that for us. I mean, uh, so much.So my last question, Leslie, has to do [00:49:00] with what is mentioned in your book, what you refer to as “the right to stay put.”And so,“the right to stay put is a common rallying cry in response to the dangers of displacement. Drawing inspiration from the broader notion of the right to the city, the right to stay put insists that communities are entitled to remain in the places they have contributed to. Furthermore, the right to dwell extends beyond simply having a home in an area, encompassing the right to continue using commercial, community, and public spaces and institutions, as well as the dignity of defending such rights. Importantly, it recognizes that agency is a critical factor. People do not want to be forced to move, nor do they want to be forced to stay in place. Rather, people value choice, the ability to participate in [00:50:00] decisions that affect their communities and the right to resist when they need to.”And so I'm curious what you think it would take for people, say, in urban environments to achieve or enshrine the right to stay put or the right to dwell in their places.Leslie: Yeah, I think we could talk about kind of two main avenues. One would be more of the top-down approach, which is to work to enshrine anti-displacement measures in neighborhoods, which can include everything from rent control or rent stabilization, to the right to return when there are redevelopment projects going on, to deeply affordable housing in new developments, to communities themselves taking on the role of becoming developers, but creating housing within the community for the [00:51:00] community. Not to draw in new residents or not to primarily draw new residents. Again, we're not trying to like, build a fortress around communities or anything, but rather to say, “this is housing that we're earmarking for people from the local community who are struggling with their rent or struggling to find housing, or who need perhaps entry-level home ownership opportunities and to kind of provide that.So there's the kind of top-down approach, really pushing our local governments to have things like community benefit ordinances when new developments are happening that force developers to actually pay attention to what the community needs and to provide those benefits and such.And then, from the kind of ground-up or more grassroots piece, the right to stay put is the the willingness, the ability to organize and come together in some of the places that I mentioned throughout the book. You know, it really [00:52:00] is community-level organization where people have really rallied to make it deeply difficult for planners or developers to kind of roll in and roll out their vision without any pushbacks, to the extent that their neighbourhoods become less of a target for gentrification, because it's like, “oh yeah, we wanna build something there. Oh, that's gonna be a real pain in the butt. The community is not gonna let us get away with what we wanna do.” And that means really making it possible for people to come out to meetings, organizing protests, that kind of right to resist. Sometimes taking... You know, we have long histories in many cities of squatters movements and perhaps we need to revitalize some of that old energy, as well. A kind of refusal to leave. And to find ways, you know, perhaps they don't always have to be kind of in-your-face protest ways, but what are ways to mobilize things like mutual aid to help make sure that our [00:53:00] neighbors are supported, for example, if they have to go before a landlord-tenant board, how can we use community resources and knowledge to actually support one another to stay in place?And that can be everything from addressing food insecurity to having a local rent bank, to partnering with nonprofits, churches, other religious institutions that may have an interest in building social and nonprofit housing to create some of those options.So I think it's about looking at the kind of wide range of alternative forms of housing and housing provision, looking at community mobilizing, community resources, and also tackling the local policy agenda to make staying put as possible, or to enshrine it as a right at a kind of higher level, as well.Chris: Hmm, hmm. Yeah, you go into [00:54:00] great detail about this in the book, and I'm very grateful for that. And the right to stay put kind of jumped out, the text jumped out of the page at me, because living here in Oaxaca, I came to know about this declaration that was created in 2009 by people in a number of communities here in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca who were meeting with their migrant kin who had gone to work in California and the people who had stayed in the community.And the declaration is literally translated as “the right to not migrate.” The way it was translated in English by the author of the book of the same name, was “The Right to Stay Home.” And so while there's a lot of differences between these contexts in terms of rural, indigenous communities here in Mexico and modern urban communities in the global north, there is this sense, [00:55:00] this kind of perhaps shared context wherein the ability to to stay in a place in order so that community can be conjured and maintained and of course enjoyed and lived in, seems to thread its way through these different social movements from the global north into the global south.So, I'm really grateful to see that and to know that there's similar understandings, of course not the same, but similar understandings that are even somewhat unorthodox and unexpected given the political context that sometimes challenge them or preclude something like that from coming up.So that's a little way of saying thank you for your time today, Leslie. On behalf of our listeners, I'd like to thank you for your willingness to join me and to speak to these often complex issues. And on behalf of them, I'd also like to ask you how they might find out more about [00:56:00] your work and your books: Gentrification Is Inevitable And Other Lies, Feminist City: Claiming Space In A Manmade World, and finally Higher Expectations: How To Survive Academia, Make It Better For Others, And Transform The University.Leslie: Yeah, thank you so much for this conversation. People can find out about me and my work at my website, which is just lesliekern.ca.If you just google my name, it will come up easily enough. Feminist City and Gentrification Is Inevitable And Other Lies. For an international audience, you can find those books through Verso books in the US and UK. There's also many translations of both of those books, so you may have the opportunity to read it in your local language if you want to do that as well.The more recent book, Higher Expectations is available from my Canadian publisher Between the Lines Books and in the US [00:57:00] from AK Books, as well. And there's also Epub versions and for the first two books, audiobook versions as well. And I've written lots of articles on these topics as well, in the Guardian and other places.So you can get a little snippet of my thoughts if you, again, Google my name and all of these things will come up in short order. So thank you for letting me share that as well.Chris: Yeah, of course. I'll make sure that the links to all those pages that you mentioned are available on the End of Tourism website and the Substack when the episode launches.And once again, Leslie, a really beautifully revealing conversation today. I think it's something that will not just provoke generally, but provoke a willingness in our listeners to reconsider some of the assumptions that they've had about gentrification.So, once again, thank you for your time today.Leslie: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate it. Get full access to Chris Christou at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

Today - Canceled citizenship ceremonies leave hopefuls in limbo across North Central Washington.Support the show: https://www.wenatcheeworld.com/site/forms/subscription_services/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Send me feedback!A video of a naturalized woman from Columbia from the whatever podcast went viral over the weekend. I break down the Naturalization Oath and offer some thoughts.SUPPORT THE SHOWGet a 10% discount by using the code LibertyDad at Black Guns Matter shop.OR, use the referral linkFIND ME ELSEWHERELinktreeSupport the show

20 Minutes of Shorts. The Re-Migration Act, Long COVID Symptoms are Actually Vaccine Injuries, Julie Kelly J6 Prosecutions, COVID Vax- Billions of Brains Injured, College Grads Unemployed   21 million Americans went to college and still earn less than $20 an hour. The proposed Re-Migration Act to revoke Citizenship since 1965 If citizenship was obtained through false statements, omissions, visa fraud, welfare fraud, or concealed criminal history. Professor Sucharit Bhakdi on COVID Vax- "We're seeing billions of people whose brains are not working anymore." Long COVID symptoms—exhaustion, brain fog, insomnia, fatigue—are actually vaccine injuries. FEMINISM WAS CREATED TO END CHRISTIANITY? JULIE KELLY J6 Long COVID symptoms—exhaustion, brain fog, insomnia, fatigue—are actually vaccine injuries.   Post Peter St Onge, Ph.D. @profstonge 21 million Americans went to college and still earn less than $20 an hour. College grads now make up a record 25% of unemployed. And their unemployment rate is now higher than high school grads. College degrees ain't what they used to be.   Post Andrew Branca Show @TheBrancaShow This isn't radical—it's black-letter immigration law being restated. The proposed Re-Migration Act of 2025/2026 (H.R. ___) amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to require DHS and USCIS to review naturalizations issued since 1965 for fraud, criminal concealment, or ineligibility. The legal standard is simple: preponderance of the evidence (51%). If citizenship was obtained through false statements, omissions, visa fraud, welfare fraud, or concealed criminal history, it can be revoked—because fraud voids consent ab initio. That principle has existed for decades. Naturalization is not magic. It is a conditional legal status dependent on truthful disclosure and lawful conduct. If someone lied at the visa stage, lied at the green-card stage, or lied at naturalization, the chain collapses—and denaturalization follows as a matter of law. That's not punishment. It's correction of fraud.   FEMINISM WAS CREATED TO END CHRISTIANITY? “The dragon, I really think, is feminism.” - Author Carrie Gress explains that until we get to the heart of what's feeding abortion, which is she says is “really feminism” we're not going to be able to not going to be able to end it. JackoWilliams64 @JackoWilliams64 JackoWilliams64 reposted Real America's Voice (RAV) @RealAmVoice @Bannons_WarRoom   JULIE KELLY: The Biden DOJ did not want to give full access to security footage from J6 because it would have shown the truth! This is why Parler was shut down! It was FILLED with clips of what police did to protestors that day. JackoWilliams64 reposted Bannon's WarRoom @Bannons_WarRoom @julie_kelly2   Professor Sucharit Bhakdi: "I am no longer optimistic anymore. And the reason is very simple." "I'm afraid that these mRNA vaccines have already done their job." "We're seeing billions of people whose brains are not working anymore." Post healthbot @thehealthb0t   Everything the media told you about Long COVID is a lie. COVID Vaccines alter T-Cells, causing VAIDS. Yale study on “post-vaccination syndrome” reveals Long COVID symptoms—exhaustion, brain fog, insomnia, fatigue—are actually vaccine injuries. Post Dr. Dawn Michael @DawnsMission

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United States v. Ferguson, No. 24-2178 (8th Cir. Jan. 6, 2026)cocaine isomers; divisibility; modified categorical approach; realistic probability test; Arkansas; Ark. Code Ann. § 5-64-401(a)(1)(A)(i)Fofana v. Noem, et al., No. 24-2485 (8th Cir. Jan. 9, 2026)jurisdiction; Patel; INA § 242(a)(2)(B)(ii); asylee adjustment; “any decision” Aguilar-Hernandez v. Bondi, No. 24-2427 (8th Cir. Jan. 6, 2026)domestic violence-type asylum; one central reason; women; acquiescence; Guatemala Gutierrez-Mikan, et al v. U.S. Att'y Gen., No. 24-13788 (11th Cir. Jan. 5, 2026)ineffective assistance of counsel; Loper Bright & Lozada; substantial compliance; CAT; acquiescence; FARC; Colombia Savane v. DHS, et al., No. 24-3286 (3d Cir. Jan. 7, 2026)material misrepresentation; naturalization; willful; diversity visa lottery; DS-230 omissions; omitting children from application; public charge; 8 C.F.R. § 103.2(a)(2); lawfully admitted for permanent residence  Matter of E-M-F-S-, 29 I&N Dec. 379 (BIA 2026)death threats; past persecution; journalists; Peru Liz's email: emontano@kktplaw.comKurzban Kurzban Tetzeli and Pratt P.A.Immigration, serious injury, and business lawyers serving clients in Florida, California, and all over the world for over 40 years. Eimmigration "Simplifies immigration casework. Legal professionals use it to advance cases faster, delight clients, and grow their practices."Special Link! Gonzales & Gonzales Immigration BondsP: (833) 409-9200immigrationbond.com  EB-5 Support"EB-5 Support is an ongoing mentorship and resource platform created specifically for immigration attorneys."Contact: info@eb-5support.comWebsite: https://eb-5support.com/Stafi"Remote staffing solutions for businesses of all sizes"Click me!Want to become a patron?Click here to check out our Patreon Page!CONTACT INFORMATION:Email: kgregg@kktplaw.comFacebook: @immigrationreviewInstagram: @immigrationreviewTwitter: @immreviewAbout your hostCase notesRecent criminal-immigration article (p.18)Featured in San Diego VoyagerSupport the show

Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:17532056201798502,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-9437-3289"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");pt> Click On Picture To See Larger PictureCanada is having problems, they are following the green new scam, since Trump placed tariffs on Canada they are desperately trying to find trading partners.Trump shows how windmills kill birds, where are all the environmentalist. The EU is now pushing the CBDC, Trump’s economy will overshadow the rest of the world. The people of this country and others must see the criminal syndicate. Without seeing it they people would have never believed there was a criminal syndicate. Trump has the leverage, more is coming in 2026 and after the midterms Trump is going to unleash hell on the [DS]. Every crime, scam and violation of the Constitution will be exposed. Justice is coming. Economy Canada Trying to Find Trade Partners   Prime Minister Mark Carney reflects a particular reality of the problem their economy will face in 2026. It appears that Canadian government officials have finally recognized the Trump administration plans to dissolve the USMCA or what Canada calls CUSMA next year.  With that reality they have a big problem. Mexico has been working throughout the year to initiate economic policies in alignment with the United States.  However, structurally and politically this is an alignment that is impossible for Canada to do.  Like many contracting European countries, the economic policies of Canada are centered around their climate change agenda and green energy goals. In order for Canada to position their economy to be in alignment with the rest of North America (USA and Mexico), Carney would have to reverse years of legislated rules and regulations.  That is not going to happen, and Canada will always be at a disadvantage because of it.   With three quarters of their economic production tied to exports into the USA, and with the USMCA likely to be dissolved in favor of a bilateral trade agreement, Canada now has to find other markets for its products or lower all the trade barriers currently in place.  Prime Minister Mark Carney is trying to find alternative markets. Carney has looked toward Europe, but that is a closed trade bloc difficult to engage.  Carney has looked to southeast Asia, but that is an export driven market with limited capabilities to import costly western products.  Carney has looked to Japan and China, but on scale there's little to be gained. The question is, where can Canada send its products if not to the USA.   The brutally honest answer is nowhere.  There just isn't any other market, or combination of markets, who could replace the consumer base of the USA.  Canada is refusing to admit this reality and 2026 is going to be a harsh awakening for the Canadian people. Source: theconservativetreehouse.com  https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/2006140340068291046?s=20  – A 2025 Trump administration initiative aims to enforce $1 million fines per bald eagle death. (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:18510697282300316,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-8599-9832"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs"); Initial Jobless Claims End 2025 Near Record Lows The number of Americans filing for jobless claims for the first time plummeted last week to 199k – the lowest since the Thanksgiving week plunge and pretty much the lowest since Source: zerohedge.com https://twitter.com/amuse/status/2006392860006846799?s=20   to give them a shot at winning the midterms. https://twitter.com/CynicalPublius/status/2006141249045291038?s=20   went to the liquor store again and tried to buy €100 worth of booze using the government-run digital currency on your iPhone, but your transaction gets rejected. Why? Because some Eurotrash EU bureaucrat decided that it’s unhealthy for you to buy so much liquor in such a short period of time, so you gets nothing. And you have no recourse, because you have become a serf whose life is at the discretion of the government. (As an aside, single-payer, government-funded healthcare will work in synchronicity with this, deciding what is best for you health-wise, because after all it’s not fair that other citizens must pay for your cirrhosis and bad judgment.) You have been warned, Europe. Political/Rights https://twitter.com/SecDuffy/status/2006203195165462545?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2006203195165462545%7Ctwgr%5Ebc322e2414802c704b50bc3c2955bae6d38269c1%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fredstate.com%2Frusty-weiss%2F2025%2F12%2F31%2Fgavin-newsom-tries-to-keep-illegals-on-the-road-a-little-longer-sean-duffy-immediately-cuts-him-off-n2197630 including cutting nearly $160 million in federal funding. https://twitter.com/nicksortor/status/2006168699502215508?s=20   The Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General can get involved in any DOJ matter they choose. It'a not a judge's job to get in the middle of those internal deliberations. That's a serious violation of the separation of powers. The American voters want violent illegals out of our country. Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., a Nashville Obama judge, needs to get back in his lane. https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/2006046386190422054?s=20   on taxpayers, should not exploit welfare systems built by the native population, should speak the language, assimilate into the host society, respect its laws and norms, and should not receive special carve-outs like separate schools, parallel institutions or different rules. If even these minimal basics can no longer gain agreement, then there is no realistic path to fixing the system at all. DOGE Geopolitical https://twitter.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/2005795643126595959?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2005795643126595959%7Ctwgr%5E813dbbc99cf3dee762087820edf11e55af9622ca%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fredstate.com%2Fjenniferoo%2F2025%2F12%2F30%2Fisis-in-texas-fbi-arrests-man-who-helped-fund-global-terrorist-organizations-n2197594   propaganda, sent cryptocurrency believing it would fund terrorist activity, and attempted to deliver materials intended for explosive devices. This is radical Islamic terrorism, and it was identified and stopped. Great work by our FBI teams @FBIDallas and great law enforcement partners. https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/2006157155666182556?s=20 https://twitter.com/AAbsaroka/status/2005723457997484150?s=20 https://twitter.com/WarClandestine/status/2006176939854196897?s=20 https://twitter.com/Osint613/status/2005961263419883887?s=20 https://twitter.com/Osint613/status/2006095673423179995?s=20 https://twitter.com/USABehFarsi/status/2005874044319436965?s=20 Courage if it were a picture…This is a black-and-white aerial photo depicting a scene from protests in Iran (likely Tehran, based on the post’s hashtags). It shows a lone individual standing defiantly in the street, holding a long pole or banner horizontally, facing a group of about a dozen uniformed security forces or riot police on motorcycles. The image symbolizes courage in the context of human rights and anti-regime demonstrations. War/Peace https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/2006367551878844863?s=20 https://twitter.com/MyLordBebo/status/2006295058492882982?s=20 https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/2006107978504524105?s=20 Zelenskyy Urges Trump to Visit Ukraine to Seal Russia Peace Deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested that President Donald Trump should visit Ukraine to help close a peace deal with Russia. Zelenskyy specifically urged Trump to travel directly into Ukraine rather than entering through Poland, arguing that such a visit would demonstrate confidence that a ceasefire is within reach. Source: newsmax.com Medical/False Flags [DS] Agenda Biden Housing Scandal EXPLODES: HUD Report Reveals Over $5 Billion in Questionable Rental Aid, Including Payments to Dead People and Non-Citizens  A bombshell federal report has blown the lid off yet another massive Biden-era taxpayer scandal — this time inside the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to HUD's own Fiscal Year 2025 Agency Financial Report, more than $5 billion in rental assistance payments during the final year of the Biden regime were flagged as “questionable” or improper, exposing systemic failures, nonexistent oversight, and breathtaking incompetence at the federal level. Among the most jaw-dropping revelations: tens of thousands of payments were made to people who were already DEAD, and thousands more went to recipients who may not have even been eligible to receive taxpayer-funded housing assistance at all, the New York Post first reported. Buried in the HUD report is a stunning admission that federal systems failed to stop payments to 30,054 deceased individuals who were either still listed as active tenants or continued receiving rental assistance after their deaths. HUD officials acknowledged that only after cross-checking Treasury databases did they finally identify the scope of the problem — meaning for years, taxpayers were unknowingly footing the bill for people who no longer exist. “[Over] 30,000 dead people receiving housing isn't an accident — it was systematic fraud by Biden and the left. HUD will hold those who defrauded the American taxpayers accountable,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner wrote on X. According to the report:   “large concentration” of these questionable rental assistance funds flowed to Democrat-run strongholds, including: New York California Washington, D.C. Yet payments to deceased recipients were found in all 50 states, proving the rot was nationwide. Source: thegatewaypundit.com https://twitter.com/CynicalPublius/status/2006068825272508679?s=20   to U.S. citizens. See 8 U.S.C. § 1623(a). There are no exceptions. Virginia violates it nonetheless. This court should put an end to this and permanently enjoin the enforcement of provisions of the Virginia Education Code that directly conflict with federal immigration law. Virginia Code §§ 23.1-502 and 23.505.1 explicitly classify illegal aliens as Virginia residents based on certain conditions. That classification makes illegal aliens eligible for reduced in-state tuition and state-administered financial assistance for public state colleges and universities while U.S. citizens from other states are ineligible for the reduced tuition and must pay higher out-of-state tuition rates. This is not only wrong but illegal. The challenged act's discriminatory treatment in favor of illegal aliens over U.S. citizens is squarely prohibited and preempted by federal law, which provides that “an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a State . . . for any postsecondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit . . . without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident.” 8 U.S.C. § 1623(a) (emphasis added). The challenged act, as applied to illegal aliens, is thus unconstitutional under the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution. This Court should declare Virginia's law, as applied to illegal aliens, preempted and permanently enjoin its enforcement.” https://twitter.com/jonesville/status/2006273719602475506?s=20 https://twitter.com/thehoffather/status/2006240702213099815?s=20 https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/2006327355166589007?s=20 https://twitter.com/MZHemingway/status/2006031707724546400?s=20 https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/2006038706893836481?s=20 https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/2006393802714439774?s=20 https://twitter.com/amuse/status/2006028437899862286?s=20  Patronage System here in America AND help them successfully assimilate. https://twitter.com/HHS_Jim/status/2006136004294664464?s=20  against the blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country: 1. I have activated our defend the spend system for all ACF payments. Starting today, all ACF payments across America will require a justification and a receipt or photo evidence before we send money to a state. 2. Alex Adams and I have identified the individuals in @nickshirleyy ‘s excellent work. I have demanded from @GovTimWalz a comprehensive audit of these centers. This includes attendance records, licenses, complaints, investigations, and inspections. 3. We have launched a dedicated fraud-reporting hotline and email address at https://childcare.gov Whether you are a parent, provider, or member of the general public, we want to hear from you. We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding the fraud. @ACFHHS @HHSGov https://twitter.com/DOGE_HHS/status/2006145075315929532?s=20 will expand the system to support itemized receipts and photographic evidence, and make all data/receipts, where possible, available to the public. https://twitter.com/CynicalPublius/status/2006120694497857977?s=20   move to another state that is honest. Make sense? https://twitter.com/C__Herridge/status/2006091693259636775?s=20  alleges the probes were “buried” because it potentially implicated Biden Administration allies •Between late May 2025 and December 2025 FBI had 16 open investigations into approximately 32 healthcare and homecare providers accused of fraud •Described as massive, joint investigations including HHS Inspector General, Medicaid Fraud Unit, IRS, Postal Inspectors, MN Attorney General, MN Department of Education,  and others Probes Now Expanding In Minnesota, Investigators Are Exploring Nation-wide Fraud Schemes •FBI Surging forensic accountants and data analytics teams to MN •Identifying fraud, then “following the money” to see the “entire web” •Investigating potential links to elected officials and terrorist financing •Potential criminal violations include public corruption, fraud, cyber fraud, healthcare fraud, homecare fraud, money-laundering Investigations Include Federal Nutrition Programs •These investigations including day care facilities are exploring links to alleged fraud involving federal nutrition programs •The Feeding our Future probe exposed an alleged $250m fraud scheme that obtained federal funding during COVID for nutrition programs but almost NO meals were provided to children •It's alleged the monies were laundered through multiple entities to enrich the participants •78 have been indicted, 57 convicted, two found not guilty among the group. Just a heads up that Patel and Trump's FBI have been all over the Minnesota fraud thing for months, 78 people have already been indicted, and Kash is openly admitting that this was buried by the Biden admin. That’s not how FBI & DOJ work. Criminal investigations take months. Trials take years. No one knows yet if Bondi & Kash will measure up. It’s too early to tell. WATCH: Karoline Leavitt Says Trump “Not Afraid to Use Denaturalization” Against Somali Fraudsters — Search Warrants Being Executed and “People Will be in Handcuffs” Denaturalization, also known as revocation of naturalization, is the legal process by which the U.S. government revokes the citizenship of a naturalized U.S. citizen, effectively stripping them of their citizenship status. This is not a process that private individuals can initiate or “do” themselves; it is exclusively handled by the federal government through judicial proceedings in U.S. district court. It cannot be done administratively by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) alone, following a court ruling in 2000 that limited such authority. Grounds for DenaturalizationUnder the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), denaturalization can only occur based on specific legal grounds. These include: The individual did not meet statutory requirements for naturalization at the time, such as lawful permanent residence, good moral character, required periods of residence or physical presence, or attachment to the principles of the U.S. Constitution (INA 316 and INA 340(a)).  The person hid key information or lied during the naturalization process (e.g., on Form N-400 or in interviews), and this directly led to approval. The fact must be “material,” meaning it could have influenced the decision (INA 340(a); see Supreme Court case Kungys v. United States, 485 U.S. 759 (1988)). Within five years after naturalization, the person joins or affiliates with the Communist Party, a totalitarian party, or a terrorist organization, which is seen as evidence of lacking attachment to the U.S. Constitution (INA 313, INA 340(c), and INA 316(a)(3)). For those who naturalized based on U.S. military service, revocation can occur if they receive a discharge under other-than-honorable conditions before completing at least five years of honorable service (INA 328(f) and INA 329(c)). These grounds apply only to naturalized citizens (those who went through the full process, including application, interview, approval, and oath). U.S.-born citizens cannot be denaturalized under these provisions. The process is initiated and pursued by the government, not individuals. Here’s a high-level overview:  USCIS or other agencies (like the Department of Homeland Security) identify potential cases through audits, investigations, or tips about fraud or ineligibility. If there’s sufficient evidence, USCIS refers the case to the Department of Justice (DOJ) via the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Coordination happens through USCIS’s Office of the Chief Counsel. Judicial Proceedings: The DOJ files a complaint in federal district court under INA 340(a). The government must prove its case by “clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence” that leaves no doubt. This is a high standard, and the process can take years. Criminal Revocation: If the case involves fraud, the DOJ may pursue criminal charges under 18 U.S.C. 1425 (unlawful procurement of citizenship). A conviction automatically revokes naturalization under INA 340(e), with proof required beyond a reasonable doubt. If the court rules in favor of revocation, it issues an order canceling the Certificate of Naturalization, which the person must surrender. Citizenship is revoked retroactively to the original naturalization date, reverting the individual to their prior immigration status (often lawful permanent resident, but this could lead to deportation proceedings under INA 237). USCIS updates records and notifies the Department of State. Denaturalization is rare—historically, around 22,000 cases occurred in the 20th century, often tied to wartime or political contexts—but it has been used more in recent years for fraud cases. https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2006013185355112758?s=20   fraud in a ginormous scale. Minnesota also lets one person vouch for 8 migrant voters’ eligibility to vote WITHOUT them having to prove it! Minnesota needs to clean house, NOW. https://twitter.com/StephenM/status/2006079447922008292?s=20 President Trump's Plan  https://twitter.com/FBIDDBongino/status/2006087308404314365?s=20   disrupted (210% increase) -2,000+ kilos of Fentanyl seized (up 31%), enough to kill 130 million Americans -Nihilistic Violent Extremism arrests up 490% -Over 6,000 child victims located (up 22%) -Historic drop in U.S. murder rate. Please read the post from Director Patel for more details on the progress that has been made, and is ongoing. https://twitter.com/WarClandestine/status/2006091717074903047?s=20 https://twitter.com/Kimberlyrja8/status/2006193599365423586?s=20 LISTEN  (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:13499335648425062,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7164-1323"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.customads.co/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

Today's Headlines: It's officially Epstein Files Friday — meaning the DOJ is legally supposed to release the files today, per the law Trump signed 30 days ago. Coincidentally, House Speaker Mike Johnson sent Congress home early for the holidays, neatly avoiding being in the building when the files are either released or… not. Meanwhile, House Democrats dropped 70 more photos from Epstein's estate, including plans for his island, disturbing “Lolita” imagery, redacted foreign passports, and photos of high-profile figures. The Trump administration is also moving to dramatically ramp up denaturalization efforts, telling immigration officials to target up to 200 citizenship revocations per month next year — a massive escalation for a process that's historically rare. Trump's media company announced a surprise $6 billion merger with a nuclear fusion firm, briefly reviving its stock, while questions swirl around the recent killing of an MIT fusion scientist and the now-closed Brown University shooting case. In other news, Trump unveiled a very familiar-sounding “Patriot Games” and backed renaming the Kennedy Center after himself, RFK Jr. cut funding for major pediatric health programs while pushing new restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors, the government admitted liability in the deadly January DC plane crash, and The New Yorker launched a fully digitized 100-year archive — finally ending on a high note. Resources/Articles mentioned in this episode: The New Republic: Mike Johnson Sends Entire House Home Ahead of Epstein Files Deadline Axios: Latest Epstein photos include "Lolita" quotes written on a woman's body NYT: Trump Administration Aims to Strip More Foreign-Born Americans of Citizenship CNN: Trump's social media business is merging with a nuclear fusion company MIT: Nuno Loureiro, professor and director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, dies at 47 WaPo: Kennedy Center board votes to rename to ‘Trump Kennedy Center' WaPo: American Academy of Pediatrics loses HHS funding after criticizing RFK Jr. NBC News: HHS moves to slash funding and access to care for transgender minors AP News: US government admits role in causing helicopter-plane collision that killed 67 in Washington New Yorker: The Entire New Yorker Archive Is Now Fully Digitized Morning Announcements is produced by Sami Sage and edited by Grace Hernandez-Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Applying for US citizenship in 2026? Immigration attorney John Khosravi reveals 5 critical mistakes that can get your N-400 application denied—or worse, lead to deportation. These issues are being scrutinized more heavily under the current administration. ⚠️ CRITICAL MISTAKES COVERED: ✅ 90-day residency rule after moving states ✅ Criminal history documentation requirements ✅ Tax filing and payment issues ✅ Immigration history review (green card validity) ✅ False claim to citizenship (I-9 forms & voter registration)

Federal vaccine advisers voted last week to scale back their guidance on hepatitis B shots for newborns. The Indiana Senate on Wednesday rejected a handful of amendments to a redistricting bill designed to benefit Republicans. Indiana Republicans are considering whether to approve a controversial new congressional map that favors their party. State senators are advancing a new measure to increase immigration enforcement. Dozens of immigrants were denied becoming U.S. citizens at a naturalization ceremony Tuesday at Union Station in Indianapolis. Want to go deeper on the stories you hear on WFYI News Now? Visit wfyi.org/news and follow us on social media to get comprehensive analysis and local news daily. Subscribe to WFYI News Now wherever you get your podcasts. WFYI News Now is produced by Zach Bundy, with support from News Director Sarah Neal-Estes.

ALSO: Indiana Senate to vote on new congressional map, Indianapolis teen killed in Kentucky State University shooting, Fed cuts rates again, and IU Football QB & Coach honored again.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

ALSO: Indiana Senate to vote on new congressional map, Indianapolis teen killed in Kentucky State University shooting, Fed cuts rates again, and IU Football QB & Coach honored again.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dutchess, Putnam clerks say they have new dates for next year Routine naturalization ceremonies scheduled for this month in Putnam, Dutchess and Ulster counties to welcome new U.S. citizens were abruptly canceled last week by the federal government, surprising local officials. Events planned for Wednesday (Dec. 3) in Putnam, Friday (Dec. 5) in Dutchess and Dec. 12 in Ulster were called off by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services (USCIS), which approves applicants for citizenship. Brad Kendall, the Dutchess County clerk, said that USCIS told his office that it didn't have enough candidates for the Dec. 3 ceremony but confirmed dates for seven ceremonies in 2026. The agency gave the same reason - a lack of candidates - to Putnam County Clerk Michael Bartolotti, but confirmed dates for next year, with the first scheduled for Feb. 4. "To my recollection, we have never had a cancellation of this nature in the past," said Bartolotti. Last month, ceremonies scheduled in seven New York counties, including Ulster, Rockland and Westchester, were also canceled but rescheduled after Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican whose district includes Philipstown, intervened. USCIS said it canceled ceremonies because the county judges may not have the authority to conduct them. Lawler said on Nov. 20 that the agency wanted to end events in Rockland and Westchester altogether, requiring applicants to travel to New York City. In a Nov. 14 letter to USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, Lawler said making immigrants travel to New York City "would take multiple hours as well as cost these folks money due to bridge and road tolls, as well as gasoline," he said. In announcing the return of the ceremonies, Lawler described them as "among the most moving and patriotic events I attend." For his wife (a naturalized citizen from Moldova) and other immigrants, taking the oath "represents years of hard work, sacrifice and an unwavering belief in the American Dream," he said. Rep. Pat Ryan, a Democrat whose district includes Beacon, said in a statement on Friday (Dec. 5) that he also has written Edlow to protest the cancellations and ask for more information. Civics Lesson The newly revised civics test for immigrants seeking naturalization has 128 questions. During the exam, a USCIS officer asks 20 questions, chosen at random, and the applicant must answer at least 12 correctly. See how you'd do with the practice test at dub.sh/128-questions, but note that, on the oral test, the multiple-choice answers are not provided. In the previous test, applicants had to answer 10 of 100 possible questions correctly. The USCIS said it revised the test in response to an executive order issued Jan. 20 by President Trump, "Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats." In an email sent this week to the clerks in Putnam, Dutchess and Ulster counties, the agency's Albany director, Gwynne Dinolfo, asked them to confirm in writing that their judges were authorized under federal law to oversee the ceremonies. She said that the judge must have jurisdiction over civil actions "in which the amount in controversy is unlimited. Because county courts in New York have a jurisdictional limit of $25,000 in civil cases, [the judge] may not be authorized to administer the naturalization ceremony." Taylor Bruck, the Ulster County clerk, told the Daily Freeman that the directive was confusing. "The law hasn't changed, so implying that the counties have been doing something unlawful for the last 15 years without anyone mentioning it doesn't make sense," he said on Tuesday. "No one said anything about this during the first Trump administration, so why now?" Naturalization ceremonies complete a process in which legal permanent residents (aka "green card" holders) have been vetted and passed English-language and civics tests. Naturalized citizens have full voting rights and are protected from deportation except in limited circumstance...

With recent news, December is bringing a great time for discussion on the general issues of immigration, visas, naturalization, and Americanism. Kiss’s Gene Simmons’ testimony at the Pentagon in 2019 on his emigration to the United States. The ‘tale’ of two Somali-Americans; Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is launching the Fentanyl Free America Initiative.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In today's show, updates to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services naturalization test - making it longer and more rigorous. Also, the inaugural La Posada celebration, and two new features to central Fayetteville's publicly-owned spaces. 

Immigration Attorney Jioselin Juarez Contreras and Client Services Manager Arianna Gonzalez led an informative session on navigating USCIS interviews, including family-based, naturalization, and employment-based cases. They guided attendees through the essentials of USCIS interview preparation, from understanding interview structures and officer questions to avoiding red flags and handling post-interview outcomes. The session also covered practical day-of logistics and provided tips to help participants feel confident and prepared.Listen in to know more!

Who Will Take the 2025 Naturalization Civics Test with 128 Questions and Answers? Aliens who file a naturalization application 30 days or more after this notice is published in the Federal Register (10/18/2025) will take this 2025 Naturalization Civics Test.Learn, Practice & Test at 128 NEW Civics Questions10 Tests with 10 Voices at Try 10 Special Civics TestsPractice Civics Tests in ORDERPractice Civics Tests in RANDOMPractice Civics Tests by GROUPPractice English Tests: Reading & WritingPractice Form N-400 at Mock U.S. Citizenship Interview#uscitizenshiptest #uscitizenshipinterview #uscitizenshippodcast #uscitizenshipexam

In this episode of Ask the Lawyer, we bring you thelatest immigration news, including USCIS's first changes to the naturalization test. And we'll explore The Path to Legalization – With or Without Inspection, giving you the insights you need to better understand your options. Be sure to share this important information with your family and friends. Stay tuned—this is Ask the Lawyer, brought to you bythe Law Firm of Figeroux & Associates, a full-service law firm proudly serving our community.To schedule a consultation:Call: 855-768-8845 Visit: www.askthelawyer.us#ImmigrationNews #USCIS #Naturalization #ImmigrationLaw#ImmigrantRights #JusticeForAll#KnowYourRights #ImmigrantVoices #FamilyImmigration#CommunitySupport #LegalHelp #LegalAdvice #LawFirm#PathToLegalStatus #ImmigrationOptions #AskTheLawyerNow#FigerouxAndAssociates #ProtectYourFuture

  USCIS just released two major policy memos in August 2025 that change how good moral character is evaluated for U.S. citizenship applicants. These are the biggest updates in decades and they affect how cases are reviewed, what evidence is required, and how officers judge your community contributions, financial responsibility, and past mistakes. In this video, Immigration Lawyer John Kasabi explains: ✅ What the new memos mean for citizenship applicants ✅ Examples of “positive factors” USCIS is now requiring ✅ Why community service, taxes, and testimonial letters matter more than ever ✅ How these changes could affect your approval chances

Magee Clegg is a digital nomad and Twitter/X personality. In this episode we discuss his Mexican citizenship and life in Mexico City vs Santiago, Chile, his new base. 

Good moral character is now vital for naturalization. And 55M visa holders, including EB-5 investors, now face continuous review.View the full article here.Subscribe to the IMI Daily newsletter here. 

SUBSCRIBE TO JORDAN'S FREE NEWSLETTER. Get the facts, without the spin. UNBIASED offers a clear, impartial recap of US news, including politics, elections, legal news, and more. Hosted by lawyer Jordan Berman, each episode provides a recap of current political events plus breakdowns of complex concepts—like constitutional rights, recent Supreme Court rulings, and new legislation—in an easy-to-understand way. No personal opinions, just the facts you need to stay informed on the daily news that matters. If you miss how journalism used to be, you're in the right place. In today's episode: What We Know About the Minneapolis School Shooting (0:27) Trump Fires Fed Governor; Fed Governor Sues Arguing Unlawful Termination (6:55) Dept. of Transportation to Reclaim Control of Union Station in D.C. Here's What It Means (14:56) Trump Wants Death Penalty for All Murders in DC, But Can He Do It? (19:35) "Neighborhood Checks" Are Back for Naturalization Process After USCIS Ends 30+ Year Waiver (22:54) Judge Says Abrego Garcia Can't Be Deported Until At Least October; Abrego Garcia Files New Asylum Claim (26:39) Critical Thinking Segment (32:05) SUBSCRIBE TO JORDAN'S FREE NEWSLETTER. Watch this episode on YouTube. Follow Jordan on Instagram and TikTok. All sources for this episode can be found here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Peru has exited the short list of countries with a two-year citizenship timeline, leaving Argentina as the only Mercosur member with a quick pathway to citizenship.View the full article here.Subscribe to the IMI Daily newsletter here. 

In this timely episode, we break down a major shift in U.S. immigration policy: the August 15 USCIS memorandum that restores a rigorous, holistic, and comprehensive standard for evaluating “good moral character” in naturalization applicants. What does this mean for immigrants on the path to U.S. citizenship—and how might it impact future applications? Joining us is immigration law expert Attorney Flomy J. Diza, partner at #ReevesImmigrationLawGroup, to unpack the legal nuances and practical implications of this new policy.Disclaimer: The views, information, and opinions expressed in this broadcast are intended for general informational purposes only. They do not constitute professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Listeners are encouraged to consult qualified professionals regarding any specific concerns or decisions. Neither the hosts nor guests are liable for any actions taken based on the content of this program.

OA1184 - The saying pretty explicitly tells us to don't, and yet here they are not don'ting. This week on Rapid Response Friday: why is a Texas lawmaker filing a habeas petition asking a federal court to release her from the state capitol building? What's the deal with redistricting, and is Texas's plan to tip the balance in the U.S. House of Representatives actually legal? Jenessa brings her voting rights expertise to explain why this plan is so bad that state Democratic leaders had to go on the lam on threat of arrest to try to stop it. We then briefly discuss the import of Attorney General Pam Bondi pulling back from her attempt to take over DC's entire police force before Matt takes on a couple of little-noticed immigration policy memos in which the Trump administration has given itself dangerously broad new powers to determine things like an immigrant's “good moral character” and “anti-American” activities and associations. Finally in today's footnote: it's Columbia-on-Columbia violence as the West Coast sportswear company goes to war with the East Coast Ivy League university over some IP nonsense which gives Matt yet another excuse to be correct about fonts. Texas state representative Nicole Collier's habeas petition (filed 8/19/25) “Restoring a Rigorous, Holistic, and Comprehensive Good Moral Character Evaluation Standard for Aliens Applying for Naturalization,” USCIS (8/15/25) “Clarifying Discretionary Factors in Certain Immigration Benefit Requests,” USCIS (8/19/25)  Columbia Sportswear v. Columbia University (complaint filed 7/23/25) Check out the OA Linktree for all the places to go and things to do!

SUBSCRIBE TO JORDAN'S FREE NEWSLETTER. Get the facts, without the spin. UNBIASED offers a clear, impartial recap of US news, including politics, elections, legal news, and more. Hosted by lawyer Jordan Berman, each episode provides a recap of current political events plus breakdowns of complex concepts—like constitutional rights, recent Supreme Court rulings, and new legislation—in an easy-to-understand way. No personal opinions, just the facts you need to stay informed on the daily news that matters. If you miss how journalism used to be, you're in the right place. In today's episode: Texas Set to Enact New Congressional Map; California to Fight Back (0:46) Court Blocks Requirement to Display Ten Commandments in Texas Classrooms (5:30) USCIS New Policy Changes 'Good Moral Character' Standard for Naturalization (8:43) Federal Government Launches Investigation Into Driver of Semi-Truck that Killed Three in Florida (17:09) HHS Staff Sends Letter to Congress and Secretary Kennedy (21:58) Quick Hitters: Trump's $454M Civil Fraud Judgement Struck Down, Office of Director of National Intelligence Announces Overhaul, FTC Sues LA Fitness, Powerball Reaches Highest Jackpot of the Year (24:16) Rumor Has It: Did the Trump Administration Spend $500K+ on Custom ICE Videos for a Hype Video? (26:20) Critical Thinking Segment (29:53) SUBSCRIBE TO JORDAN'S FREE NEWSLETTER. Watch this episode on YouTube. Follow Jordan on Instagram and TikTok. All sources for this episode can be found here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Naturalization Act of 1790 linked here

In today’s deep dive, it's the second year in a row in which there was a naturalization ceremony at the Illinois State Fair. We'll talk to some of the nearly 400 new Americans.

For the second year in a row, there was a naturalization ceremony during the Illinois State Fair-welcoming immigrants. This comes at a time when the Trump administration is doing everything it can to discourage people from coming to America. Brian Mackey spoke to some of the 400 new Americans at the ceremony, who shared a little bit about their background and why they chose to immigrate to the U.S.

John Q. Khosravi shares his Top 10 immigration law updates every attorney needs to know this week: ⚠️ NTAs for H‑1B & H‑4 Holders – Rising notices to appear during transfers and pending cases ⚖️ Third Circuit Ruling on Administrative Fines – Sun Valley Orchards & impacts on DHS civil penalties

Golden Visa experts weigh in on retroactivity, investor confidence, possible outcomes, and the future of the program.View the full article here.Subscribe to the IMI Daily newsletter here. 

His Attorney, Nate Wessler, of the Vermont ACLU also joins MIP on 89.3 WPFW-FM.Madawi v. TrumpAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Wondering if it's worth becoming a U.S. citizen? This episode highlights the top 7 benefits of naturalization, from the right to vote and sponsor relatives to accessing federal jobs, avoiding deportation, and enjoying more travel freedom. Tune in to hear how U.S. citizenship can provide lasting peace of mind.#USCitizenship #Naturalization #GreenCardToCitizen #ImmigrationLaw #CitizenshipBenefits #ImmigrationAttorney #USImmigration #NPZLawGroup #Visaserve #ImmigrationHelp #BecomeACitizen

A mass shooting in downtown Indianapolis early Saturday left two teenagers dead and five others injured. Some of America's newest citizens took the Oath of Citizenship in downtown Indianapolis Thursday as the country celebrates its 249th birthday. The Trump administration told states last week that it won't be dispersing nearly seven billion dollars in federal education grants. This past holiday weekend – scores of people gathered in Indianapolis to send a protest message to the Trump administration. New cases of HIV continued to rise in Indianapolis over the past few years. Want to go deeper on the stories you hear on WFYI News Now? Visit wfyi.org/news and follow us on social media to get comprehensive analysis and local news daily. Subscribe to WFYI News Now wherever you get your podcasts. WFYI News Now is produced by Drew Daudelin, Zach Bundy and Abriana Herron, with support from News Director Sarah Neal-Estes.

There are now 364 days to go until the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a historic document that remains relevant as we approach the semiquincentennial. Eight days have passed since the executive branch of the federal government demanded the resignation of University of Virginia President Jim Ryan. There's a lot happening, and Charlottesville Community Engagement is intended to document as much as possible. I'm Sean Tubbs.In this edition:* Five people were shot in the city's Fifeville neighborhood late Friday night including two children* A Charlottesville Circuit Court judge has thrown the city's zoning ordinance out after a legal deadline was not met (learn more) (learn even more)* President Jim Ryan has resigned from the University of Virginia and the path is known for his replacement (learn more) (learn even more)* Former Attorney Ken Cuccinelli continues to serve on the UVA Board of Visitors despite his confirmation being rejected by a Virginia Senate committee, prompting a legal case* Seventy-four new Americans were sworn in as citizens on the morning of July 4 at Monticello (not yet in print)* Hundreds of people were on hand for a protest at UVA just a few hours later to demand steps to prevent the public institution from more federal interference (not yet in print)* Greene Supervisors vote to move forward with smaller water supply (learn more)Thanks for reading Charlottesville Community Engagement ! This post is public so feel free to share it.A note before we beginThis edition should have gone out yesterday as soon as I finished the version for WTJU, but I chose to attend a social event instead. I'm glad I went but do wish I had stayed to complete the work.You will also note that this edition has written versions for three stories including the one about the shooting. I didn't have a lot of audio to work with this week, and I wanted to document in audio the zoning code and the Ryan resignation. The headlines are sparse because those are slugs. The protest story and the naturalization story will be posted to Information Charlottesville before going out in Monday's newsletter.No written shout-outs in this one because I want to get this posted, but I'm going to be experimenting as I go.Five people shot in Fifeville Friday nightAn Independence Day celebration in Fifeville turned tragic late Friday night when gunfire erupted, sending five people to the hospital including three children.A series of firework displays had begun after dark across the neighborhood causing many people to be outside to see and hear the explosions.According to an information release from Charlottesville Police Department, officers responded to multiple calls of a shooting on Orangedale around 11:23 p.m. The first officers arrived a couple of minutes later and found five people who had been shot.The victims were a 10-year-old girl, an 11-year-old boy, a 17-year-old male, an 18-year-old female, and a 52-year-old male.“Due to heavy foot and vehicle traffic, emergency medical units were initially unable to access the scene,” reads the release. “Officers and medics worked together to transport the victims on foot and in patrol vehicles, applying pressure to their wounds until additional EMS personnel arrived.”Everyone shot was reported to be in stable condition as of the release sent out at 11:13 a.m. this morning. The Criminal Investigations Division and Forensics Unit are investigating and police want to see video footage.The Fifeville Neighborhood Association is holding a community gathering at 6 p.m. at Abundant Life at 782 Prospect Avenue.Copy for UVA RYAN:Facing pressure from the United States Department of Justice, University of Virginia President Jim Ryan resigned from his position on June 27.The Cavalier Daily reports that the Civil Rights Division under the control of President Donald Trump sent seven letters to UVA between April 11 and June 17 insisting that not enough had been done to demonstrate that programs to encourage and promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion had not been sufficiently dismantled.In a statement, Ryan said he did not want to put federal grant funding at risk to save his job, a job he planned to leave in 2026. So he resigned and Executive Vice President J.J. Davis will serve as acting president.Many groups have condemned the pressure from the federal government including the Faculty Senate. The Virginia Conference of the American Association of University Professors sent a letter on June 30.Later on in the program we'll have audio from a protest held at the University Avenue side of the Rotunda on July 4.The Board of Visitors had been scheduled to meet on July 1 for a personnel matter but canceled the virtual event before it began. The claim is that the meeting wasn't needed, but on that same day former Rector Robert Hardie was served with a lawsuit arguing that one of the members of the Board of Visitors continued to sit in the position unlawfully.On June 9, the Senate Privileges and Elections Committee failed to confirm Ken Cuccinelli for the seat. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares advised Hardie and others to ignore that out of a claim that the entire General Assembly had not taken a vote. Members of the committee have sued in Fairfax County Court and are seeking an injunction.More from that protest in a moment.DEVELOPMENT CODE copyNearly five years ago, the City of Charlottesville embarked on a process called Cville Plans Together which sought to update the city's housing policies, the Comprehensive Plan, and the zoning code. The general idea was to increase development rights across the entire city and to remove City Council from many of the decisions about density and height.City Council voted unanimously on December 18, 2023 to enact the code, and a group of property owners who disagreed with the blanket approach filed suit in Charlottesville Circuit Court asking for the new rules to be declared voided ab initio, a Latin term meaning “from the beginning.”The plaintiffs in White v. Charlottesville survived an attempt by the city to have Circuit Court Claude Worrell dismiss the case. In April of this year, Judge Worrell ruled that the case would proceed to trial and a date was set for June 2026.However, attorneys for the plaintiffs noticed that the outside counsel for the city, Gentry Locke, failed to respond to a directive to submit a particular document. On June 2, they filed for default judgement and the next day the city's attorneys filed for permission to file late.In a hearing in Charlottesville Circuit Court on June 30, Judge Worrell sided with the plaintiffs and expressed lament that the case would not go to trial.“There are things in this case I thought might be useful about what zoning is and what zoning isn't,” Worrell said. “It would have been interesting.”The next day, the city's Department of Neighborhood Development Services sent a note to the development community.“Pursuant to the order issued by the Honorable Judge Worrell of the Charlottesville Circuit Court on June 30, 2025, the City of Charlottesville is currently reviewing all zoning and development applications on file to assess appropriate next steps,” reads the email.The next day, Charlottesville City Manager Sam Sanders called the default judgement “terribly disappointing.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

what if you were never actually a U.S. citizen... legally? and what if your “identity” was tied to a contract you didn't knowingly sign? BUCKLE UP for a mind-bending, paradigm-warping conversation that invites you to question... everything. not from fear, but from sovereignty. especially when it comes to the unconscious contracts we enter into with systems we barely understand. in this episode, i sit down with Brandon Joe Williams to explore: the difference between state and federal citizenship why the 14th Amendment changed everything (but maybe not how you think) the legal definitions of “person,” “individual,” and “citizen” how language has been weaponized to shape compliance and identity and the ways we can break free from chains we didn't even know we had!  ⚠️ PRO TIP: watch on YouTube to see brandon's screen shares as he reads directly from legal documents and court cases (link to watch here).    connect with Brandon Joe Williams: website: https://one-stupid-fuck.com instagram: @iambrandonjoewilliams facebook: Brandon Joe Williams youTube: Brandon Joe Williams https://www.williamsandwilliamslawfirm.com/   want to go deeper? i host monthly SOUL SYMPOSIUMS, share private transmissions, and explore topics like this inside my patreon — a digital sanctuary for critical thinking, spiritual inquiry, and sacred questioning. if you want my full commentary on conversations like this... ...join my inner circle → https://www.patreon.com/eringunzelman/membership (drop in. linger. lurk. start a conversation. cancel anytime.) other ways to work with erin:

7/2/25: D.A. David Sullivan: naturalization & Trump's lies about crime. Historic Northampton's Laurie Sanders & Betty Sharpe: "Slavery & Freedom in Northampton,1654- 1783." GCC Prof Brian Adams w/ Kestrel Land Trust Conserv Dir Mark Wamsley: Vollinger Farm conserved!! GLAD Attorney Jennifer Levi: SCOTUS decisions attack transgender youth and parents.

Gonzalez Castillo v. Bondi, No. 24-3631 (6th Cir. June 18, 2025)crime of child abuse, abandonment, or neglect; conviction after naturalization; denaturalization; statutory interpretation; rule of lenity; “is convicted” Matter of Roque-Izada, 29 I&N Dec. 106 (BIA 2025)termination of removal proceedings; parole; Cuban Adjustment Act; C.F.R. § 1003.18(d); Cabrera Fernandez; parole Lemus-Escobar v. Bondi, No. 18-73423 (9th Cir. June 16, 2025)mental health; attorney not necessarily adequate safeguard; CIMT; NACARA; Loper Bright; shooting a firearm at an inhabited dwelling in violation of Cal. Pen. Code § 246; attorney withdrawal of asylum application; motion to reopen and discretion; withholding, CAT, and mental health facilities in GuatemalaSponsors and friends of the podcast!Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli and Pratt P.A.Immigration, serious injury, and business lawyers serving clients in Florida, California, and all over the world for over 40 years.Cerenade"Leader in providing smart, secure, and intuitive cloud-based solutions"Demo Link!Click me too!Stafi"Remote staffing solutions for businesses of all sizes"Promo Code: STAFI2025Click me!Gonzales & Gonzales Immigration BondsP: (833) 409-9200immigrationbond.com Want to become a patron?Click here to check out our Patreon Page!CONTACT INFORMATIONEmail: kgregg@kktplaw.comFacebook: @immigrationreviewInstagram: @immigrationreviewTwitter: @immreviewAbout your hostCase notesRecent criminal-immigration article (p.18)Featured in San Diego VoyagerDISCLAIMER & CREDITSSee Eps. 1-200Support the show

Li v. Bondi, No. 18-70278 (9th Cir. June 10, 2025)ineffective assistance of counsel before the circuit court; failure to file brief; motion for BIA to reissue decision; BIA failure to give reasoned consideration De Souza Silva, et al. v. Bondi, No. 24-834 (9th Cir. June 11, 2025)past persecution; inability to practice religion freely; internal relocation; practicing religion in secret; Candomblé; Brazil Matter of E-Y-F-G-, 29 I&N Dec. 103 (BIA 2025)bond; flight risk despite grant of withholding of removal; Laken Riley implications Grey v. USCIS, No. 23-1910 (4th Cir. June 10, 2025)false testimony during deposition; good moral character for naturalization; FOIA exemption 7(E); evidentiary exclusion for discovery violations Antonio de Paz-Peraza v. Bondi, No. 24-2854 (7th Cir. June 9, 2025)nexus; young Salvadoran males; gang recruitment; MS-13; El Salvador Toalombo Yanez v. Bondi, No. 22-6267 (2d Cir. June 13, 2025)exceptional and extremely unusual hardship review; Wilkinson; clear error; serious medical condition standard; retroactivity Sponsors and friends of the podcast!Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli and Pratt P.A.Immigration, serious injury, and business lawyers serving clients in Florida, California, and all over the world for over 40 years.Cerenade"Leader in providing smart, secure, and intuitive cloud-based solutions"Demo Link!Click me too!Stafi"Remote staffing solutions for businesses of all sizes"Promo Code: STAFI2025Click me!Gonzales & Gonzales Immigration BondsP: (833) 409-9200immigrationbond.com Want to become a patron?Click here to check out our Patreon Page!CONTACT INFORMATIONEmail: kgregg@kktplaw.comFacebook: @immigrationreviewInstagram: @immigrationreviewTwitter: @immreviewAbout your hostCase notesRecent criminal-immigration article (p.18)Featured in San Diego VoyagerDISCLAIMER & CREDITSSee Eps. 1-200Support the show

Get ready for your N-400 naturalization interview with expert guidance from immigration attorney Hillary Walsh. In this episode, we break down what to expect before, during, and after your interview—from what to wear, to how to answer questions with confidence. We'll also walk through a mock interview and explore possible outcomes. Whether you're weeks away or just starting your application, this episode will help you feel more prepared and empowered.

"He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of the new Appropriation of Lands" ..."for cutting off trade with all parts of the world." In this episode, Steven Pincus explores grievances against King George for restricting free trade and for preventing immigration to the colonies. Topics include the following: -The importance of the trans-Atlantic Patriot Party, which existed both in Great Britain and throughout the Empire and which criticized the policies of King George for ruling as the King of England alone, rather than the King of the whole Empire -Economic justifications and criticisms of the Stamp Act (1765), the Townshend Acts (1767), and the Fairfax Resolves (1774) -The evolving splits in the Patriot Party that led some like Thomas Paine to advocate for independence others like Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire to for advocate reform while remaining loyal to the King -Reasons behind the pro-immigration beliefs of the Patriot Party Steven Pincus' select publications are below: The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders' Case for Activist Government.Yale University Press, 2016. 1688:The First Modern Revolution. Yale University Press, 2011. Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Ready to take the next step toward U.S. citizenship? In this episode of Immigration Law Made Easy, attorney Hilary Walsh shares her family's naturalization story, breaks down the N-400 process, and explains why now is the time to apply. Learn who can file on their own, when to seek legal help, and how citizenship protects your future. Whether it's for you or a loved one—this is your moment to Live Free.

The girlies are back for part two of the immigration series to unpack our modern-day McCarthyism. Starting with a recap of current events (aka The Horrible Things Update), they pick up where they left off in history, discussing Japanese internment, the second Red Scare, post-9/11 surveillance, and how fear of the 'other' has always justified oppression. Digressions include Khloe Kardashian's venture into protein dust and the comforting fact that, as of today, sunlight is still legal to experience. We're going on tour!!!! Find tickets at https://linktr.ee/binchtopia  This episode was produced by Julia Hava and Eliza McLamb and edited by Allison Hagan. Research assistance from Kylie Finnigan. To support the podcast on Patreon and access 50+ bonus episodes, mediasodes, zoom hangouts and more, visit patreon.com/binchtopia and become a patron today. SOURCES:  ‘He is not a gang member': outrage as US deports makeup artist to El Salvador prison for crown tattoos At $5 Million Each, 1000 ‘Gold Card' Visas Have Been Sold. Could This Pay Off The US Debt? Ask a Historian: How Many Japanese Americans Were Incarcerated During WWII? Columbia University agrees to policy changes after Trump administration funding threats Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Counterintelligence and Access to Transactional Records: A Practical History of USA PATRIOT Act Section 215 Eighty Years After the U.S. Incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans, Trauma and Scars Still Remain  Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations Edward Snowden Speaks Out: 'I Haven't And I Won't' Cooperate With Russia Fact check: Is Tren de Aragua invading the US, as Trump says? Florida lawmakers push legislation to weaken child labor laws  Forced to live in horse stalls. How one of America's worst injustices played out at Santa Anita Harvard Renames Diversity Office As Trump Demands Dismantling of DEI Harvard, Under Pressure, Revamps D.E.I. Office Harvard Will Not Fund Affinity Group Graduation Celebrations Following Ed Department Warning  Higher education, federal government ‘intimately connected' History of the Certificate of Citizenship, 1790–1956 Hollywood Ten How U.S. immigration laws and rules have changed through history HUAC   ICE Arrests Nearly 800 in Florida in Operation With Local Officers ICE deported 3 children who are U.S. citizens, their families' lawyers say   Immigration and Naturalization in the Western Tradition Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua Japanese Internment Camps Judge Blocks Deportations of Venezuelans Under Wartime Law Law from the 1950s may play role in Columbia University student deportation case   Maryland judge orders return of second man deported to El Salvador in violation of court order  McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 (1950) McCarthyism / The "Red Scare"  McCarthyism and the Red Scare Memorializing Incarceration: The Japanese American Experience in World War II and Beyondlocked National Security Entry-Exit Registration System Of Spies and G-Men: How the U.S. Government Turned Japanese Americans into Enemies of the State PATRIOT Act    Redress and Reparations for Japanese American Incarceration The Alien Enemies Act, Explained The Alien Enemies Act Is a Weak Argument for Deportation The Alien Enemies Act Paved the Way for Japanese American Incarceration. Let's Keep It in the Past. The Alien Enemies Act: The One Alien and Sedition Act Still on the Books The case of Edward Snowden This Is What Detention Under the Alien Enemies Act Looked Like in World War II Truman's Loyalty Program Trump is promising deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. What is it? Trump May Seek Judicial Oversight of Columbia, Potentially for Years  Trump officials issue quotas to ICE officers to ramp up arrests U.S. Immigration Timeline Venezuela minister says no Tren de Aragua members among US deportees When John Adams Signed a Law to Authorize Deportations and Jail Critics World War II Japanese Americans Incarceration: Justice Denied  

The United Nations was founded to promote peace, security, and international cooperation, but critics argue that it has become an inefficient bureaucracy that often works against U.S. interests. In particular, UN agencies and organizations – in which each UN Member State can choose whether or not to participate – have sometimes taken positions in conflict with what some U.S. policy makers regard as important principles and priorities. The Trump Administration recently announced that the United States will no longer participate in the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), will end all financial support for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and may withdraw from the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).Supporters, on the other hand, contend that the U.N. and its affiliated organizations remain a vital forum for diplomacy and that the United States should lead efforts to reform them rather than abandon them.Should the United States push for structural changes within the U.N. and its affiliated entities, or would withdrawal better serve American sovereignty and foreign policy goals? What are the legal and geopolitical implications of either path? Join the Federalist Society for a discussion with experts on international law, foreign policy, and constitutional governance as we explore whether the United States should help reform or quit the United Nations. Featuring: Hon. Grover Joseph Rees, III, Former General Counsel of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization, Former United States Ambassador to East TimoPeter Yeo, Senior Vice President, UN Foundation; President, Better World CampaignModerator: John McGinnis, George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Abrego Garcia v. Noem, No. 25-1404 (4th Cir. Apr. 17, 2025)illegal abduction and disappearing of individuals with withholding of removal grants based on Executive overreach; facilitate Ebu v. USCIS, No. 24-5431 (6th Cir. Apr. 16, 2025)declaratory relief; naturalization with ongoing removal proceedings; INA § 318; INA § 336(b); legislative history Sponsors and friends of the podcast!Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli and Pratt P.A.Immigration, serious injury, and business lawyers serving clients in Florida, California, and all over the world for over 40 years.Cerenade"Leader in providing smart, secure, and intuitive cloud-based solutions"Click me!The Pen & Sword College (formerly The Clinic at Sharma-Crawford Attorneys at Law) Use Promo Code: ImmReview2025Link to Nonprofit: https://thepen-and-swordkc.org/ Link to books:https://www.rekhasharmacrawford.com/ Stafi"Remote staffing solutions for businesses of all sizes"Promo Code: STAFI2025Click me!Want to become a patron?Click here to check out our Patreon Page!CONTACT INFORMATIONEmail: kgregg@kktplaw.comFacebook: @immigrationreviewInstagram: @immigrationreviewTwitter: @immreviewAbout your hostCase notesRecent criminal-immigration article (p.18)Featured in San Diego VoyagerDISCLAIMER & CREDITSSee Eps. 1-200Support the show

Andrew Henderson from Nomad Capitalist joins me to discuss the strategy of jurisdictional arbitrage, the process and implications of renouncing U.S. citizenship, the value of accumulating multiple passports, the political and economic shifts impacting American expatriates, what it means to live like a king abroad, and how Nomad Capitalism is a path to sovereignty for individuals. Andrew Henderson is a lifelong entrepreneur, best-selling author, and founder of “Nomad Capitalist.” // GUEST // Event: https://nomadcapitalist.com/live/ Website: https://nomadcapitalist.com/ Book: https://nomadcapitalist.com/book/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nomadcapitalist Personal Website: https://andrewjhenderson.com/ X: https://x.com/nomadcapitalist  // SPONSORS // The Farm at Okefenokee: https://okefarm.com/ iCoin: https://icointechnology.com/breedlove Heart and Soil Supplements (use discount code BREEDLOVE): https://heartandsoil.co/ In Wolf's Clothing: https://wolfnyc.com/ Blockware Solutions: https://mining.blockwaresolutions.com/breedlove On Ramp: https://onrampbitcoin.com/?grsf=breedlove Mindlab Pro: https://www.mindlabpro.com/breedlove Coinbits: https://coinbits.app/breedlove // PRODUCTS I ENDORSE // Protect your mobile phone from SIM swap attacks: https://www.efani.com/breedlove Noble Protein (discount code BREEDLOVE for 15% off): https://nobleorigins.com/ Lineage Provisions (use discount code BREEDLOVE): https://lineageprovisions.com/?ref=breedlove_22 Colorado Craft Beef (use discount code BREEDLOVE): https://coloradocraftbeef.com/ // SUBSCRIBE TO THE CLIPS CHANNEL // https://www.youtube.com/@robertbreedloveclips2996/videos // OUTLINE // 0:00 - WiM Episode Trailer 1:13 - What is Nomad Capitalist? 4:19 - The Game of Jurisdictional Arbitrage 12:27 - The Process of Renouncing US Citizenship 19:55 - The Passport Accumulation Game 25:01 - Naturalization 27:11 - The Benefits of Having Multiple Passports 30:07 - Trump, Tariffs, and the Future of US Politics 35:00 - The DNA of the USA Abroad 41:43 - Finding a Place Where You Can Live like a King 46:27 - The Best Place for Health and Wellness 51:20 - National vs International Identity 58:59 - Money and Taxation 1:04:18 - Bitcoin Denominated Net Worth 1:06:28 - Closing Thoughts and How to Connect with Nomad Capitalist // PODCAST // Podcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/ Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsE RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYI // SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL // Bitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7 Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22 Dollars via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedlove Dollars via Venmo: https://account.venmo.com/u/Robert-Breedlove-2 // SOCIAL // Breedlove X: https://x.com/Breedlove22 WiM? X: https://x.com/WhatisMoneyShow Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22 Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/ All My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/robertbreedlove Go Where You're Treated Best: Becoming a Nomad Capitalist with Andrew Henderson (WiM572)

Alvarez Mendoza v. Bondi, No. 24-1112 (1st Cir. Mar. 31, 2025)cooperators against MS-13; Henriquez-Rivas; persecution in the U.S.; Matter of H-L-S-A-; social distinction and ocular visibility; El Salvador  United States v. Cervenak, No. 23-3466 (6th Cir. Apr. 2, 2025) (en banc) crime of violence; realistic probability test; robbery in violation of Ohio Rev. Code § 2911.02 Mathin v. Mayorkas, 746 F. Supp. 3d 1327 (M.D. Fla. Aug. 16, 2024)naturalization review; INA § 310(c); warrant of arrest; statutory interpretation; declaratory reliefSafe Passage Project:www.safepassageproject.orgSponsors and friends of the podcast!Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli and Pratt P.A.Immigration, serious injury, and business lawyers serving clients in Florida, California, and all over the world for over 40 years.Cerenade"Leader in providing smart, secure, and intuitive cloud-based solutions"Click me!The Pen & Sword College (formerly The Clinic at Sharma-Crawford Attorneys at Law) Use Promo Code: ImmReview2025Link to Nonprofit: https://thepen-and-swordkc.org/ Link to books:https://www.rekhasharmacrawford.com/ Stafi"Remote staffing solutions for businesses of all sizes"Promo Code: STAFI2025Click me!Want to become a patron?Click here to check out our Patreon Page!CONTACT INFORMATIONEmail: kgregg@kktplaw.comFacebook: @immigrationreviewInstagram: @immigrationreviewTwitter: @immreviewAbout your hostCase notesRecent criminal-immigration article (p.18)Featured in San Diego VoyagerDISCLAIMER & CREDITSSee Eps. 1-200Support the show