Ask them at the end. At the end of the conversation the authors will sign books at the book tent which is right there. The books are on sale by book people, your independent bookstore, the largest bookstore in texas. A portion of every book supports the texas book Festival Mission to help Fund Programs that bring students to lowincome schools in texas to find grants for laborers in texas. Thank you. In this panel we will be going beyond the headlines to discuss the real experience of immigrants having an america. We have two authors suketu mehta and Aarti Shahani that will share about their journeys and thoughts. She is an associate professor at nyu and most recently this land is our land and Aarti Shahani is a correspondent based in Silicon Valley and the author of the men more here we are, American Dreams, american nightmares. All that you all retaile read ts on the website. Welcome to both of you. [applause] can we start off by you telling us a little bit more about yourselfor. I was born in qatar at the age of 14 i moved with my family to queens in new york and theres a part of queens called jackson height which is second only and most of right nonfiction. I write about bombay and new york city for ten years this land is land and its about building migration. If youve heard my voice before,voha chances are i thinkf myself, if youve heard me before you might think of me as the l indian it lady on npr, im delivering news on facebook and google, talking about artificial intelligence, the Disinformation Campaign and the disruption of democracy, very important topics but there is always a disconnect between how peoplew know you whether its a public or even your friends versus what is inside of you. In my back story and what defines my sense of myself and myay identity as i always thinkf myself as an immigrant daughter who was undocumented at as a child. His father was in jail and fought for more than a decade to keep her fo emily together in ts country. Here we are as American Dreams and workinger nightmares is to reflect on the journey that has a new american such as myself who is a piece to the country and something and has a history inside about what it took for my family to make america home. I was not given, its something we fought very hard for and along the way like any fight when the cost to that site you have questions, you have regrets, you wonder frankly wasnt worth it. So i explore that in the memoir and we know show there from your city, were both from queens and i grow up a couple stops over in queens into me what is hilarious and instructive about where we grew up, this incredible stand number and bravery and drive to cross the olympic or the pacific or the desert, and then lose steam and find themselves by the airport. [laughter] that is actually why we are in queens is because we got tired and thats why queens is such a phone nominal window into the dna of america. We will talk about this more, we grew up in a place that explains why america w is great and if yu understand our hometown in our journey you understand this country. Thank you. As i read yourun memoir, i impat my immigrant journey as an immigrantof daughter myself in e of the characters that really stood out for me is your mother. You see her at the partition and during an abusive relationship with their paternal grandmother coming to the United States with three children and becoming a communityer organization or without a traditional role. Can you tell us about this amazing woman, did she ever seemed like she belonged . T thats a great synopsis of my mom. , part of what i needed to do in my memoir to understand myself and my voice and identity was understanding my parents more deeply. And when i was beginning to write the book, i had a bit of resentment, i ended up fighting pretty much all of my 20s to keep my dad in this country against the deportation case that we can talk about later. By the time i was 30 i never knew i would fight this long, i felt like i had put my life on hold in my credit score was awful and those really worried about my future and when i was doing the memoir, there are many mixed emotions and one was resentment. And i went to my mom and i saidd mom, my father has since passed, he passed in 2015 and i said you and dad always said we came here for a better life for you kids. Because we had a happy life. And i grew up, i love queens and i love the neighborhood, but the building i grew up and had roaches. I woke up multiple times as a child with a roach crawling on the bearskin. We fought incredibly hard to stay in this country, my fathe fathers life was destroyed and state in this country and we all lived. When you have one Family Member hurting and under attack by legal issues or health issues, everyone suffers. So what do you mean a better life, why would you have risked crossing the ocean with three kids and having a plan. And thats when mom told me, that my paternal grandmother, her motherinlaw she did not use the word abusive but inward circulationat back then but she was abusive. My family lived in a joint family, many immigrants will know this set up, you living with your inlaws, the brothers of your husband, whatnot. And my mom situation i did not know this, we were very close that my grandmother, if she did not like something my mom made she would throw the plate of food atr. Her. My mom has asked permission to open the refrigerator or go outside. My grandmother would not allow my parents sleep in the same place. So my dad was required to sleep and my mothers room and my mother was required to sleep on the floor. This went on for years and years. Then something horrific happened i did not put specifically what happened in the memoir but my mother who is the most resilient human being that i no attempted to take her life. And she swallowed pills, woke up again, i was born nine months later, i was the accident that happened after the attempted suicide in my grandmother when my parents brought me home, my grandmother was not holy because i was a girl. And she wanted a boy. So coming to america story is sad, my parents decided to leave a broken home because it was easier to cross the ocean then to try to live across the street. Thats the social structures we were born into. When you ask my mom was toggling between places, did you ever feel like she belonged, america was the first place she ever felt like she belongs. Because america was the place where she got to be something more than just a wife andacre mother. Where she got to explore herh into identity and her inner leadership. My mom and dad spoke six languages, they were forced to live around the world with different people. My mom is an extrovert who loves problem solve everyones problems. If you ever met her shed be out really quickly. In america, new york cityic queens, was the place where she got to grow to be what was inside of her. So to me what mom reminds me, the subheading is American Dreams, american nightmares, not just nightmares, yes there is a memoir, a journey through the deportation system that my family went through that i recount but my mother will always remind me, your life here is sootr much better than it wouldve been. In any back home place. Thank you. The sacrifices that your mother had to make, she was on her way to get a degree and she left behind and also the other women you referenced about leaving their children to come over here. Does anything come to mind about the journey and sacrifice of the story of migration what you gain . They want to eliminate the family reunification category. I know which my family came to this country, we did not come here my father or mother did not have a visa. And as i learned when i was in my 30s, my mother did not even have a college degree. She went to college in bombay and one day i was with my parents driving over the George Washington bridge and she told me about a car accident that she was in when she was in college. And by her final year she was pregnant with me. She was in a taxi with two of her best friends and the taxi stopped at a gas station and my mother was by the window and her best friend was in the middle and she said you sit in the middle because youre pregnant. And my mom said you just want them window seat. And her best friend was bossy and made my mom sit in the middle and the taxi stopped at the gas station and a drunk driver comes in and broadsides a taxi. My mother was mostly unhurt, she hes to the doctor and my mother had to skip the two final exams. Use it for three days at these exams. And they said you were to been shaken up by the accident and i tell her not to take the final exam. So my mother told me 30 some years later that she never finished her college degree, she went with my father and had me and she could not go back and finish. T she settles lucky because i got you. In my book is dedicated to my mother into my father. And i wrote about this in Time Magazine and my mom read the Time Magazine expert and she said you put me in the excerpt i didnt want the world to know i dont have a college degree. [laughter] it is really important for people to see that immigrants have Strong Family values around. Most of the migrant cement documented or not are here because her sending money back to the families back home. I went to a place called friendship on the usmexico border and i spent two weeks there. Along the border there was one place where if you dont have papers you can meet your family on the other side. And theres a place or under their started during the Nixon Administration replaced if you wereld undocumented you can sit down with your family on the other side and have a picnic and then you both have to go back to the different side of the border. It was basic fence. Its one thing where they let you go on weekends for ten minutes at a time and great family. I stayed there for two weeks and its most emotionally heartbreaking thing ive ever done. I saw mexicans who havent seen their mother and 17 years go up to this place and his mom comes out on the other side an offense and he puts up his face in his mom puts up her face and he says i miss you mama and she says i love you. She says i love you have you been eating right. [laughter] so for two weeks i saw mothers and children husbands and wives, in the end, it puts up the pinky finger and the mom puts up her pinky finger in the holes are only big enough to touch pinkies so all along the fence its kissing of the pinkies. If you ever had an issue with someone in your family in a break with somebody in a primitive brother or parent go to Friendship Park and sue happens when the department comes between you and your family and the hunger of people to just talk to the families and hear them breathing in touch. Immigrants are born without family values. Thank you. [applause] immigrant families and the strength of those families is within those walls and when yous go out your very much in a different world. Both of you had to experience, you of the age of 14, growing up in queens and experience a very different world inside your home and going out to the american world, looking back now what would tow you tell your 15yeard self . Life is long, it is funny. What i am doing with here we are is tracing i put together a puzzle. My motivation for writing the book was to understand how is it that my father, the man who i did not really like when i was growing up, he was old world and worked seven days a week and then came home and sat in the corner and smoked his cigarettes and i only ever heard when my skirt was too short term i sure was too tight and he was so worried about the size of my mouth. He would never have imagined this to become an asset of the profession. I did not like that. He was a stranger and sometimes we were antagonistic. How is it that man ended up becoming my very best friend in life. That is really what im tracing in this memoir, it happens in the context of the case that destroyed his life. It is not a pure bright story, its like the ones overlying while the process i got to know my father. I got to see him clearly in my father gave me a working definition of d love. Youre asking what i would tell my 15yearold self, theres no question more important in this world than the nature, what is love and how do you live it. Its what we w exist for. The experience with my father, when he first got into legal trouble, he was arrested when i was 16 years old. He was running a shop, we had a ring cards and some were naturalized citizens and we thought we were on a Straight Path to the American Dream. My father was running an Electronic Store and 20th street and broadway. A little district in manhattan. And then we got a call he was arrested and according to newark state hee had sold calculators o columbia and family store is a Drug Trafficking ring. The case was a failed drug lord investigation where the prosecutor needed a prosecution and they drive myyer family to t and offered my father eightmonth sentences to put the matter behind them. So basically my dad took a plea and he thought whos going to do eightmonth for silly watches and calculators to the wrong guys and go back to work and put the matter behind him but insteade deportation came as a Second Surprise punishment, we had no idea at the time of pleading but because of the plea even though they had green cards and others were naturalized citizens, it did not matter and he was going to be put into automatic deportation. When my dad was first arrested, i remember as a child, my child has always been to become a prosecutor. I was completely ashamed of him. And i think its something that many children feel about the country, youre not supposed to say out loud they are ashamed of your parents but many are i had a sense of im a kid trying to make it big in america and a scholarship to a fancy private school and i felt my family was smalltime. And when dad got arrested unlike how can you be doing this to me. And as the case dragged on land i saw that things were not working, were apparently a Drug Trafficking front but dad just got in eightmonth sons to put it behind him. We were doing the time he was made to pay so much more than what was proportional. Eventually my shame chattered and the indignation of how the Justice System was working, a desire to protect him, my father, and a sense that hes a threedimensional person who complains about my skirt but he is also a workaholic whose basically lived his life trying to support and build a family, he pad a Pretty Simple ambition to have an supportive family. He was not a computer person. And in the process of fighting for my father what happens you have choices in life. You turn toward somebody or away from the. When someone needs you, there is a choice that youou make. Basically at the region of 19 when things were falling apart i decided to turn toward my father i stopped going to college and i decided i was going to stay in new york city and fight my familys fight to keep us together inn this country and i did not know it would be ten years. But in the process i got to understand for example the man who i thought was judgmental and controlling, why was he so patriotic because he grew up in a world where he had 0 stability forced to move around from place to place so where he got the sense of any stability was from tradition. He held onto it because there was nothing else to hold onto. Ito feel that to a 15yearold e i would say, whatever you feel you are suffering, he or she too is suffering and when you can open your eyes to the reasons that people are who they are without feeling threatened, open your eyes to see it you will find ways to appreciate the strength of someone there is a power to seeing clearly and sometimes we dont want to see clearly. The 15yearold me i went to an all Catholic School and on my second day of school this kid with red hair and freckles comes up to my lunch table and says lincoln shouldve never left plantation. And i said what does that have to do with me. [laughter] so i was one of the first minorities in thee school. And i became a writer every day i long to get back to bombay i left my friends, my grandpa into my cousins and i missed it. I was going up in Jackson Heights but my senior year got better. Because other minorities started coming in and the lunch table excluded. [laughter] in the beginning of my senior year. This is during the crisis in 1980 and walking down the hallway in this kid. [inaudible] [laughter] i was impressed by his knowledge. [laughter] [bleep] the lunch table was excluded and we had a cuban who claims his father was a burglar. We had the schools only gay student who is having an affair with a math teacher. [laughter] and everybody wanted to be them. But we had as a protector the mysterious oriental, he was a korean friend whose mother would pack noodles in his lunchbox and said at the table and look this way and eat his noodles in silence and say very little. So we said all things. [laughter] martial arts [bleep] and you talk about the black belt, he was so advanced youre not even supposed to know its color. So he would sit and eat his noodles and people would leave us alone. He went to Engineering School at columbia and could hardly fly. So in the class before lunch i would go to the table of excluded in run like hell before school ended. When this table was defending. If you ask any great communion why arenn you funny though say i had a miserable childhood. But then they would run and go to Jackson Heights and i was in a room full of dominicans, haitians, jews, muslims, the building was owned by a turkish man of greek, all these people who is killing each other before they got on the plane. [laughter] in here we were living next door to each other and sharing our strange food when the only thing that brought them together wasth sunday morning there was a program on the Spanish Language station which played songs and sunday morning the entire building, dominicans russians, greeks, palestinians, israelis, always singalong because into global phenomena interlaced everyone loved it so this is the only thing that united us. But they without me and about Jackson Heights and am actually going back to live in Jackson Heights. Diversity works. And it works when no one grew predominant. The last time there is ethnic conflict in the 1990s, new york has never been safer or richer and never been more diverse to immigrants of the children. You see this in texas, in the city of texas. A Jackson Heights jewish center. And and in places like Jackson Heights. [applause] but to emphasize something that you are pointing out and then to mention but that hindus and muslims who are neighbors these are the same people during the partition of india and pakistan were murdering each other. Millions of to their children during that partition. It was horrifically violent. These groups were at war with each other. And we were neighbors sharing milk and sugar and flour and babysitting for each others kids and complaining about the same slumlords killing the roaches over in queens. [laughter] the thing about america is our childhood has shown us with those differences america is a highly absorbent culture where you come and this is the truth everything is relevant it is not utopia but having perspective about what happened people can and do coexist so i just want to emphasize get real. Sumac you talked about being at the border. I want to be careful how i explain this but before launching is in new york city we unofficially launched in texas. Borderd to go to the because i had not been there in a long time while i was writing my memoir and looked on the images on my newsfeed. These are not alien newcomer groups. So part of what i saw was terrifying. Those at the banks of the rio grande you have women and children who under law should be allowed for asylum are forced to camp out on the banks of a river nose in Education Loan no sanitation no porter parties and it is horrific. And they try to make claims for asylum and theyre basically describingai instances of being gang raped or see their children attacked they are describing these experiences that is terrifying. And i want to acknowledge that. But what gave me hope is what is keeping these families alive cracks how are they from the banks of the rio grande you have those who are not paid to do this work who cross the footbridge every day. Those who go back and forth. Who one dash and to have another volunteer force. With trolleys bringing food and water and diapers. While the lobby be broken, our culture is a good. We are in a standard moral crisis. We basically need leadership in this country that can reflect our culture progress not that complicated it just takesd courage. [applause] thank you. We have five minutes before we go to q a. That it is so well with the phrase your grandfather said i am hereth because you were there so is immigration separationth enough quick. My book begins when my grandfather was in india and then retired in london. And then to sit in a park in the 19 nineties one day and then to come up to him and say why are you here . Why dont you go back to your country cracks and my grandfather said because we are the creditors. [laughter] you came to my country you took my gold and my diamonds and prevented my industry so we have come to collect. [laughter] [applause] we are here because you were there. So that is the debate of global migration. From the point of viewio of the rich country. So why in the first place . Leand an african man is because those rich country stole the future of the poor countries. With inequality and Climate Change. So when the british got to india it shared gdp was one quarter but by the time the british t left 200 years later it was under 4 percent. Roso that european share when 20 percent at 60 percent so its the same thing so we went into iraq and those that lost their lives. And then with the iraqi refugee. E. [applause] so take Climate Change. 4 percent of the worlds population with that excess carbon and revise countries like india or africa they are literally roasting to that there was a heat wave and 10000 people died of heatstroke. So when they move they are not moving that that is good because when immigrants move because the economies do better. And that the best and most targeted way. Four times more so what they have been doing on as a species. Enough that 21st century of Climate Change and then to come to the shores rescue. [applause] wheel open the floor for questions. Originally it wasnt going to bed at your story inspired one. In 1975 going to college that these filthy dirty people coming on the boat will ruin our country. And one happens toan be my cardiologist. [laughter] but that very hardship and deprivation and then they went to harvard with that analysis quick. If you believe in immigration it doesnt hurt and then they are dirt poor going to harvard. That then you are supporting someone and the other issues. Is the American Dream still alive cracks people still get to live it . What is the nature of the American Dream . Its the ability to go to places you did not know existed. So that is closing that lacks moral vision. Its many of our stories and whether this country allows thatat anymore. That all of those companies that were founded by immigrants. And those that are 60 percent are founded. And then to think that that there is this woman amy who mywrites the books and i want saw an article in Time Magazine she has a book of the eight minorities we should all emulate. And my answer was but explain india. [laughter] [applause] and in this book and then to be singing a different tune. And then to know how to apply for a visa. And honduras and then we should be rescuing them. And that it is made up of all the other countries. Thank you. [applause]. And then to come to the United States and then deep down beneath the politics with the nationalities. And i guess that worldclass can listen is there any type strategy and then to embrace immigration. As a fuel for the country. We are talking about personal stories so they make a difference but in your perception a way to embrace immigration that we could be doing . Are trying to frame the question but watching the way their there was some real impac impact. And the romance that we saw that the event here as look at that. Re america is a country where they can come in with the tens of thousands can feel connections to the homeland so that proves the point of immigrants. And that is actually quite simple. There are a lot of myths. What is the most common thing you hear about with anti immigrant . There is no line to stand on. The line does not exist for people. And the people emphasize those stories and then one third can trace the roots to ellis island. What was the average wait time cracks for the average majority three and five hours to come into america. So as we know our path and would actually made america this is the culture that it is. And to turn this into fact. I just came back to give a speech about coming to india. And i have never been so concerned. What the Indian Government is doing to the hondurans. And 4 million basically could be stripped of their citizenship. And o now gulags all across the country basically to detain muslims but there are no Indian Muslim members of activeduty heidi movements except for a few Fringe Groups because of the detention centers, so the atmosphere in india right now have been silenced s and intellectual journalist about the fate of the country right now. But that democracy and for a populace can tell a false story well. And then to be imprisoned and murdered. And that truth telling. [applause] we have to stop there. Conversations]