- [announcer] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy, and by claire and carl stuart. - i'm evan smith. she's a veteran magazine journalist whose first two books, just like us and soldier girls, were critical favorites. her third, the newcomers: finding refuge, friendship and hope in an american classroom has just been published. she's helen thorpe, this is overheard.

helen thorpe, welcome. - thank you so much. - i'm gonna pretend that we don't know each other. stipulate, we've been friends for - a long time, decades. - 25 years, longer than that. and you know, the thing about this book, which made me cry, and i think is wonderful and is the best of your three books is, i'm overwhelmed with admiration for what you've accomplished here. - thank you so much. - it's a great book and it's a great book right now because of the world we're in and the issues that are before us. and i'm trying to understand, even having read the book and having thought about what you must have been thinking about, how did you know that we would be having this conversation? - i love that you're asking that question, because the world has changed so much in the course of - just in that time. - yeah, while i was hanging out with these students. - you started writing this book and researching this book, it's the 2015-16 school year that is the guts of the reporting. - right, so to sort of bring us back to that moment, that summer was the summer that the syrian refugee crisis kind of moved on to the front pages of our newspapers. it had been happening for a while already,

and the iraqi refugee crisis had been happening before that, but without a lot of news coverage. and i just knew that we were hitting record numbers of refugees and displaced people in the world. my parents are immigrants to this country, and so i was moved by those stories of transition. and i went looking for a way to write about it so that that international story kind of would intersect with my own backyard. found a high school that has an expertise - south high school in denver. - south high school in denver is the designated place in our public school system where refugee teenagers will wind up. - right. and so this class was 22, right? - 22 kids who spoke 14 languages and used five different alphabets. one teacher trying to teach them english. - and he's, by the way, a fantastic character in this book. - he's the, you know, his work is heroic. i mean, i feel that i really wanted to celebrate him. - i mean, i just wanna stop for a second and ask, how did you find him, how did you find them,

and how did you find it? because you know you could have chosen wrong. - yes, i could've, i could've. i've had that feeling sometimes. - because as a journalist, you go into it thinking, i've got a perfect idea, we're gonna execute it, and this is gonna be the thing, and it turns out not to be the thing. - it depends on finding the right place to be. well, south has kind of a reputation in colorado, where i live, for being an incredible, for having incredible expertise in welcoming refugees and asylum seekers. so there's just a great breadth of knowledge. there are staff people who speak all kinds of languages. when i showed up there, the principal at the time had read my first book, which was about undocumented students, dreamers. and so she right away said, you're welcome in our school, you can be in any classroom you want. and i had never had somebody, you know, as a journalist you don't get that kind of access typically.

- i mean, we also know that with regard to kids, there are all kinds of privacy issues, and how complicated it must be for these kids and their families to give you access. - well when i found this classroom, i recognized that this teacher was extraordinary, because he's very highly sensitive, he's very skilled at working with students who may not find it easy to trust a teacher. he's fluent in spanish and english. his dad was anglo, his mom is latina, so he really understands having two cultures and trying to find your place in the world. he identifies with the kids. so i knew i was in the right place, but the kids weren't speaking. they were terrified. they didn't have any english. i couldn't even say to them, hi, i'm a journalist. - that's at the beginning of the year. - yeah, right. i brought in interpreters to introduce myself to the students. - you brought in some number. - 14. - right, some crazy number of interpreters, i mean that, to my mind, already that's something that probably no previous reporting assignment have you had to bring your own interpreters. - never, no.

it was really important, i thought, that the kids fully understand who i was and why i was in their room. and that they had a choice whether they wanted to be in the book or not. but ultimately, by the end of the year, the kids just blossom, i mean, they become more comfortable in their new home, their starting to have relationships with one another, and flirt. one of them proposes to another one in math class. these kinds of things are happening. - that's really, i mean among the many things about this book that really gripped me was the tension, not in a negative sense, between assimilation on the one hand and retaining the essential elements of the culture they had come from one the other. that this is not a case of, we're gonna level everything and rebuild. - no, they wanna feel at home here, but they wanna never forget where they came from. and that stretches them in all kinds of ways. but they're overjoyed to be here. i mean, they're filled with gratitude to have a safe home. - did you set out to write a political book? you know you've written a political book, i mean of course, this is a book that's going to be perceived as having a political agenda.

but even if it doesn't have an agenda, it is inherently a political book. - i guess i would respond by saying i believe this book has a moral agenda. so i don't mind who's in office - not inconsistent for it to be moral and political on some levels. - i don't mind what party they're from. but i really feel that anybody with a conscience who understands all the privileges we live with, when you look at this refugee crisis, if you really understand how much we have and how desperate the struggle is elsewhere, i think you feel moved to say, as a good human being, what can i do to help? what's the right thing to do? how can i make that possible? - but you understand, helen, that not everybody is saying that, the response has not been that. people have identified this as a public safety issue, bordering on a public safety crisis. - you know, we have fear. it's natural, it's understandable, i share that fear. nobody wants to admit people into this country

who will do us harm. but to mistake these students and their families for possible terrorists, it's a great mistake to make. - but one being made. - well, i think for lack of information. so, you know, the department of homeland security vets every refugee family before they're admitted to the u.s. in europe, you see asylum seekers walking to germany, walking to european countries without being vetted. but if a refugee enters this country after being vetted by the department of homeland security, they have not made a mistake one time. there is no instance of a vetted refugee - so the need for extreme vetting, the vetting that we're doing is already extreme in that respect. - we could vet more, that's not, i would never object to that. but we vet already to a level that is quite extraordinary. - and one of the other differences between here and europe, you've just identified one key one,

a second one, back to this notion of assimilation, one of the issues as i understand it with the refugee situation in europe is that when the refugees arrive in these countries in europe, they're actually not integrated into communities. there is some difference, and that's actually created an otherness. - i think the situation in europe is most analogous to the situation we have in this country with mexico or countries south of there. so the situation in europe is millions of people entering without legal permission. it's like undocumented immigrants from mexico or el salvador coming here. we don't necessarily know who they are. they haven't actually been vetted, they haven't received legal permission to enter the country. - and they don't necessarily integrate with the population and remain in the same way that the refugees we're talking about here do. i mean this whole idea of otherness, right? the concept of the "other" has been demonized. and the concept of otherness has been weaponized.

the idea that people are from someplace else which used to be a positive, used to be a feature and not a bug, we used to celebrate the contributions of immigrants, we're all from someplace else, now suddenly this has been turned into a bug. - and i try to respond to that, not with argument or analysis, but with a story in which i choose to write about my subjective feelings sitting in this classroom, and in which i choose to try to identify with some of these students or their parents. maybe the parent i identified with the most was the iraqi mother who's two daughters, jacqueline and maryam, walk into the classroom at the beginning of the school year, one pretty soon after she arrives starts wearing a headscarf, a hijab, one sister does not, and i'm sitting in the classroom unable to speak to them at first, wondering, why is one wearing a headscarf and the other not? what were their lives like? - talk a little bit about their backstory. they had a very interesting backstory. - well, absolutely.

so when they walk in the room, i think they are from iraq, which originally they were. their father, it turns out, you know i look at them, i see a headscarf, i think muslim, but of course it's much more complicated. their mom is muslim, their dad, christian. their father worked with the u.s. during the american invasion. he became a bodyguard providing security to a judge in the provisional government, sided with the american-backed provisional government, and then was targeted, received death threats, the judge that he worked for was assassinated, assailants came to their home, they had to flee. so because they sided with us, they didn't have a home in iraq anymore, not a safe home. and they fled to syria, thinking that would be a safe country. so, unable to find work in syria, their dad returned to iraq looking for work, vanished, probably was killed.

so their mom became a single mom with three children, living in syria on the cusp of the syrian civil war. and then, they're double refugees basically. they had to flee from syria as well. - and honestly, every one of the kids in this book, and these are extraordinary kids, they show extraordinary courage, extraordinary character. - you fall in love with them. - weirdly, the best of america. - oh, it's the best of what we do is to welcome - i mean that's the part that to my mind is just so moving, is that you think about the situation in this country now, politically, the conversation we're having around these kids and how otherness has been turned into this negative, but these kids are more american than some americans. - well it's a quintessential american act that their teacher is doing in teaching them english, explaining society here to them, and welcoming the huddled masses, if you will, that phrase that we all know. - this book is your third, and in two previous books, you've identified these interesting

little units of culture. women service members who enter the service prior to 9/11 and end up discovering, as so many do, never intending, and the four mexican immigrants, or women who are mexican descended, two who are documented as i remember it from reading the book long ago, and two who are not. and in each instance, you kind of immerse yourself in this culture, and you come out of it able to tell the story in a way that somebody who's just flying over or parachuting in could not possibly do. and i think, again, the commitment that you made to reporting this book, similarly, this is the kind of work you like to do. - i love doing this work. it's an honor and a privilege to get to spend this kind of time. it's hard in journalism, 'cause you face these tight deadlines and you've gotta jump in and get a story and come back and meet your deadline. to have the chance to spend this kind of time with people is extraordinary. - and also the fact that you're willing to put yourself out personally,

because really, in any of thee instances, the women who you wrote about in just like us or the service members in soldier girls, they have to first come to trust you before you can put the time and the energy and the commitment in to do the reporting and to write the book. the very first thing that you have to do, the trigger is, trust me. and that is a hard thing to do. - and in this case, it was a little bit even more of a gamble, because i had the trust of the principle and the teacher in this classroom, but the students were arriving throughout the school year, and i never knew at the outset if i would or would not gain the trust of the students well enough for them to share their stories with me or to invite me home. ultimately, there are two families that i got to know really well. one's the iraqi family, but the other is a family from the democratic republic of congo, which actually is the country that has sent the most refugees to the united states in recent years. and i didn't know that. we don't hear a lot about the congo in our media.

we're very focused on what's happening in the middle east. but the refugee crisis, the students in this room perfectly map the refugee crisis. if there's a country producing refugees, somebody ends up from that country in this room. - i have to say that that is one thing about this book that will be hugely important for people to get a fuller picture of what the refugee - yeah it's much bigger than we think, broader. - we tend to simplify it, dumb it down, in the same way that when we talk, you know, the deferred action against childhood arrivals program, daca, that's now in the news. you would believe that it was all mexican kids, when the reality is it's so much more. - we have haitian immigrants to florida. - so in the same way the refugee program is so much more diverse in the origin of the people in it, it's a much more complicated situation than we've been led to believe. - you've done this kind of work, long-form narrative nonfiction, for a very long time. and again, our friendship - thanks to our shared background in texas monthly. - texas monthly, and in fact i remember you, we met, i think, when you were at

the pre-jared kushner new york observer. - that's right. - you were working long ago in new york. - before texas monthly. - right, long before that. but as i've known you over the years, what you've liked to do is to tell complicated, detailed, layered stories, in long form. - i'm a classic introvert. i get to know people slowly over time. i don't feel comfortable telling somebody's story until i've known them for ages and ages and ages. and i try, you know and i'm not good at knowing huge numbers of people necessarily, and handling that kind of life, but i'm really good at getting to know a few people extremely well. and then i think there's always such surprise. we have these policy debates about immigration, or about refugee resettlement. but our debates have become increasingly superficial as they've gotten faster. and i feel long-form journalism has an ever more important place in the world in terms of, you can pick up a book now

and just dive in and really understand a subject so much better at book length and come away far more informed with a much deeper understanding. - well the problem is that there are more places to get information, but they all require so much less of us. even at 280 characters, twitter is not gonna tell us the story of the refugee crisis. - yeah, you can't understand it on twitter. - and the fact is, the venues that existed for so many years to produce that kind of work, are fewer themselves. so even if you wanted to tell, i mean, the new yorker, you're a new yorker alum as so many wonderful people are, the new yorker is one of the rare cases where they're still willing to devote the time and energy and ink to this, but they're the exception that proves the rule. - right. i've loved seeing some of the texas monthly alums go to places like propublica, which are also trying to dive in deep, these new, you know, ways to try to

add depth to our national conversation. - but it's hard. - it is hard, it is hard these days. and i think we depend on readers, and you know, the public to not totally tune out. and it's east to feel overwhelmed by the news cycles these days, and by some of the bad news. - and also to be able to carve out the time in your day, we're all busier than our parents' generation was. to carve out the time of the day to devote to long-form reporting is harder. - my hope with this book is that, because the teacher is such an engaging character, and there's so much joy in the classroom, i really tried to focus on that point in the refugee story where resettlement is happening, and it essentially becomes a much more optimistic story. i think people are overwhelmed by bad news, and so by choosing to focus on the moment where families feel safe and are experiencing gratitude and relief, i give the backstory so people understand the difficulty of why they had to leave their home country, but you read this book, you feel uplifted.

you know, you're celebrating the fact that we're welcoming these people. - you know what i thought about this book? it should be a movie. - we're actually having some interest already, which is exciting. - because again, the positive nature of the story and the fact that you just can't resist these kids. - yeah, they're irresistible. - i wanna slightly shift away from this for a second and talk about you. so you mentioned that you're the child of immigrants. so for you, the concept, in the first book and in this book particularly, of otherness, or of kind of coming to a place that is not your place - i'm not feeling otherness so much, i'm feeling identification, but i see that the rest of my country has that other. - you're sympathetic to the predicament of this. tell your story. - my mom grew up on a dairy farm in rural ireland, she's one of 10 kids. she's right in the middle. so she left at 18 to go study to become a nurse in london. my dad, meanwhile, grew up on what's considered the wrong side of dublin, the north side.

if you read angela's ashes, that's my dad's background. and he left to go to london to become an engineer. so my parents met in london where i was born. - even though they're both irish. - and i, you know, i grew up in this country, but all my cousins, all my aunts and uncles are in ireland. - and you did not become a full-fledged american citizen until 21. - yes, yeah. - so you understand the conversation that's happening in this country all the time, at least through your own door. - you know, i've always, obviously, you know, i'm white and freckled, so i identify both with mainstream society in this country, but also with every immigrant that comes here at the same time. i have a little bit of a split personality in that regard. but i feel that this country, we are essentially generous people, and i think we are misunderstanding

the refugees in our midst and misunderstanding the refugees who need homes. we wanna view them as dangerous people, but i think we are really conflating them with people who wanna do us harm. and it's unfortunate, because we are at our best when we know how to empathize and sympathize with people who've lived through tragedies and are only seeking safety. - that's why i assert, your intentions notwithstanding, that this ends up being a political book. because people are gonna view it through that lens. so you spent, last couple of minutes we have, you spent some number of years, by my count about seven and a half, as the first lady of denver. - i did. - and then you spent about four years as the first lady of colorado. - well i would just explain that in my kickass rock n' roll days here in austin, i happened to meet a bar owner who lived in denver, colorado. it made perfect sense at the time. but then he ran for office. - the problem was his.

- people like beer in denver and colorado, and he was very popular. - enough that they said, be our leader. that's exactly right. i wanna ask you, really, about the experience of being the first lady of a city like denver and of a state like colorado, because most of us will never, of course, have the experience of being in that position. i wonder about the platform or the portfolio, the opportunity it gives you to think about, as i always knew you as a journalist, things that interested you, things you cared about, things that you wanted to work on, and it was always through the journalism door. what was the experience of being in that position like? - because i'm shy and an introvert, for me it was excruciatingly uncomfortable in some ways. - please tell us about that. - but i feel that i grew. so i found myself at countless events in rooms filled with a lot of extroverted people who were kinda movers and shakers, all of whom knew my name and knew who i was, and i could not keep track of their names or who they were necessarily, at the outset. but i kinda grew into it,

and today i'm much more comfortable. the great blessing for me in all that was that once i started writing books, i found, to my wonder and joy, that i had kind of a platform as an author that isn't available to everybody. so tons of book groups and book-oriented people across the state of colorado would search out my book, my first book, partly because of who i was married to. it gave me great entree into reading circles that i think was just a gift. - but i'm even thinking less about access to readers and more about access to the kinds of people who ultimately you're writing about. i mean the fact is, as an introvert, as you say, being forced to spend time in this environment that had it been your choice you probably wouldn't have, probably helps you as a reporter and as a journalist and as somebody who deals with people all the time. - it was absolutely true that when i would

walk into a school or a classroom, the teacher or the principal, because they would already be familiar with me from the news media coverage and things like that, i was a known quantity, and it was easier for them to trust me, absolutely. - at a time when nobody trusts the media. what are you gonna do after this? what comes next? - i'm starting work on a project about a mom that i've been friends with for the entirety of my son's career in our public school system. she's a spanish-speaking mom. we have boys the same age. and we've been friends for a very long time. she makes a living selling burritos and tacos at rockies games and broncos games. she doesn't have legal status. she's a spanish speaker. we've known each other for 15 years and been good friends, and i'm trying to write about our friendship and our relationship, and the struggles that she's had.

- another story that's effectively a political story on some levels, right? - yeah but we're at our best in this country when our kids are in the same school system and she tries to teach me spanish and i try to teach her english and we hang out on the playground. - that is the nature of the relationship. you know, i'm just fascinated by the stories that you gravitate to, because these are not, i mean a lot of people write books - i have contrarian impulses. - well you do, but a lot of people will write books that are versions of a book that's already been written, and the reality is, there was no book that had been written like just like us, there was no book that had been written soldier girls, there's certainly no book that has been written like this, and that story also is such a modern story and it seems so obvious on one hand, but no one is actually telling that story and in part it's because nobody is taking the time to search it out or to gain the trust of somebody like your friend. - she's an extraordinary woman. she kept inviting me over for breakfast and i kept saying, no no, i write in the morning.

and then finally i looked at myself and my own response and what i was doing and i said i don't wanna be that mom who just has a playground relationship and not a real relationship, i'm gonna go to her home for breakfast. and i went, and i was just astonished. she had prepared this absolute feast, and it turned out her mom had had a restaurant in mexico where she had grown up learning how to cook from the age of seven. she was an artist with food. and i was just in awe, and i realized we were sort of kindred spirits. i write, she cooks, but we're both looking for an audience. that's why she wanted me to come over for breakfast. - that's wonderful. well all of your success is just, as i said, as somebody who's known you for a long time, i'm just elated to see it and to read this book. i do think this book is extraordinary, and is gonna have a huge impact and i hope that everybody buys it. - thank you so much. - good to see you, pal. - it's great to see you. - helen thorpe, thank you very much.

- [announcer] we'd love to have you join us in the studio. visit our website at klru.org/overheard tot find invitations to interviews, q&as with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes. - with these students, i'm super curious to see how they do. the two brothers from the congo did so extraordinary well over the course of this one school year where i follow them that the teacher recommended they skip over a year and a half of instruction. so by the two year mark, i was watching them read to kill a mockingbird. - [announcer] funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy, and by claire and carl stuart.