welcome to amanpour on pbs. tonight, migrants in the trump age. the pulitzer prize winning author and vietnam war refugee vie yet nguyen joins the program. plus, allies in europe try to fight off trump's exit from the nuclear deal. my exclusive interview with a former top environmental official, a victim of a fierce struggle between those hard-liners and rouhani's government. good've evening and welcome

to the program. i'm christiane amanpour in london. the u.s. government says it has lost track of nearly 1500 unaccompanied migrant children last year after placing them in sponsor homes. this as the trump administration implements more policies that will likely lead to more children being separated from their parents. amid this antiimmigrant sentiment sweeping the united states and the west my next guest says his family could have been the poster children for how refugees make america great. he is viet thanh nguyen, a writer, professor and winner of both the mcarthur genius fellowship and pulitzer prize for his landmark novel "the sympathizer." and we was a refugee from vietnam. viet thanh grew thnguyen, welco the program. >> thanks for having me.

>> what was it that sparked -- what moved you to get involved in this highly polarized debate? >> i've always been interested in refugees and immigrants because i am a refugee and, of course, right now in the united states we're going through a moment of high anti-immigrant and anti-refugee feeling so it was recent actions on the part of the trump administration, john kelly calling undocumented immigrants uneducated and a harm to american society and jeff sessions arguing for the removal of children from undocumented immigrants and these are crises in our society that i wanted to respond to. >> and before i play this john kelly soundbite to remind everybody what you're talking about, just remind us of your story. obviously it's a long story, but you are a refugee, an immigrant. you came with your family from vietnam, right? when was it, how difficult was it to assimilate back then? >> well, it was 1975, i was four years old, my parents were in their 40s and the vietnam war ended and we were on the losing

side so we fled as refugees to the united states and ended up in a refugee camp in pennsylvania in 1975 and while it was a great gesture of hospitality on the part of the united states, what happened to us personally what that i was separated from my parents at four years of age in order to leave that refugee camp. that's a traumatic experience and it stayed with me for a long time as well as this understanding that refugees and immigrants are in need of hospitality and help and, again, it seems like at this time in the united states and many other parts of the world, that sense of hospitality has been fading. >> so then i want to play the jeff sessions soundbite because this goes to the heart of the matter that is a big story today as well. allegedly the u.s. government losing track of something like 1500 kids who've come across the border from the south. this is what he said earlier. >> it's an offense to enter the country unlawfully. if you smuggle an illegal alien across the board, then we'll prosecute you for smuggling. if you're smuggling a child, we're going prosecute you.

and that child will be separated as required by law. if you don't want your child to be separatseparated, don't brin across the border illegally. it's not our fault that somebody does that. >> that is the opposite of sympathy, right? >> the exact opposite. and we can have a reasonable debate about borders and the legality of immigration but the idea we'll take children away from their parents as a way of deterring immigration is inhumane and immoral so it's a moral question i don't think we should lose sight of and i think too many people have lost sight as they stick to this rhetoric of legality. >> so i want to ask you based on this issue and what happened to you, in a way the u.s. did something in vietnam, that's why there was a need for people like you to flee and come to the united states. it was sort of a direct reaction to a u.s. intervention.

so i wonder if you can comment on that and then compare what the united states has done in central america over the decades that might have prompted even generations since to be refugees. >> well, of course the united states fought a very controversial war in vietnam and one of the strangest and weirdest parts was that it was recorded on tv and in many newspaper photographs so that war felt intimate to a lot of people including many americans so when the war ended a good number of americans felt there was an obligation to help south vietnamese people for whom the united states have been fighting. now the situation with immigrants coming from south of the border is not any less complex but it's less visible to so many americans and it comes from these issues where refugees and immigrants coming from south of the boarder are coming from economic and political reasons and in many cases, they're fleeing from situations that the united states has had a hand in in terms of the united states' involvement south of the border. but these kinds of action s tha the united states has been involved in has been invisible

to many americans so therefore i think many americans don't feel they have any obligation to these particular immigrants and so therefore it's easier to behave towards them in an inhumane or callus fashion. >> so let's go back to these children. it's incredible what's happening to them. the united states says it's trying to place many of them with family members if there are or with people known to the children if possible or else they go into some sort of state control so to speak but all obligations end once these kids are put in so-called sponsored units somewhere. what happened to you? just the emotion of being separated from your family or being put in a sponsored family who you say treated you well but nonetheless wasn't your family. >> well, now i'm the father of a four-year-old and i was four years old when i was separated from my parents so i can see through him what happened to me. when you're four, you have no understanding that you're being taken away from your parents, possibly for your own good.

all i felt was this tremendous loss and pain and that has stayed with me through four decades. i look at my son, if i'm away from him for a day or two, he finds that to be painful, i find that to be painful so i can completely imagine for these children being taken away for these parents under situations of coercion that the trauma is greater especially if they're being taken away for many, many months, i was only gone for three months, a f and if they'r taken to strangers who are not hospitable to them. in their case i ended up with sponsors who were quite nice to me but that barely mitigated the situation. >> you are a real success story, highly educated, you are a pulitzer prize winning author for "the sympathizer" you've written many books. but i want to play for you what john kelly, the chief of staff to the president, said about the quality of immigrants who are

coming from at this time from south of the border but perhaps he means in general. let me play this and we'll talk on the other side. >> let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into the united states are not bad people. they're not criminals, they're not ms 13, but they're not people that would easily assimilate into the united states. they're overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from, fourth, fifth, sixth grade educations are kind of the norp. they're coming here for a reason and i sympathize with the reason but the laws are the laws. >> so, again it's pretty brutal. he says he sympathizes but you've pointed out that he doesn't empathize. he is essentially saying that, hey, they're not good enough for us. your mother, she went through a hard time, right, learning english, learning to assimilate. >> it's not as if we can change our immigration laws so we only admit pulitzer prize winners, there's not enough of those

around. when i look at my mother, she's the kind of person john kelly was describing. she was born poor in a rural area and she had a sixth grade education and nevertheless she was a heroic woman who transformed her life both in vietnam and in the united states. she was a refugee twice, once in each country and it was because of her hard work and survival and courage that she produced people like me and my older brother who went to harvard and so on so we have to remember in american history we have had a pattern of this which is that new immigrants, new refugees to this country have always been welcomed -- not welcomed but always greeted with suspicion by the majority of americans and after a generation or two these populations do produce people like myself and also people like john kelly whose grandparents were italian and irish working class laborers whose english was suspect. but i think he's forgotten that or he thinks italian and irish immigrants are different from vietnamese and latino immigrants but really they're not.

>> there is that. there's either a collective indonesia or a collective sort of selection, natural selection, where they think perhaps white immigrants are better than other immigrants. but let's face it when the boat people as you say, because you were known as the boat people because of the way you had to flee vietnam, when you came west, you are considered the good immigrants. you did come here and work like the blazes and make huge successes of yourselves, for your communities as well. but you take issue with that, right? you don't think you were the good immigrants. >> well, i take objection with the term "boat people" which i find dehumanizing. i call them oceanic refugees, for example. you have to remember people who took to the oceans had about a 50% survival rate in crossing that ocean which is much, much worse than what the astronauts have faced. now the other thing is that the united states accepted vietnamese refugees, only 36% of the american population wanted

to take the refugees. the perception of us that we were the so-called boat people, for example, and that we would bring all kinds of problems and contamination to this country. . now 40 years later because of the successes of vietnamese americans, that's been forgotten by many americans. they're repeating what john kelly has said. but the refugee community in the 1970s and 180s in california, i can testify many of us were bad refugees doing things like welfare cheating and scams and much, much worse and we've ever come that, or many of us have. and the point is not that vietnamese americans are perfect or undocumented immigrants are perfect but that given the opportunity in the united states these populations tend to succeed. >> so in the end, you're a storyteller and the story is very important, the narrative is very important. and you say that donald trump

has succeeded in dominating the narrative and that people like yourself need to get better at countering the narrative and the story telling. >> and we're all storytellers, i believe that. when donald trump says make america great again he's telling a story in four words that are very seductive and powerful to many people and they repeat that story and do so over the dinner table and thanksgiving and so on so it's up to us who believe in a different kind of story about an inclusive america, about a welcoming america, about a america that is -- about all kinds of people from working class white people to people of color, it's important for us to give another kind of story such as make america love again which is something that america has been capable of in the past and can be capable of today. >> viet thanh nguyen, that you can so much for joining us. >> thanks for having me, christiane, it's an honor. >> what a message as americans remember all those who gave their lives to make america a

shining city on a hill. immigrants and refugees aren't just news in the united states. all over europe. in france today, president macron promised citizenship to this young immigrant from mali after he performed an almost impossibly heroic feat over the weekend. he rescued a child who had been danging fr dangling from the balcony of this parisian apartment block. he bare knuckled it up limb by limb. he was quickly dubbed spider-man and the paris fire brigade even offered him a job. meantime, the trump administration's threat to punish europe for doing business with iran is meeting a fierce pushback as eu fooreign ministes met for the first time to discuss strategy since the united states pulled out of the iran nuclear deal. they fear that far from breaking iran as trump has touted, reimposing tough sanctions would empower iran's hard-liners and

further break the backs of the ord nair people there. my next guest is a victim of the political tug-of-war in iran. he was a reverse brain drainer, a scientist working in britain who was wooed back by the moderate government of hassan rouhani to become a deputy vice president and deputy head of the environmental department. his job? to fix the country's chronic water crisis after decades of mismanagement. instead, he endured months of harassment, threats, and interrogations amid a crackdown on environmentalists and eventually he resigned. he's now living in a location that we will not reveal and he joined me for an exclusive interview about iran's internal power struggle and the chances of success for trump's regime change play. welcome to the program. >> thanks for having me. >> can i just ask you, what do you make of the leadership in iran basically warning people

about protests saying that if they do protest they are simply falling into the trap of enemies such as united states and what they called the zionists. what do you make of that. >> these are very hard times for iran when the external pressure on iran increases i think things get worse for the people over there because if now they have any sort of peaceful i would say protest it can be interpreted as alliance with the enemies. and i think that's what makes things tricky and that's why the external pressure might function in the wrong way, actually, and those who are trying to get some sort of things done actually get the opposite result. >> so in other words, we have heard that the trump administration believes that they can quote/unquote break iran. you heard president trump reach out to the iranian people when

he pulled the u.s. out of the iranian nuclear deal. but you think it could have the opposite effect? >> it's an interesting statement when you say you stand by the people of iran and you call them terrorists or ban them from entry to the united states and then you say you stand by them and impease sanctions and all of them would be a worse for the people of iran and those who president trump and others claim to be worried about. so breaking in iran is not an easy thing and i think miscalculations on the western side are significant. plus you're putting people in the middle of a battle between forces and things won't get better necessarily. so breaking iran is a big claim and i'm not sure if it's backed

up by enough facts and a good understanding of how things work in the middle east as a whole and in iran in particular. >> you said about people getting caught up between the forces there. you are a classic example of that. here you are a scientist, a water expert, you were doing your job at imperial college, one of the most prestigious universities in the world and you were asked by to iran by the rouhani government to work in their much-needed environmental and waterish 1450u issueissues. how did you get caught up between the hard-liners and the rouhani moderates? >> my case is unusual for perhaps the first time in 40 years that they reached out to a person abroad, established and doing his job asking for help but i go home and this becomes a positive thing. it becomes a credit for rouhani's government which is doing a good thing. it's a new thing and 2

hard-liners are not happy with any sort of thing, which gives credit to rouhani's administration on one side plus to people who break down borders. if you look at my case and compare it with the rest of the people and some of these people who are in jail and have got into trouble. the whole problem with us is that we are breaking down the borders. like what jcpoa can do. when diplomacy works and when iran becomes friendlier with other nations, hard-liners, no matter where they are, whether 234 the united states, whether in israel or iran they get nervous. >> let's talk about the kompromat. when you arrived, they took your devices, they downloaded all the stuff you had had from before you set foot in iran. >> yes, exactly. it was shocking. i walked in thinking i'm the

deputy vice president of the country or something. it wasn't like that. for six or seven months they tried to prove that i'm a spy. they had 14 years of e-mails. they knew where i was. all the details of my life, like private life. they tried hard to prove that. i knew that i'm not a spy. i'm not working for any foreign service, intelligence service and i'm in love with my country and i've done anything i could in the years of abroad for helping my country, for helping my nation because i care about it and my science was my weapon and when things didn't work out they tried to release some old photos of mine in which -- five years ago dancing in san francisco in an awards ceremony saying that a person with that condition, dancing, is not

eligible to serve as deputy vice president of an islamic state. >> let's get to the hard of t s this. in addition to what personally happened to you and is also happening to environmentalists in iran. a huge number remain languishing in jail. one man was killed, the iranians say he committed suicide. why is the environment the new political front line? . why do they call environmentalists spies and enemies of the state. >> part of the problem is the fact that some of these guys involved in environmental a activism and again an

international person who understands iran and the west and can function in both sides and can live in both sides and communicate to both sides can be a scary foreign the hard-lines.s having enemies are essential to the hard-liners, i believe. the other thing is that the environment has been some sort of a free space, a place to people to show madness, to criticize the government on different things and result in environmental populism so if you're concerned about the economy and not happy with the political system, if you have other complaints and you cannot express them still you have the environment where you can open up and you can say whatever you want. the environment can become really connected to the demonstrations, tensions and all these things and that has become i think to an extent scary for

the government that we have seen some uprises, some sort of tensions in different regions in iran related to water shortages, related to dust storms, and these are not really easy things for the government to handle. >> well, exactly. and apparently their own meteorological department says something like 97% of the country is suffering from drought. but they have all these sort of conspiracy theories and they accuse environmentalists of stopping the weather and they called you an environmentalist terrorist. they called you a bio terrorist. they, because of -- from what i gather their mismanagement of the environment and of water is causing so much discontent and so many protests now that they're trying to figure out how to head that off.

remember, the dust storms cannot be the main cause of protest. at the end of the day people come out in the street for economic reasons, they have salary issues and they have pay. issues. but when your political economy or social economy is dependent on water. when people lose jobs because of water shortage, farmers lose jobs and income a lot can happen and we're familiar with what happened in syria related to a drought which functioned as a catalyst to make tensions worse in that region. >> that's important what you say because i don't know how many people remember that it was water shortage and drought avrt moog m -- and mismanagement of water that was the manifestation of the first unrest in syria. >> so water was not the cause of

isis but water was a catalyst. when farmers lost jobs, migrated to cities, started living in suburbs, economic inequalities, tensions, then people can carry guns and kill each other. this is not out of the game and these things can happen in the developing world in poor economies and now we see the consequences for years. so iran's political economy is dependent on water. water shortage can affect your economy and this is the situation, people lose jobs as a result of water shortage. in the past few weeks they have been getting rain and people are looking at it like, ah-ha, look at it, he's gone and the rest are in jail, they cannot control the weather anymore. >> that's incredible. what do you think will happen to people inside iran, ordinary

citizens affected by these decades of mismanagement, mismanagement of the environment that's affecting their bottom line. what if they rise up again? do you think they will be crush ed? >> iran is suffering from a serious water shortage and battle and fights over water transfer projects so we would see tensions and conflicts at the lower levels and increased tension can result in -- so water shortage can function as a trigger to a larger problem. right now it just -- you know, keep your eyes on the skies and hope that there would be a rain and things get better. that's how we are managing the system and we're looking for band-aid solution this is how we have managed water in the developing world and iran and

the west doesn't understand how things new york that part of the world. people would suffer from decades from these progresses chb which with -- problems which are from years of wars. they don't respect geological borders and time so generations after us would suffer from environmental problems there and unfortunately the decision makers, the intelligence services and the governments of the region miscalculated these things and never saw them. >> thank you so much for joining us. >> pleasure. that's it for our program tonight. thanks for watching amanpour on pbs. join us again tomorrow night.

katty: you are watching beyond 100 days. the summit in north korea is keeping everyone guessing. >> people are scrambling to get things back on track before the summit. katty: delegations -- delegations from both countries are trying to hammer out a framework that will make talks possible. a delete and the eurozone -- italy and the eurozone brace for more uncertainty. president trump honors members of the military who died in service to their country, but for many