Immigrantly Podcast

In 1988, the vote count in Mexico stopped in the middle of the night, and when it started again the ruling party had won. Mexicans still call it the night the system crashed. What the country built after that is very different from how we vote in the US: an independent election institute, polling stations run by ordinary citizens picked at random, one day of voting on a Sunday, and no ballots by mail. Saadia talks with Rodrigo Cervantes, a bilingual journalist who has spent years explaining Mexico to American audiences. He was the Mexico City bureau chief for KJZZ...

It's Election Day, and Saadia Khan is going to vote. A few days ago, a text message told her she had voted in the last three midterms. It made her think about why she keeps showing up when she feels so disillusioned.

In this solo episode, Saadia looks back at 2018 and 2022 to see what showing up actually changed. Then she looks at this year, when campaigns have gone after Muslim candidates more openly than ever.

If you can vote today, go.

You can connect with Saadia on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠IG ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@itssaadiak⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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Host & Producer: Saadia Khan I Content Writer: Saadia Khan I Editorial Review: Shei Yu I Sound Designer & Editor: Lou Raskin...

On January 13, 2024, Taiwan voted for a president. Polls closed at 4 p.m. Poll workers then took out every paper ballot, held it up for the room to see, and read the name out loud. There are no voting machines and no absentee ballots. You vote in person where your household is registered, which is why thousands of Taiwanese Americans flew home to do it. By that evening, the island knew who had won. William Lai took 40 percent, the first time one party has won three presidential terms in a row since Taiwan began direct elections in 1996. The same day...

On the morning of February 8, 2024, Pakistan went to vote, and the government switched off mobile phone service across the country. Weeks earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled that Imran Khan's party, PTI, could not use its election symbol, a cricket bat. Khan himself was in jail, convicted in three cases in the last ten days before the vote. When the results came in, candidates backed by his party had won more seats than anyone else. They still didn't form the government.

Saadia Khan talks with Anas Mallick, an Islamabad-based journalist who covers diplomacy, militancy and conflict. Anas...

At this year's UN General Assembly, whole delegations walked out as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium. Two days earlier, President Trump told the world he could make a deal with Iran or "annihilate the Islamic Republic," and called on countries to quit the International Criminal Court. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, denied a U.S. visa for the second year in a row, had to address the Assembly by video.

In this solo episode, Saadia Khan asks what that building is actually for. She goes back to 1945 and a Charter that opens with "We the...

This is a rerun of Saadia's conversation with Mory Fontanez. Saadia found Mory on Instagram after Mory posted a video about her family in Iran during the June 2025 strikes. With the US now seven months into a new war with Iran, we're bringing this episode back.

Mory is an intuitive life and leadership coach, a former crisis manager, and the author of Higher Self: Reclaiming the Power of Your Intuition. She and Saadia talk about whether fear and intuition can work together, why Eastern and Western cultures treat intuition so differently, and how CEOs...

This week Saadia Khan brings back one of her favorite conversations of the year. Ramzi Fawaz has just relaunched his podcast, Nerd From the Future, for a second season, and the first new episode is out now.

Ramzi is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of The New Mutants and Queer Forms. His next book argues that the humanities can work like psychedelic therapy, using art, literature, and media instead of drugs to change how students see the world.

When Saadia and Ramzi first spoke, everyone was panicking about...

Three days before the 25th anniversary of September 11th, New York City released 170,000 pages of its own 9/11 records, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani made September 11th an official citywide day of remembrance and service. The first Muslim mayor of New York is doing more 9/11 accountability work than any mayor before him. Does that protect Muslims, or put them on trial again?

In the final episode of Immigrantly's 9/11 at 25 series, host Saadia Khan sits down with Salam Al-Marayati, co-founder and president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). He was walking to the White House for a meeting with...

More than 95,000 people have signed a petition asking the organizers of the 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero to reconsider whether Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York City, should attend. Liz Miller's answer has traveled further than most: "Mayor Mamdani is not a terrorist."

Elizabeth Miller (Liz) was six when her father, FDNY firefighter Douglas Miller of Rescue 5, went into the South Tower and did not come home. Today she is the project director of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group of 9/11 family members who have spent more than two decades being...

Twenty-five years after September 11th, Guantánamo Bay is still open. Fifteen men are still held there. Six have never been charged with anything at all. And on August 26, 2026, a military judge finally set a trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three co-defendants: June 5, 2028, nearly 27 years after the attacks.

In the first episode of Immigrantly's three-part 9/11 at 25 series, Saadia Khan sits down with Shayana Kadidal, Senior Managing Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has litigated Guantánamo cases since 2002. He filed the first habeas petition on behalf of detainees when no one in Washington wo...

Erika Lucas spent years inside private equity and venture capital, the rooms that decide who gets funded in America. Then she left to build what goes around them. In this episode, she tells Saadia Khan exactly what investors say about founders once they’ve walked out.

Erika was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and came to rural Oklahoma at 13 with her mother and sister, speaking no English. She went back. She built a career in Mexico, returned to the U.S., ran foreign direct investment for the State of Oklahoma, became a private equity partner—and then walked away...

This week, we're sharing an episode from Pehchaan, hosted by Bilal Lakhani with co-host Ambreen Ali, a show about the Pakistani diaspora in the US, told by the people living it.

Their guest is Noorain Khan, who joined the Girl Scouts as a second grader in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and three decades later became the first Muslim American to lead the organization as National Board President. She's now Chief Innovation Officer at the Ford Foundation. They get into her path there, and the many layers of identity she's carried along the way.

New Immigrantly episode...

There's a question on the U.S. citizenship test, question 74, that asks you to name one cause of the Civil War. The Government accepts three answers: slavery, economic reasons, states' rights. Saadia memorized all three. She passed. She became a citizen. And she never felt a single one of them.

Then, on a detour from a wedding in Maryland, she spent an afternoon at the Gettysburg museum in ninety-degree heat and found a fourth answer that will never make it onto a flashcard.

In this solo episode, Saadia walks through the exhibit that promised her...

UNRWA USA CEO Mara Kronenfeld is a Jewish American woman and the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor — and she leads the American nonprofit supporting the UN agency for Palestine refugees. In this episode of Immigrantly, Saadia Khan asks her what it costs to break the script.

Mara traces her path from Riverside, California to a Fulbright year in Damascus, where friendships built in Yarmouk refugee camp reshaped everything she thought she knew about the Arab world. She explains what UNRWA actually is, why it was designed to become obsolete, and answers the "UNRWA institutionalizes refugeehood" critique head-on. Sh...

In 2011, a handful of skeptical New Yorkers answer a call to Occupy Wall Street. What they find feels less like a protest and more like a glimpse of a different world—one where people openly share stories of debt, hardship, and frustration. They start to build an anti-capitalist village in a tiny Manhattan park — under the watchful eyes of police.

This is the first episode of Future Hindsight’s brand new 6-part series, OCCUPY! An Unfinished Uprising. Subscribe to Future Hindsight wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss a single...

Seven years ago, Sahar Saleem was the first-ever guest on Immigrantly, talking about her creative marketing career at PepsiCo. She's back, and everything has changed. In this episode, we talk about leaving a corporate "dream job," breaking into screenwriting in LA right as the writers' strike hit, the quiet blacklisting of pro-Palestinian voices in Hollywood, and her pilot Cash, about a Pakistani American memory archeologist. Then, the unexpected turn: somatic therapy, epigenetics, and how trauma lives in the body across generations. Sahar now leads Soma Sahar, a healing practice weaving somatic embodiment, ancestral reflection, and creative ritual. A conversation...

"No one fits into these types of boxes." Darializa Avila Chevalier has spent her whole life being asked to pick one: Black or Latina, Dominican or American, organizer or politician. Two weeks ago, the 32-year-old from Harlem broke the biggest box of all, defeating a five-term incumbent to win the Democratic nomination in New York's 13th Congressional District, with no corporate money and no party machine. If she wins in November, she'll be the first Dominican woman ever elected to Congress.

In this episode of Immigrantly, Saadia Khan goes beyond the headlines with Darializa: growing up the...

The Supreme Court just upheld birthright citizenship, striking down Trump's executive order in a 6-3 ruling that leans directly on a case 130 years in the making. We're re-releasing our deep dive into Wong Kim Ark — the Chinese American son of immigrants who won this exact fight at the Supreme Court in 1898 — because Chief Justice Roberts built this week's decision on Wong's story, by name.

In this episode: the history of the 14th Amendment, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Julia Lynch's 1844 citizenship case, and how "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" has been the most contested phrase in American immigration law...

Sharing a special episode this week from the More Muslim podcast. Reporter Tanita Rahmani realizes a small detail—blue ink instead of black on a marriage contract—means her marriage was never legally registered. That revelation sends her on a personal and investigative journey into the legal gray zone where many Muslim marriages exist: recognized by faith, but invisible to the law. From overlooked paperwork in New York to courtroom battles in the UK, this episode unpacks what happens when a nikkah isn’t enough, and asks: who decides if a marriage is a marriage? You can hear other episode...

There's a voting bloc large enough to decide 126 congressional races and most of it isn't showing up. In this episode, Saadia Khan breaks down data on naturalized citizens, immigrant voter turnout, and civic participation in America, and makes the case that the ballot is one of the most powerful tools immigrants have but aren't using. From New York's 2026 primary to the $383 billion immigrants pay in taxes every year, this is an unfiltered look at belonging, power, and why "be grateful you were let in" was never the deal.

You can connect...

What does it really mean to belong, and what happens when belonging feels like betrayal?

Beatriz Nour has lived this question. Born in France, raised between Brazil and Egypt, and based in Dubai for nearly a decade, she's the creator of the podcast InBetweenish and someone who knows firsthand what it costs to reject your heritage, and what it takes to slowly find your way back to it.

In this conversation, Beatriz and Saadia Khan go deep on the kind of identity work that doesn't show up on a visa application: the grief of cultural...

Saadia Khan sits down with Raj Goyle, whose parents came from India with a few dollars and a medical degree. His mom was the only female OB in Wichita shut out by the establishment, so she built her own referral network with Filipino and Vietnamese immigrant doctors. Raj took a different path: civil rights lawyer, ACLU after 9/11, state legislator, tech founder. Now he's in New York challenging a 20-year incumbent for State Comptroller.

And he's got receipts: the current office is spending $1 billion in Wall Street fees that aren't growing your pension. It's proactively buying Palantir stock...

His Instagram bio says it all: "Just a dude working on political stuff."

Charlie Goldensohn grew up in San Francisco's Mission District with a Marxist activist father and a Planned Parenthood director for a mother. He went on to work for Senator Dianne Feinstein, became Dr. Jill Biden's digital director, served in the White House, and worked on the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign. Then Democrats lost, and something in him snapped.

He pointed a camera at himself, started walking, and started talking. Within four months, 200,000 followers. Today, over 359,000.

In this episode...

On the eve of Eid ul-Adha, host Saadia Khan reflects on the San Diego mosque shooting that killed three men during prayer — and the Instagram comment calling Islam a "bloody demonic cult" that followed. In this raw narration episode, Saadia connects the dots between normalized anti-Muslim rhetoric, political silence, and the violence it enables. From her daughter being called "queen of Taliban" in sixth grade to being interrogated in an ER while in pain, she shares what it actually costs to be Muslim in America — and why, despite all of it, Muslims will still show up for Eid tomorrow. A mu...

Your favorite museum might be built on stolen goods. Nicole Dowd works inside the Smithsonian,  and she's not here to defend it. Saadia Khan sits down with Nicole to break it all down.  As Head of Public Programs at the National Museum of Asian Art, she's sitting with the uncomfortable truth: Western museums have a colonial problem, and a fresh coat of "inclusivity" paint won't fix it. We get into repatriation, who really has access to art, the model minority myth, and what it means to be Korean, adopted, and suddenly surrounded by Korean treasures every day at work.

What does it look like when someone walks away from a prestigious career, on principle, and comes back fighting? Chuck Park did exactly that. A son of Korean immigrants who sold T-shirts on Canal Street, he rose to become a U.S. diplomat, then resigned in 2019 after the El Paso mass shooting and published his letter in The Washington Post. Now he's running a 100% grassroots campaign for Congress in New York's 6th District — Queens against a seven-term incumbent. No corporate PACs. No AIPAC money. No focus-grouped talking points.

In this conversation, Saadia sits down with Chuck Park to...

Immigrant life in New York City looks glamorous from the outside, but what happens when you arrive in January with snow up to your knees, no work permit, and no roadmap for who you're supposed to become?

In this episode, host Saadia sits down with Laura Peruchi, a Brazilian journalist, content creator, podcaster, and one of New York City's most trusted voices for immigrants navigating life in a new country. Laura is the host of Transplants, a podcast about women thriving in new roots abroad, and the writer behind The Tiny Apple, a newsletter about New York...

Apply for the Vilcek Foundation Creative Promise Awards in Culinary Arts to win $50,000 in unrestricted grant money. Click on ⁠⁠Vilcek.org⁠⁠ for more information.

When we first sat down with Zainab Hasnain — DJ, producer, and writer FKA ZEEMUFFIN — back in 2022, she was already doing something remarkable: carving out space as a Pakistani immigrant woman in one of the most male-dominated creative industries in New York City. We're re-releasing this conversation now because a lot has changed since then, and we think it's worth revisiting.

Since this episode was recorded, Zainab has played Boiler Room, Governors Ball, and Gl...

Apply for the Vilcek Foundation Creative Promise Awards in Culinary Arts to win $50,000 in unrestricted grant money. Click on ⁠Vilcek.org⁠ for more information.

What does it feel like to leave your faith at the door, not because you're ashamed, but because you're exhausted?

In this episode of Immigrantly, host Saadia Khan sits down with Salman Khan, a journalist, composer, and Executive Producer of More Muslim, a narrative podcast that tells Muslim stories from the inside out.

Salman grew up Pakistani in Qatar, moved to New York in his late twen...

Apply for the Vilcek Foundation Creative Promise Awards in Culinary Arts to win $50,000 in unrestricted grant money. Click on Vilcek.org for more information

What do you do with grief for something that never was?

Helena de Groot spent years circling one of the most quietly radical questions a person can ask: whether or not to have a child. The result was Creation Myth — an 8-part audio memoir for CBC that became a Tribeca Festival Official Selection, landed on the New York Times Modern Love podcast, and earned praise from Death, Sex & Mo...

What does it really mean to do good, and who gets to decide?

Saadia sits down with Dr. Rhea Rahman, an anthropologist at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and the author of Racializing the Umma: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown, and White. After more than a decade embedded with Islamic Relief, the largest Muslim NGO in the West, Dr. Rahman asks the questions most of us avoid: when Muslim organizations fly across the world to help, whose definition of "help" are they using?

The episode gets into:

The "good Muslim" trap-how Islamic charities are pressured...

We love to romanticize food as a universal connector. But behind every plate is a story of power, privilege, and who gets to define what's "authentic."

We're bringing this one back because it hits harder than ever. Chef, food activist, and Studio ATAO founder Jenny Dorsey joins Saadia Khan to expose the uncomfortable truths about race, class, colonialism, and the politics of food. From childhood shame to the myth of fine dining, this is a raw conversation about who controls the narrative and who gets left out.

With SNAP cuts hitting millions, food insecurity rising...

How do you let yourself celebrate Eid when the world feels like it's falling apart? In this solo episode, host Saadia Khan reflects on the guilt and tension that came up this Eid and what it means to hold joy and grief at the same time. She unpacks two traps most of us fall into (performing grief vs. total compartmentalization), and makes the case that the two aren't opposites. This one is for anyone who has ever felt guilty for having a good moment or felt torn between living their life and staying awake to the world.

...

What if reading the right book or watching the right film could transform how you see the world, the same way psychedelics do?

In this episode, Saadia Khan sits down with Ramzi Fawaz, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, queer theorist, comic book scholar, and host of 'Nerd from the Future'. Ramzi's upcoming book “How to Think Like a Multiverse” makes a bold argument: that the humanities' art, literature, and media can function as psychedelic therapy, cracking open the way we think, feel, and relate to one another.

But this conv...

Jonnie Park was born in Argentina to Korean parents, crossed the US-Mexico border undocumented at age three, carried by a mother with two toddlers and nothing but courage, and grew up in Koreatown, Los Angeles, caught between Korean, Latino, and Black American culture.

He became one of the only Asian battle rappers in history to gain mainstream notoriety, starred in Run DMC, appeared in Awkafina is Nora from Queens, voiced a character in Raya and the Last Dragon, and now he's written a memoir, Spit: A Life in Battles, which drops on April 14th.<...

Today, we’re bringing you a special feed drop from ReCurrent, a podcast from the Getty that explores how art, history, and culture shape the world around us.

In this episode of ReCurrent, host Jaime Roque takes us back to 1980s Los Angeles, when civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua sent hundreds of thousands of people north and helped turn LA into “Little Central America.” With professor and longtime participant Rubén Martínez as our guide—someone who lived through this moment firsthand—we follow the Sanctuary Movement as churches quietly, and then publicly, open their d...

Perfection is overrated.

In this episode of Immigrantly, Saadia Khan sits down with Iranian-American podcaster Sheila Kazan (Small Talk with Sheila) to talk rom-com heroines, immigrant identity, the truth about Iran beyond headlines, and why your next pivot might be your best move.

They explore:

It's smart, funny, and refreshingly honest.

Listen now.

Join us in creating new intellectual engagement for our audi...

When Bad Bunny takes the stage in Spanish, millions celebrate.

But for many Puerto Ricans, it lands as something deeper: visibility, resistance, and a reminder of a history the United States still struggles to face.

In this episode of Immigrantly, Saadia Khan sits down with Becca Ramos, creator of Welcome to El Barrio, (new episodes release every Tuesday) to discuss colonialism, diaspora, and the complicated politics of calling yourself Puerto Rican—not Puerto Rican American.

Becca shares what it meant to grow up Afro-Latina in Texas, feeling too Black in some rooms, not La...

What does migration do to the heart, not just the body?

In this deeply intimate conversation, award-winning writer Reyna Grande joins host Saadia Khan to discuss her latest book, Migrant Heart, her undocumented childhood, language loss, family trauma, and the emotional inheritance of migration. Reyna reflects on shame, resilience, motherhood, and how writing became a way to release what she once carried silently.

The episode explores the hidden emotional costs of immigration, love, identity, belonging, and healing beyond borders, paperwork, and politics.

Join us...

This coverage was made possible by a grant from URL Collective, a non-profit supporting local diverse media

In this reflection episode of Borderly, host and journalist Mario Carrillo returns to the U.S.–Mexico border that shaped his life to ask what the border really is and what it has asked of those who live with it.

Through deeply personal stories, Mario reflects on proposing to his wife while overlooking Ciudad Juárez, navigating a nearly seven-year immigration process, and crossing the border together for her final visa interview after decades of separation from her cou...