I've learned...

“I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life. I've learned that making a "living" is not the same thing as making a "life." I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back. I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one. I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I've learned that I still have a lot to learn. I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

REMEMBER

REMEMBER

September 1, 2000

One woman complained to a friend that she couldn't remember anything from one day to the next.

"Let me get this straight," he said. "You can't remember anything from one day to the next? How long has this been going on?"

She said, "How long has what been going on?"

If your memory is not what you would like it to be, it may help to focus on the few things you really need to remember.

• Remember that your presence is a present to the world.
  
  
• Remember that you are a unique and unrepeatable creation.
  
  
• Remember that your life can be what you want it to be.
  
  
• Remember to take the days just one at a time.
  
  
• Remember to count your blessings, not your troubles.
  
  
• Remember that you'll make it through whatever comes along.
  
  
• Remember that most of the answers you need are within you.
  
  
• Remember those dreams waiting to be realized.
  
  
• Remember that decisions are too important to leave to chance.
  
  
• Remember to always reach for the best that is within you.
  
  
• Remember that nothing wastes more energy than worry.
  
  
• Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
  
  
• Remember that the longer you carry a grudge, the heavier it gets.
  
  
• Remember not to take things too seriously.
  
  
• Remember to laugh.
  
  
• Remember that a little love goes a long way.
  
  
• Remember that a lot goes forever.
  
  
• Remember that happiness is more often found in giving than getting.
  
  
• Remember that life's treasures are people, not things.
  
  
• Remember that miracles can still happen.

--- Author Unknown --- Sent in by Andrew Ho --- Malaysia

TABLE SET FOR TWO

TABLE SET FOR TWO

March 1, 2000

A woman, by her husband's bed,
Could only watch as he slowly died.
With tears streaming down her face she cried,
"Are You here God? Tell me why?!"

"Sweetheart", her husband uttered,
"I have something I want to say to you...
Remember that night I asked for your hand,
At that table just set for two?"

"Of course I do," she replied,
"That was the happiest day of my life.
You were so nervous that you cut your steak,
Using the butter knife!"

He wiped the tears from her tired eyes,
Kissed her hand and then gently smiled.
"Remember the talks on those long walks,
When it seemed we'd go for miles?"

She grinned at him as she touched his face.
"Yes, so please don't ever leave me!"
"I won't my love," he softly replied,
"And so there's something I want you to see."

With all the strength that he had left,
He took a picture off the bedroom stand.
"When I'm gone please look at this,"
As he placed it in her God-sent hand.

She never got to say good-bye,
As her husband had passed away that night,
But she had the picture that he'd given her,
And to this she forever held tight.

While years have passed,
The yellowed photograph reminds her of his smile
And the talks and those long walks,
When it seemed they'd go for miles.

The picture is of him and her,
The one that led to her saying, "I do."
It was taken by a waiter one night,
At that table just set for two.
--- Copyright © 2000 Brian G. Jett

what is your attitude like?

Twelve Points On Attitude

1. It is your attitude at the beginning of a task more than anything else that will determine your success or failure.
   
   
2. It is your attitude towards life that will determine life's attitude towards you. Despite many people's belief to the contrary, life plays no favorites.
   
   
3. You control your attitude. If you are negative it is because you have decided to be negative and not because of other people or circumstances.
   
   
4. Act as if you have a good attitude. Remember actions trigger feelings just as feelings trigger actions.
   
   
5. Before a person can achieve the kind of results he wants, he must first become that person. He must then think, walk, talk, act and conduct himself in all of his affairs, as would the person he wishes to become.
   
   
6. Treat everybody as the most important person in the world.
   
   
7. Attitudes are based on assumptions. In order to change attitudes one must first change one's assumptions.
   
   
8. Develop the attitude that there are more reasons why you should succeed than reasons why you should fail.
   
   
9. When you are faced with a problem, adopt the attitude that you can and will solve it.
   
   
10. We become what we think about. Control your thoughts and you will control your life.
    
    
11. Radiate the attitude of confidence, of well being, of a person who knows where he is going. You will then find good things happening to you right away.
    
    
12. In order to develop a good attitude, take charge first thing in the morning. Do you say, "Good morning, Lord" or "Good Lord, morning?"

Read these twelve points every day for the next thirty days
and see how your life changes.

ATTITUDES ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN FACTS

--- Sent in by Helene Gerber --- Western Cape, South Africa

http://www.motivateus.com/stories/points.htm

Against The Grain

Against The Grain

Too many people to me have implored
Not to travel down the lonely road
They have said their advice I should heed
For I am not likely to succeed
The risks are too difficult to manage
The damage too hard to salvage

My aspirations to them are not wise
For I will fall and never rise
My actions will lead to eternal doom
My tender life never to bloom
But do they consider what I feel
That the calling is living and real

Do I have to travel the path wide
So that we are all on the same side
Does it mean on my own I cannot stand
If I don't yield to their numerous demands

So I choose to ignore what they say
I shall travel through the narrow way
Hoping for the best and armed for the worst
I shall fight any challenging task
With faith, courage and confidence
I aim for nothing less than excellence

I want to prove that it is you yearn
If you believe you can it will be done
And it wont be a bad idea after all
To do that which truly makes you feel whole

--- Copyright © 2011 Sofina M.Nelsoni 

http://www.motivateus.com/stories/against-the-grain.htm

Iphone is the new blood diamond...

Prologue.

Ira Glass

OK, I am holding a new iPhone 4S in my hand. This is the one that you can talk to, and it talks back. It's a program called Siri. So let's try this. I'm just going to hold it up to the microphone here and push a button.

Ira Glass

Siri, where do you come from?

Siri Software

I, Siri, was designed by Apple in California.

Ira Glass

Where were you manufactured?

Siri Software

I'm not allowed to say.

Ira Glass

Why?

Siri Software

Good question. Anything else I can do for you?

Ira Glass

Can I say I love especially "I am not allowed to say," because it implies that Siri somehow knows the answer, but she's just not allowed to tell me. Which is insane, because she's a machine. Especially because-- flip over the phone-- right here on the back it's printed, assembled in China. Which we all know anyway. It's not like this is some big secret. We all know that stuff is made in China. Our phones, our computers, our clothes, our household goods.
A couple weeks ago I saw this one-man show where this guy did something on stage I thought was really kind of amazing. He took this fact that we all already know, right, this fact that our stuff is made overseas in maybe not the greatest working conditions, and he made the audience actually feel something about that fact. Which is really quite a trick. You really have to know how to tell a story to be able to pull something like that off.
And I bring this up because today we are excerpting that story here on the radio show. The guy's name is Mike Daisey, and he makes his living doing monologues on stage. He's been doing that for years, though you're going to hear in this story that he turns himself into an amateur reporter during the course of the story, using some investigative techniques once he gets going I think very few reporters would ever try, and finding lots of stuff I hadn't heard or seen anywhere else, not like this.
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Mike Daisey takes us where Siri fears to tread. What you are about to hear is an excerpt of Mike Daisey's show which he adapted for the radio and performed for a small audience. Here is Mike Daisey.

Act One. Mister Daisey Goes to China.

Mike Daisey

My only hobby is technology. I love technology. I love everything about it. I love looking at technology. I love comparing one piece of technology with another. I love reading rumors about technology that doesn't exist yet. I love browsing technology. I love buying technology. I love opening technology. Even when it's in that bubble packaging, I love opening it. I love the smell of a new piece of technology, that sort of burnt PVC smell when you run electricity through it for the first time. I love that.
And of all the kinds of technology that I love in the world, I love the technology that comes from Apple the most, because I am an Apple aficionado. I'm an Apple partisan. I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm a worshiper in the cult of Mac. I have been to the house of Jobs. I have walked the stations of his cross. I have knelt before his throne.
And like so many of you who may be members of this religion with me, you may know that it can be difficult at times to keep the faith. And I have strayed now and again. In the late '90s I did sleep with a Windows system or two. But who didn't, really? But for the most part, I have been faithful.
But I do think it's important to understand where I sit in that hierarchy of Apple geeks for the purposes of our story. And so the best way I know to describe it is to say that I am at the level of geekishness where to relax after performances like this one, sometimes I will go back to my apartment and I will field strip my MacBook Pro into its 43 component pieces. I will clean them with compressed air, and I will put them back together again. It soothes me.
So the truth is I never would have questioned this religion. I never would have looked deeply at this belief system, because it gave me so much pleasure, if it hadn't been for the pictures. One day I was relaxing on the internet, which for me means reading Macintosh news sites, which I should specify have no actual news in them. They're instead filled with rumors about what Apple will do next, written exclusively by people who have no goddamn idea what Apple will do next. But for some reason I find this soothing.
So I'm reading one of those news sites when this article gets posted. And it's about the fact that someone bought an iPhone, and when they got it, it wasn't blank. It had information on it from inside the factory. And in fact in the camera roll, there were pictures on it from inside the factory. And they posted these pictures into the article. And I looked at these pictures, and they took my breath away.
They're not very good pictures, you know? They're just testing that the camera on the phone works. They're not of anything. But I'll never forget them. There were four of them. First there was a stack of pallets, wooden pallets stacked up. And the second one was the edge of a conveyor belt. And the third was totally out of focus. It could just be an enormous space. And the fourth was a woman. She doesn't know her picture's being taken. She's looking off in another direction. She's wearing a clean suit. She has no expression on her face.
And I looked at these pictures, and I downloaded these pictures to my desktop, and I put them in a folder on my desktop. And in the weeks and months that followed, I found myself returning to them again and again almost compulsively. I would mouse over there, and I would fan them across my desktop, and I would look at them. Who are these people?
Because you have to understand, I have dedicated an embarrassing amount of my life to the study of these machines. I'm an amateur, but I'm a dedicated amateur. I understand as best I can how the hardware works, and how the software rests on the hardware. And in all that time, until I saw those pictures, it was only then I realized I had never thought ever in a dedicated way about how they were made.
It's actually hard now to reconstruct what I did think. I think what I thought is they were made by robots. I got an image in my mind that I now realize I just stole from a 60 Minutes story about Japanese automotive plants. I just copy and pasted that. I was like, pwop, Command-V, pwop. It looks like that, but smaller, because they're laptops.
I started to think how if this phone has four pictures on it taken by hand in testing, then every iPhone has four pictures on it taken in testing, every iPhone in the world, by hand. I started to think, and that's always a problem for any religion, the moment when you begin to think.
Shenzhen is a city without history. The people who live there will tell you that, because 31 years ago Shenzhen was a small town. It had little reed huts, little reed walkways between the huts. The men would fish in the late afternoon. I hear it was lovely.
Today Shenzhen is a city of 14 million people. It is larger than New York City. Depending on how you count it, it's the third largest city in all of China. It is the place where almost all of your crap comes from.
And the most amazing thing is, almost no one in America knows its name. Isn't that remarkable that there's a city where almost all of our crap comes from, and no one knows its name? I mean, we think we do know where our crap comes from. We're not ignorant. We think our crap comes from China, right? Kind of a generalized way. China.
But it doesn't come from China. It comes from Shenzhen. It's a city. It's a place.
And I am there in an elevator, going down to the lobby of my hotel to meet with my translator, Kathy. Kathy is fascinating. She's very small. She has these sort of rounded shoulders. And she has these glasses that are way too big for her face, so they keep sliding down, and she has to push them up assiduously. She also has this sort of unnerving habit that when she is listening to you, she leans forward indeterminately, so you really get the feeling that if you were to talk to her for long enough, she would actually fall into your chest, and you would have to pick her back up again.
We go outside and get into a taxi and begin to drive through the streets of downtown Shenzhen. Shenzhen looks like Blade Runner threw up on itself. LEDs, neon, and 15-story-high video walls covered in ugly Chinese advertising. It's everything they promised us the future would be.
We get out to the edge of the core of Shenzhen and we come to the gates. Because 31 years ago, when Deng Xiaoping carved this area off from the rest of China with a big red pen, he said, this will be the special economic zone. And he made a deal with the corporations. He said listen, use our people. Do whatever you want to our people. Just give us a modern China. And the corporations took that deal, and they squeezed and they squeezed. And what they got was the Shenzhen we find today.
And on the other side of the gates it's the factory zone. And whew, it's like going from the Eloi to the Morlocks, everything changes. I've never seen anything like it. Everything is under construction. Every road has a bypass. Every bypass has a bypass. It's bypasses all the way down.
We pull onto an elevated expressway. We begin to drive under a silver poison sky. Because the air in Shenzhen-- it's not good in Hong Kong, but when you get to Shenzhen, you can actually feel it like a booted foot pressing down on your chest. But it's amazing what human beings will get used to, isn't it? Because after you're there just a few days [DEEP INHALATION AND EXHALATION] you hardly even notice it at all.
And as we're driving, we're passing by arcology after arcology, these immense buildings that are so large, they're redefining my sense of scale moment by moment. And then our taxi driver takes an exit ramp, and he stops, because the exit ramp stops in midair. There's some rebar sticking out and an 85-foot drop to the ground. The only sign that the exit ramp ends is a single solitary orange cone. It's sitting there as if to say, we're busy, be alert.
We back back onto the expressway and begin to drive again. And then Kathy turns to me, pushes up her glasses, and says, excuse me, but I do not think this is going to work. And I hasten to assure her that it will work, but I'm talking out of my ass, because I don't know that it's going to work. In fact, I have a lot of evidence that this is not going to work. In fact, all the journalists I have talked to in Hong Kong when I told them about my plan, you can actually see them wrestling with just how to express to me just how totally [BLEEP] my plan is.
My plan is this. We are in a taxi right now in the factory zone. We are driving on our way to Foxconn. Foxconn, a single company, makes a staggering amount of the electronics you use every day. They make electronics for Apple, Dell, Nokia, Panasonic, HP, Samsung, Sony, Lenovo, a third of all of it. That's Foxconn. And at this plant they make all kinds of things, including MacBook Pros and iPhones and iPads.
And so my plan is to take this taxi to the main gate, and then I'm going to get out of the taxi with my translator. And then my plan is to stand at the main gate and talk to anybody who wants to talk to me.
And when I tell journalists in Hong Kong about my plan, they say, that's different. That's not really how we usually do things in China. That's really a bad idea. That's really a bad idea.
But I don't know what else to do. I have been trying to do things the right way. I have been working with a fixer for the BBC. I can't get anywhere. All the doors are closed. And you reach a certain point when you realize you may need to obey your natural inclination. And at the end of the day, I am large, I am American, and I am wearing a goddamn Hawaiian shirt. And we are going to the main gates.
But I have to admit, when we get there, my resolve wavers because the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen is enormous. The Foxconn plant in Shenzhen has 430,000 workers. That can be a difficult number to conceptualize. I find it's useful to instead think about how there are more than 20 cafeterias at the plant. And then you just have to understand that workers told me that these cafeterias can hold up to 10,000 people. So now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that seats 10,000 people. I'll wait.
And I get to the main gate, and I get out of the taxi with my translator. And the first thing I see at the gates are the guards. And the guards look pissed. They look really pissed, and they are carrying guns. And I look back at the taxi, which is now pulling away.
And I'm involuntarily reminded of a Google News alert that popped into my inbox a few weeks earlier about a Reuters photographer who was taking pictures not at the Foxconn plant, but near the Foxconn plant. And Foxconn security went out, scooped him up, and beat him before releasing him.
And I look up past the gates and the guards. I look up at the buildings, these immense buildings. They are so enormous. And along the edges of each enormous building are the nets, because right at the time that I am making this visit, there's been an epidemic of suicides at the Foxconn plant. Week after week, worker after worker has been climbing all the way up to the tops of these enormous buildings and then throwing themselves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner, not thinking very much about just how bad this makes Foxconn look. Foxconn's response to month after month of suicides has been to put up these nets.
It's shift change, and the workers are coming out of the plant. And I'm standing there under the hot monsoon sun and the gaze of the guards. I feel ridiculous. I look absurd in this landscape. I mean, I wouldn't talk to me. And Kathy surprises me. Who knew? She turns out to be a spitfire. She runs right over to the very first worker, grabs them by the arm, drags them over to us. We start talking, and in short order, we cannot keep up.
First there's one worker waiting, then there's two, then there's three. Before long the guards are like, er? Er? And we move further and further away from the plant, but the line just gets longer and longer. Everyone wants to talk. We start taking them three or four at a time. We still can't keep up. Everyone wants to talk. It's like they were coming to work every day thinking, you know what would be great? It would be so great if somebody who uses all this crap we make every day all day long, it would be so great if one of those people came and asked us what was going on. Because we would have stories for them.
And I'm just ad hoc-ing questions. I'm asking the questions you would expect. What village in China are you from? How long have you been working at Foxconn? What do you do at the plant? How do you find your job? What would you change at Foxconn if you could change anything?
That question always gets them. They always react like a bee has flown into their faces, and then they say something to Kathy. And Kathy says, he says he never thought of that before. Every time, every time.
And the stories are fascinating. I talked to one young woman who works on the iPhone line. She cleans the screens of iPhones by hand in these huge racks, thousands and thousands of them every day. And she shows me how she does it. And I show her my iPhone. And I hand her my iPhone. I take a picture of her holding my iPhone. And I say to her, we'll never know, but you may have cleaned the screen of this iPhone when it came by you on the line. We'll never know. And she, quick as a whip, she takes my phone and she rubs it against her pants. And then she says there, I've cleaned it a second time.
And I say to her, you seem kind of young. How old are you? And she says, I'm 13. And I say, 13? That's young. Is it hard to get work at Foxconn when you're-- and she says oh no. And her friends all agree, they don't really check ages. The outside companies do have inspections, but workers told me Foxconn always knows when there's going to be an inspection. So what they do then, they don't even check ages then. They just pull everyone from the affected line, and then they put the oldest workers they have on that line.
You'd think someone would notice this, you know? I'm telling you that I do not speak Mandarin. I do not speak Cantonese. I have only a passing familiarity with Chinese culture, and to call what I have a passing familiarity is an insult to Chinese culture. I don't know [BLEEP] all about Chinese culture. But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were 14 years old, 13 years old, 12.
Do you really think Apple doesn't know? In a company obsessed with the details, with the aluminum being milled just so, with the glass being fitted perfectly into the case, do you really think it's credible that they don't know? Or are they just doing what we are all doing? Do they just see what they want to see?
Emboldened by my success at Foxconn, I decide to embark on a new plan. But I'm going to need Kathy's help if it's going to work, so I meet with her in the lobby of my hotel. And I say to her, Kathy, now you work with a lot of American businessmen, don't you? And she says, yes, I do. And I say, great, here's what I want you to do. I want you to call all the factories you have connections with, and I want you to call them. And I want you to tell them that I am an American businessman, and that I want to buy whatever they are selling.
And she listens to this, and she says, but you are not a businessman. And I say, that's true, I am not a businessman. And she says, and you aren't going to buy their products. I say, that's true, I'm not going to buy their products. And she says, you will lie to them. And I say, yes Kathy, I'm going to lie to lots of people.
And for a moment I think it isn't going to work. And then you can actually see the idea leap the synaptic gap from a problem to a problem to be solved when she says, you are going to need a lot of business cards.
And two days later we head out into the factory zone. As we come to each factory, Kathy briefs me on what it is they make and what it is I have said I am going to buy. The factories are all different, but really they're more similar than different. There's always gates and guards. When you get past those, there's always a lawn, big and green and plush. No one walks on it. No one uses it. You go into the lobbies. The lobby is these huge empty Kubrickian spaces, totally empty except for a tiny little desk for the receptionist.
And you cross the huge, empty lobby to the tiny little desk. You introduce yourselves, and then the executives always come down in a gaggle, all together. They pick you up, and you go up together to a conference room.
After the PowerPoint, we head down to the factory floor, industrial spaces with 20,000, 25,000, 30,000 workers in a single enormous space. They can exert a kind of eerie fascination. There's a beauty to industrialization on such a massive scale. You don't have to deny it. There's a wonder to seeing so much order laid out in front of you. And people are walking around, whispering statistics in your ear.
It's easy to slip into a kind of Stalinist wet dream, but I try to subvert that by locking onto actual faces. They take me up and down the aisles. And the first thing I notice is the silence. It's so quiet. At Foxconn you're demerited if you ever speak on the line.
At no factory I went to did anyone ever speak on the line, but this is deeper than that. As a creature of the First World, I expect a factory making complex electronics will have the sound of machinery, but in a place where the cost of labor is effectively zero, anything that can be made by hand is made by hand. No matter how complex your electronics are, they are assembled by thousands and thousands of tiny little fingers working in concert. And in those vast spaces, the only sound is the sound of bodies in constant, unending motion.
And it is constant. They work a Chinese hour, and a Chinese hour has 60 Chinese minutes, and a Chinese minute has 60 Chinese seconds. It's not like our hour. What's our hour now, 46 minutes? You know, you have a bathroom break, and you have a smoke break. If you don't smoke, there's a yoga break. This doesn't look anything like that. This looks like nothing we've seen in a century.
They work on the line, and the lines only move as fast as its slowest member, so each person learns how to move perfectly as quickly as possible. If they can't do it, there are people behind them watching them. And there are cameras watching both sets of people, and people watching the cameras. They lock it down. They sharpen it to a fine, sharp edge every hour, and those hours are long.
The official work day in China is eight hours long, and that's a joke. I never met anyone who had even heard of an eight-hour shift. Everyone I talked to worked 12-hour shifts standard, and often much longer than that, 14 hours a day, 15 hours a day. Sometimes when there's a hot new gadget coming out-- you know what the [BLEEP] I'm talking about-- sometimes it pegs up to 16 hours a day. And it just sits there for weeks and months at a time, month after month after month, straight 16's, sometimes longer than that.
While I'm in-country, a worker at Foxconn dies after working a 34-hour shift. I wish I could say that's exceptional, but it's happened before. I only mention it because it actually happened while I was there.
And I go to the dormitories. I'm a valuable potential future customer. They will show me anything I ask to see. The dormitories are cement cubes, 12-foot by 12-foot. And in that space there are 13 beds, 14 beds. I count 15 beds. They're stacked up like Jenga puzzle pieces all the way up to the ceiling. The space between them is so narrow, none of us would actually fit in them. They have to slide into them like coffins.
There are cameras in the rooms. There are cameras in the hallways. There are cameras everywhere. And why wouldn't there be? You know, when we dream of a future where the regulations are washed away and the corporations are finally free to sail above us, you don't have to dream about some sci-fi dystopian Blade Runner/1984 bull [BLEEP]. You can go to Shenzhen tomorrow. They're making your crap that way today.
When I leave the factory, as I can feel myself being rewritten from the inside out, the way I see everything is starting to change. I keep thinking, how often do we wish more things were handmade? Oh, we talk about that all the time, don't we? "I wish it was like the old days. I wish things had that human touch." But that's not true. There are more handmade things now than there have ever been in the history of the world.
Everything is handmade. I know. I have been there. I have seen the workers laying in parts thinner than human hair. One after another after another. Everything is handmade.
I'm at a restaurant in the factory zone, seated at a table with Kathy. And this aphorism is running through my head over and over again-- I can't remember who said it originally-- that paranoia is not paranoia when they're actually out to get you.
And I go through my checklist again. I've gone through my pockets and found every slip of paper with an email address or a phone number, and I've destroyed all of these. I've hidden my paper notes off of my person, and I've erased everything on my laptop. And anything I can't erase is on an encrypted partition that I hope is encrypted enough. I've done all of these things because I am in this restaurant to meet with a union.
Because there are unions in China. There are the ones that are fronts for the Communist Party, and then there are actual unions interested in labor reform. They're called secret unions, because in China, if you're caught being a member of or affiliating with a union like that, you go to prison. You go to prison for many years. And that's why I've had to take these precautions.
And getting this meeting involved climbing a ladder of associations, going to meeting after meeting, each step along the way just making good my intentions, just being clear that I am a storyteller. Just want to hear people's stories. Just want to hear what they have to say.
And the union organizers come in and sit down, and it's awkward at first. And then they begin to tell me about the situation on the ground. There is so much turmoil in southern China, so much happening just beneath the surface. They tell me about the two Honda plants that have gone on strike in the north of the province, and how they helped organize that strike. And I think about what it would mean to go on strike in a country where even being a member of a union can get you thrown in prison, what it would take to be pushed to that point.
And I feel provincial saying this, but it's true. I can't stop thinking about how young these people are. They don't even look college age. They look younger than that. And I say to them, how do you know who's right to work with you? How do you find people to help you organize?
And this sort of breaks the narrative, and for a moment they look their age. And they look at each other bashfully, and they say well, we talk a lot. We talk all the time. We have lots of meetings, and we meet at coffeehouses and different Starbucks in Guangzhou. And we exchange papers, and sometimes there are books. And it's so clear in this moment that they are making this up as they go along.
Then the workers start coming in. They come in in twos and threes and fours. They come in all day. It's an eight, nine-hour day. I interview all of them. Some of them are in groups.
There's a group that's talking about hexane. N-hexane is an iPhone screen cleaner. It's great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can't even pick up a glass.
I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It's like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine. And you need to know that this is eminently avoidable. If these people were rotated monthly on their jobs, this would not happen.
But that would require someone to care. That would require someone at Foxconn and the other suppliers to care. That would require someone at Apple and Dell and the other customers to care. Currently no one in the ecosystem cares enough to even enforce that. And so when you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined. And when they are truly ruined, once they will not do anything further, you know what we do with a defective part in a machine that makes machine. We throw it away.
And the thing that unites all these people is that they are all the kind of people who would join a union in a place where joining a union can destroy your life. I talk with one woman. She's very birdlike, very nervous. And she just wants to explain to me how it is that she came to be in a union, because she never thought she would ever be in a union. It's just that she couldn't get her company to pay her overtime. And she complained and complained. This went on for weeks and for months.
And Kathy says to her kind of sharply, she says, you should have gone to the labor board. That's what they're there for. You should have gone to the labor board. And the woman says, I did. I went to the labor board, and I told them about my problem. And they took down my name and my address and my company, and they took my name and they put it on the blacklist, and they fired me. And then she shows me a copy of the blacklist. A friend of hers in Accounting photocopied it and snuck it out to her. She gives it to me. I hand it to Kathy to translate.
You know, in a fascist country run by thugs, you don't have to be subtle. You can say exactly what you mean. The sheet is very clear that it comes from the labor board. And it says right across the top, the following is a list of troublemakers. If any of them are found in your employ, dismiss them immediately. And then there's just column after column after column of names, page after page after page of them. Kathy's hand trembles as she translates it.
I talk to an older man with leathery skin. His right hand is twisted up into a claw. It was crushed in a metal press at Foxconn. He says he didn't receive any medical attention, and it healed this way. And then when he was too slow, they fired him. Today he works at a woodworking plant. He says he likes it better. He says the people are nicer and the hours are more reasonable. He works about 70 hours a week.
And I ask him what he did when he was at Foxconn, and says he worked on the metal enclosures for the laptops, and he worked on the iPad. And when he says this, I reach into my satchel, and I take out my iPad. And when he sees it, his eyes widen, because one of the ultimate ironies of globalism, at this point there are no iPads in China. Even though every last one of them was made at factories in China, they've all been packaged up in perfectly minimalist Apple packaging and then shipped across the seas, that we can all enjoy them.
He's never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen, and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view, and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand, and the icons slide back and forth. And he says something to Kathy, and Kathy says, "he says it's a kind of magic."
It's a long day. At the end of it I'm packing up everything to go, and Kathy says something to me out of nowhere. She says, do you think these people are mentally ill? Do you think it is possible they are making all this up? And I look at her as though for the first time, because I mean, let's be clear. She's my Chinese worker. I pay her for her time. I don't think about her very much at all. But now I really look at her. She is exactly who all these workers I've been talking to for weeks, she is exactly what they are all dreaming that their children will one day be. She has a good life in the center of Shenzhen for her, for her family. What does this look like to her?
I say to her, what do you think? Do you think they're mentally ill? And she suddenly looks very tired. She takes off her glasses, and she rubs the bridge of her nose. And she says, no, I do not think they are mentally ill. It's just that you hear stories, but you do not think it is going to be so much. You know? It's just so much.
And I reach across the table, and I touch her hand. It's the first and last time we will ever touch, I and this woman whose real name I don't even know. I say to her, I know exactly what you mean.

Ira Glass

Mike Daisey performing an excerpt adapted for radio from his one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. After the break, what are we supposed to think of all this? That's in a minute, when Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Act Two. Act One.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, Mr. Daisey goes to the Apple factory. We've arrived at Act Two of our show, in which our subject is actually Act One of our show. And so Act Two of our show, Act One.
When I saw Mike Daisey perform this story on stage, when I left the theater I had a lot of questions. I mean, he's not a reporter, and I wondered, did he get it right? And so we've actually spent a few weeks checking everything that he says in his show. We invited Apple to come onto the program and respond, and they turned us down. We invited Foxconn to come onto the program and respond, and they also said no. Mike, however, was willing to come in and explain his methods at Foxconn's gates and in the factories that he visited.

Mike Daisey

I had talked to about 100 workers, a little over 100, over a number of different days.

Ira Glass

Staying outside the gates?

Mike Daisey

Outside the gates. And I went to about 10 different factories when I was posing.

Ira Glass

When you met with the union workers, how many of those did you meet with?

Mike Daisey

There were three of them.

Ira Glass

And then the workers who came through to meet you?

Mike Daisey

God, there were like 25, 30 throughout the course of the day.

Ira Glass

As for Mike's findings, we have gone through his script and fact checked everything that was checkable. In one instance, we think that his translator may have misunderstood or mistranslated a fact for Mike. He says in his show that workers told him that the cafeterias at Foxconn seat 10,000 people, but based on press accounts, we think that it's possible that they serve 10,000 people, but seat only 4,000 at a time. Foxconn wouldn't answer the question for us directly.
When it comes to the suicide rate at Foxconn, there were about 12 suicides at the Shenzhen plant in 2010. It was actually hard to get the exact number. Some people have pointed out that 12 suicides for 400,000 workers is actually much lower than China's suicide rate as a whole, as China has an unusually high suicide rate of 22 suicides per year per 100,000 people. That would work out to 88 suicides for 400,000 workers. Mike Daisey points out that we don't actually know if these were the only suicides at Foxconn.

Mike Daisey

And the biggest problem is that it isn't the quantity, it's the cluster. If there was any company in America where a sizable chunk of your workforce went up over a period of time, especially close to one another, and killed themselves in the same way very publicly, it would be an enormous news story because it's far outside the norm.

Ira Glass

Overall, we checked with over a dozen people. Those would be journalists who cover these factories, people who work with the electronics industry in China, activists, labor groups, about the working conditions that Mike Daisey describes in his show, and nobody seemed very surprised by them.

Ian Spaulding

Well unfortunately I think some of these conditions sound actually quite common.

Ira Glass

This is Ian Spaulding, who estimates that he has been in or worked with about 1,000 factories throughout China. The company that he founded and runs, INFACT Global Partners, goes into Chinese factories and helps them meet social responsibility standards that are set by Western companies so those companies are ready when outside auditors come and check on working conditions. He has a staff of 45. They do hundreds of factories a year, including electronics.

Ian Spaulding

There are hours in factories that are often too long, and are excessive, and required over time. Things like cramped quarters can also happen, and repetitive motion injuries can be quite common.

Ira Glass

Another thing that Mike Daisey says that's disturbing to hear is he says that the companies will deceive the auditors when the auditors come in. Have you seen that?

Ian Spaulding

Yeah, that actually is quite common, and I think many other people have also exposed this problem.

Ira Glass

Now don't get the wrong impression. Ian Spaulding did have a few quibbles with Mike Daisey. He said that if a worker gets injured and then is fired by his company, he or she can sue the company, and he said that lots of people were doing that these days. He said electronics companies have been improving their handling of toxic chemicals.
And his only real objection to anything that Mike Daisey found had to do with child labor. Ian Spaulding said yes, there definitely is child labor in China, but not at the top tier electronics manufacturers. Other people who we talked to agreed with this. Even people who are critical of Foxconn for all kinds of things agreed with this. He said maybe a stray worker here and there might get in on a borrowed ID, but it is not a widespread problem.

Mike Daisey

Well I don't know if it's a big problem. I just know that I saw it.

Ira Glass

Again, Mike Daisey. He says sure, maybe it's not prevalent.

Mike Daisey

I know that I met people that were there, and I know that I talked to them. I mean, there weren't very many as a proportion of the total group. I talked to more than 100 people. I met five or six who were underage.

Ira Glass

And they were over the course of days?

Mike Daisey

No, they were together in a group.

Ira Glass

So it's basically the girl who you describe who deals with the iPhones--

Mike Daisey

Yes.

Ira Glass

--who wipes off your thing, and then her friends?

Mike Daisey

And then some people that were with her. They seemed like savvy kids, honestly.

Ira Glass

The one source that I could find that backs up Mike on this one at least a little bit is Apple. Apple has released a report stating in the year that Mike was in China, 2010, Apple's own auditors went into 127 facilities around the world that make its products and say they found 91 underage workers. It doesn't say which facilities the workers were at. The report states that Apple helped install systems to verify ages, educated suppliers on recruiting practices, made them return underage workers to school, and made them pay for the kids' education. And then it stopped doing business with one supplier that has 42 underage workers and showed no commitment to addressing the problem.
All this research that we did did fill in some interesting details about working conditions at Foxconn that are not in Mike Daisey's show. There's an advocacy group called SACOM, which is Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior. They're based in Hong Kong. And since the suicides at Foxconn in 2010, they have put out three reports investigating conditions at the company. Each report surveyed over 100 Foxconn workers.
And they even had a researcher go undercover and take a job at the Shenzhen plant. Debby Chan Sze Wan is a project manager at SACOM. The surveys that she did of workers depict a company where many employees have to stand all day long.

Debby Chan Sze Wan

Because there's some research in the industry that workers who stand during work is more efficient than those who sit. And workers, they are regularly yelled by the supervisors. And if they make some mistake then they have to write confession letters, et cetera.

Ira Glass

In your documents, you call this military-style management. Why is that what you call it?

Debby Chan Sze Wan

I think it is the word given by some of the workers.

Ira Glass

According to SACOM's surveys and reports, the wages at Foxconn are not much more than the Chinese minimum wage. SACOM claims that it's only with tons of overtime that the money approaches what SACOM calculates is a decent living wage for a family.
But probably the most surprising thing I learned about Foxconn and other Chinese electronics manufacturers from Debby and from Ian Spaulding had to do with the turnover rate. Ian Spaulding says that it could be 10% to 20% turnover per month. He says it's a huge business problem these days in China.

Ian Spaulding

So you imagine the number of employees that you're hiring and that leave after one week, two weeks, one month on the job, and you're constantly trying to re-hire people into those positions.

Ira Glass

With so many workers quitting, why doesn't that lead to companies changing conditions and raising salaries so they don't have to go through the hassle of hiring new people?

Ian Spaulding

Well that's the good news, is it is. Nowadays a lot of people talk about what should companies' brands, US and European brands, do to make conditions better? And the reality is is that actually what's proving to be more effective is this bottom-up labor market that's emerging where employees are speaking with their feet. By leaving a factory, they're forcing factories to improve wages, improve working conditions, and improving dormitories to make things more attractive for employees.

Ira Glass

When Apple turned down our invitation to come onto today's radio show, in a rather Orwellian gesture they told us that they are 100% transparent-- as they refused to come on the air. They referred us to these reports that they've been issuing every year since 2007 on working conditions in the factories that make their products overseas.
And these reports, I have to say, are remarkable documents. You can find these online at Apple's website. Apple, like many companies, has a code of conduct that suppliers have to commit to before they can do business with them, and each year Apple audits many of the suppliers to make sure that they are complying with the code. If they don't, then there are corrective action plans, and there's training, and there's follow-up audits. It's very elaborate. And if it all fails, Apple stops buying from the supplier. Or that's what they claim, anyway.
Apple monitors pretty much all the working conditions that Mike Daisey talks about in his show. The report covering the period that Mike was in China. Talks about what Apple did in the wake of the suicides at Foxconn. They say they did an independent review. They asked for mental health counselors and other changes, which Apple says Foxconn has implemented.
The report also has a whole section on n-hexane, which workers, not from Foxconn but from another plant, told Mike that they were exposed to, and he talked about it on his show. Apple says that it found 137 workers had adverse health effects after exposure to n-hexane. It says that the supplier using the stuff was told to stop using the chemical, and it's been audited since then to make sure it has happened. Mike Daisey has read these reports.

Mike Daisey

I'm glad Apple does this. It's unfortunate more companies don't do it, and I do respect them for doing it. But it doesn't change the fact that the situation on the ground, even in their own reports, is not good. And then every year the numbers are roughly the same in terms of people who are non-compliant with overtime.

Ira Glass

Yeah, I would say that in the 2010 report, Apple found that only 32% of suppliers that it audited followed its standard about working hours, though Apple doesn't name the companies that they audited in the report.

Mike Daisey

And I really question the wisdom of that. I think that if they have a serious commitment to changing how things are done in the special economic zone in Shenzhen, then they would name those companies, and then those companies would begin to be held responsible.

Ira Glass

As it is, Daisey says, Apple is basically saying, trust us, we're taking care of the problems. But without supplier names, nobody can independently verify any of it. Should we feel weird about the computers and phones we use, all the clothes that we wear that are made in faraway factories in Asia under harsh working conditions?
Leaving Mike Daisey aside for a second, that's the question that all this raises, right? And the mainstream view that you would hear from lots of economists would be no, you shouldn't feel weird. The famously liberal Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics and New York Times columnist, has argued that in places like Indonesia, terrible factories, far, far worse than anything you've heard about here today, they raised the economy. They made everybody better off. Here's a quote from Krugman. "It is the indirect and unintended results of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs. It is not an edifying spectacle, but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful, but nonetheless significantly better."
Another person whose support for sweatshops may surprise you is one of Krugman's colleagues at The New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, quote, "for his powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world's often-forgotten people." Kristof spent years reporting in Asia. He co-wrote a book about the changes going on in China.

Nicholas Kristof

Well I mean, if you look at Shenzhen, for example, in Guangdong where Foxconn is, then there's no doubt that it's been a tremendous benefit, not only to southern China but indeed to much of Asia. It created massive employment opportunities, especially for young women, who frankly didn't have a lot of alternatives. That tended to give women more clout within families, within the community.
My wife's ancestral village is in southern China, not too far from Foxconn. And people in that village went from a really grim kind of lifestyle, basically in the rice paddies. And for them, and indeed for many Chinese, the grimness of factories like Foxconn was better than the grimness of rice paddies.

Ira Glass

There's a passage of your own writing that we emailed you before you came in this morning. Did you get that?

Nicholas Kristof

Yeah, I did.

Ira Glass

Can I ask you to read it?

Nicholas Kristof

Sure, absolutely.

Ira Glass

So this is from a New York Times Magazine article that you wrote in 2000, and the article was called "Two Cheers for Sweatshops."

Nicholas Kristof

14 years ago we moved to Asia and began reporting there. Like most Westerners, we arrived in the region outraged at sweatshops. In time though, we came to accept the view supported by most Asians. In the years since our first conversations there, we've returned many times to Dongguan and the surrounding towns and seen the transformation. Wages have risen from about $50 a month to $250 a month or more today. Factory conditions have improved as businesses have scrambled to attract and keep the best laborers. A private housing market has emerged. A hint of a middle class has appeared, as has China's closest thing to a Western-style independent newspaper, Southern Weekend.

Ira Glass

So you're saying sweatshops are bad, but we should feel OK about it?

Nicholas Kristof

Well, it's a very awkward thing to defend sweatshops, if you will. I mean, I think it's useful to be reminded about how grim the conditions are. But again, I just think that if you try to think how you can fight poverty most effectively, and what has fought it within China, then I think sweatshops are a key part of that answer.

Ira Glass

For that, Mike Daisey says sure, he's heard that argument, sweatshops are just a phase poor countries go through, a phase that all the industrialized countries already went through. But he says, even given that, don't we have some basic obligation as outsiders coming in, to treat the workers the way that our country has already agreed that workers should be treated?

Mike Daisey

It may be true that over the long span of time in 100 years, people will look back and be happy about how things went. But I don't think it's as clean as that. I just want basic labor protections for people. That's entirely compatible with everything that has been flourishing in Shenzhen. It's absolutely compatible to have everything work as it has, but also people are rotated in their factories. It's entirely compatible to have things work as they are now, but there are also independent people outside of individual corporations that inspect without announcement to see that basic labor standards are covered.
It's a really basic thing. It's a basic thing that we fought for in this country. It took 100 years of labor struggles to get to a place where that happened for most workers. Then we exported those jobs overseas, and we didn't send the protections with them. And it's not right.

Ira Glass

Mike Daisey. His one-man show about Apple is going back on stage this month in New York at the Public Theater. The full show has this entire other story line about Steve Jobs that you will have to buy a theater ticket if you want to hear.
[MUSIC - "OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND" BY THE FIVE KEYS]

Credits.

Ira Glass

Well our program was produced today, as always, entirely on Apple computers by Brian Reed and myself with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Production help from Miki Meek and Matt Kielty. Scouting help from Elna Baker. Music help from [? Damian Gray, ?] from Rob [? Geddes. ?]
[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]
Our website, where we have links to information on Apple and on Foxconn, thisamericanlife.org. A note to our Australian listeners-- yes, we are on the radio in Australia. I will be in Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane this month, and there are still tickets available.
This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. Torey, how much money do you make anyway?

Siri Software

I'm not allowed to say.

Ira Glass

And how old are you exactly?

Siri Software

Good question. Anything else I can do for you?

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI, Public Radio International.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/transcript

Sams Valentine

On Valentine’s Day, my eleven-year-old son Sam begged me to allow him to buy his teacher an enormous red heart filled with delectable chocolates. We compromised, and he bought her a smaller but respectably sized heart. On his small budget, $4.99 was a huge investment, and I was touched by his generosity.

Sam has not always loved teachers. He doesn’t yet admit that he likes school, but he does like to hang out in his classroom after three o’clock, and he is excited about some class projects.

Last year, Sam’s most memorable achievement was having the longest “missing assignment” list in the entire fifth grade. He struggled all year to keep his head above the academic sea. Many nights Sam sank into tears of frustration while working his way through another pile of homework.

In defense of his fifth grade teacher, she didn’t really assign two hours of homework each night. Sam was bringing home all of the work he had not finished in class each day. His focus was somewhere else when the other students were doing their class work. He may have traveled to Narnia or Middle Earth or Alagaesia. Wherever he was, it must have been much more interesting than fifth grade because he spent a lot of time there. Sam approached sixth grade with the anticipation of one awaiting a root canal.

I must admit I was concerned when I first met Mrs. Hogan. She was a beginning teacher. She seemed so young and sweet and inexperienced. How was this new teacher going to lift up a boy who had learned to dread school?

As the first weeks of school flew by, the same missing assignment issue reappeared. Then, slowly, it began to disappear. Sam had his assignment notebook filled in every day. Amazed, I wondered aloud which bribe had inspired him. “Mrs. Hogan checks everyone’s notebook every day, Mom.” Sam reported.

As I observed this teacher’s interactions with my son at the end of each day, I realized that Sam’s inattentiveness and disorganization were not the primary things that Mrs. Hogan noticed about him. She recognized Sam as a knowledgeable, capable student who loves to read. He rose to her expectations.

Sam began to do his homework without numerous reminders or a major search through his crowded backpack. He brought home less and less class work. He earned six A’s on his second-quarter report card.

I still don’t know how much of this miracle is due to the magic of maturity and how much is due to the magic of Mrs. Hogan. I do know that my son loves his sixth grade teacher, and I think there is a magic in relationships that can motivate children when nothing else will.

I believe that every child should have at least one teacher whom he absolutely loves and admires. Every child should have a teacher who inspires his best effort. Every child should have a teacher who inspires the purchase of a candy-filled heart on Valentine’s Day.

Kathy Heffernan and her husband are raising three children in Missoula, Montana. They have also helped raise three grown foster sons.

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http://thisibelieve.org/essay/27746/

Reap what you sow...

456:

Reap What You Sow
Transcript

Originally aired 01.27.2012

Note: This American Life is produced for the ear and designed to be heard, not read. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

© 2012 Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass

Prologue.

Ira Glass

One of our radio show's producers, Jonathan, went driving around after the snowstorm this week with this family friend.

Jonathan's Friend

We're heading down into a neighborhood where I started all this. That's when I got my first snow plow. And I think the karma thing started there.

Ira Glass

This guy was working for a school. It was his job to plow the parking lot. And just as a lark, he began to do a few of the neighbors' driveways also. And it totally won people over. It actually made him a friend. It made the school look good with its neighbors.
And then, after that, long after he quit that job, he'd be driving around in the middle of the night, plowing driveways for a couple dozen people who would pay him for the service. And he also, just for free, would plow the driveways of people that he liked and for old people he didn't think should be shoveling and for people who he thought just deserved it.
He tells this story about how, a couple years ago, he was riding around with his motorcycle, and he ran out of gas. And he knocked on a stranger's door.

Jonathan's Friend

And this really nice Chinese lady answered her door. And I told her I ran out of gas with my bike. Could I leave it there? And I was prepared to walk home. And she offered the gas. She said, I have gas for my lawn mower. Will it work for your motorcycle?

Ira Glass

She saved him from a five-mile walk home late at night.

Jonathan's Friend

So I did her driveway for her for two years. And she never knew that I did it, I don't think.

Jonathan Menjivar

Why didn't you tell her that you were doing this?

Jonathan's Friend

I didn't think I needed to do that. I don't know. I didn't want to creep her out or anything. I just did it like that.

Ira Glass

So that's what he would do if you likes you. If you crossed him, he would mete out snowy, icy justice, like he did with one of his customers who decided not to pay him for a couple plows, stiffed him.

Jonathan's Friend

You know, that six inches of snow at the end of her driveway, I can't tell you how many times that became 12 or 18 inches. And it wasn't from mother nature. It was from me. Drop a little present, you know? Some snow, a little extra for them. A little payback there.

Ira Glass

It would be nice if we all had a snowplow fairy out there for every part of our lives, shoveling out street justice while we all sleep. We don't, of course. Usually, the best that any of us can hope for is that everyone around us will get what they deserve, that they'll reap what they sow, and things will work themselves out in a way that rewards the right people and punishes the other people.
Today on our radio program, we have two stories where we watch that play out. In one story, an entire state tries something bold, and then everybody in the state has to live with the shakeout. In the other, consequences include two live chickens. From WBEZ-Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Act One. Alien Experiment.

Ira Glass

Act One, Alien Experiment. The Obama administration has deported undocumented immigrants at a greater rate than any previous administration. It was 392,862 immigrants in 2010, over a million since he took office, which means that he's on track to deport more people in four years than the Bush administration did in eight. The Obama administration has also issued 10 times more in fines to employers who knowingly hire illegal workers.
But as a country, we are still in this weird limbo of having no coherent or effective national strategy to deal with the 11 million people who are in the country illegally. For a long time, there's been two camps when it comes to this issue. There's the zero tolerance people, who want to round them all up and kick them all out. And then there are other people who want leniency, a pathway to citizenship.
But now there is this third way. There's this new movement that has popped up in states like Arizona and Alabama. It's formally called attrition through enforcement. But casually, proponents use a phrase that you may have heard, self-deportation. The idea is, make life so difficult, so unpleasant for illegal immigrants, that they choose to go home. They self-deport. Jack Hitt went to the place that has been trying this out since October, Alabama.

Jack Hitt

When Arizona passed its notorious immigration bill in 2010, there was outrage and a national debate about whether it had crossed some constitutional line. Then, last summer, Alabama went way, way beyond that, passing the most sweeping immigration bill in the country. I went down there, hearing that the law was causing no small amount of chaos. I wondered if they'd accidentally created more problems for themselves than they'd solved.
You may have seen reports of desperate farmers complaining that their crops were rotting in the fields. Tomatoes, blueberries, squash, unpicked as workers fled the state. Members of the military who couldn't prove citizenship were frustrated in the simplest thing, like registering a boat. The Alabama Department of Revenue sidestepped certain provisions of the law so people wouldn't be thrown out of their homes. Frightened Latino parents kept thousands of students home from schools. Outraged principals rose up against the law. A 12-year-old I met, named Stephanie, told me about an assembly in her school.

Stephanie

They started talking about how they're going to take illegal Mexicans out of school. They were talking about that if they do take our parents, we're OK, because they could send us to Mexico with them. Almost everybody was crying.

Jack Hitt

The new law is designed to work like this. Turn almost every encounter between a regular person and a government official into a checkpoint, and the illegals will leave on their own accord. That's self-deportation. Alabama's law, known as HB56, does this by enlisting every local and state police officer into the work of busting undocumented aliens.
It also requires every state and local bureaucrat to first make sure you're legal before having any, quote, "transaction with a citizen." This includes everything from getting a hunting license to a mobile home registration sticker, to getting a death certificate. Undocumented kids can still attend public school. But administrators have to determine the immigration status of all new students.
The law also makes it a crime for any citizen to knowingly hire or even help an undocumented worker in any way. The Home Builders Association of Alabama, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Alabama Farmers Federation, and other local business groups came out against the law, because it created heaps of new paperwork and made the state look like a bad place to invest.

Gerald Dial

This bill was so far-reaching and so much unintended consequences out of it that continues to surface.

Jack Hitt

This is Gerald Dial, the Republican whip in the state Senate, who helped pass the new law and now regrets it. He worries that new businesses are going to stay away.

Gerald Dial

I understand economic recruiting. And I say often that economic recruiting is more ruthless than quarterback recruiting for colleges. They'll use anything against you. And other states will begin to say, hey, you don't want to go to Alabama now.
If we're teetering out there, it's us and another, and everything's pretty even, we're probably going to lose those people. We won't know about it. It won't be a big red flag-- hey, we didn't go to Alabama. We're going to go to Arkansas, or we're going to go to South Carolina because of this. But those things are going to impact on people. And that's probably the most detrimental part of the whole bill.

Jack Hitt

The guy who runs Alabama's retirement system, David Bronner, declared in November that the new law was already chilling foreign investment. An $80 million Birmingham office tower, planned by a Spanish mega-bank, BBVA Group, had been scrapped. And the Chinese backers of a new copper plant in Thomasville were having second thoughts, Bronner said.
Nine days later, the morning I arrived in Birmingham, the six-column headline screaming across the front page of the paper was, "Mercedes manager arrested under immigration law." The first newsworthy bust of this law was not a tractor-trailer filled with Mexican workers, but a German executive named Detlev Hager, who was seized and detained for not having the proper papers. It was the talk of the town all day. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch later published an editorial poking fun at Alabama for its southern inhospitality and invited Mercedes to move its plant to Missouri. "We are the Show-Me State," it said, "not the 'Show me your papers' state."
A week later, another auto executive was stopped at a police checkpoint, this one from Honda. He was carrying an international driver's license, a passport, and a work permit. But it wasn't enough. The governor, Robert Bentley, freaked out. He held a press conference to let foreign executives know that they were still welcome in Alabama. "People just need to calm down," he said. "Everything's going to be OK."
I spoke with Steven Anderson, the police chief in Tuscaloosa, whose officer stopped the Mercedes executive. I figured he might be defensive about the arrest, considering it made national news and embarrassed the governor. But from his point of view, the situation was straightforward.

Steven Anderson

Officer made a traffic stop on a vehicle because it did not have a license plate displayed on the vehicle. The officer subsequently, under 32-6-9, was required to take that individual into custody.

Jack Hitt

If those same circumstances were to happen this afternoon, would the executive be brought before a magistrate again? I mean, is that the process now?

Steven Anderson

Yes. If the situation were to arise again, we would handle it just as we handled it.

Jack Hitt

Back before the law, the officer could have issued a quick citation to the German executive on the side of the road.

Steven Anderson

And be done with it in about a 15- to 20-minute traffic stop.

Jack Hitt

Versus?

Steven Anderson

Versus having to spend two or three hours with an individual while we determine whether they're here legally or not.

Jack Hitt

Chief Anderson tells me flat-out, he thinks this is a waste of resources, something his officers shouldn't be doing. But they have no choice, because the new law makes immigration a primary mission for police. Legislators put language into the law that allows any citizen to sue the police if they are caught not enforcing the immigration provision.

Steven Anderson

To me, that just screamed of the fact that they understood that they had to have some type of sanctions out there to hold law enforcement's feet to the fire on this, because we wouldn't make this a priority if they didn't.

Jack Hitt

And why wouldn't they make it a priority? Because there's actual crime in Tuscaloosa.

Steven Anderson

And I'll tell you what. The Hispanic population was not the population in our community that was committing those crimes. So immigration was not a problem for our police department. It was not in my top 10, maybe not even in my top 20, of concerns that I had for the city of Tuscaloosa.

Jack Hitt

Not in the top 20 for many reasons. But here's one. There just aren't that many immigrants in Alabama. It's not like Arizona, where a third of the state is Latino. In Alabama, the number is less than 4%. And yet, rooting out illegal immigrants is now a priority across the state.
The law is so comprehensive that some officials seem to be overreaching, just to be on the safe side. An attorney told me about one guy being denied a jailhouse phone call, since use of the phone was considered a business transaction, and about a victim of domestic violence who was told by a judge that if she wanted a protective order, she might open herself up for deportation.
But what I found most surprising was that amid the chaos, regular Alabamians, here and there, were taking the law to heart, pursuing ad hoc immigration justice on their own. I met a young Costa Rican woman named Carolina who long ago overstayed her visa. She told me about a recent time at a grocery store checkout. She and her husband tried to pay for their food with a credit card and valid ID. The cashier refused them, saying they'd first have to show that they were here legally.

Carolina

I swear, they don't want to sell us the groceries.

Jack Hitt

Carolina had just had a birthday when we met. And her mother back home had wired her some money to buy a gift, a money gram she could pick up at Walmart, not a government office, but a private business. So no problem. She'd done this many, many times in the nearly seven years she's lived in Alabama. Before the law, all she had to do was show ID and type in the secret PIN number her mother had sent her. But this time--

Carolina

They did not give me the money. They just refused to give me the money, because I cannot prove to the girl that I was legal. And I don't know why I have to prove her that.

Jack Hitt

Again, this is not part of the law.

Carolina

So I tried a lot with her. I was dealing with her for about 15 minutes. But she says no. So I went already to three different Walmarts. And I don't have my money yet.

Jack Hitt

When we asked Walmart about this, a spokesperson said their procedures for getting a money gram are the same at every store nationwide and don't require proof of citizenship. Another provision of the law makes any contract with an undocumented alien unenforceable in court. Some people are using it to mess with illegal immigrants. Mary Bauer is a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Mary Bauer

Certainly, people have been told that they're not going to be able to rent housing anymore. That's something that's been very common. Some workers have been told that they're not going to get paid for the work they've already done, because that would be an illegal contract.

Jack Hitt

Before the law, undocumented people like Carolina expected certain bureaucratic inconveniences. She couldn't get a water bill in her own name. And sure, she had to be careful in certain situations. She worried what would happen if she were pulled over by a traffic cop.
But by and large, life was predictable. It wasn't scary. The intention of the law is to take all that away, to make life uncomfortable. And it's working. Now Carolina told me that before she drives anywhere in a car, she says a prayer.
She has appointed a legal guardian, an American, for her three-year-old son, in case she disappears into an immigration holding cell. At least she'll know that her son won't wind up in foster care. And recently, she made a decision. Her son loves preschool. He's a smart kid. And he's got a lot of friends there. But getting caught on the road now on the drive back and forth to school is too risky.

Carolina

And actually, this is the last month that my son is going to school, because he's not safe with me to take him to school. And he's going to be safe in here, at home.

Jack Hitt

For a lot of Latinos who've decided to stay in Alabama, life has become about hunkering down, waiting and seeing. I went to a mobile home park where a lot of undocumented immigrants live, and spent a day with a mother named Gabriella. Like Carolina, she's afraid to drive now. But she's taken it one step further. She's quit her job and almost never goes out.

Gabriella

And I had to be here, hide in my own home, because I need to stay here for my children when they come back from the school.

Jack Hitt

Folks like Gabriella have another strategy, too-- try not to encounter white people at all. They only shop at Hispanic markets. Carolina told me that when she does go to a regular grocery store now, she wanders up and down the cashier area, hoping to catch a subtle smile before getting into a checkout line.
Another mobile homeowner told me he'd heard of a friendly clerk in a neighboring town who would renew mobile home licenses without asking too many questions. Others said they've created an underground railroad of information about sympathetic folks and make contact with faith groups that defiantly provide workers rides to their jobs. Gabriella said that the new attitude has permeated every aspect of her life, every aspect.

Gabriella

Even in the church.

Jack Hitt

Really?

Gabriella

Yes, because even in the church, you find people that say, well, we are in God's house. And then they don't want to talk at you. And they don't want to give the peace to you. That is so sad.

Jack Hitt

So in your church, you have the passing of the peace, that part of the service? And so in your church, when they do that, what normally happens? You turn and shake hands with people?

Gabriella

Yes. They shake hands and everything. But now I found some people that say, I don't want to do peace with you.

Jack Hitt

Every Latino person, legal or illegal, whom I spoke to noted at some point that there's just something hateful in the air now. Before the law, they felt accepted. They had American friends. They didn't feel out of place.
Now when they go to a store, every single one of them told me they feel that people are looking at them weirdly, like, what are you still doing here? When the law changed to make them less welcome, they actually became less welcome, in a day-to-day, "passing you on the street" sort of way. School kids told me they're fighting off comments like, I'm glad you're all moving, we don't want you here, you take our jobs. At a pep rally, where Latinos were all sitting up front, kids started shouting, Mexicans move to the back. And most of them did.

Jack Hitt

How many people have left your class?

Stephanie

There's missing about at least five in each one of my classes.

Jack Hitt

Are there friends of yours?

Stephanie

Yeah.

Jack Hitt

This is Stephanie. She was hanging out with Gabriella's daughter and some other kids in the back of Gabriella's trailer, playing video games while their parents held a prayer meeting in the other room, hoping for repeal of the new law. We talked about all the kids that had left her school since October.

Stephanie

It was really hard to let them go, mostly because they were girls. One of the names was Jessie. She was my best friend. But she had to leave because of the law. So what we did, we went to the movies before she left. And the day that she left, I went to the store and bought her a teddy bear. We started to cry.

Jack Hitt

When was that?

Stephanie

Two weeks ago.

Jack Hitt

And where did she move to?

Stephanie

She moved to Mexico.

Jack Hitt

And what did she tell you about Mexico?

Stephanie

She said that it's funner than here. She said that she can move around. Her parents let her go out more, because they're not scared that immigration or something, that she can just be free, go out to the mall by herself, because here, we can't do that without getting in trouble or something.

Jack Hitt

Stephanie says that. But the adults, in fact, are terrified of Mexico. They read the papers, too, and hear of dead bodies found in playgrounds, revenge killings, random murders. If the new law brings more pressure on them, the grown-ups say, they might move to another state, but not to Mexico.
Here's Gabriella again. A friend of hers did go back to Mexico just after the law passed.

Gabriella

And I even called her last week. She was crying, because she never thought Mexico was so scary. And she told me, I prefer to be there, waiting for the police to catch me. But here, I'm afraid. And they are going to kill my children or me.

Jack Hitt

Besides the fear, Gabriella's like any mom. Her kids are Americans. They were born here. Their friends are all here. Alabama's their home. She doesn't want to uproot them or herself. We met in November, in her living room. Earlier this week, as I was finishing this story, I found out that Gabriella's husband was arrested and deported. She and her children have moved to Mexico.

Scott Beason

All these bills are designed for people to say, you know what, they're going to try to enforce the law here in this state. And maybe we need to move back to our home country. Or maybe we need to move to a state that has its arms wide open for illegal aliens.

Jack Hitt

Senator Scott Beason is the Republican leader in the state legislature. And he was the primary sponsor of the bill last year. As far as he's concerned, the law is working spectacularly well. In just three months, it's prompted massive self-deportation, roughly 75,000 people. And, Beason says, this has opened up jobs for American citizens, just like lawmakers hoped it would.

Scott Beason

Of course, it only went into effect October 1. We've already seen a tremendous drop in our unemployment numbers. In the month of October alone, while the country averaged a tenth of 1% drop, Alabama had five times that. And that's corrected seasonal numbers. So we're very proud of what the legislation has done already.

Jack Hitt

Given those numbers, Beason has every right to be proud. He's saying Alabama shaved half a percentage point off the unemployment rolls in October, while the national average was a piddly one-tenth of 1%. And that's in a place that ranks among the lowest states in terms of illegal immigration. If Beason's right, then a quick solution to this unending recession and its high unemployment would be an anti-immigration bill like Alabama's in every state. Jobs, Beason told me, were the main reason he drafted this bill.

Scott Beason

I would probably say one of the most moving stories is, back in 2008, we had started the immigration commission. And we were in Huntsville, Alabama. And there was a woman who came up. I don't know her name. I'd never seen her before and never seen her again. My guess is she was in some sort of maid service, custodial service.
She came up to the table and said, Senator-- she was beginning to cry-- she said, I just want to let you know that in the job service I'm in, a lot of my competition has begun to hire people who aren't supposed to be here at all. They're here illegally. Because of that competition, I can't find work. I've lost my clients. And I have just paid my house payment on my credit card.
When I tell that story today, it still breaks my heart. And I decided that was one of the main things. I've been interested in this issue. But this is the kind of thing that cannot be allowed. We were elected to stand up for that lady. And if I ever get a little deterred about what we're trying to do, I think about that lady's face, the story she told me. I've never talked to her again. And I hope that now that we've done something, that we've helped her.

Jack Hitt

Whether he's helped her is unclear, because when it comes to the impressive unemployment numbers Beason cites, there's a catch. Other than Beason and his strongest supporters, I could not find anyone else who attributed the drop in unemployment to the new law.
The director of economic forecasting at the University of Alabama, Ahmad Ijaz, he didn't. In fact, he said that most of the job growth last year was in the automotive sector. You don't find many illegal workers in those Mercedes and Honda plants. He went on to say that the other area of growth this fall was retail, probably due to the seasonal Christmas bump. And Ijaz says there wasn't any job growth in sectors where Latinos typically work-- agriculture, poultry processing, and construction.
So how did immigration become the hottest political topic in a state with relatively few illegal immigrants? It wasn't much of an issue at all in Alabama until 2010, when Beason and his fellow Republicans put it on the agenda in a big way way. They campaigned on a set of promises they called "the Republican handshake," five pledges to voters, including combating illegal immigration.
The Alabama legislature has been dominated by Democrats since the Civil War. But the handshake worked. Republicans gained super majorities in both chambers of Alabama's legislature. They essentially could pass anything they wanted. And they had a mandate from the people. Democrats say the people had little to do with it.

Joe Hubbard

I did not once hear about immigration when I was on the campaign trail. Now, keep in mind I live in an urban district. But it seemed to me to be more of a political issue than a practical issue.

Jack Hitt

Joe Hubbard is a conservative Democrat for Montgomery. He was also elected in 2010. He says that the immigration issue represents a fundamental change in the way Alabama politicians run for state office, one that's been in the works for years.

Joe Hubbard

In the past decade or so, before 2010, your state legislator was as local a politician as you got. He was the guy that you talked to about schools. He was the guy that you talked to about funding for that road project you need. And so the legislature was, in essence, a very local race.
I think from 2004 to 2006, and ultimately in 2010, you saw efforts by the Alabama Republican Party to nationalize local elections and to talk about what's going on in DC, the congressional Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, on and on. I think there was polling that showed immigration, which heretofore has been a national issue, could make for good state political fodder.

Jack Hitt

And when it came to actually writing the immigration bill, Hubbard says, the Alabama Republicans seemed to listen not so much to local voters, but to strategists in the National Republican Party.

Joe Hubbard

And I think Alabama, perhaps, has become a state where the National Party could try out some legislative experiments to see how they'd work in other states. I'm not sure. But that appears to be the case on immigration.
And I know for a fact that an attorney from the Midwest actually drafted the legislation that the state legislature passed. The bill that came out of conference committee was not drafted by any Alabama legislator. It was drafted by an attorney. And his name escapes me right now.

Kris Kobach

My name is Kris Kobach. And I'm Secretary of State of the state of Kansas.

Jack Hitt

And he's the mastermind of attrition through enforcement. You might not have heard of him, but he's an up-and-coming Republican star. He was campaigning with Mitt Romney in South Carolina all last week. He's helped write different immigration bills in cities and states all over the country-- Pennsylvania, Texas, Missouri, Nebraska, Utah. And he wrote Arizona's law.

Jack Hitt

So some folks, on the weekends, they go into their garage and fiddle with their car. You go into your garage and fiddle with immigration law.

Kris Kobach

Yeah. People do with their spare time what they feel fulfilled in. And so some people golf. Some people work on their car in the garage. I go into my home office and start typing away on the computer and trying to help states do what they can to restore the rule of law.

Jack Hitt

And if you're starting a new movement, Kris Kobach is who you want to have as your spokesman-- Harvard undergrad, master's degree from Oxford, Yale law. He's young. He has three adorable children. He is ruggedly handsome in a "TV superhero, rip off his shirt" sort of way. And in the final days, as the Alabama immigration bill came close to a final vote, the lawmakers wanted his help. Even though Kobach already had plans, he's not the kind of man to turn his back on legislators in distress.

Kris Kobach

I had already scheduled a turkey hunt and was going to be in Gardner, Kansas, looking to call in and shoot a tom turkey, and realized that if I wanted to get this work done, I'd have to do it while in the turkey blind or just give up on the hunting. So I got in the blind, took my laptop computer, took my shotgun, and got all set up and had a good, fully charged battery, and just started working on the final amendments to the bill. And fortunately I did that, because the turkey didn't show up that day. So I had something else to do. Maybe it was the clicking on the keyboard that scared them away.

Jack Hitt

For Kobach, the passage of HB56 was the culmination of years of work. He'd been drafting and trying out different laws in other places, seeing if they'd hold up in court, revising, trying them again. Then a few years ago, he met Senator Beason at a conservative conference. They collaborated on an anti-illegal immigration bill that went nowhere.
Then in 2010, with new super majorities in the Alabama legislature, they could try everything on their immigration wish list, even things Republicans didn't get into the Arizona law, that immigration data would be collected on all entering schoolchildren, that every business transaction with the state would require a birth certificate. After much of Alabama's bill held up in court, Kobach felt he'd finally had a template for other states to adopt. Kobach has been working on illegal immigration since 2001. His big insight came right after 9/11, when he was working for the Justice Department.

Kris Kobach

It was an a-ha moment when I realized that five of the 19 hijackers were in the country illegally. Four of those five had traffic violations while they were illegally in the country. And if the police officer had had that information at his fingertips, he could have made an arrest.

Jack Hitt

But cops don't check for immigration status. Immigration agents do. The problem was, there were only a few thousand of them. Kobach realized what we need is what war planners call a force multiplier. What if we enlisted the more than 700,000 state and local law enforcement officers across the country into the fight against illegal immigration?
The simplicity of Kobach's argument is what's so appealing. He isn't creating new policy at all. He's simply empowering states to enforce what is already in the federal statutes.

Kris Kobach

And from the alien's perspective, it's better, too. He can depart the United States on his own, freely, without ever being in custody. And so there's more liberty for him. And there's less cost for the United States.

Jack Hitt

There's less cost, because if someone self-deports, there's no arrest. There's no detention or immigration hearing. Attrition through enforcement sounds so rational, so clean, when Kobach explains it, like it'll happen automatically. You don't have to do much. They'll just go.
But of course, the reality of self-deportation is much messier than that. You're threatening to separate parents and kids, drive them from their homes. It's completely primal, the things that terrify us most. And that is the actual plan, to scare them.
I asked Kobach, point by point, about the unintended consequences of the Alabama bill. He disputed everything. Did it hurt business? Did it create chaos in the schools? All overstated, he said. Finally, I asked him if it unearthed long-sequestered racial attitudes aimed at Latinos.

Kris Kobach

I think it's really an argument of last resort. And that is, well, if you start enforcing immigration laws more aggressively, that's going to become a racially charged issue. And my answer is, no, it's not. I don't buy it. And frankly, that hasn't happened.

Jack Hitt

Well, you must know that there are people in Alabama who are saying unholy things as a result of this law, no?

Kris Kobach

Well, I don't think it's fair to say as a result of the law. You can't legislate what is in people's hearts. And if people have those twisted ideas of the world and have those ill feelings toward people who have a different skin color, I don't think you can say that the law has caused that. And I don't think you can say that the law can ultimately stop that. I would also say that Alabama's reputation has also increased around the country, too. There are many legislators in other states that are saying, they've really done something great.

Jack Hitt

Do you think there have been any unintended consequences from this bill?

Kris Kobach

No, not really. I mean, there have been some minor misinterpretations by one or two local officials of how they read the language. But that's inevitable with any state law.

Jack Hitt

Which brings us back to State Senator Gerald Dial, the Republican whip you heard earlier, who's worried about scaring away business. He's leading a campaign to, as he puts it, "tweak the law," in all sorts of ways. Here's a big one. He wants to get rid of this idea that any attempt to help people who might be illegal is itself illegal. That bothers him enormously. He's a devout Christian, so he wants to insert a Good Samaritan provision to protect good, charitable folks who are just practicing their faith.

Gerald Dial

I had a man who runs a soup kitchen, feeds people just off the street, call me and said, that's just terrible, because I feed people. And I don't stop the door and say, are you here illegally or legal? I feed you because you're hungry. And so that's a compassionate thing. And that's the Christian thing to do. And we're going to put that part into the bill also.

Jack Hitt

OK. So once you've amended the bill, do you think Jesus would vote for the bill?

Gerald Dial

Gosh, you've asked me a tough question. I would hope that he would understand. I would say that, would he vote for the bill? Probably not. Probably not. If you just laid it all the way down, probably not.

Jack Hitt

Don't get Dial wrong. He still favors a strong law to encourage self-deportation. But he thinks the law that passed last session, the rush and reach of it, the stuff that got inserted last minute, and the stuff he was told that would be included but wasn't, is hurting the state.

Gerald Dial

I would not have voted for the bill had I understood the unintended consequences. There are others who would not have also. But you were locked into position, where you either vote for this, or you vote against it. And therefore, you're encouraging illegals.
So you're in a catch-22 as far as that goes. So to show that we were not [? illegals ?], we had to vote for the bill. But today, after hearing our constituents talk and after looking at the problem, we're going to try to fix some of those problems.

Jack Hitt

There is a bill, there is a proposed total repeal of HB56. If it just came down to keeping things the way they are or voting for total repeal, how would you vote?

Gerald Dial

Well, I would probably vote for the repeal. But the repeal bill's not going to get before us.

Jack Hitt

I asked Joe Hubbard, the Montgomery democrat, what he thought the chances were for repeal.

Joe Hubbard

Zero.

Jack Hitt

Republicans have been pounding this issue for too long to backtrack now. Besides, Hubbard says, they don't need to.

Joe Hubbard

The politics of this bill are very good for the Republicans, I think. A Republican operative told me the other day that this bill's polling very high in popularity in Alabama. Expect to see this same bill, HB56-- it's already been in South Carolina passed-- expect to see it in many other Republican-controlled legislatures.

Jack Hitt

Last week, Alabama's law made a national debut of sorts. Kris Kobach endorsed Mitt Romney. And the two spent time traveling South Carolina together, talking to voters about their new third way to reform immigration. Then this week, Romney introduced the idea during a Republican debate.

Mitt Romney

Well, the answer is self-deportation, which is people decide that they could do better by going home, because they can't find work here, because they don't have legal documentation to allow them to work here.

Man

Isn't that we have now? If somebody doesn't feel they have the opportunity in America, they can go back anytime they want to.

Mitt Romney

Yes, we'd have a card that indicates who's here legally. And if people--

Jack Hitt

You can hear the audience laughing a little. And Romney struggles a bit to explain what he means. It sounds preposterous. Why would anyone leave if they didn't have to? Within days, Newt Gingrich was slapping Romney around on the issue. Quote, "For Romney to believe that somebody's grandmother is going to be so cut off that she's going to self-deport, I mean, this is an Obama-level fantasy."
By Thursday's debate, Romney had his pitch down better, and Gingrich didn't come off as well. Even Rick Santorum chimed in. He was for self-deportation, too.
By the time the Republicans decide their nominee, voters will come to know the meaning of this word, and it will no doubt be part of the electoral shorthand. Repeal health care. Cut taxes. Reform Medicare. Self-deportation.

Ira Glass

Jack Hitt. He's got a new book coming out this spring, called Bunch of Amateurs. The Alabama legislature is going back into session February 7. They're planning to take up possible changes to the immigration law. Meanwhile, parts of the law have been suspended by the courts. Some provisions will come before the United States Supreme Court this term when it considers the constitutionality of the Arizona immigration law.
Coming up, a bird that faces deportation. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Act Two. Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chickens.

Danny Lobell

About a year ago, in the summer, this took place. I'd been looking out my kitchen window for five years. And my backyard, well, it looked like a prison yard, really. It had a weight set that was rusted and smashed bottles and garbage everywhere and random barbed wire. I don't even know where the barbed wire came from. It was just there to make the yard look worse, I think.
And one morning, I woke up. And I said, that's it. That's enough. I can't take this anymore. I'm going to make this yard look good. And I go outside. And I take a garbage bag. And I start cleaning up the backyard, like 6:00 in the morning.
My neighbors that I share a floor with are Ecuadorian gangsters. There's a bunch of them. And they all have the same nickname, Blanco. So we basically call them, like, Small Blanco, Medium-sized Blanco, and then there's the Main Blanco.
And the Main Blanco, around 11 o'clock, he opens his window. And he says, what are you doing? I said, I'm cleaning up this yard. And he said, all right, I'll join you. That's, like, the first time I've ever spoken to the Main Blanco in, like, five years of living there.
And he comes out. And we start cleaning this backyard together. And we're talking. And he tells me he'd been in juvy hall when he was younger. He may or may not have stabbed somebody. We don't know. But he learned how to draw there. And he was reformed by learning artwork. And he came out. And now he does tattoos out of his kitchen. So that explained why a lot of people were coming in and then leaving with bloody shirt arms and stuff. Questions were being answered, you know?
And we're cleaning this backyard together. And as the day went on, some of the neighbors upstairs were like, what are you doing? We're like, we're cleaning the yard. It was like the Berlin Wall coming down. They're like, I'm coming to help. Let's do this. I guess everybody was as depressed as I was from looking at this backyard.
And so the whole building comes together. And we're cleaning this backyard together. And we did it. We got rid of the rusty bench press. That was it. It was like liberation.
And Blanco and I, we start talking and hanging out. And we had some beers afterwards. And I come up with this idea. I said, you know what would really be great to make this yard complete? Chickens. We should get some chickens.
I said, I'm done paying for eggs. That's a major expense in my life, eggs. And he was like, yeah, man. I'm in! Let's get some chickens! Let's do this!
So he goes, where are we going to get chickens? And I said, live poultry shop. I see them all over. We could go to a live poultry shop. We'll get some chickens.
So we venture out to find a live poultry shop, Blanco and I. And we find one. And it's run by an Arabic dude. And we go in, and we go, hi. Yeah, we'd like to get some chickens. And we'd like to take 'em to go, alive.
[LAUGHTER]

Danny Lobell

And the guy goes, my friend, we don't sell live chickens. It's not legal. We only weigh and fillet. And I'm like, well, just weigh and don't fillet. And he's like, no, fillet and weigh. Only fillet and weigh. And I'm going, weigh and don't fillet. And Blanco's just like, [BLEEP] this. We're going to steal a chicken.
[LAUGHTER]

Danny Lobell

He's like, you distract him. I'm going to grab a chicken. So I go over to the dude, and I start talking to him. I think it's going to be quick. But there's some Benny Hill chase going on out of the corner of my eye with Blanco and the chickens.
So I start talking to him. I'm like, what's the most chicken you've ever sold at one time? He's like, I don't know. Why would-- what do you want? You ever seen the movie Chicken Run? What?
And then he sees what's going on. He goes, what's your friend doing? And then Blanco hears, so he goes, oh [BLEEP]. Let's go! And he just runs out. And he's like, come on, we got--
I don't think we even needed to run out, but we did. And we just ran out with no chicken. We weren't even really caught. But we start running out.
And there was this Spanish dude who had been standing by and listened to the whole thing. And he calls Blanco over. He's like, yo, primo. And he says something in Spanish to Blanco, something like, [SPEAKING SPANISH].
And basically, what the conversation translated to was, I know a place where they do under-the-counter live chicken sales. And I'll tell you where it is. So he tells us about this place.
And we go there. And it's run by Spanish people. And Blanco goes in, works his magic, all smooth, [SPEAKING SPANISH]. And the guy's like, si, si, si! Come, come! Takes us in the back. And he grabs a chicken, gives it to us.
And then he comes out, and he goes, you guys want a rooster, too? And he brings out this beautiful rooster. And Blanco's like, oh, that's an ill rooster, damn!
And it was. It was a beaut-- I don't know if you've ever seen a rooster up close. They are beautiful animals. So we start talking. We're like, yeah, I guess we need a rooster to make these eggs happen. So we should take a rooster.
Which is actually completely wrong, we found out, because the roosters really fertilize the eggs. And then they're completely inedible. But we didn't know that. So we're like, yeah, we'll take that rooster. Let's go.
And so we got this chicken and this rooster. And we're walking down Grand Street. And we feel like $1 million. We're like, we are going to change our lives. We're going to be eating fresh eggs.
We get fancy. We start talking. We're like, yo, man. These hipsters are gonna be coming, knocking on our door. Organic eggs. We're gonna make a lot of money off this [BLEEP].
So we're walking with these chickens. And we bring them home. What we didn't realize is we bought an old chicken, which was postmenopausal and had stopped laying eggs. It was at that point.
And the rooster, from being in a dark, enclosed space for so long, had no concept of time according to the sun. It had a broken internal clock. So this rooster's, like, going off at all times, 5:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the afternoon, 8:00 in the eve-- just times you're like, really? Now, you're going off?
But we loved this chicken and the rooster. We named the rooster Juanito. And the chicken was Dona. And the rooster's real smart. And they start sitting at my window or Blanco's window, depending on who's home when they're hungry, and even tapping with their little, scratchy claws.
So we start really falling in love with these chickens. And Blanco and Juanito start getting pretty close. Juanito's kind of learning his name. He'll be like, Juanito, Juanito! And he'd start running up on him.
And things are good for a while there. Little things started to pop up, like on the wireless signal, somebody named their network, like, "Shut Up Rooster." That was one thing I noticed. And then one day, randomly, on a telephone pole on the block, there was a sign that said, "Honk if you love roosters." But other than that, things were good. Life was good for a little while.
Until one morning, I got woken up by knocking at my window. There was an Irish lady who was, like, seven months pregnant, who lived on the block. And it was early in the morning. She starts knocking-- [KNOCKING]. And I go, and I open the door. And she goes, shut your [BLEEP] rooster!
And I'm like, actually, it's a joint-owned rooster. But--
[LAUGHTER]

Danny Lobell

--go on. She goes, I'm pregnant! And that [BLEEP] rooster is waking me up at random hours in the day. And it's ruining my pregnancy. You've got to get rid of the [BLEEP] rooster.
I'm like, all right, look. I'll talk to the other person whose rooster it is. And maybe we could figure this out. And I'm thinking, OK, well, this is obviously a delicate situation. She's pregnant. This ought to be OK to talk to Blanco about.
And I go, and he just flips out. He's like, white people are destroying the neighborhood. They're trying to take my rooster! And they're never getting it! I'm like, oh, [BLEEP]. This is worse than I thought.
And I'm like, look, you talk to her. I put him on the phone with her. And he disappears with my phone for a while. And then he just comes back and goes, it's all good. We worked it out. I'm like, really? It's worked-- what'd you say? He's like, don't worry about it. It's worked out. I was like, all right. That's good.
And like a week goes by. And then an inspector from the city shows up at our door. And Blanco comes over. He's like, [BLEEP], we've got to hide the rooster. It's a crappy old building. And there are these wooden floorboards in his kitchen. And we lift the floorboards. And we put the rooster underneath the floorboards.
And the inspector comes in. He's walking around. It's like that scene from Inglorious Basterds, you know? There is rooster!
But he's like, you guys got a rooster in here? And we're like, nope. No. He's like, I had some complaints that there's a rooster in this building. And we go, no, no, no. I think there's an injured cat on the block that has been making some noises. But there's no rooster here.
And then, just then, the stupid internal clock on Juanito goes off. And he just, [CROWING], from under the floorboard. And we're caught red-handed. We're busted. And he's like, yo, you have a week to get that rooster out of here. Otherwise, you've got a $2,000 fine from the city.
And then Blanco, I think he just decides he could probably connect with him on a minority level. And he's like, yo, man, white people trying to destroy this neighborhood! I've had that rooster since I was born! Which I don't even think is possible. I don't know how long roosters even live, but I'm pretty sure not 30 years. But the guy's like, no, you've got a week.
At first, he's like, look, we split it $1,000 each on the fine. I'm like, you don't have $1,000. And I don't have $1,000. He's like, I'll double up on tattoos. We're gonna do it. I'm like, we're just going to keep getting hit with more and more fines. We've got to get rid of this rooster.
He's like, I can't see anything happen to Juanito, man. I can't see it happen. I'm like, look, I'll deal with this. I'm going to get this done humanely. Nothing's going to happen. We'll find a place.
So I start calling farms. And it's, like, two days till D-day. We have to get rid of the rooster, or we get hit with a fine.
And I figured I only have one option. And that is a drop-and-run. And a drop-and-run is exactly what it sounds like. It's me going to a farm and dropping the rooster and then running.
And I said, Blanco, you down to do this with me? I scouted out a good farm. We could do this. It's a humane farm. It's a petting zoo. They've got a pumpkin patch and kids.
And he goes, it's too painful for me, man. You gotta do it on your own. You gotta to do it. I can't do it. I can't see Juanito go.
And the day comes for me to do this drop-and-run. And I remember Blanco sitting on the stoop, holding Juanito. And he is crying like I never saw him cry. He is bawling.
He's kissing Juanito. He's like, my little dude. I hate to see you go. And I'm like, I gotta take him now.
The neighborhood perceived them both to be loud and annoying, and wanted them out of there. But if you got to know them, they're really pretty good dudes, you know? And I think it bothered him that there was really just nobody that would stick up for this innocent rooster. Thank you very much.

Ira Glass

Danny Lobell. He's a comedian and an illustrator in New York City and @dannylobell on Twitter. He recorded this for us at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.
[MUSIC - "NEIGHBOR, NEIGHBOR" BY JIMMY HUGHES]

Credits.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Jonathan Menjivar and myself with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Ship, and Nancy Updike. Dan Grech was Jack Hitt's producer in Alabama. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Production help from [? Matt Kelty, ?] scouting help from Elna Baker, music help from Damien Gray, from Rob Gettes.
[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

We first heard a version of Danny Lobell's chicken story on Kevin Allison's Risk podcast. The Risk podcast website is risk-show.com. That's risk-show.com Our website is thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who came back from his vacation in Colombia with this small package for the staff.

Jonathan's Friend

Drop them a little present, you know? Some snow, a little extra for them.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life.

Announcer

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