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Erika Lucas spent years inside private equity and venture capital, the rooms that decide who gets funded in America. Then she left to build what goes around them. In this episode, she tells Saadia Khan exactly what investors say about founders once they’ve walked out.
Erika was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and came to rural Oklahoma at 13 with her mother and sister, speaking no English. She went back. She built a career in Mexico, returned to the U.S., ran foreign direct investment for the State of Oklahoma, became a private equity partner—and then walked away to co-found StitchCrew, which has brought capital and networks to hundreds of founders the system overlooks. She also founded VEST, a peer network for women professionals, and VEST Her Ventures, a fund backing women-led companies in the care economy. Her TEDx talk, America's Trillion Dollar Blindspot, argues the money in this country is pointed the wrong way.
She and Saadia get into the part most founder conversations skip: not how to pitch better, but who is on the other side of the table and why they keep writing checks to people who look like them. Erika's advice to founders is not what you'd expect from a former VC; she'd rather talk you out of raising venture at all.
You can connect with Saadia on IG @itssaadiak
Find Erika Lucas on IG at @erika_07
Email:[email protected]
Host & Producer: Saadia Khan I Content Writer: Saadia Khan I Editorial review: Shei Yu I Sound Designer & Editor: Lou Raskin I Immigrantly Theme Music: Simon Hutchinson | Other Music: Epidemic Sound
Immigrantly Podcast is an Immigrantly Media Production.
For advertising inquiries, contact us at [email protected]
BOYOT (Belong On Your Own Terms) is the next step. It’s our new app, designed to help you think through identity, culture, ambition, relationships, and the stories we carry with guided reflections, prompts, and frameworks developed over years of conversations on this show.
It’s thoughtful. It’s challenging. And honestly, it’s the kind of space many of us wish existed earlier in our lives.
If you’re ready to go deeper than the podcast, subscribe to BOYOT and start the journey.
Don't forget to subscribe to Immigrantly Uninterrupted for insightful podcasts. Follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes content.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week, we're sharing an episode from Pehchaan, hosted by Bilal Lakhani with co-host Ambreen Ali, a show about the Pakistani diaspora in the US, told by the people living it.
Their guest is Noorain Khan, who joined the Girl Scouts as a second grader in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and three decades later became the first Muslim American to lead the organization as National Board President. She's now Chief Innovation Officer at the Ford Foundation. They get into her path there, and the many layers of identity she's carried along the way.
New Immigrantly episode next week. And if you know someone who'd be a good fit for the show, send them our way.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There's a question on the U.S. citizenship test, question 74, that asks you to name one cause of the Civil War. The Government accepts three answers: slavery, economic reasons, states' rights. Saadia memorized all three. She passed. She became a citizen. And she never felt a single one of them.
Then, on a detour from a wedding in Maryland, she spent an afternoon at the Gettysburg museum in ninety-degree heat and found a fourth answer that will never make it onto a flashcard.
In this solo episode, Saadia walks through the exhibit that promised her the Civil War left America "a different people in everything," and traces what she actually found: an economy built on unpaid labor, a grievance politics that outlived the war that produced it, and two glass cases of brass buttons that map almost perfectly onto the country we still argue about every election cycle.
It's America's 250th year. The stories told at a birthday party are the flattering ones. This is the other kind, the immigrant's read on American history, from someone who waited twelve years for the passport and has no intention of being quiet with it.
You can connect with Saadia on IG @itssaadiak
Email:[email protected]
Host & Producer: Saadia Khan I Content Writer: Saadia Khan I Editorial review: Shei Yu I Sound Designer & Editor: Lou Raskin I Immigrantly Theme Music: Simon Hutchinson | Other Music: Epidemic Sound
Immigrantly Podcast is an Immigrantly Media Production.
For advertising inquiries, contact us at [email protected]
BOYOT (Belong On Your Own Terms) is the next step. It’s our new app, designed to help you think through identity, culture, ambition, relationships, and the stories we carry with guided reflections, prompts, and frameworks developed over years of conversations on this show.
It’s thoughtful. It’s challenging. And honestly, it’s the kind of space many of us wish existed earlier in our lives.
If you’re ready to go deeper than the podcast, subscribe to BOYOT and start the journey.
Don't forget to subscribe to Immigrantly Uninterrupted for insightful podcasts. Follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes content.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
UNRWA USA CEO Mara Kronenfeld is a Jewish American woman and the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor — and she leads the American nonprofit supporting the UN agency for Palestine refugees. In this episode of Immigrantly, Saadia Khan asks her what it costs to break the script.
Mara traces her path from Riverside, California to a Fulbright year in Damascus, where friendships built in Yarmouk refugee camp reshaped everything she thought she knew about the Arab world. She explains what UNRWA actually is, why it was designed to become obsolete, and answers the "UNRWA institutionalizes refugeehood" critique head-on. She describes conditions in Gaza after the October 2025 ceasefire that hasn't stopped the killing — rodents biting children in tents, women unable to afford or find menstrual supplies, a father tearing up his last clothes for his daughter.
She tells the story of her colleague Hani Almadhoun, who lost two brothers in Gaza — including Chef Mahmoud of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, killed by a drone as he walked to Kamal Adwan Hospital, the hospital whose director Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya remains in Israeli detention without charge to this day.
And she takes apart the Board of Peace, which declared this summer that UNRWA has "no place" in Gaza's future and framed its work as perpetual aid dependency. Mara also answers the hardest one in her line of work — when a Palestinian says, "This is our story to lead," where does your voice end and theirs begin?
Mara Kronenfeld is the CEO of UNRWA USA. She speaks Arabic, holds a Master's in Middle East studies, and has worked across the Middle East for more than two decades. Learn more and donate at unrwausa.org. The NYC Gaza 5K returns to Prospect Park, Brooklyn on Sunday, October 11.
Keywords: UNRWA, Gaza, Palestinian refugees, Mara Kronenfeld, Kamal Adwan Hospital, Hussam Abu Safiya, Board of Peace, humanitarian aid, Jewish American identity, ceasefire, Immigrantly podcast
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In 2011, a handful of skeptical New Yorkers answer a call to Occupy Wall Street. What they find feels less like a protest and more like a glimpse of a different world—one where people openly share stories of debt, hardship, and frustration. They start to build an anti-capitalist village in a tiny Manhattan park — under the watchful eyes of police.
This is the first episode of Future Hindsight’s brand new 6-part series, OCCUPY! An Unfinished Uprising. Subscribe to Future Hindsight wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss a single episode!
Want to dive deeper? Listen to these episodes of Future Hindsight:
For a conversation on activism with a co-founder of Occupy Wall Street, tune in to this episode with Micah White: https://www.futurehindsight.com/episodes/episode/micah-white
For a recap of how American capitalism evolved into what it is today, listen to this episode with Kurt Andersen: https://www.futurehindsight.com/episodes/episode/americas-evil-geniuses-kurt-andersen
On solidarity and mutual aid, listen to this conversation with Manuel Pastor: https://www.futurehindsight.com/episodes/episode/solidarity-and-mutuality-manuel-pastor
Credits:
Host / Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer / Writer: Maria Luisa Tucker
Audio Producer: Zack Travis
Additional production help: Mia Warren, Erika Gjada, Megan Detrie, Lizzie Jacobs, and Ilya Magazanin
Archival research: Marisa Holmes
Archival material courtesy of: Occupy Wall Street Media Working Group.
Original music: Rude Mechanical Orchestra and Puge Ruhe
Special thanks to T.J. Raphael, Lauren Passell, Arielle Nissenblatt, and Kate Blumenfeld for being our first listeners and sounding boards, and to Tom Koenig for his support.
Distributed by PRX
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Seven years ago, Sahar Saleem was the first-ever guest on Immigrantly, talking about her creative marketing career at PepsiCo. She's back, and everything has changed. In this episode, we talk about leaving a corporate "dream job," breaking into screenwriting in LA right as the writers' strike hit, the quiet blacklisting of pro-Palestinian voices in Hollywood, and her pilot Cash, about a Pakistani American memory archeologist. Then, the unexpected turn: somatic therapy, epigenetics, and how trauma lives in the body across generations. Sahar now leads Soma Sahar, a healing practice weaving somatic embodiment, ancestral reflection, and creative ritual. A conversation about privilege, purpose, and coming home to yourself.
Sahar’s Personal / Writing IG:
@saharsaleem
Subconscious Glass on Substack
Somatic Coaching & Healing -
@somasahar_ www.saharsaleem.com right now, but starting in mid-August it'll be www.somasahar.com
You can connect with Saadia on IG @itssaadiak
Email:[email protected]
Host & Producer: Saadia Khan I Content Writer: Saadia Khan I Editorial review: Shei Yu I Sound Designer & Editor: Lou Raskin I Immigrantly Theme Music: Simon Hutchinson | Other Music: Epidemic Sound
Immigrantly Podcast is an Immigrantly Media Production.
For advertising inquiries, contact us at [email protected]
BOYOT (Belong On Your Own Terms) is the next step. It’s our new app, designed to help you think through identity, culture, ambition, relationships, and the stories we carry with guided reflections, prompts, and frameworks developed over years of conversations on this show.
It’s thoughtful. It’s challenging. And honestly, it’s the kind of space many of us wish existed earlier in our lives.
If you’re ready to go deeper than the podcast, subscribe to BOYOT and start the journey.
Don't forget to subscribe to Immigrantly Uninterrupted for insightful podcasts. Follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes content.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
"No one fits into these types of boxes." Darializa Avila Chevalier has spent her whole life being asked to pick one: Black or Latina, Dominican or American, organizer or politician. Two weeks ago, the 32-year-old from Harlem broke the biggest box of all, defeating a five-term incumbent to win the Democratic nomination in New York's 13th Congressional District, with no corporate money and no party machine. If she wins in November, she'll be the first Dominican woman ever elected to Congress.
In this episode of Immigrantly, Saadia Khan goes beyond the headlines with Darializa: growing up the daughter of working-class immigrants across Florida's many Americas, arriving at Columbia University as a low-income Afro-Latina student who didn't know office hours were a thing, and how campus organizing turned into a life of movement-building. They get into the surreal weight of making history while being picked apart in public, housing for all, abolishing ICE, the Democratic establishment's meltdown — and why dissent might be the most patriotic act of all
You can connect with Saadia on IG @itssaadiak
Email:[email protected]
Host & Producer: Saadia Khan I Content Writer: Saadia Khan I Editorial review: Shei Yu I Sound Designer & Editor: Lou Raskin I Immigrantly Theme Music: Simon Hutchinson | Other Music: Epidemic Sound
Immigrantly Podcast is an Immigrantly Media Production.
For advertising inquiries, contact us at [email protected]
BOYOT (Belong On Your Own Terms) is the next step. It’s our new app, designed to help you think through identity, culture, ambition, relationships, and the stories we carry with guided reflections, prompts, and frameworks developed over years of conversations on this show.
It’s thoughtful. It’s challenging. And honestly, it’s the kind of space many of us wish existed earlier in our lives.
If you’re ready to go deeper than the podcast, subscribe to BOYOT and start the journey.
Don't forget to subscribe to Immigrantly Uninterrupted for insightful podcasts. Follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes content.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Supreme Court just upheld birthright citizenship, striking down Trump's executive order in a 6-3 ruling that leans directly on a case 130 years in the making. We're re-releasing our deep dive into Wong Kim Ark — the Chinese American son of immigrants who won this exact fight at the Supreme Court in 1898 — because Chief Justice Roberts built this week's decision on Wong's story, by name.
In this episode: the history of the 14th Amendment, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Julia Lynch's 1844 citizenship case, and how "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" has been the most contested phrase in American immigration law for over a century. Plus a new opening and closing segment breaking down this week's ruling, the rejected "domicile" argument, and why the fight isn't actually over.
Birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment. American identity. Immigration history. All still unfinished business.
Show Notes
Episode Summary
Originally released in 2025, this episode traces the legal and racial history of birthright citizenship in America — from the Naturalization Act of 1790 through Wong Kim Ark (1898), Lynch v. Clarke (1844), and Trump's January 2025 executive order. This re-release adds new bookend segments covering the Supreme Court's June 30, 2026 ruling in Trump v. Barbara, which upheld birthright citizenship 6-3.
What's New in This Re-Release
Topics Covered
Host & Producer: Saadia Khan I Content Writer: Michaela Strauther I Editorial review: Shei Yu I Sound Designer & Editor: Lou Raskin I Immigrantly Theme Music: Simon Hutchinson | Other Music: Epidemic Sound
Immigrantly Podcast is an Immigrantly Media Production.
For advertising inquiries, contact us at [email protected]
BOYOT (Belong On Your Own Terms) is the next step. It’s our new app, designed to help you think through identity, culture, ambition, relationships, and the stories we carry with guided reflections, prompts, and frameworks developed over years of conversations on this show.
It’s thoughtful. It’s challenging. And honestly, it’s the kind of space many of us wish existed earlier in our lives.
If you’re ready to go deeper than the podcast, subscribe to BOYOT and start the journey.
Don't forget to subscribe to Immigrantly Uninterrupted for insightful podcasts. Follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes content.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sharing a special episode this week from the More Muslim podcast. Reporter Tanita Rahmani realizes a small detail—blue ink instead of black on a marriage contract—means her marriage was never legally registered. That revelation sends her on a personal and investigative journey into the legal gray zone where many Muslim marriages exist: recognized by faith, but invisible to the law. From overlooked paperwork in New York to courtroom battles in the UK, this episode unpacks what happens when a nikkah isn’t enough, and asks: who decides if a marriage is a marriage? You can hear other episodes of More Muslim at moremuslim.org
You can connect with Saadia on IG @itssaadiak
Email:[email protected]
Immigrantly Podcast is an Immigrantly Media Production.
For advertising inquiries, contact us at [email protected]
BOYOT (Belong On Your Own Terms) is the next step. It’s our new app, designed to help you think through identity, culture, ambition, relationships, and the stories we carry with guided reflections, prompts, and frameworks developed over years of conversations on this show.
It’s thoughtful. It’s challenging. And honestly, it’s the kind of space many of us wish existed earlier in our lives.
If you’re ready to go deeper than the podcast, subscribe to BOYOT and start the journey.
Don't forget to subscribe to Immigrantly Uninterrupted for insightful podcasts. Follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes content.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There's a voting bloc large enough to decide 126 congressional races and most of it isn't showing up. In this episode, Saadia Khan breaks down data on naturalized citizens, immigrant voter turnout, and civic participation in America, and makes the case that the ballot is one of the most powerful tools immigrants have but aren't using. From New York's 2026 primary to the $383 billion immigrants pay in taxes every year, this is an unfiltered look at belonging, power, and why "be grateful you were let in" was never the deal.
You can connect with Saadia on IG @itssaadiak
Email:[email protected]
Host & Producer: Saadia Khan I Content Writer: Saadia Khan I Editorial review: Shei Yu I Sound Designer & Editor: Lou Raskin I Immigrantly Theme Music: Simon Hutchinson | Other Music: Epidemic Sound
Immigrantly Podcast is an Immigrantly Media Production.
For advertising inquiries, contact us at [email protected]
BOYOT (Belong On Your Own Terms) is the next step. It’s our new app, designed to help you think through identity, culture, ambition, relationships, and the stories we carry with guided reflections, prompts, and frameworks developed over years of conversations on this show.
It’s thoughtful. It’s challenging. And honestly, it’s the kind of space many of us wish existed earlier in our lives.
If you’re ready to go deeper than the podcast, subscribe to BOYOT and start the journey.
Don't forget to subscribe to Immigrantly Uninterrupted for insightful podcasts. Follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes content.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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