The Immigrant Perspective

Anthea Taljaard was born in Durban, South Africa, and grew up traveling constantly. Her father packed the family into a caravan for nearly every holiday, instilling in her a lifelong comfort with the unfamiliar. She spent most of her adult life in South Africa, including her years in the small whale-watching village of Hermanus near Cape Town, before escalating political violence made staying no longer an option.

She left, as she describes it, on “the basis of survival,” taking a contract to teach business skills to women in Saudi Arabia's newly opened women's colleges, a role that meant wearing a full abaya and niqab, being escorted everywhere by a male chaperone, and helping open bank counters and retail positions to women for the first time in the country's history. Four years and a marriage later - to a Canadian woman she met on contract - she immigrated to Toronto, then relocated to Nova Scotia's eastern shore just three weeks before COVID-19 shut the world down. She became a Canadian citizen in 2023.

In this episode, Anthea talks through the specific, sometimes absurd mechanics of culture shock, from navigating Saudi Arabia's gender segregation to adjusting to Toronto's twelve lanes of traffic after years in a South African village of twenty thousand people. She describes how a severe burn injury led her into art as therapy, and how a “worst drawn stick man” consolation prize and a pandemic pop-up shop eventually turned into a full folk-art sculpture practice, one where each character, from an aging seagull named Norma to an “off-point” girl named Molly, gets its own original song. She also talks about her book, Soul Decor: At Home in Your Own Skin, and closes with a definition of home that reframes it entirely: not a place, but a state of being, made of every version of herself she's carried forward.

Anthea has also created a page especially for The Immigrant Perspective listeners, with more on her art and where to find her book, Soul Decor: At Home in Your Own Skin. Follow this link: https://www.saltspraydesign.ca/immigrant-perspective

Lynda Charles grew up in northern Haiti, the daughter of a mother who "dreamt big" for her children despite having little formal education herself. Lynda knew she wanted to be a doctor from around age five, after a visit to her pediatrician, a memory she still carries word for word. She went on to medical school in Port-au-Prince, choosing medicine over parallel acceptances to study teaching and languages, and finished her internship and required social service year to earn her medical license.

Her path to the U.S. wasn't a plan; it was a death threat. Two weeks after returning from a training in France that had set her up to lead a national genetics education program, Lynda received a threat serious enough that her mother insisted she leave the country immediately, even though her mother had paid for medical school and stood to "lose" that investment. Lynda arrived in Delaware in 2015 on a visitor visa, eventually starting an immigration process at her uncle's urging. She later returned to Haiti with her husband and young daughter, worked at Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and then a nonprofit, and, after a cold application to the UN Volunteers program she almost dismissed as a scam, landed a UNICEF nutrition role in northern Haiti, close to her hometown. She was promoted to a full UN staff position about a year later, fulfilling a dream she'd written down in a journal at age fifteen. In 2024, escalating gang violence and kidnappings in Haiti pushed her to move permanently to Delaware with her three children, while her husband remains in Port-au-Prince.

In the episode, Lynda talks about the choice she made not to pursue U.S. medical relicensing as an international medical graduate, deciding instead to build a career in leadership coaching and community health work so she could be the present, hands-on mother she didn't get to be while working long hours in Haiti. She describes the heartbreak of realizing her children's caregivers knew their day-to-day preferences better than she did, and how that shaped her choice to prioritize time over title. She also opens up, for the first time in this kind of public setting, about surviving sexual abuse as a teenager and the years she spent privately carrying shame and a sense of unworthiness even while succeeding professionally, and how her faith became the turning point that let her forgive her abuser, her mother, and herself. The conversation closes with a look at her book, Not Just an Immigrant: Not Defined by Borders, But Refined by Grace, why she wrote it, and her reflections on what she wishes people understood about the real cost of immigrating to the U.S: financial, emotional, and beyond.

Adriana Bialostozky's immigration story started a generation earlier, when her grandparents left Russia and Poland and landed in Mexico instead of the United States, because the doors here were closed. That layered history is the backdrop for a conversation about what it means to carry multiple homes inside you, and what gets lost (and found) when you rebuild a professional identity in a new country.

Adriana trained as a physician in Mexico City, came to the US on an H1 visa, and made her way through New York, Miami, and Ann Arbor before putting down roots in Nashville nearly twenty years ago. Along the way she married a fellow immigrant physician, raised two sons in a household where Spanish, late dinners, and a strong sense of community were non-negotiable, and built a practice focused on the families most physicians aren't trained to see clearly.

In this episode, we talk about the sexist residency interview that sent her packing for the US, the study library in New York where immigrants from every country sat side by side chasing the same dream, and the moment she cried after her first clinic in Miami because she couldn't decode the abbreviations on the chart. We also get into her cultural competency work with medical residents, and why it's not about memorizing cultures, but about learning to ask better questions. Adriana explains what she means when she says she doesn't belong in Mexico anymore, and she doesn't fully belong here either, and she has made her peace with that.

Freangel Pacheco left Venezuela in 2015 after being threatened for protesting the government, and he hasn't seen his mother since. Eleven years later, his political asylum case is still pending. Freangel, a musician, personal trainer, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, talks with Mary Lou about the limbo of waiting on asylum with no passport and no embassy to turn to, the years he spent depressed before finding his way back to music, and the six-song, six-film, six-painting project he's releasing this year in hopes it builds a strong enough case for an artist visa, which is the path that will allow him to see his mother again. His first single from the project, “Dejando el Ayer” (“Leaving Yesterday Behind”), is the opening chapter of his debut album Incondicional Vol. 1, released under his music project Lastdaysofjude, and it just hit #1 on Venezuela's Record Report Pop Ballad chart. It's a conversation about displacement, depression, art as survival, and what “home” means when you can't go back to the one you had.

Perry Constantine has three immigrant stories layered into one: his Greek grandfather fled political violence in Istanbul to bring the family back to Chicago; his British father emigrated through Canada; and Perry himself left Chicago for Japan in 2008 through the JET Program, expecting to stay a year. Almost twenty years later, he's teaching at a university in Kagoshima, married to a Japanese woman, and raising two bilingual kids. In this conversation, Perry and Mary Lou talk about arriving in a town with no English-language information available online, the reverse culture shock of moving back to the US, and what it actually means to feel at home in a place that isn't where you're from.

Cathy met my wife Lois twenty-five years ago at a summer resort in Lois's Michigan hometown. They remained in touch and stayed close enough that Cathy flew back to the U.S. for our wedding, then eventually settled in the US herself with her husband Mark, who's also from England. In this episode, Cathy and Mark talk about meeting, marrying for a green card (mostly joking), and building a life across two apartments, one house, and 48 states. One of the parts of their story is especially fascinating to me: their two kids speak with British accents at home and American accents with friends, and they switch mid-sentence depending on who's in the room. We dig into what that's like to witness as a parent, whether the kids even think of themselves as American, and what Cathy and Mark themselves still call "home" after eleven years - a question that gets two different, equally honest answers.

At thirteen years old, Nigel de Leon left Cebu City, Philippines with his mom and a one-way trip to Alberta, Canada. In this episode, Nigel talks about the small, unexpected things that stuck with him most: the taste of the tap water, the radio station playing the night he landed, and his grandmother crying at the airport as he left. Now settled in Edmonton, Nigel is a Toastmasters member and host of his own podcast, The Meetup Spot, using it to build his path toward a career in media and radio. We talk about culture shock, chasing opportunity, and what it means to call two places home.

Max grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado. Thanks to his Irish-born mother, he has an Irish passport and a restlessness he couldn't quite explain. He left college, spent a semester in Costa Rica with essentially no Spanish, and somewhere between a host mother who spoke no English and a breakfast table breakthrough, something shifted. In Sept 2026, he moved to Cádiz, Spain, on the southwest coast near Gibraltar, and he has no intention of leaving.

In this episode, Mary Lou talks with her nephew about the winding road that led him to Cádiz, the culture shock of Costa Rica, and what daily life actually looks like in a small Spanish city where the locals talk "violently but always with love." They dig into the loaded difference between the words immigrant and expat - who uses them, why it matters, and how gentrification plays into all of it. Max also shares his take on identity (firmly American, luckily Irish-passported, increasingly gaditano), what it's like to be asked about US politics everywhere he goes, and why he thinks everyone in the US should be learning Spanish.

And at the end - where is home? His answer is immediate.

Negin Farsad is a comedian, filmmaker, author, and podcaster based in New York City. She's a regular panelist on NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, the creator and star of The Muslims Are Coming!, and the author of How to Make White People Laugh. She also hosts the political comedy podcast Fake the Nation.

In this conversation, Negin shares the story of how her father, a surgeon detained by the Shah's secret police over a Soviet anatomy book, eventually made his way to New Haven as part of Iran's brain drain. She talks about growing up in Roanoke, Virginia and Palm Springs, California, longing to be Mexican, speaking Farsi to her daughter, and the heartbreak of not being able to return to Iran for over 20 years.

She also makes a pretty compelling case that immigration is great for the economy, even if you don't like empanadas. (You do like empanadas, right?)

This episode was recorded in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the week of Negin's show The Muslims Are Coming! with Equally Threatening Friends.

Frank is the only American-born member of our family, and the one who had to figure out how to become an immigrant in reverse. A conversation about names, leaving, and what home really means.