NPR reporter and author Aarti Shahani joined Boston Public Radio on Friday to discuss her new book “Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares.”
Shahani described her book, which follows her father and uncle’s struggle against the U.S. deportation system as a "coming to America, and desperately trying to stay here story.”
"My father was a brilliant man,” Shahani said. "He spoke six languages. He could multiply large numbers in his head. He was, by anyone’s definition, a really valuable worker, a really valuable contributor.
"But as a migrant, he didn’t get to matter,” she continued. "The fact about migrants is whenever you pick up and start over. You hit the reset button, and everything you’ve done previously no longer counts. That was my father’s fate.”
Shahani was born in Casablanca, Morocco. She moved to the Queens, New York, as a child. After a decade living in the U.S., her father opened an electronics shop in Manhattan, which he operated alongside his brother.
But their dream came to an abrupt end when New York officials arrested her father and uncle over false allegations that they were linked to the Cali drug cartel.
"Here’s a front row seat into the deportation system,” Shahani said. "Maybe you don’t know how it works — it’s crazy. Look at how it works, step into this Kafkaesque system as it unfolded for us."
