Who owes the greater debt: immigrants, or America?
Author Dina Nayeri discusses her book, The Ungrateful Refugee.
Author Dina Nayeri fled Iran at the age of 8. After stints in Dubai and then Italy, she and her family arrived in Oklahoma as refugees when she was 10.
People told her how lucky she was to be here – how grateful she should be.
Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee
To be plucked from a refugee camp and resettled in small town America – a lucky break, right? Something for which anyone should be grateful. Iran-American refugee Dina Nayeri wrote a viral piece in The Guardian a few years ago that begged to differ. It was called “The ungrateful refugee: we have no debt to repay.” In her new book The Ungrateful Refugee: Stories Immigrants Never Tell You, she argues that if anyone owes a debt, it’s America.
A few years ago, she wrote a viral essay for the Guardian that challenged that. It was called "The ungrateful refugee: ‘We have no debt to repay.’"
Her latest book is also called The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You. She spoke about the book with Bill Radke on The Record.
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Bill Radke
Host
Bill hosts Week In Review and Words in Review. After starting with KUOW as a University of Washington student in 1985, Bill was KUOW's morning host in the '90s and the creator of past show, Rewind, a news-satire show heard on KUOW and nationwide on NPR. Bill moved away to Southern California to host American Public Media's Weekend America and Marketplace Morning Report and returned to KUOW in 2012.
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