Straight White American Jesus - Immigration, Christianity, and Refugees: The Story of One Million Neighbors
Aired: 2026-03-30
Duration: 46:32


=== A Story of the United States (11:39) ===

[00:00:07]  Axis Mundi.
[00:00:13]  There's a world of opportunity out there beyond the typical nine to five, where purpose and grit come together, where the American spirit and ingenuity are welcomed in places that could really use your skills and your experience.
[00:00:27]  We're talking about the Peace Corps, with volunteers living in working communities around the globe.
[00:00:32]  It's been called the toughest job you'll ever love.
[00:00:34]  Tough because it asks so much of you to dig deeper, get your hands dirty, go that extra mile, rise to the occasion, and meet challenges head on.
[00:00:44]  And the love part, that comes from being part of something bigger than yourself, from building bonds that last a lifetime.
[00:00:50]  It's knowing your hard work transformed lives, including your own.
[00:00:54]  After 65 years, the Peace Corps is still the toughest job you'll ever love.
[00:00:59]  Explore opportunities in more than 60 countries, learn about benefits, and apply at peacecore.gov slash serve.
[00:01:08]  That's peacecorp.gov slash serve.
[00:01:13]  By now, we are accustomed to hearing Christians talk about immigrants like this.
[00:01:18]  Christians can and should oppose mass migration, support secure borders, support mass deportations and denaturalization and remigration, because God is a God of order, not chaos.
[00:01:35]  God is a God of justice, not anarchy, and God is a God of righteousness.
[00:01:41]  And that's really what it comes down to when I think about this.
[00:01:45]  Unfortunately, we've reached a place where we expect people of faith to think that mass deportations are part of God's plan, that Jesus taught to expel the neighbor, to get rid of the other, to tell the foreigner there's no more room here.
[00:02:02]  But today I want to introduce you to a new series from Access Moody Media where just the opposite happened.
[00:02:23]  Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
[00:02:25]  I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of American Caesar, How Tech Lords and Theocrats Are Turning America into a Monarchy, and the founder of Axis Monday Media.
[00:02:35]  I want to introduce you today to a new series that I produced with Andrew Gill with help as engineer and musician, composer Scott Okamoto and Kerry O'Nishi, a podcast called One Million Neighbors by Dr. Melissa Borja.
[00:02:51]  Dr. Borja is an associate professor at the University of Michigan and an expert on one aspect of American history that you rarely hear about.
[00:03:01]  It's a story about refugees.
[00:03:03]  It's a story about faith.
[00:03:04]  It's a story about the United States.
[00:03:07]  A time a few decades ago in the 1970s when ordinary folks across the country, particularly in the Midwest, particularly in the Twin Cities, did something that seemed impossible.
[00:03:21]  They helped resettle 1 million refugees from Southeast Asia.
[00:03:27]  But if we're going to understand that story, we have to start here.
[00:03:31]  Yeah, they just took me out there with no clothes on, and I did the cover with my grandson's blanket.
[00:03:41]  That's Chung Lee Scott Tao, the man who I know many of you remember, who was pulled out of his home in his underwear.
[00:03:48]  He's elderly.
[00:03:50]  It was 10 degrees in January.
[00:03:52]  He was taking a nap, and then the men came to the door.
[00:03:57]  They were looking for sex offenders, people who allegedly committed sex crimes, two of them.
[00:04:02]  Unbeknownst to them, for some reason, one of them was already in jail, but it didn't matter to them.
[00:04:08]  It seems that all Asian people looked the same.
[00:04:11]  So they knocked on his door, started to shout, started to demand, and when he offered to provide his ID, proof that he was an American citizen, they didn't care.
[00:04:23]  About 10 federal agents with rifles and riot shields prepared for a siege on his house.
[00:04:30]  When he got outside, covered only by a baby's blanket from his grandson, there were neighbors yelling at the cops, telling them that they were un-American, traitors, merciless.
[00:04:44]  Now, just days earlier, federal agents had shot and killed Rene Good, and soon it would be Alex Pretty.
[00:04:54]  We can all remember watching the news footage from those days in the Twin Cities.
[00:04:59]  Some of you lived it.
[00:05:01]  It was awful, disgusting, harrowing, violent.
[00:05:07]  And in the middle of it was this man, Chong Lee Scott Tao, a U.S. citizen, no criminal record, no charges.
[00:05:17]  They eventually returned him to his home.
[00:05:19]  They didn't give an apology, no explanation, no acknowledgement of wrongdoing.
[00:05:24]  They left behind a broken door.
[00:05:26]  They left behind a scared neighborhood.
[00:05:29]  They left behind a family that doesn't feel safe going to sleep at night in its house.
[00:05:35]  But the story of Chong Lai Scott Tao doesn't begin in 2026.
[00:05:40]  It goes back much further than that.
[00:05:42]  It goes back further to 50 years ago when his mother fled Laos.
[00:05:47]  She was a nurse treating Hmong and American soldiers during what is known as the secret war, the one backed by the United States.
[00:05:55]  When that war ended, people like her became targets.
[00:05:59]  They were in danger in their country because they had helped our country.
[00:06:04]  So leaving Laos meant survival.
[00:06:07]  Like Chong Lee's mother, many in Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam were in a similar position.
[00:06:15]  Wars there, U.S.-backed wars, meant that they were in danger in their own countries, that because of their support for this city on a hill, they no longer had a place where they could stay.
[00:06:28]  So she came here to the United States as a refugee, looking for safety, looking for a place where she could live without fear of soldiers coming to her door.
[00:06:41]  And what happened when she came here was actually pretty remarkable because there was a moment in time that was different than this one.
[00:06:49]  It was a moment when many Americans chose to welcome the stranger, to help the huddled masses, to say that it was patriotic and Christian to make sure that those from Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia had a place where they could be safe.
[00:07:09]  So neighbors and churches, synagogues and community groups, many of them motivated by their faith, not despite their faith, worked resiliently to open their doors to refugees.
[00:07:24]  Now, this isn't a story of white saviorism.
[00:07:26]  It's not a story of white people being the answer to everything.
[00:07:30]  It's not a story of Christianity being the solution.
[00:07:32]  I'm not here to sell you on either of those narratives.
[00:07:37]  What I am here to sell you on is the fact that the current climate surrounding immigration and faith in this country is not the only one.
[00:07:45]  And in fact, there was a moment when things were much different.
[00:07:49]  This was one of the largest humanitarian efforts in American history.
[00:07:54]  And it's one of the least told, least taught, and least understood.
[00:08:00]  But it impinges on now, because as we watched over the last three months, as you lived over the last three months, we're living in a time of American contradiction, of a country that is tearing itself apart.
[00:08:14]  And here's Chong Li Scott Tao, a man whose story goes back to Laos, a man whose family came here looking for safety and was welcomed by American patriots and by church-going folks in the Twin Cities.
[00:08:30]  It's him who is facing an angry, riotous set of police officers at his doorstep, telling him that he doesn't belong here, that just by being who he is and how he looks, he's under suspicion.
[00:08:44]  That in order to make this country great again, we have to get rid of people like him.
[00:08:52]  So today I want to introduce you to 1 Million Neighbors.
[00:08:55]  I'm so proud of this series.
[00:08:57]  I'm so proud of the team that worked on it.
[00:08:59]  And I'm particularly excited about it because I think it's going to change how we can think of a couple of things.
[00:09:05]  What's possible when it comes to immigration, when it comes to the American ethos, and even when it comes to faith.
[00:09:12]  Some of you out there are not people who practice religion, or maybe you've left it.
[00:09:17]  Maybe it has always given you a bad taste in your mouth.
[00:09:20]  I get it.
[00:09:20]  I'm not here to evangelize.
[00:09:23]  I'm not here to sell you anything.
[00:09:26]  I'm here to say that there are many people of faith who have had a different understanding of immigration and still do.
[00:09:35]  I'm here to tell you that if we're going to make this country a place of safety and inclusion and equality, it's going to take everybody.
[00:09:44]  People of no faith, people of minority faiths, people of Christian faith.
[00:09:50]  But it's also to me important.
[00:09:52]  You may say, Brad, that's great, but I'm still not sure I care.
[00:09:55]  Well, let me tell you this.
[00:09:58]  If you witnessed what to me was one of the most inspiring and patriotic set of actions in Minneapolis and St. Paul over the last couple of months, if you watched neighbors, PTA moms, grandmothers,
[00:10:14]  people who were the sons and daughters of refugees, if you watched them build networks that resisted ICE, that stood up to the terrorists occupying their city, to the murderous brigade of secret police, if you watched neighborism in action.
[00:10:33]  Well, here's my argument.
[00:10:35]  The precursor to that, one of the foundations of that, is this story.
[00:10:42]  Because this story is the story of those who did that before in the very same city, who made sure that despite opposition and racism, despite the ideas that these people would never really be American or they could never assimilate to our country, they were backward.
[00:10:56]  Despite the ideas that this was just simply going to ruin our country, they said no.
[00:11:02]  And it's also the story of the refugees themselves, the people who came here looking for a new home, the suffering and pain that they endured, the ways that they were persecuted and made fun of, the ways that everyone from the KKK to folks in rural Minnesota and Michigan threatened them.
[00:11:25]  And the ways they adapted, the ways that they made America home, the way that they made this country great in their way.
[00:11:33]  So I'm proud to bring this to you.
[00:11:35]  We're going to be dropping these episodes on the Swatch feed on Thursdays.
[00:11:39]  But there's also a separate feed where you can find 1 Million Neighbors.
[00:11:43]  And you may be thinking, well, that's fine.
[00:11:45]  I'll just listen on Swatch.

=== Mercy for Asylum Seekers (15:31) ===

[00:11:46]  But let me ask you a favor.
[00:11:48]  You may have friends who don't listen to this show.
[00:11:50]  Know people who are teaching a class about immigration or religion, about refugees.
[00:11:55]  You may know a teacher who needs a new resource.
[00:11:58]  We'll send them the link in the show notes, the link to One Million Neighbors.
[00:12:03]  Spread the word because I think this is a story that will change how many people think about a lot of things, but one of them is what's possible here and what kind of future we might build.
[00:12:15]  I'm so grateful for you all.
[00:12:17]  I'm so grateful to get to do this work.
[00:12:19]  Thanks for listening.
[00:12:20]  Thanks for supporting.
[00:12:21]  Thanks for helping us make all of this happen.
[00:12:29]  Yeah, they just took me out there with no clothes on and it's covered with my grandson's blanket.
[00:12:39]  He was taking a Sunday afternoon nap when the men arrived.
[00:12:44]  Federal agents, around 10 of them, standing on his doorstep, armed with rifles and bearing riot shields.
[00:12:51]  They pounded on the door.
[00:12:54]  The man was Chang Li Scott Tao, and he told his daughter-in-law not to open the door.
[00:13:00]  He was afraid.
[00:13:02]  But after a minute, the agents broke down the door with a battery lamp, invaded his home, and pointed guns at his family.
[00:13:10]  They asked me, do I have my idea?
[00:13:12]  I go, yeah, is in the room.
[00:13:14]  And then my daughter-in-law, she tried to get my ID, but they didn't want to see it no more.
[00:13:20]  They didn't want proof.
[00:13:21]  They wanted compliance.
[00:13:24]  As his four-year-old grandson cried and watched, Tao was handcuffed by ICE agents and marched outside into the cold winter day.
[00:13:33]  He was wearing only sandals and underwear.
[00:13:35]  He had no coat, just a light baby blanket his family had draped on his shoulders.
[00:13:41]  It was snowing, and the temperature was 10 degrees.
[00:13:46]  On the street, his neighbors screamed at the agents to leave.
[00:13:49]  There were whistles, horns, chaos, rage, fear.
[00:13:55]  It was January 2026 in St. Paul, Minnesota.
[00:14:00]  It was just days after an ICE agent had shot Renee Goode at point-blank range and killed her in neighboring Minneapolis.
[00:14:07]  She was a poet and a mother of three.
[00:14:10]  And it was just days before Customs and Border Patrol agents gunned down and killed Alex Predi, a nurse who cared for veterans.
[00:14:19]  Like Renee Goode and Alex Predi, Chang Lee Scott Tao is a U.S. citizen.
[00:14:25]  He has no criminal record.
[00:14:27]  And yet, after breaking down his door and terrorizing his family, the federal agents drove him to the middle of nowhere, his words, and questioned him for an hour, a couple times demanding that he step out into the cold in order to identify him.
[00:14:43]  Then they brought him back home and left.
[00:14:47]  No apology, no explanation, no accountability.
[00:14:51]  Just a broken door and a broken sense of security for a family that no longer feels safe sleeping in their own home.
[00:15:04]  To feel safe.
[00:15:06]  This is why Tao and his family had made a home in America in the first place.
[00:15:11]  His mother had been a nurse who treated Hmong and American soldiers in Laos, where a secret war orchestrated by the U.S. government left devastation and mass death.
[00:15:22]  And when the war ended, people like Tao's mother were in danger.
[00:15:27]  They were refugees.
[00:15:29]  When those agents pulled the elderly man out of his home, forcing a tired, huddled grandfather out into the cold, they were reversing a process that started decades ago.
[00:15:41]  Back then, other Americans, many of whom were people of faith, welcomed refugees from war-torn Southeast Asia.
[00:15:49]  They offered them homes, food, and coats to keep them warm in the winter.
[00:15:54]  They did so in the name of American patriotism and the call to love their neighbor.
[00:16:00]  Chang Li Tao's experience is a story of America pulling itself in two directions and putting refugees in the middle of its contradiction.
[00:16:10]  And the tragic irony of this happening in the Twin Cities in 2026 is that 50 years ago, it was average Minnesotans who, against all odds, made this region one of the epicenters for the largest refugee resettlement in American history.
[00:16:42]  is One Million Neighbors.
[00:16:44]  I'm Dr. Melissa Borja.
[00:16:46]  This limited series is about American faith communities who mobilize to do the impossible, resettling over a million Southeast Asian refugees in the face of deep and widespread hostility towards migrants.
[00:17:22]  We'll return to Chong Li Tao in Minnesota in just a moment.
[00:17:26]  First, let's go back to one year before ICE agents invaded his home, to the time when Donald Trump was inaugurated the 47th President of the United States.
[00:17:37]  On January 21st, 2025, the Right Reverend Mary Ann Buddy found herself grappling with a big question.
[00:17:46]  As the Episcopalian Bishop of Washington, she was scheduled to preach at the National Cathedral at the Inauguration Week Interfaith Prayer Service.
[00:17:56]  It was going to be one of the most high-profile sermons of her life because the world's most powerful man would be in the audience, President Donald Trump.
[00:18:06]  Let me make one final plea, Mr. President.
[00:18:11]  Millions have put their trust in you.
[00:18:15]  And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God.
[00:18:24]  In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.
[00:18:35]  She was asking for compassion because this is where we had arrived as a country.
[00:18:41]  A Christian bishop needed to plead with the president to consider the humanity of migrants.
[00:18:48]  Many Christians now believe that it is a biblical teaching that Americans should care for Americans first, even if it means refusing refugees fleeing persecution, separating mothers from their children, and deporting migrants to overseas prisons without a trial.
[00:19:06]  But Bishop Buddy knew that there is a deep and rich tradition of American Christians opening their homes and their hearts to strangers from across the globe.
[00:19:16]  She knew that American history includes ordinary people of faith doing radical things in the name of loving their neighbors, whoever they may be, wherever they might be from, and whatever religion they practice.
[00:19:31]  To so many, it is the Christian and American thing to do.
[00:19:36]  Just one day before her sermon, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.
[00:19:42]  He had won his second election after campaigning on a promise to crack down on migrants.
[00:19:48]  But leading up to Election Day, many voters didn't really believe he would make good on his most extreme threats.
[00:19:56]  That's just Trump being Trump.
[00:19:58]  Don't take him so literally.
[00:20:00]  This is what many Americans said before casting their vote for him.
[00:20:05]  But his opposition to immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees had been the focus of his agenda for nearly a decade.
[00:20:14]  He's put those promises at the center of his policy plans and his public identity since he entered the political fray.
[00:20:21]  When I'm elected president, we will suspend the Syrian refugee program and we will keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country, okay?
[00:20:36]  Believe me.
[00:20:37]  We keep them out.
[00:20:40]  That was a few days before Election Day in 2016.
[00:20:43]  And even though many undecided voters recalled his first term as more bark than bite, this was one campaign promise he did keep.
[00:20:53]  One of the first things he did as president was sign an executive order that banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days.
[00:21:03]  It suspended entry of all Syrian refugees indefinitely, and it prohibited the entry of all other refugees for 120 days.
[00:21:12]  This executive order was known as the Muslim ban, and it prompted protests all across the country.
[00:21:18]  Refugees are welcome here, Billy!
[00:21:20]  Look here!
[00:21:22]  Reputees are welcome!
[00:21:23]  They're tiding away countless children, women, and men fleeing violence and persecution is inexcusable!
[00:21:32]  Maybe those undecided voters don't remember the Muslim ban because the protests were effective.
[00:21:39]  Eventually, it was lifted, and President Joe Biden later restored the refugee resettlement program in 2021.
[00:21:47]  But fast forward to 2024.
[00:21:51]  Once again, Trump was running for president.
[00:21:53]  And again, he campaigned on a promise to exclude, punish, and deport migrants.
[00:22:00]  He claimed they were a dangerous threat to American life.
[00:22:04]  These are hardened, horrible criminals, and we have to get them the hell out of our country because they've ruined, I mean, they're ruining the fabric of our country.
[00:22:15]  He usually focused on migrants crossing the southern border, but he also promised to revive his Muslim ban.
[00:22:22]  And one of them, Biden, revoked that beautiful, wonderful travel ban and has surged refugee resettlement from the most dangerous countries in the world.
[00:22:34]  This is from August 2021, less than a week after the Taliban captured Kabul.
[00:22:40]  Thousands of Afghans were suddenly refugees.
[00:22:43]  The most dangerous terrorists in the world.
[00:22:46]  They come into our country now with no problem.
[00:22:50]  Come on in.
[00:22:52]  Love to have you.
[00:22:54]  This is a sick culture, and our country is a disaster, and it's going to die before your very eyes if this craziness isn't stopped in so many ways.
[00:23:08]  As he began his second term, it was clear he intended to make good on these promises.
[00:23:14]  In his inaugural address, he said he would stop what he called a disastrous invasion of immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees.
[00:23:23]  Then, later that day, came the executive orders.
[00:23:27]  Trump signed 26 executive orders on January 20th, 2025.
[00:23:33]  They were dizzying in their reach, declaring diversity, equity, and inclusion programs illegal, outlawing transgender identity, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization.
[00:23:47]  There were many affecting migrants, including one that halted the United States' refugee resettlement program.
[00:23:55]  For many Americans, this flurry of executive orders was unsettling.
[00:24:00]  What would President Trump try next?
[00:24:03]  There were rumors that ICE would be doing mass deportation raids any day now.
[00:24:08]  At this point, no one knew what that would look like.
[00:24:12]  These were the events that unfolded the day before Bishop Buddy was scheduled to preach at the prayer service at the National Cathedral.
[00:24:21]  President Trump would be sitting in the first pew.
[00:24:25]  How would he react to her sermon?
[00:24:28]  Would Bishop Buddy be safe if she said something challenging?
[00:24:32]  She planned to talk about unity, but then, in the last 24 hours before the service, she did some reflection.
[00:24:40]  She consulted with colleagues and she made some last-minute changes, in part because of what President Trump had said about migrants and other marginalized people in his inaugural address.
[00:24:52]  On the day of the inauguration, the president had spoken so cruelly and misleadingly dishonestly about the two groups of people that I mentioned, that were people among whom are my closest friends and people I love and serve, that you can't just paint all immigrants as dangerous criminals, and you can't paint all LGBTQ people as if they were a threat to our society and our way of life, that that's just wrong.
[00:25:19]  And he knew it, and everyone else knows it, and I had the opportunity to say it.
[00:25:25]  She eventually decided to make a direct appeal to President Trump to show mercy.
[00:25:31]  Let me make one final plea, Mr. President.
[00:25:37]  Millions have put their trust in you.
[00:25:40]  And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God.
[00:25:50]  In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.
[00:26:00]  Some of those people who were scared and worthy of mercy were immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees.
[00:26:07]  And the people.
[00:26:08]  The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation.
[00:26:28]  But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.
[00:26:32]  They pay taxes and are good neighbors.
[00:26:36]  They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, wadara, and temples.
[00:26:46]  I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away.
[00:26:54]  And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.
[00:27:05]  Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger.
[00:27:12]  For we were all once strangers in this land.

=== Contradictions in American History (13:00) ===

[00:27:17]  During these comments, you could see President Trump and Vice President JD Vance shift in their seats, look away, glance sideways, and whisper.
[00:27:28]  When asked about the service afterward, President Trump offered no praise.
[00:27:34]  I did think it was a good service, Steph.
[00:27:36]  Thank you very much.
[00:27:37]  They can do much better.
[00:27:40]  Bishop Buddy had struck a nerve with President Trump, and she had done so as a person of faith, through her faith, and by responding to the new political moment with an old idea.
[00:27:53]  Her argument that we were all once strangers in this land makes reference to biblical language and to a sacred story that Americans frequently tell about our nation.
[00:28:04]  That we are a nation of immigrants and a place of refuge for people who seek freedom.
[00:28:10]  Think of Emma Lazarus' celebrated lines of poetry emblazoned on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
[00:28:17]  Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
[00:28:25]  Send me these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.
[00:28:30]  Or think of the words of President Gerald Ford 50 years ago when he urged the nation to welcome refugees from Vietnam.
[00:28:39]  Because the United States has had a long tradition of opening its doors to immigrants from all countries.
[00:28:49]  We're a country built by immigrants from all areas of the world.
[00:28:55]  And we've always been a humanitarian nation.
[00:28:59]  And yet the painful truth is this.
[00:29:02]  The United States hasn't always been a humanitarian nation that opens its doors to immigrants and refugees.
[00:29:08]  America is the country of President Trump and Father Coughlin, just as it is the country of President Ford and Bishop Buddy.
[00:29:17]  Our treatment of refugees throughout American history often reveals stark contradictions between the ideals we like to proclaim and the actions and attitudes of our government and our people.
[00:29:30]  Welcoming the tired, poor, huddled masses has never been popular.
[00:29:37]  Think, for example, of how in the 1930s, the United States government refused the immigration of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.
[00:29:45]  This response to Jewish refugees reflected intense and pervasive anti-Semitism in American society during this period.
[00:29:53]  Prominent public figures like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford advanced anti-Semitic views.
[00:30:00]  And in 1939, 20,000 people gathered in Madison Square Garden for a pro-Nazi rally where speakers issued vicious diatribes against Jews.
[00:30:12]  We only call upon our leaders to awake to the fact that the Jew is as alien in body, mind, and soul as any other North Aryan, and that he is a thousand times more dangerous to us than all the others by reason of his parasitic nature.
[00:30:32]  These attitudes shaped public responses to the question of Jewish immigration.
[00:30:37]  In the wake of Kristallnacht in late 1938, a Gallup poll found that only 21% of Americans surveyed believed the United States should welcome a larger number of Jewish exiles fleeing Nazi Germany.
[00:30:52]  72% said it should not.
[00:30:55]  And in the following year, the United States refused the entry of hundreds of Jewish refugees aboard a German passenger ship, the MS St. Louis.
[00:31:05]  But this public attitude wasn't only present during the World War II era.
[00:31:09]  50 years ago, most Americans didn't want to resettle refugees from Southeast Asia either.
[00:31:15]  And that brings us back to the story of Chong Li Scott Tao.
[00:31:32]  Tao's mother was a refugee from Laos.
[00:31:35]  She was a nurse in charge of two hospitals during the secret war, and she had supported U.S. covert operations by treating American and CIA-backed Hmong soldiers.
[00:31:46]  When communists took control of Laos, her life was in danger.
[00:31:50]  So she fled, just like thousands of other Hmong people who, after supporting the Americans, found that it was no longer safe to stay in their own country.
[00:32:00]  So they came to the United States, a place where they hoped to find freedom and security.
[00:32:08]  Southeast Asian refugees like Tao's family first began to arrive in significant numbers in the spring of 1975, after the end of the Vietnam War.
[00:32:19]  But the effort was unpopular.
[00:32:22]  Just a month after the fall of Saigon, only 36% of Americans surveyed favored the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees.
[00:32:31]  54% opposed it.
[00:32:33]  Attitudes towards Southeast Asian refugees warmed somewhat over time.
[00:32:38]  But even a full decade after the end of the Vietnam War, a plurality of Americans still believed that the United States had accepted too many refugees.
[00:32:48]  Americans were unenthusiastic about Southeast Asian refugees for a few reasons.
[00:32:54]  First, these refugees were different from previous groups.
[00:32:58]  Up until that point, most refugees coming to the United States had been white and European.
[00:33:04]  But these refugees were from a new part of the world, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
[00:33:09]  And they arrived at a time when the United States had relatively few Asian Americans.
[00:33:15]  These refugees were also religiously different.
[00:33:18]  They were often Buddhist and animist, arriving in a country that was predominantly Christian.
[00:33:24]  When Southeast Asian refugees arrived also mattered.
[00:33:28]  After years of war in Southeast Asia, many Americans harbored resentment and suspicion of Vietnamese people, whom they accused of bringing disease, communist infiltration, and un-American ways of life.
[00:33:42]  As CBS News reported, some complained to their elected officials.
[00:33:47]  On Capitol Hill, the mail is overwhelmingly hostile to the refugees.
[00:33:51]  One letter from Nebraska reads, they bring only disease, corruption, and apathy.
[00:33:55]  The United States was also experiencing a lot of economic trouble during the 1970s, including inflation, high levels of unemployment, rising energy costs, disruptions in the industrial sector, and recession.
[00:34:10]  These problems coincided with a lot of social strife, including ongoing struggles around racial justice.
[00:34:17]  Here's Reverend Jesse Jackson speaking in June of 1976.
[00:34:22]  Well, our concern is that Americans are basically being put in an emotional van on the one hand.
[00:34:27]  The spirit of America, give me your time, give me your poor, your huddled masses, that's still a sound situation.
[00:34:34]  But this situation of extreme joblessness in the nation and people without a domestic plan in a domestic crisis, 100 odd thousand refugees, irritates that situation.
[00:34:46]  But Americans did resettle Southeast Asian refugees despite these obstacles in an effort that historians now recognize to be something of a miracle.
[00:34:57]  Between 1975 and 2010, over 1 million Southeast Asian refugees were resettled in the United States.
[00:35:05]  And it was an enormous undertaking.
[00:35:08]  It involved huge amounts of public and private resources and the labor and love of thousands of volunteers all across the country.
[00:35:17]  And it was an important event because it transformed American life.
[00:35:21]  It changed American policy.
[00:35:24]  Southeast Asian refugee resettlement set the stage for the 1980 Refugee Act, which created the modern resettlement system.
[00:35:32]  It also changed the American people, those who volunteered to help with resettlement, who lived in communities that welcomed refugees, and of course, Southeast Asian refugees themselves.
[00:35:45]  In this series, we'll meet people like Kathleen Villenga, who watched Saigon fall on her hospital room TV in Minnesota.
[00:35:54]  She was inspired to welcome refugees into her community.
[00:35:58]  And people like Simon Huafan, who left Saigon by helicopter in 1975 when he was 10 years old, and who wound up growing up in Denver, Colorado.
[00:36:08]  Religion is a central reason why Southeast Asian refugee resettlement was possible.
[00:36:14]  To be sure, there were geopolitical and ideological reasons why Americans chose to resettle Southeast Asian refugees.
[00:36:22]  Among them, loyalty to our friends and allies, intense anti-communist fervor, and concern about human rights.
[00:36:31]  But there was more than that.
[00:36:32]  There was a moral principle.
[00:36:35]  I must, of course, as I think each of you would, consider the safety of nearly 6,000 Americans who remain in South Vietnam and tens of thousands of South Vietnamese employees of the United States government,
[00:36:57]  of news agencies, of contractors and businesses for many years, whose lives with their dependents are in very grave peril.
[00:37:13]  This is President Ford again, speaking on April 10, 1975, weeks before the fall of Saigon.
[00:37:21]  There are tens of thousands of other South Vietnamese intellectuals, professors, teachers, editors, and opinion leaders who have supported the South Vietnamese cause and the alliance with the United States, to whom we have a profound moral obligation.
[00:37:42]  This sense of moral obligation was why religious people, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, mobilized to advocate for refugees.
[00:37:51]  It's why they organized their congregations to do the day-to-day work of making sure refugees had a place to live and food to eat.
[00:37:59]  It's why they labored to help smooth relationships between refugees and the broader community.
[00:38:05]  Put simply, Southeast Asian refugee resettlement would not have been possible without the manpower and material resources of religious communities.
[00:38:15]  And these people of faith did this work because they felt a deep religious commitment to welcome the stranger, to be peacemakers, to feed the hungry, to serve people who Jesus called the least of these, and to love their neighbors, one million of them from the other side of the world.
[00:38:35]  I think Jesus Christ gave us the example of reaching out to more than the persons who are part of the already existing religious community.
[00:38:42]  He reached out himself to persons who were far beyond that.
[00:38:46]  The Lutheran Council in the USA commissioned this documentary in the late 1970s about resettling Southeast Asian refugees.
[00:38:54]  We need in this country to be responsive to other people's desires and what they are looking for in America.
[00:39:01]  But we need also for ourselves to renew the sense of America being an experiment that was launched by immigrants that has been sustained by immigrant dreams and will be renewed by immigrants.
[00:39:17]  This is the story of an improbable and monumental event.
[00:39:22]  How the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees happened at all, given all the forces against it.
[00:39:28]  How people of faith provided the labor and the love to make resettlement a reality.
[00:39:33]  And how this type of radical hospitality is hard.
[00:39:38]  How it involves making a lot of mistakes.
[00:39:41]  How it requires humility and sacrifice and discomfort and a willingness to learn difficult truths about ourselves and others.
[00:39:50]  But how it's also worth it.
[00:39:53]  Because hospitality is about making room.
[00:39:56]  It's about being open to growing and changing.
[00:39:59]  It's about making our hearts bigger and our world smaller.
[00:40:04]  It might be the most human thing we can do, showing mercy and compassion by opening our home to another person who needs shelter and welcome.

=== Bishop Buddy and Social Media (04:55) ===

[00:40:18]  And this brings us back to Bishop Mary Ann Buddy, who asked President Trump to show mercy to strangers.
[00:40:25]  Not long after Bishop Buddy's sermon, President Trump attacked her on social media.
[00:40:31]  She brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way, he wrote.
[00:40:36]  She was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart.
[00:40:40]  He later added, apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one.
[00:40:47]  She is not very good at her job.
[00:40:49]  She and her church owe the public an apology.
[00:40:53]  Representative Mike Collins of Georgia, a Trump ally, said on social media that Buddy should be added to the deportation list.
[00:41:02]  Those were his words.
[00:41:05]  President Trump and his administration have since pursued a wide range of actions that imperil migrants.
[00:41:12]  They have detained and deported migrants without due process, taking actions that judges have deemed unlawful.
[00:41:19]  They have halted funding for programs that provided legal services for unaccompanied children.
[00:41:24]  They've drastically cut refugee admissions and ended temporary protected status for several groups, including Afghans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and Cameroonians, groups that had been allowed to stay in the United States because of civil unrest or natural disasters in their home countries.
[00:41:42]  And in city after city, ICE agents have violently detained people with no criminal records.
[00:41:50]  But there has also been an outpouring of support for these migrants.
[00:41:55]  After millions of people saw images and videos of how federal agents had treated Chong Li Tao, an online fundraiser topped $100,000 in less than two weeks.
[00:42:06]  And a lot of this support came from people of faith, including Bishop Buddy.
[00:42:11]  After her confrontational sermon in 2025, she received 20,000 letters from supporters who were moved by her remarks.
[00:42:20]  And then, in January of 2026, a year after she had pleaded with President Trump to show mercy to migrants, she was in her home state of Minnesota, taking her plea out of the pulpit and into the streets.
[00:42:34]  She was one of several hundred religious leaders who traveled to the Twin Cities to bear witness to what she has described as the vitriol and brazenness of the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign.
[00:42:48]  And shortly after that trip, she posted a video on social media in which she shared what she had seen.
[00:42:54]  The eyes and ears of the nation are rightfully fixed on what's happening in Minnesota now.
[00:42:59]  She described violent detentions and the killing of protesters, but she called attention to much more than cruelty.
[00:43:06]  She called attention to compassion.
[00:43:09]  We are also seeing across the state of Minnesota hundreds and thousands of people who are determined to care for their neighbors and to stand up for the communities that they love.
[00:43:23]  People are volunteering to help teach children who are sequestered in their homes, donating food, delivering groceries.
[00:43:33]  She urged all Americans to consider what they can do to show up for their neighbors.
[00:43:38]  And you may be wondering, as many of us are, what is yours to do?
[00:43:45]  And I'm here to say that this is a moment for all of us across the nation.
[00:43:51]  And we all can do something.
[00:43:54]  Something large, something small.
[00:43:57]  We can look around and to see who among our neighbors are in need of our care.
[00:44:03]  In her view, much was at stake.
[00:44:06]  This is our moment to determine who we are as Americans, who we are as the United States of America.
[00:44:14]  And I believe, and I have seen, how Minnesota is showing us all, is showing us all the way.
[00:44:21]  And we can follow their example wherever we are and do what we can to recreate and restore fabrics of decency and kindness that sustain us all.
[00:44:37]  We don't know what else will happen as Trump continues enacting his agenda.
[00:44:42]  But we do know what happened at least once before in the case of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement.
[00:44:48]  Thousands of everyday people rejected fear and chose to put their religious values into practice by showing care, hospitality, and mercy to migrants, by loving their neighbors.
[00:45:03]  It was a courageous and compassionate choice.
[00:45:06]  It also came at a cost.
[00:45:09]  This work tested the limits of communities and led to real tensions.

=== Radical Hospitality for All (01:18) ===

[00:45:14]  And it prompted big questions about the boundaries of faith and the true meaning of respect, compassion, and welcome.
[00:45:21]  What they did, what they struggled with, and what they learned, that's the story of One Million Neighbors.
[00:45:44]  That's it for this episode of One Million Neighbors.
[00:45:47]  Thank you so much for listening.
[00:45:49]  If you enjoyed the show, please rate it and review it on your podcast listening app and tell a friend about it.
[00:45:55]  I'm Melissa Borja.
[00:45:57]  Listen next time when we focus on the wars that uprooted Southeast Asians, made them refugees, and brought them to the United States.
[00:46:06]  One Million Neighbors was produced by Andrew Gill and Bradley Onishi.
[00:46:10]  Original music and audio engineering were by Scott Okamoto.
[00:46:15]  Carrie Onishi provided production assistance.
[00:46:18]  One Million Neighbors was made possible in partnership with Apari through generous funding from the Lilly Foundation.
[00:46:26]  Until next time, remember, radical hospitality isn't just for Radicals.