Arslan Chaudhary says America has made an underclass part of its workforce. After 16 years practicing immigration law, he has seen the distance between the rules and the lives built around them. Tab wants to understand why a country that argues so loudly about who belongs can quietly rely on people it does not fully recognize. Their conversation goes beyond the border and into jobs, wages, families, and the prices the rest of us pay.
Arslan handles family and employment cases and previously worked with people seeking asylum or facing removal. Even the routes considered “legal” can mean lengthy applications, uncertain timelines, and decisions that affect whether a family can travel or stay together. Tab asks why a system that needs workers can make it so difficult for people to work with secure status, and why the words used to describe them carry so much weight.
Then Arslan makes the observation that changes the conversation: in parts of the economy, he says, unauthorized labor is not an exception to the way things run. It is built into it. Workers without secure status have less power to negotiate, while employers and customers benefit from the prices that arrangement makes possible. Tab presses him on the uncomfortable part. If those workers had full bargaining power, would the rest of us be willing to pay what the work actually costs? And if the current arrangement serves interests across the political spectrum, who is really motivated to change it?
They talk through what Arslan experienced in detention and asylum work, what shifted across administrations, and a possible political compromise that he presents as a practical opening, not a perfect fix. Later, the conversation takes an unexpected turn into AI, the judgment a lawyer brings to a case, and Arslan's life as a musician and writer. He is using new tools to make a film about immigration. His hope is that people might first see the workers and families inside the system, then have a more honest argument about what to do with it.
