Bending Borders

Twelve workers who might otherwise go unnoticed – a deli waitress, bus driver, metal scrapper, longshoreman and bathroom attendant, to name a few – take us inside their places of work to show us what they do, why they do it and what it takes to get through a shift.

In this hour-long special, nine stories from immigrants who left their homelands for America, but find themselves somewhere in between. A Nigerian pop star, an Iraqi Kurdish restaurant owner, a group of Central American women and others make the journey to America, only to be reeled back home.

Modern cities are a place of simultaneous decay and resurrection. Part of this process is the creation of an ever-widening chasms between rich and poor. This goes hand in hand with the shifting demographic fault lines that have created new spaces of fusion and collision, where inhabitants now live with people they would have never known just a few years ago.