Transcript

00:41 Doug Blackmon: Welcome back to American Forum. We all reacted in horror in the fall of 2015 when images were broadcast around the lifeless body of a three year old Syrian boy, named Alan (A-LAN). His family was fleeing the Syrian Civil War. He drowned as they attempted to reach Europe, and his body washed up on a Greek beach. There was a clear sense of outrage around the world that such a thing could happen now and a fear that something was unfolding akin to the great European refugee crisis of World War II—when, for years, the United States and many countries turned a blind eye to Jews attempting to escape the Holocaust. Germany signaled a willingness to permit large numbers of refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries.  Thousands of migrants clogged border crossings in the former Yugoslavia, Turkey and Bulgaria. Tens of thousands crowded boats headed for Greece. But then something else happened. The arrival of those refugees ferociously unleashed anti-immigrant political parties in Europe.

FACTOID: The Question: What does migrant crisis mean for Europe and U.S.?

In the United States, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said refugees might be terrorists and should be kept out.  Huge numbers of Americans applauded. Now, more than 4 million Syrian refugees remain displaced, and millions of others are trapped in hopeless camps and detention centers. In this American Forum, we attempt to sort through this complicated and worrisome situation, and what it means for the future of Europe and America's leadership roles in the world. Joining us are: Kathleen Newland a co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute and one of the leading voices in the world on refugees and migrants. She’s joined by David Leblang, who is a political economist at the University of Virginia, and has served as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund and the Directorate of Finance and Economics of the European Commission. Thanks you both for joining us.

Kathleen Newland: It’s great to be here.

Blackmon: So that terrible image that we all saw of that little boy is haunting to me even looking at it again this morning, ah, did catalyze a tremendous outpouring of concern and interest and a great expression of humanism, ultimately around the world. Has something actually gotten better Kathleen, or what is the current situation? Why has the crisis faded a bit from the headlines?

Newland: I think that’s more phenomenon in the United States than it is in Europe. And one of the distinguishing things about this winter is that the numbers of people crossing the Mediterranean by boat which usually are very seasonal. You know it goes up in the sprint and the summer and then it trends down as the weather gets rougher. Hasn’t happened to the same extent it usually does. There’s still three or four thousand people a day coming into Greece and that, I think, demonstrates the sort of measure of desperation that people, not just in Syria but in Iraq and Afghanistan and other parts of the world that are subject to violent conflict are still feeling.

FACTOID: 1 million refugees reached Europe in 2015, vast majority by sea

Blackmon: And the numbers, I want to just run through some of these, ah, this is from the United Nations high commissioner of refugees, 4.6 million Syrian refugees have fled their homes, registered refugees, um, most of that in the past two years. UNACR is asking for 4.3 billion dollars to care for them and only a portion of that, a significant amount of money that has been raised, a certain portion of that. Now in these numbers it seems that there may be others that might be different suggest that about 10 percent have sought refuge in Europe of those numbers. I’ve seen others that made me think it was much larger. But also 7.6 million people displaced inside Syria, 1.2 million in refugee camps in Lebanon, 630 thousand in Georgia, 250 thousand in Iraq, 130 thousand in Egypt. These are really huge, huge numbers. Is it only because these terrible pictures came out of Europe that we began to be aware of that these people were in this situation and begin to care about it? Is that really the thing?

FACTOID: Over 200,000 people died in Syrian civil war by September 2015

04:44 Newland: Well I think, you know, the power of the image is very considerable in that photo of young Alan Kurdi really did humanize the problem. It wasn’t just about numbers any more, it was about real people and about lots of young children and families. But there’s been a sort of periodicity about the headlines and about the attention to it. In October of 2013 just as the UN was convening a big, big conference on migration a boat went down in Lampedusa, just of the island of Lampedusa within sight of the shore and almost 500 people drowned on that occasion. That was kind of the first big burst of attention and then, you know, various, you know, rescue operations were put on and it faded a little bit and there was another catastrophe so it comes in waves but the power of the image is very much a factor in how much attention we pay to these incidents.  

Blackmon: And it seems as recently as late November was the point in which the EU and Turkey reached some sort of an agreement about where a significant amount of support would go to Turkey aimed at essentially dealing with refugees in Turkey, essentially keeping them in their points of entry into the European Union and at the boundaries. Is that the beginnings of some sort of a broader resolution within the European Union that ultimately gives us a solution or does that just put things off?

FACTOID: Germany supports Turkey’s EU bid in exchange for helping migrants

David Leblang: I’d be hesitant to say that that’s the beginning of a resolution. But it’s an interesting, a very interesting pivot on the part of the European Union especially on the part of Germany that has not turned a blind eye but has always been very hesitant about even discussing Turkish membership in the European Union. And so part of this discussion that began was not only about European aid going to Turkey but an actual invitation to begin the conversation about Turkish accession, right? And that’s, you know, that changes the dynamic in terms of the internal dialogue and internal politics within the European Union as a whole but it also makes one appreciate the enormity of the challenge of dealing with and trying to protect the EU’s external borders

Blackmon: The idea that there is an explicit quid pro quo of that essentially of your desire to be a part of the European Union will be accelerated and have a, be seen in a significantly different way if you will help with this immediate crisis. But at the same time it also speaks to this more fundamental question around the stability of the entire European Union and how the migrant crisis has seems to be bringing to a head these very big existential questions. It speaks to the, the thicket of issues that are at work here far beyond just what do we do beyond Syrian refugees?

07:46 Newland: I think that one of the really significant things that’s coming out of this crisis now is an insistence of the powerful countries in the EU of taking action not on a unanimous basis but on a majority voting basis so you have the plan to redistribute 160 thousand refugees from Greece and Italy and Hungary into other European countries on a mandatory basis not voluntary. And that was passed over the violent objections of some of the Eastern European member states, but it is EU law. Now I’ll add that it’s not happening of those 160 thousand people who are supposed to be redistributed. Less than 500 have moved so far. But the Europeans have also decided to establish a European border force which they’ve never had before. It’s always been up to the individual states to decide what to do about their borders. It’s a big change.

Leblang: There’s a tension here, right? So if we go back three or four years, right, just after the Arab spring. The big concern in the, in the discussions over the asylum and refugee policy in Europe had to do with burden sharing. Most of the refugees who were leaving North Africa were ending up in Italy or in Malta, right? And there was a concern that the other, the big, the rich countries were not doing their part in either taking these asylees or providing funds to help offset the costs that would be borne by these governments. So that’s, in a sense that’s this has really brought home the fact that there needs to be burden sharing if there’s going to be some sort of common migration policy. But at the same time, these pressures that may drive towards a common set of external policies are also driving the rise of populist parties, radical right wing parties that are not only anti-immigrant but a large number of them are anti-EU.

FACTOID: Right-wing parties growing in Poland, Denmark, Greece, Austria

Some of them are anti-Euro right? So you have that tension going on that could from the inside pull the Union apart, where at the same time it’s the exact factor that you might need to secure the borders and really protect the European Union as a single geographic space.

Newland: It’s hard to exaggerate both the scale and the pace of this crisis. I mean Germany has received 1.1 million asylum seekers this year. And that’s unprecedented. Um, Sweden, you know, a country of less than 10 million people has received over about 200 thousand including over 30 thousand unaccompanied miners. Now talking to a friend who works in the Swedish ministry of justice just said for us that’s the equivalent of a thousand classrooms that we need for these kids. That’s a lot of classrooms and a lot of teachers in a country the size of Sweden. And many of the countries of Europe generally, but especially in Eastern Europe, have no experience of settling refugees. They were sources of refugees themselves no so long ago and it’s a tremendous adjustment. They’re ethnically homogeneous, religiously homogeneous. Many of these countries you know, the little Baltic States just can’t imagine integrating people who are so different from what they are used to. And it’s um, going to be a very steep learning curve to the extent that they even get on that curve.

Leblang: Scale matters but timing matters as well. We saw the increased popularity and the importance of some of these radical right parties. I mean the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Golden Dawn in Greece, the AFD in Germany. The thing that has happened now with the immigrant crisis you have these parties not only gain in strength within countries but they’regaining seats and they’re gaining seats at the local level, right? So I mean I made a list because I couldn’t remember how many different countries radical right wing parties had gained some purchase in. And the list is, you know, it’s France, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. Ok? Where they have all gained a political foothold either regionally, locally, or at the national level. And that’s really quite different from the blips that we’ve seen in terms of radical right wing parties supporting Europe.

Newland: I think what generates a lot of the anxiety is the feeling that the authorities are not dealing with this very well. And an incident like the incident we saw in Cologne over the New Year holiday with people around the train station which is a tough neighborhood being attacked by groups of young men who seem to be of immigrant background. They seem to have been mostly Moroccan, Algerian, and Indonesian. In other words not refugees, not Syrians but that immediately sort of changes the image in people’s minds from the hopeless toddler to the aggressive young man. And that raises a whole set of anxiety that the authorities have not dealt with very well in most countries. And I think that’s what gives rise to this action as much as anything else. It’s not so much that people don’t want immigrants, they just don’t want uncontrolled flows. They don’t want the uncertainty of where people are going to live and what they are going to do. And Chancellor Merkel has been really a remarkable communicator on this whole issue but she has not had a lot of company in that.

Leblang: She had to back pedal on a lot of things she said because of conflicts within her coalition.

14:17 Blackmon: A big part of the dialogue out there is the folks who ought to be taking care of these people are not doing it. The people who look like them and are from their culture right next to them are not doing their part and they’ve got money, they should be taking care of this. Why should they be coming to us?  Is that just a distraction or is there any legitimacy to some version of that narrative?

Newland: Well, I think it’s legitimate to ask capable countries from any region to contribute to this global, the solution of this global problem, and that includes the Gulf countries.

FACTOID: Economists say refugees could increase EU’s GDP by 0.25%

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect them to be taking a lot of refugees because they have tiny populations for the most part. A country like, you know, Kuwait, the UAE already has 70, 80 percent of their population already made up of immigrants. Although a lot of those immigrants are Syrians by the way.

FACTOID: Since 2010, Gulf States have had 470% increase in Syrian Residents

There’s lots of Syrians living in the Gulf countries. They are just not living there as refugees. And in many cases people would rather not be refugees if they could be there as businessmen or students or workers or visitors. Being a refugee is not a status people crave. And so I think we sort of underestimate, how much in terms of resources and places to stay are coming from the Gulf countries. I think the much more salient point for these countries is the extent to which they are fanning the flames in Syria and in Iraq and the Middle East by supporting radical groups.

Blackmon: And that brings us to something that I definitely want us to discuss which is you wrote a really, Kathleen, you wrote a very interesting Op-Ed piece I think was published on CNN.com a while back but where you talked about several reasons why, I think, three primary reasons that the United States has a real obligation, not just an act of kindness, that we have some obligations to play a much bigger role here. One of them was simply the leadership that the United States has shown over time received more refugees than all of the countries combined. I think you said.

Newland: We resettled more.

Blackmon: Resettled more. But you also, you know, went right at the most sensitive parts of that question of the U.S. and that is that so much of the current crisis was precipitated by the acceleration of the Syrian civil war and that the United States involvement in events that led to that in terms of our invasion of Iraq set in motion a sequence of events is what created the anarchy that then, or certainly facilitated, the anarchy that has triggered this. And I think that the idea that we what you said was that we broke it, we have some obligation to fix it. What’s interesting to me, and I want to hear you talk more about that but I also want to make the observation that it is curious to me that that parallel and how similar it is to the post-Vietnam experience where at the end of Vietnam there was a real sense in America that however you felt about the war that we had some obligations particularly to the Vietnamese who had been on our side. I grew up with a little Vietnamese girl in the family that my church sponsored in our town. And we had clarity on that to some of these folks we owed something to and we should welcome them into our own country. And it’s curious to me now though that we seem to have none of that ability in the popular discourse in the United States to separate between. I mean we went over there to fight for some of them not just against all of them. And it’s strange to me that it’s so difficult for us to create that separation the way we look at it today.

Newland: It’s a very different kind of war both in Syria and in Iraq. In Vietnam there was a much more well defined enemy. Um, and um in, in, in the Middle East you never really know who’s a friend, who’s an enemy, ah, who’s carrying a bomb, who’s going to try to blow you up. And I think that affects the way we, you know, we look at people including unfortunately civilians. And I think there’s even more a sense of remove from Syria because we didn’t cause the war in Syria. I mean we were implicated in some of the things that led up to it but Bashar Hafez al-Assad caused the war in Syria and set up that train of events that created an opening for Daesh the Islamic state. And so I don’t really hold the U.S. responsible for the war in Syria in any except a really marginal way. But I think the more important point is the humanitarian leadership and the real contribution that that makes to the soft power as the political scientists call it of the United States. We are seen as a leader in the humanitarian field or at least we have been. And I think that’s a really precious resource which would be tragic if we lost it.

Leblang: Why would a president, why would an administration not  reach out and grab on to this humanitarian mantle that is, that’s there for the taking. I think you know I think in a simple sense it’s comes down to politics right?

Newland: Yeah. I think it really comes down to one thing, 9/11. That completely changed the attitude of, toward risk taking. Toward any, you know, the idea nobody in the U.S. government wants to be responsible for stamping the visa of somebody who turns out to be a terrorist. And the realization is so extreme and the sort of misplaced fear. You know, after the Paris attacks when 31 governors said they were not going to accept Syrian refugees in their states, I thought what? What does this have to do with Syrian refugees? The answer is absolutely nothing. FACTOID: PEW 2015: 51% of Americans say immigrants are good for U.S.  

And, you know, since 9/11 when security protocols for refugees were really ramped up to a very high level and it kept being ramped up since then. Since 9/11 we have resettled 785 thousand refugees in the United States. There has not been one single attack carried out by a resettled refugee. Now everyone is saying Boston bomber, right? But the fact is that the Boston bombers were not resettled refugees. They came here as children. Their parents were asylum seekers who came under their own power. So not one single resettled refugee has been implicated in a terrorist attack. There have been maybe five who have been arrested on terrorism related charges mostly having to do with providing material to support groups overseas. All I think. So it’s a really misplaced fear to direct those fears toward Syrian refugees but people don’t make the distinction between resettled refugees, asylum seekers, ah, illegal immigrants, umm, you know, people who look different, Muslims. There’s just a lot of confusion.

Blackmon: What about the parallels between the whole migrant discussion in Europe now and our own migrant debate in the United States?

Leblang: Yeah, I mean the parallels are useful if we think about where some of this support comes from. You know, if you think about what we discussed earlier having to do with the rise of support for radical parties it comes from people who feel like they are excluded from reaping the rewards or the economic benefits that, that might exist within a country. You know the research that studies this finds that support, anti-immigrant sentiment and support for right wing parties really correlates very highly with unemployment rates.

Newland: You know part of the reason we don’t have debate is the tendency to sort of dismiss other people’s point of view and say you don’t like the idea of refugees living in your town, you must be a racist. Not necessarily. You may be worrying about how are the teachers in the schools are going to cope with having children who speak 30 different languages that they don’t understand. So there are real fears and I think those need to be acknowledged and addressed in a respectful way.

Blackmon: Well it is frustrating that even the most basic facts of the discussion it’s almost impossible to settle. Things as basic as, and again not to harp on Donald Trump, uh, but the continued assertion that the refugees who would be considered by the United States at this point that the quote unquote we don’t even know their names or anything else about them. These are basic factual things that we get hung up on. And it does seem at times there, that anti-immigrant sentiment might, we might be able to express that as anti-brown immigrant sentiments. There does seem to be a higher level of concern.

Newland: Although interestingly enough you know in Germany the anti-immigrant sentiment that is most broad based is directed toward people in from the Balkans, ah, from Bosnia, from Serbia who are not considered to be, these are no longer considered to be refugee producing countries. So there’s a strong sense in Germany that these people are not deserving and people don’t like that. Where there is a great deal of sympathy for the Syrians. Everybody knows what they are going through. And I think the sympathy is broad based.

Blackmon: We’ve got a project here at the Miller Center called First Year that is very focused on identifying critical issues that the next president whoever she or he will be of whatever party, what are the issues that are going to be immediately on the table that first year and try to bring some counsel to some approaches to those. Let’s hear quickly from both of you though and let’s start with David. If the, if you were sitting down with whoever the next president is and the focus was on this topic right now, what would you say? What would be the three bullet points that you would give the new president as she or he began?

Leblang: I don’t know if I have three but the first one would be to become very well versed in the executive action. Because it is highly unlikely unless you have I would say highly unlikely even with a solid Democrat or a solid Republican Congress and president that you are going to get comprehensive immigration reform through the legislative branch. So my advice would be to focus on executive action and see where and how executive action can be used to try and make or reinforce or clarify immigration policy.

FACTOID: Visit Firstyear2017.org for more advice for the next U.S. president

So that would be thing number one. Thing number two would be to talk about some of the things that we have talked about which is the effect that immigrants have on our culture and on society, on the ability that we have to educate the young people in this country and also to point to some of the really good academic work that’s been done that shows that there is no effect on immigrants on wages. That’s enough for two terms.

Newland: More than enough. I guess my number one item would be to accept more Syrian refugees and then really go out aggressively and make Americans proud of our generosity. I think you know there is a basic instinct toward generosity in this country and as you said we all have immigrant roots and have had this experience in the not too distant past so I think use social media, work with young people and really invest in integration. That I think is the recipe for success. 

Blackmon: Well one thing that’s clear is that many versions of this issue this core issue not just that the United States is changing but the world is changing around the around the way that people come together what economies they can be a part of the tensions that that all creates, this is an issue that is going to be facing whoever is the guest on American Forum 30 or 40 years from now. So it’s the long ball that leaders have got to be look at. But thank you both so much. David Lebland. Kathleen Newland. We hope you’ll join the conversation with American Forum at the Miller Center Facebook page, or by following us on twitter @douglasblackmon or @AmericanForumTV. To send us a comment about this program or download Podcasts or Transcripts, visit us at millercenter.org/americanforum. I’m Doug Blackmon, see you next week.