 For those who don't know, New America is a non-partisan think tank. This is one of the first big events that we've had in our new headquarters. And when we first started discussing this idea of Cady Martin and Amory Slaughter and myself, back in September of course the political context around the issue of refugees was very different. It was before Paris, and as you know in the Paris attacks, two people basically posed as Syrian refugees and were part of the attack that killed. It was the worst terrorist attack in Europe, in the West, in fact, since the Madrid attacks of 2004. Then of course we had the San Bernardino attack where one of the perpetrators came in on a so-called fiancée visa. And the house has overwhelmingly passed a measure that basically would pause all Syrian refugees coming to this country even though we've taken so few already. As a factual matter, no refugee has been involved in any violent jihadist attack in this country. It is simply a myth. And the last thing you'd want to do as a terrorist is come here as a refugee because it would probably take you four years to get through the process. First of all, you have to go to a refugee camp outside of Syria. Then you'd have to be selected by the United Nations, one of 23,000 out of 4 million, who would then be referred to the United States. Then you'd have to spend two years going through the American system in which you would be subjected to a battery of interviews and biometric data kind of collection. Basically, that's not the way terrorists have tried to operate in this country. So the political context has changed. Of course, we've had Trump calling for the banning of all Muslim immigration. What we hope today to do today is to try and explain what is the scale of the problem and also what to do about it. I mean, Cadi, when we talked about this, we understand there's a problem. What can we actually do? What can the United States do? What can the EU do? What can the international community do? And we're going to hear from some of the world's leading experts on the answers to that question. I'm going to invite to the stage our CEO and President, Amri Slaughter, who doesn't need a lot of introduction, but I do want to mention something that's quite relevant to this discussion, which is Amri, when she left the administration as policy planning director of the State Department, the first woman to hold that position, was one of the first to publicly say, much I think to the annoyance of some of our former colleagues, that Syria was going to hell in a handbasket and we needed to do something about it, including no fly zones and safe zones for refugees and also actually engage militarily in Syria, which Amri first wrote about in the New York Times. That seemed like an outlandish idea, and now of course that is in fact what the United States is doing. I also want to invite to the stage Cadi Martin, who is one of our longest term board members here and has been absolutely critical to the growth of New America. We started in 1999 with maybe literally a dozen people now. We're almost 200 people and Cadi was instrumental in all that growth. Cadi herself is a refugee. She came to this country from Hungary, so she speaks with a great deal of personal experience. She's also been a leading human rights activist on the Board of Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists. She's the author of her ninth book is about to come out. So both Amri is going to talk first, then Cadi, and I'll hand it over to you, Amri. Thank you, Peter. I should perhaps add also my mother and her mother and her brother, a refugee from Belgium to Free France to Switzerland, then before the last wave of the Nazis overrunning the south of France to Madrid, finally to Lisbon, and finally by plane to London. It took six months. So I am not a refugee, but I would not be here if my mother and her family had not been received as refugees in World War II in Britain. I'm just going to say three things. We're going to have a rich conversation. The title of this is After Paris, The Refugee Crisis, and indeed in most Americans' minds right now, terrorism and refugees are linked. As I'll say in a minute, I don't think that's the way we should be thinking about the refugee crisis. But to the extent there is a link between terrorism and refugees, it is that terrorists taking over large swathes of country give rise to refugees rather than refugees give rise to terrorists. The causal direction is not the one that most Americans are currently assuming, as Peter just laid out, that bringing in refugees can give rise to terrorists. It's the other way around. Although it is not only terrorist groups that give rise to refugees, and that's my second point. Well before Bernardino, Barris, any of this, the UN issued a report that said there are 60 million refugees in the world, just think about that. I just said my family is from Belgium. Belgium is roughly 10 million. There are six Belgians worth of refugees in the world. Six Belgians, Belgium is a pretty decent-sized country. There's one France. France is roughly 60 million people. So when we think about the crisis of refugees, we have to think that we have 194 nations in the world. Well, actually, that's 199, or add another power the size of France. That's the scope of the problem. And that is not a problem that is going to be addressed by thinking about letting in 10,000, 20,000, even 50,000 against 60 million. So that's my third point. And we'll be talking about this later in the panel discussion. I actually think we have to start thinking about refugees in terms of opportunity, rather than in terms of a problem to be solved. I wrote recently for Project Syndicate, a column that talked about the ways in which the National Democratic Institute is beginning to think about refugee camps, not as places of squalor and despair and waiting to return home, but as places where you have concentrations of talented people, entrepreneurial people, entrepreneurial enough and driven enough to get up and leave for a better place for their family, but also places that if you think about it differently, you're creating potential cities. You're creating places where you can educate young people differently, where you can create different habits of political participation, where you can jumpstart entrepreneurs who want a different kind of economy. So thinking about refugee camps more in terms of refugee cities, and similarly, we haven't been nearly creative enough. There is a Egyptian billionaire who is negotiating with the Greek government to buy islands to resettle refugees. Now you might think, well, that's preposterous. There are 1,500 Greek islands in the Mediterranean, and they are for sale to billionaires as resort destinations. There's actually a website called My Island online. Now if a billionaire can buy an island for private vacation, why can't we actually be far more creative about places where we can resettle large numbers of people who then can create a place they want to be, not that they'll never want to go home. That's not the point. But when you have 60 million people around the world, thinking simply of putting them in camps or resettling tiny numbers is never going to get at the actual problem we face. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Kati, and then to our first panel. Thank you. Thank you, Anne-Marie. Thank you, Peter. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the honor of speaking to you this afternoon on a subject that's very close to my heart. As Peter mentioned, I'm a refugee, and should be very close to the hearts of all Americans because if we are not a nation of refugees, I don't know what we are. Anne-Marie's own saga confirms that, and if I would ask for a show of hands as to how many of you are either first or second generation, I assume most hands would go up. Ladies and gentlemen, we are betraying our very core values in not stepping up to this enormous humanitarian crisis that's engulfing the world, and it is beyond a humanitarian crisis. It's also a crisis of national security, frankly. So let me explain and let me backtrack and let me just start by saying that I was one of 200,000 Hungarians who was processed in a matter of weeks after the Soviets crushed Hungary's uprising. I was a little kid, and I was swept from my country to this country in a matter of weeks and processed at an army camp on the New Jersey Turnpike in a single day. And the Marine who processed me noticed that it was my birthday. Don't ask which one because I'm not going to tell you, but it was my birthday, and so that Marine gave me a silver dollar, and by the end of the day, I had six silver dollars in my pocket, and that was my first introduction to the big-heartedness of my new country. But that big heart somehow seems to be missing today, and having made a trip to Hungary on behalf of the International Rescue Committee and the Committee to Protect Journalists in recent months, I have to tell you that the families that I talked to at the Serb-Hungarian border and also at the train station in Budapest where they were waiting to board trains for Germany looked very much like my family, my pregnant mother, my older sister, and myself in four suitcases. That is all we had. And America took a chance on us, and I don't think that it's a big chance to allow, as Anne-Marie said, not 10,000 but several hundred thousand more of these people who are refugees as a result of a war that we either started in Iraq or, quite frankly, have neglected far too long the war in Syria. So it isn't as if we had no responsibility beyond the human responsibility, which I think is what the Statue of Liberty is about, isn't it? Give me your tired, your wretched, your poor. Do we not believe that anymore? At the moment, the country that's being the best international citizen is, ironically, given its history, Germany. 800,000 Syrian and other refugees have been processed and are now going through Germany's doors to a very warm welcome that Germany, the home of the Third Reich, should be teaching us lessons about how to deal with this humanitarian crisis is, well, there's a bitter irony in that. But I think that all of us have a role to play in this because our politicians are letting us down. Washington's voice has been very faint in this. And after I made my trip to the Hungarian Serb border, I went to EU headquarters in Brussels. And of course, I'm sorry to say that the EU is a study in dysfunction. It was so when the Balkan wars broke out and the then head of the European Commission said the hour of Europe has dawned. Well, it didn't turn out that way. And it isn't turning out that way today. There's simply no coherent European policy toward refugees. It's each country for himself. And that is partly what has set off this panicked race for borders before they close because there is no coherent unified policy. And this is something we, the United States, know how to do. And even if we don't open our gates, as I hope that with pressure from every single one of you, we will, we can collaborate with the EU and partner with them. You can only lead by example. Words are not enough. The United States is not in a position right now to say to any other country in the world, actually, you must do this. You have to let in more refugees. Because we're not. So words no longer enough. I mentioned that this is also an issue of national security. We're all a bit jittery after San Bernardino. This conference could have been called after San Bernardino. We came up with the name after Paris, after Paris. But tragically there will be other San Bernardinos. That is almost inevitable. But the most powerful counter narrative that we, the United States, can submit to the world, which now sees us as a nation, thank you Donald Trump, but not only Donald Trump. It's the entire, virtually, the entire Republican field, including Jeb Bush who prefers Christian refugees to any other. How little outrage that has provoked. Who are we anymore? The counter narrative we need to put out for our own security, if for no other reason, is that this is a nation that welcomes Muslims. And that these Muslims, who are escaping Jihad, have to be decoupled from Jihad. Since 9-11 the United States has admitted close to 800,000 refugees from the region, from the greater Middle East region. Do you know how many of them have been implicated in terrorist activity? Three, implicated, three. So it makes absolutely no sense. But of course demagogues don't need to make sense. And they just need to persuade people that fear is more important than humanity or reason. And it really is a sorry chapter in our nation's history. We've been here before. The internment of Japanese during World War II is a stain on our history. As quite frankly, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaction vis-a-vis Jewish refugees from Hitler. So those are two dark chapters from our history. And I fear that we are about to repeat a dark chapter. And I don't think we want to do that. I don't think we want to buy the fear mongers version of events. I think that we need to assert our right as Americans and our humanity as citizens of the world and do what our nation is really all about. Thank you very much.