 Hello, everyone. Welcome. What a glorious day. This is as good as it gets for winter, just saying. And I'm looking at the roaches who just came back from Florida like, this isn't so great. Okay, now I'd love to introduce Pablo. Now, he's so stranger to us. I think you might remember him speaking to me before. Pablo Bo, it's Bo's, right? Just like the speakers. That's it. Pablo Bo's is a modern study scholar born in India and raised in Canada. Dr. Bo's is interested in landscape shape one another. He has a BA in English and history and MA in communications and a PhD in environmental studies. He has, at UVM since 2006, in the Department of Geography since 2015. He's studying the program. Dr. Bo shares UVM's publication curriculum committee and is a part of the Gund Institute for Environment, Food Systems Program and the Sustainable Development Policy, Economics and Governance Graduate Programs. His four main research projects currently are G, Fire and Mentality, the Access and Cities of the Global South. He has always been interested interdisciplinary teaching. Some of his teachers at UVM and Food Race and Ethnic, Ethnicity. I can't say it. Say it for me. Too many C's in there. In the U.S., Migration and Transnationalism, Geography of India, Global Cities, Migration and Transnationalism and the Geography of Sports. When not on campus, he's probably building Legos or talking with his daughter and trailing boys on a kayak or hiking. Very good. Wonderful. Thank you and welcome to Dr. Bo's. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me back. I think this is my third or fourth time speaking here. I know I've spoken before about refugees and resettlement in Vermont and other parts of the U.S. I understand Tracy Dolan, the state refugee coordinator, may have come in spoken at a previous session as well. So I was asked to come in and talk a little bit more broadly about immigration in the U.S. Immigration is of course one of the big hot button topics not only in the U.S., but all across the globe. I would say alongside climate change and more basic differences in politics, these are some of the the main things that people are concerned about. And so I want to give a little bit of an overview of some of the things that I'm seeing. I'm somebody who has been an immigrant twice in my life. My family immigrated to Canada when I was a child. I grew up in Canada. And then I immigrated here to the U.S. when I started my job at UBM. And both have been really interesting. Some overlapping and some really distinct things in those two immigration experiences. And I realized how challenging some of these conversations are. I was having a conversation just before I started here where I was told about some of the is that better? Where I was told about some of the challenging conversations even here in the U.S. I was in Arizona last week and as I was in the airport waiting to go through customs, there was a couple of people speaking very animatedly about the border and about immigration. And they were speaking, they had a lot of issues with the border and they were talking about all the people coming across. And both of them had heavy, heavy Spanish accents and switched to Spanish quite frequently throughout the course of the conversation. And I think one of the things that is sometimes, especially in a place like Vermont, sometimes not understood as the nuance that the immigration conversation can take in lots of different parts of the country. So the ways in which, for example, in border communities in Texas and Arizona, you can actually have some very interesting views on immigration amongst Mexican American communities, for example. Often quite strongly, I would say, not quite xenophobic but quite anti-immigrant in some sense. Some things that we don't necessarily anticipate or expect. So I want to give a little bit of an overview and a background to this context in the U.S. today. So the first thing I want to kind of just put into context is what migration looks like today. Because when we see it on TV, we often see the kind of image of people on the move and the sense that everybody is on the move all the time. And when we think about how many people in the world today are actually migrants, it's a lot of people. In 2000, there were some 173 million people living outside of their country of origin. In 2022, that number has gone up to 291 million. So there's a lot more people living outside of their country of origin. And in fact, if we think about the scale of this migration, that itself has ramped up. So in 2000, it was predicted that there would be 230 million people living outside of their country of origin by 2050. By 2020, that projection had gone up to 400, over 400 million. So there are lots of people living out of their country of origin, and there are more of them. However, just to put that into perspective, if you think about it, I always ask my students, how many people do you think are actually migrants? And they'll say 20%, 30%, 50%, nobody says 50%. But lots of people say there's a lot of people, but it's really under 4% of the world's population are migrants. So it's still actually a relatively small number of people, even though in terms of specific categories, some of these have grown vastly. When I started doing work on refugee resettlement, there was a little under 35 million people in the world who were displaced for a variety of different reasons, all conflict based, nothing about environmental change. Today, there's nearly 100 million. So that number has really grown. So in some of these, I don't want to undersell the number of migrants there might be today, but I also don't want to overstate it. When you look at opinion polling, almost every, especially wealthy country thinks that everybody wants to come to their shores. Whether you are in Portugal, in the US, in Canada, Australia, everybody thinks everybody is trying to come. And that is really overstating the situation. Nevertheless, this kind of fear of immigrants has animated politics in all kinds of ways. Here in the US, you could have looked at when Donald Trump ran for president and said there were many, many things in which he was not in alignment with the broader US population on environment, on race, on lots of things. But one thing that he was actually fairly in tune with was the fact that there is a substantial portion of the US population that is very concerned about immigration and different forms of immigration. And you actually see that in a lot of polling from then, and you see it to a somewhat different degree, but you still see it today. So this kind of fear of immigrants and of people who are crossing borders is big. And it's led to all kinds of back flashes. When you look at Europe and you look at the way in which right-wing populist parties have gained power, they have gained power primarily around the question of migration. Asylum seekers, refugees, immigrants more generally, it's different kinds of anxieties, but that's really what's animated. In Italy, for example, you have some very different kinds of political parties that have come together around that anti-immigrant sentiment. In France, the rise of whatever the National Front is now called, that has again been around sort of harnessing those fears. Brexit, which is misguided in every... Brexit has the same kind of kernel of understandable resentment that we see in parts of the Rust Belt, where if you look at Brexit, you see that a lot of people have very real grievances about being left behind by globalization, the fact that most of the benefits of things like that accrue to wealthy cities like London and leave all these other places behind. But a lot of the animus towards that gets focused on immigrants and immigration, even though that's not really who's causing people to lose jobs or have economic downturn, etc. Nevertheless, in Brexit, again, aimed at immigrants, in this case, primarily at Eastern Europeans, at Polish immigrants, at Romanians, etc. In Germany, a backlash against, in this case, primarily refugees and asylum seekers who came in 2015, Syrians, Afghans, a number of others. In other parts of Europe, even in parts of Scandinavia, places that have been, at least in the last 20 years, gotten to be known for being sort of havens for refugees and immigrants. You have even these political movements like the true Finns in Finland who are, by our standards, like Bernie Sanders, but it's Bernie Sanders only for true Finns. So there's this very kind of sons of the soil type of approach. This is in the Czech Republic, even in Canada. Which I mean, it's been very interesting with seeing the border crossing issues that are happening right now, which are animating anxieties on both sides of the Northern border. We don't tend to see that as much here. I have done a bunch of newspaper and radio interviews in the last few weeks where people have said, you know, apprehensions have gone way up, still nothing compared to the Southern border. And if you look at the Swanton sector, it has gone up. It's always been kind of back and forth. We've seen people moving on both sides of the border, but it's created once again, all of these anxieties. There's a lot of really interesting anxiety in Canada right now. Usually the border crossings have been, you know, it's not as much of an issue in Canada when the border crossing is coming down to the US. But yeah, so it's been interesting. But again, it's not just in wealthy parts of the global North, but we see this same kind of thing in Singapore, in South Africa, in Brazil, in South Korea, this whole kind of backlash against immigrants. So what is going on here? And I want to talk about this obviously in the context of the US specifically. And another part of this context that's important to recognize again is that there is these long histories of push and pull. We often talk about the US as an immigrant country, as a country with this long immigrant history. And of course it has that, but it also has a long history of not being particularly welcoming to immigrants. There are parts of of that history that are very welcoming, but there are lots of parts that are not. And so I always like to emphasize this to many of my students for whom especially the the latest turn towards kind of xenophobia seems really unexpected, especially in the kind of post 2000, well, not close 2000, but like post Obama era, the idea that all of a sudden we would demonize immigrants. This is a long history of this. Certainly if we look at, there's really three major periods in which we've seen immigration in the US in a large scale. The largest, which we still as a proportion of the US population, we haven't reached this level again, was in the late 19th and early 20th century when we saw mass immigration, primarily from southern and eastern Europe. The second, and then of course that immigration was actually progressively shut down between the 1920s and about the 1960s. And then when it was reopened in the 1960s, you had a long period of immigration between the 1960s and the 1980s. And then again, from the 1990s onwards, we're now in one of the most profound periods of a much more diverse form of immigration into the US. The early feelings about immigrants in the US, and I say this only to again contextualize what's going on now with what's happened before, was really around hostility, a lack of opportunity, definitely encouragement of immigrants from certain places and not others. So Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Eastern European immigrants were not encouraged, whereas immigrants from parts of Northern Europe were very much viewed as threats to jobs, to culture, to identity. Now most of these European immigrants of the late 19th, early 20th century were by the midpoint of the 20th century able to become white, which is something that is quite different for many of the immigrant groups who are coming now. There are some of them who will never be able to become white Americans in the way in which Italian and Irish immigrants, for example, were able to. And so the story of assimilation, which is very much one of the ways through which we tend to think of immigration, people come, the parents really suffer, but by the second and third generations they have become American. That tends to be really restricted to some groups rather than others. And this kind of even the attempted immigration of people from Asia and Africa in the earlier part of the 20th century was discouraged. It was discouraged in the U.S. through law, through culture. It was just equally discouraged in places like Canada and Australia. And these kinds of attitudes, I will often put up quotes like this and I will ask my students, when was this said? Who do you think this is being said about? John Jay, speaking about Catholic, said we should build a wall of brass around the country. Benjamin Franklin, speaking about Germans, says unless the stream of their importation could be turned, they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language and even our government will become precarious. John Dos Pasos, speaking about Jewish immigrants, the people of this country are too tolerant. There's no other country in the world where they'd allow it. After all, we built up this country and then we allow a lot of foreigners, the sum of Europe, the offscarrings of Polish ghettos to come and run it for us. I could transpose who is being spoken and just use the language and plug that into talk radio and a lot of the people screaming on cable news. And it would be just different people being talked about. This is a statement in the California Senate in the late 19th century. During their entire settlement in California, they have never adapted themselves to our habits, modes of dress or our educational system, have never learned the sanctity of an oath, never desired to become citizens or to perform the duties of citizenship, never discovered the difference between right and wrong, never seized the worship of their idol gods or advanced a step beyond the musty traditions of their native tribe. So again, this kind of this, why aren't they doing X? Why aren't they assimilated? Even if that is something that you want, it was very interesting. I chose to take citizenship or apply for citizenship in 2017. I thought, I wasn't sure what was going to happen in this country, but I figured I'll make it slightly more difficult to get rid of me. So I took you as citizenship in part also after I realized I didn't have to give up my Canadian citizenship. And as I took my tests, I studied for the the exams, I did all of the rest of it. And then I went in to take my oath of citizenship and realize the oath you have to read out in court says that you renounce your allegiance to all other, all other, not rulers, whatever it is. And I was sitting there in the courtroom googling to see like, I'm not going to lose my Canadian citizenship, am I? And only to realize that in very typical Canadian fashion, you can only give up your Canadian citizenship by filling out a form and submitting it to parliament. But at any rate, so when we talk about immigration today, we tend to operate under a lot of these different kinds of myths about the fact that there's a great flood of people coming to overwhelm us that the effect on culture, especially language, it's, it's, it's frightening, you know, how do we deal with, with the politics of the situation? You know, what is the security concern? None of which are, I mean, not all of these don't have, again, some basis in, in real anxieties, but a lot of them are really overstated. I'm not going to go through this a whole lot. But again, just to also because it's kind of small, but I'll just say that when we think about these attitudes towards immigrants and immigration more generally, while there are a lot of positive sentiments about immigrants, there can also be a lot of these anxieties hidden underneath. The population of immigrants has grown significantly since 1965. In part, that's because during that long period of immigration restrictions between the 1920s and the 1960s, the share of the foreign-born population steadily decreased. But since the 1960s, it's grown and grown and grown. As I was saying before, you know, Trump's views on immigration in lots of ways actually reflected a substantial portion of the US population. If you look here at, this is from the Pew Research Center in 2015, nearly 40% of respondents said that immigrants had a negative effect on society. 40% saw immigrants as a burden rather than a strength, that they nearly half of respondents said that immigrants make crime in the economy worse, that they worsen moral and social values, and that immigration needs to be decreased. Now, again, as I said, a lot of these are myths. Like, you know, we hear these things about immigrants raising crime. And yet, if we look at FBI statistics going back decades, in those parts of the country in which we see more immigration, crime rates are either at a par with other parts of the country or they are lower. You know, we hear some things like, you know, again, California is an interesting example where we've seen some environmental organizations kind of decry immigration as, like, well, you know, if you have more people in, people are coming from these places and they actually have poorer environmental attitudes. The research actually shows that first generation immigrants tend to have much better environmental practices than native-born Americans. By the second and third generation, they have much worse environmental attitudes because they've become more American. But I'll leave that aside. But as I said, there's been this kind of electoral backlash that is quite interesting. Some scholars have called this the Latino threat narrative, that this kind of, there's always been this anxiety about immigrants. But where it really takes hold is when that immigrant population is above, is around 10%. When immigrants are a much smaller portion of a given population, they can be seen as colorful and there's some nice restaurants and, you know, something like that. But when there are more people, when there are, there is more language of a visibly different group, this can sort of provoke more anxieties. And so this is something that we've seen in all sorts of places and in all sorts of ways. There has been, you know, so much of this kind of focus on the Latino threat and the way in which it's animated, especially the white working class. And I think that's true. That's definitely true that there's been a lot of this kind of concern. And we hear the anxiety about illegal immigration in particular. Who is coming? Where are they coming from? What do we know about these groups, etc. I still think it's really overstated and it's a way of deflecting from what some real challenges are. Not to say that I think that what's happening at the border is an easy issue to fix by any means. I think it's really, really, really challenging. And I will be talking about some of the ways in which the Biden administration has changed its own tune on its approach to the border as a result. All right. So what does immigration look like today in the US? As I said, it is currently reaching but hasn't reached the levels of 19th, late 19th, early 20th century in terms of scale and scope. What's really different is that you have very different immigrant populations, different forms of entry, all sorts of other kinds of patterns that are going in terms of the groups themselves. We've seen a pretty significant shift in the 19 late 19th, early 20th century. As I said, it's primarily European groups by the 1970s by 1970 itself. If you were to look at the three largest foreign-born populations in the US, they would have been from the Philippines, Canada, and Mexico. And today they would be Mexico, India, and China. So you also see a real shift in the populations themselves. But you also have seen over the course of the last 150 years or so a really significant shift in what it means to migrate itself. You will sometimes hear people say things like, oh, well, you know, I'm a fan of immigration, they just need to do it right like my family did. But the reality is that for the majority of this country's history, there was no way of immigrating. You showed up, right? If you showed up and you had some money, you got off the boat. If you showed up and you didn't have a lot of money, they probably put you at all asylum, right? They interned you, or you came from certain backgrounds, they tended to intern you a little bit more. It wasn't nearly as straightforward as it seems now. One of the things that people sometimes on the political right get really worked up about is the diversity visa lot lottery program, which today the US uses to try and encourage immigration from places that don't have as many immigrants in the US. But the reason that program first started was after the Second World War, the US looked around and said, we have a lot of people with Italian heritage who have no record of when they came to this country. They had not been regularized. And that diversity visa lottery program was used to go through, and over the course of about six or seven years, regularize people who simply didn't have paper. So there's been a lot that's changed over the years. Immigration in the US today, as I said, is very diverse, but it has also become in many ways this kind of target. And one of the questions that always arises with me is what's wrong with immigration today? What is it that actually has made it such a target? We've talked about immigration reform for a long time, and it has gone nowhere. We have, in lots of ways, certainly legislatively, certainly in a bipartisan fashion, it really has not gone anywhere. That is not to say, however, we haven't changed immigration. Under the Trump administration, primarily using things like executive orders, the Trump administration actually made profound changes primarily to legal immigration. The first two years, they had a bunch of ideas, and they just didn't know how to do anything. The last two years, they actually made a lot of substantive change. In the first couple of years of the Biden administration, similarly, there's been a lot of tweaks. There's not been a lot of unraveling of Trump-era policies. In fact, there's been some doubling down on a number of Trump-era policies as well, so I'll talk about that. One of the main ways in which we see this is in, I've talked about the border a lot, and so one of the big questions is, how do you actually deal with the question of asylum? One big difference I've talked about this when I've talked about refugees here is the reason that somebody may be seeking to cross the border, may be seeking to come to the US as a result of being persecuted somewhere. If you are a refugee and you are in a camp somewhere and you go through the lottery system and it takes a long, long time, if you come to this country with the status of a refugee, you've already been approved overseas and you're coming here. If you're actually looking for asylum, that means you show up at the border and you ask for protection. The grounds on which we give that protection has been really kind of debated and opened up over the last six, seven years. The US used to be a real leader in saying we're going to take into account things like not just that you're in fear for your life because of your political beliefs, your ethnicity, your religion, things like that, but because of your gender identity or because of domestic violence or things like that. Under the Trump administration, there was a real narrowing of those definitions, and under the Biden administration, there's been a lot of back and forth about it. But we are now in a situation in which the numbers of people who are seeking asylum in places like the US or in places like Europe has gone up drastically. They've gone up for some related reasons and some for very different reasons. Here in the US, the primary reason that we are seeing such a rise in the number of people seeking asylum is that within our hemisphere, we have a number of failed states at this point. You have Haiti, you have Venezuela, you have what's going on in Central America. I was looking at the numbers of the apprehensions in the Swanton sector, as I was saying in the northern border, there's been more. I was looking at the numbers of who has been apprehended, and the largest numbers are, so there's Romanians, which again speaks to the fact that there are Roma communities in upstate New York. This is a more historical pattern. The big difference is Central Americans is from what I can see. That's one big issue. It's led to this whiplash, this back and forth on deportation and detention. Another one of the big myths we sometimes hear is that the US southern border is so porous and there's so many people, again, not entirely untrue, but that we don't do anything about it, that there's no deportations. That's not true under the Obama administration. Immigration advocates used to call Obama the deporter-in-chief because there was such a rise in deportations. But one of the real challenges with all of this, with managing the border, etc., is that you can increase deportation, you can increase detention, you can try and deter people from coming. The main things that we've actually done over the last 30 years especially in militarizing the border and putting more border guards, more surveillance, more patrols, all of these things, what we've fundamentally done is we've pushed people into more and more dangerous crossings. We've done that in the US. We've seen it happen in Europe where the Mediterranean has become this zone that pushes people to be making these dangerous crossings. In the case of the US, it's deserts and high plains and places like that, so more people die. Does it deter people from coming in the same way that people in the Trump administration said, well, how can we make people not come? We'll brutalize them. We'll take away their kids. We'll put them in cages. We'll do these kinds of things. But when you have people, the poet, Har Sanwal Sheer, in this poem says, you only put your children into this flimsy boat to cross the Mediterranean if the land is the mouth of a shark. It really makes you think, how dangerous is it in Central America? Forget getting to the US border that people would cross the Darien Gap and go through having to deal with the cartels in Mexico and the incentivizing that we've done for human trafficking in trying to get people through this. We've had this increase in deportation and detention. The building of private prisons in the US is actually well dwarfed by the building of private immigration detention facilities. That's where actually the big money is. But it hasn't really stopped people. We've criminalized immigration offenses where before being in the US without authorization, the vast majority of people who are in the US without documentation haven't crossed the border illegally. They've overstayed a visa. They came with a student visa. They came with a travel visa, and then they overstayed it. That's the real way. So securing the border doesn't actually address that issue. But we've criminalized crossing the border without authorization. As I said before, this kind of focus on immigration issues has tended to look at the border. It's tended to look at things like the US refugee program. That blue line is the number of people we say we'll take. The orange line is the number of people we'll actually take. In the Trump administration, the number of people we said we'll take will go down, down, down. This is what Biden said to his listeners. There was no way we had the capacity to actually take in so many refugees after so many years of cuts. A couple of other programs I'll mention just really quickly here. The DACA program is another part of the immigration landscape that we often hear talked about. And DACA is another product of being unable to engage in actual immigration reform. It's called the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival. In its very name, it says how temporary it is. It was a program that said, okay, this is only for those kids who were under the age of five when they came across the border because a parent brought them across the border. They have come to the US, they've grown up here and they've proved themselves to be productive members of society. They're in school, they're in the military, they've got a good job, something along those lines, and they therefore should be allowed to stay. But keeping it temporary, the Deferred Action is a real disservice to them. It keeps you in a limbo. TPS is another one of these programs. It's the Temporary Protected Status Program. This is a program through which if the country that you come from, while you're here in the US, all of a sudden there's a civil war, there's a huge natural disaster, there might be provision for you to stay here. There was about 800,000 people in the US who came here through this program. So it would be, they didn't come through it, but they were here. War broke out in Syria, a very small number of people. Earthquakes in Honduras and El Salvador. But there are people who have been in this country now under this program, Haitians, a large number of Haitians, and they have to have this status re-renewed every 18 months. So imagine living in the cases of the Salvadorans, Hondurans. They've been here now for 30 years and every 18 months you have to wait to see if this gets renewed. People have built lives here, have blended families with family members who are US citizens. The Trump administration, when they came in, sought to cancel this entire program and deport about 800,000 people. That was part of the reason that in 2017-2018, when you started to see all the people flowing up into Canada, a lot of them were Haitians who were worried that this program was going to end. And the irony was that, the irony was that those who crossed the border into Canada, Canada used to have also one of these temporary protected programs for Haitians, they didn't have it anymore. So when they went across the border, they did not have the same protection. The program didn't end up getting canceled, the Biden administration has kept it on. I mentioned the Diversity Visa Lottery Program before. One other program that I'll mention is the H1B Lottery Program. This is specifically focused on kind of like tech workers, educational workers, but this has become a particular route through which high skilled workers come in. Some of the other ways in which people enter the US, traditionally family reunification has been one of the main ways in which one can sponsor a relative to come in. We often hear this spoken about in a very derogatory fashion that this is a chain migration, as if the horror you want to reunite with your family never quite understood this. But essentially it has within it this kind of very negative sense, a sense that the only immigrants that you really want are skilled workers who are of a certain age. You don't want folder immigrants, you don't really want younger immigrants. You really want that lessed 18 to what is it 18 to 54, 18 to whatever it is category. That's what you want. And to encourage that, when there has been discussion of immigration reform, a lot of people point to what are known as point systems. Point systems essentially rank potential immigrants by giving them a scale of points on the basis of their education, their income, their knowledge of language, a number of these different things. Canada uses a version of this. Australia and New Zealand use versions of this. I created one and I make my students take it and none of them can score above 25 and so I say, all right, you all have to get out of the country because a winning score is 65. It's a really high burden in many ways. So people ask about the equity of moving to something that privileges skill-based immigration versus family-based immigration. As I said before, I'll kind of wrap up here. One of the things to really keep in mind is like, what's the problem? What is going on here that people find contemporary immigration to be an issue? We hear about this a lot in terms of the cost of migration. Can we really afford immigration? Can we really afford to have so many people coming in? I would counter that by saying, can you not afford to have immigration? Because if we look right now at other countries that have very low levels of immigration and very low levels of population growth, take Japan. Japan is a classic example of this. Japan has pretty low immigration. There's all sorts of issues around the Japanese approach to citizenship and they have very long-lived population. And so what you're seeing right now is a pretty profound sea chain. I think 30% of the Japanese population falls into a senior cap. They simply do not have enough workers. They do not have enough workers to sustain their tax base. And they do not have enough workers even to provide services. And that's a real concern in countries that have a slowing growth rate like the US and countries that at the same time do not encourage immigration. Because if you don't have people coming in, who is going to actually fill that gap? It's something that I've certainly talked a lot about here in places like Vermont as well. But part of this also involves having a realistic sense of costs and benefits. One of the things that we know when we look at most of the economic analysis of immigration is that the costs to local jurisdictions for immigration, if you're thinking about things like language services, job services, any of those kinds of things, or even direct funding through support programs like food stamps or things like that, they can be somewhat high for first-generation immigrants, still not hugely out of whack with the general population. But by the second and third generations, immigrant households tend to contribute at a multiplier effect significantly more to local tax receipts and tax revenues. And so there's a pretty quick payoff for immigration. And part of the work that I did, I'm just going to go through, this is just to say that again, some of those myths around immigration assumes that all immigrants are either doing incredibly well or incredibly poorly and neither of those is accurate. But I just said, in the U.S., even if we were to look at the undocumented population, the undocumented population plays an outsized role in, especially in certain kinds of sectors, like construction in domestic labor, kind of more generally in the hospitality industry, etc. And even if we're simply looking at payroll taxes, contribute significantly to the U.S. economy. I'm going to skip public charge. So I'll end just by saying again, when we look at the categories of immigrants in the U.S., we tend to have this focus on unauthorized, sometimes called illegal immigrants. But really, we have much more of a presence in lots of ways in legal temporary and legal permanent categories. We have refugees and asylees who are small, but significant part of the immigration landscape. And there's this kind of interest in shifting from family reunification and some guest worker programs that including more and more skilled immigrants. We already have a lot of skilled immigrant classes, but I already kind of talked about some of those. All right. I'm not going to get into all this. I clearly have a lot to say about immigration. So I'm going to stop and I'm going to open it up to questions because I have lots to say, but I'm going to stop. Okay, so questions. Oh, yeah. Stop sharing my screen. I did. No, I did. I did. I think I stopped. I see there are a couple of questions. Is this working? About the sounds. Uh-oh. That's where you're late to fix that. Oh, no, we fixed it. Yeah. Oh, excellent. Thank you. All right. Awesome. Here's a question about my family. So my grandmother emigrated from Vukovar, Croatia. It was Yugoslavia back then. In 1908, we think, or 1909, and she moved to Cleveland, Ohio because a lot of Hungarians were there. Is the migration system today still going to where family was or some ethnicity? Yeah, that's a great question. I decided not to go into my stuff about that, but so traditionally in the U.S., about 95% of immigrants went to six states. They went to Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, California. Yeah, so there was just a few places, and within those, it was the large cities. And there's always been this, what's sometimes called persistent ethnicity, right? So certain groups settle near other groups. So today, for example, one of the largest Bosnian cities in the world is East St. Louis, all right, because so many people have moved there. I remember having conversations with people in the legislature a few years ago where they were concerned about the fact that some of the Bhutanese refugees who had come to Vermont had left and had gone to Ohio and had gone to Dayton and Columbus. Like, oh, don't they like that? They didn't say that, but that was kind of the sense of like, why aren't they staying here? And I was like, well, there's two things that Dayton and Columbus have that we don't have, which is one, there's a bigger Bhutanese population. So people were making this calculus of like, I want to be closer to a family member, etc. The other thing that Dayton and Columbus and Bruss Belt cities in general have that we don't have is excess housing. And so for some of these refugee or immigrant communities having access to, you know, excess housing stock that you might be able to fix up, this is a few years ago. I don't think anybody has excess housing stock at this point, but it's particularly acute in places like Vermont, so yeah. But it's definitely still a big aspect of it. Nobody controls immigration in the sense of telling somewhere, someone where they can go, except for refugees. Refugees for the first year, the federal government and its partners actually tell you where you go. You can leave, but you don't get to carry your benefits with you. So it's a big incentive to stay in one location. Just as a social element, my grandmother was 11 and her brother was eight when they immigrated. She stopped going to school in eighth grade, which may have been normal back in 1908 or nine. Her brother got a PhD and was a college professor. And the one thing I remember about my grandmother tell her dying day, one day a week, she would put her purse on her arm and she'd walk two blocks to a general store where there were many people who either spoke German, Croatian, Hungarian that she could all speak and so that they could keep their language going. It's interesting. There's a fantastic, if I can find the link to it, I will try and share it. There's a fantastic exhibition that the New England Historical Society put together called More Than a Market. And it's wonderful. It's actually on display at the Old North End Community Center. But it is this beautiful exploration of Jewish, Italian, Lebanese maybe, markets and groceries around Burlington and how many of those same neighborhoods and in some cases, same buildings are now operated by African, Bhutanese and other. Anyway, it's such an interesting exploration of the ways in which like how do you hold on to your culture when you go somewhere new? One of my biggest regrets is that I haven't been able to teach my daughter my language. Now in part, that's because my wife doesn't speak it and it would be like a weird like secret language to have. But it is difficult if you don't have a linguistic community there. When I moved to Canada, there was a large enough community that my parents forced us to go to language school, things like that, which I am very happy about, but at the time didn't feel as good. So it's definitely I think that ability and you do see it here in the larger refugee communities here. There's wonderful like Nepali dance and singing troops, some of the Somali and Congolese communities have things as well. I'm going next week to the Afghan community is throwing a Noru celebration for the Afghan New Year. So it's definitely possible. Before that exhibit, the posters were created. They had walking tours and they were wonderful because you could really walk around and see where the stores were and see what they are now. And it was connect and you got to go and eat at different places as well. I went on with the trip. It's fantastic. Yeah. I don't know where to begin other than to say that I am a naturalized American citizen and my family arrived here in the US in the 60s. At that time, the whole perception of an immigrant was completely different. No one told us that the government would provide anything for us. They made sure that we that my father could support us because fear at that time was that we would go into welfare and nobody. They didn't want anyone like that. My father had represent. I'm originally from Brazil and my father had represented Brazil in Washington DC and in several other locations. And then he retired and he brought his family to Washington where he had lived for a while. And so I was 13 years old and everybody's always asking me, did you know any English? And my answer is yes, a few words, chair, table, boy, girl. And that was it. The extent of my knowledge was that. And so the perception was different. It was never assumed that the government would provide anything to us. And now immigrants arrived here thinking that the government will provide a house will provide all kinds of things. And there are services that have been created. There was no one in Washington DC who could speak Portuguese and help me with homework or anything. My father had to help me. And now when I dial a certain number and press this for Spanish, well, I speak Portuguese. No one gave me that choice in the beginning. Okay, there was no such thing. Of course, granted, more people speak Spanish than Portuguese. So anyway, also, I don't know if you mentioned this or not in your lecture, and I arrived about five minutes late. The internet had sent this message that anyone can come here now. And when we arrived here in the 60s, my father followed all the procedures and applied for all kinds of papers. That's that was the way to do it. And recently here in Vermont, I was asked, how did you cross the border? You know, we didn't cross the border. We arrived legally. We filled out all the papers. It was a whole different concept. And now mass numbers of people arrive here with the expectation that the government will provide. So things have changed. And the internet, I think, has sent this idea that, you know, anything goes a better life. Yes, there is a better life. Yes, there are many opportunities here. But government cannot provide everything. And that every American is rich. Everyone living here is rich. Those are the misconceptions. And that's out there. And people will do anything to come in. And so back in the 60s, it was a whole different ball game. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's definitely things have definitely changed. I would also say that if you look at the way in which government programs themselves have evolved from the 1960s to now, you have a different sense of, you know, whether it's of obligation or responsibility. There's there's definitely a different sense of that. I would say that, you know, if you look back, you know, through the 1960s and 70s, immigration that happened, as I said, again, tended to have people go to other places that had been immigration hubs for a long time. So places like, you know, even places we think of today as immigration hubs like Miami and Los Angeles weren't until the the sort of post war period. New York, Chicago had long, long histories of different immigrant groups coming in. So even if it was a community that didn't speak the same language, there was some sense of what the experience of being an immigrant was like. A lot of the organizations and, you know, to be honest, much of the help that has been provided in the past came from within communities. So you had community based organizations. And today the bulk of the assistance that we actually see is provided by community organizations. It's not actually not provided by government services. There are some government services that are provided for immigrants, but there are very few and the burdens and barriers to actually accessing them are extremely high. It's it's very difficult. And in some cases, there is such a disincentive to use government services. So one of the things I skipped over there is something called the public charge rule. The public charge rule was something that was developed in the 19th century to say that if you are an immigrant and you come to the US, if you use public services, if you use government services, we will hold that against you. We will use that as a way to bar you from getting citizenship, right? That has not really been used because people said, well, this is this is inhumane. It is also, regardless of whether or not you think it's humane, if you are going to have immigrants come into the country, and this is one of the things I have said at the federal level, at the state level, don't resettle refugees if you're going to resettle them into poverty. It makes very little sense to bring immigrants in and say, I already think that the way we do it is pretty crazy. You know, I moved here as an immigrant, and I think you're quite right that for the vast majority of immigrants, almost everybody who comes here as an immigrant, there are no programs that you access. You make that transition on your own. You go and you get the job. You get the housing. These kind of ideas that the government provides housing, provides services, in very rare cases as in the refugee program, you actually may get eight months of support. You got eight months to turn around and be on your feet. I moved here with a job from Canada. It took me a lot longer than eight months to get on my feet. So we have a couple of more Zoom folks. We're almost out of time. Sorry. Yeah. Sure. Yep. Should one, sorry. I don't think one should. I think that it's happened either because people have chosen to do that to make, you know, either first or last name. We have a long kind of sordid history of immigration officials changing people's names at Ellis Island and other places, unfortunately. But that's a great question that for a lot of people, that question of acceptance. I had a really interesting conversation with my wife's grandfather and his family migrated from, I think, near Quebec City in, I don't know when, quite a while ago to Vermont. And he grew up speaking French, but he learned very early on. They were migrant farm workers in the Champlain Islands. And he said they learned very early on that you don't speak French. So they lost their French. They were Catholics. That was also something. So there's a lot of this kind of sense of in order to fit in, we need to lose these outward markers. What's really challenging is that there are certain kinds of outward markers you can't lose. You can't lose rakes, for example. So in my classes, I cannot tell the students I have who are Bosnian unless I see their last name. But I can generally tell other students from African backgrounds or Nepali backgrounds, both by name and by how they look. I think that question of like how do you get, how do you get to know the place? I think it's important to get to know the place. I don't think I've met anyone who is as in love with Vermont as my daughter. At one point, we were playing some game and the question was, where would you move the capital of the US if you could? And she said, Lindenville, Vermont. And we're having a hard time getting her to go away with us on sabbatical to the south of France because she's like, no, why would I miss March in Vermont? So I think that building an attachment to home can be a really authentic experience, but it is difficult when you are constantly reminded of why you are not from there. And I think that's something that people over generations have been told. One of just a one really quick story is like, I remember reading about in the post-war period, the USDA going out and telling Italian grandmothers to stop growing and cooking from backyard gardens, right? Because that wasn't like a modern way of, you know, like these kinds of things of saying like, well, these traditional practices are not something that you should do if you want to be a modern American. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, human trafficking is a scourge everywhere. And I think that what's become unfortunate. So a couple of years ago, a few years ago, there was an attempt to create something called the global compact on migration. And the global compact on migration is supposed to be an agreement between nation states to say, how do you do this in a way that's orderly so that you don't just have tons of people coming all of a sudden all the time that you can't control and that removes the incentive for criminal organizations to be involved in human trafficking. And it happens both informally, you pay somebody to just get you across the border, but increasingly where it's really, really dangerous is when you get the cartels involved. And that has become, you know, a real scourge. It tends to be more focused on the southern border still in the northern border. The other issue has been because you also have, you know, indigenous lands that also cross certain parts of the border. So there's also a longer tradition of like crossing in these other places too. You know, that doesn't really answer the question of like, what do you do about, you know, elements of this. But one of the things that certainly a lot of advocates say is like, you need to de-incentivize the getting across the border because a lot of the people who are, especially if somebody is crossing the border from Canada to come into the US, they have had to have enough money to get a plane ticket to get to Canada. Right. That's the old and so it's people who are somewhat middle class who are able to make that, that journey. And sometimes it is, you know, horrific. I'm sure you've seen the stories of people freezing, you know, crossing this border. So I don't unfortunately have a good answer to, you know, how to address that other than to say like, it cannot be one or the other where you are saying like, okay, the only way we deal with this is we just build walls and, and, you know, shut down the border because that's never worked, you know, the Chinese built the great wall to try to stop the Mongols. It didn't work unless you're thinking in a few hundred years we'll have a great like tourist destination. Walls don't tend to work. But by the same token, you know, if you see that, that the Biden administration has not backed away from a lot of the Trump era rules, it's partly because what is the response? You also cannot have a response where you just say, anybody can cross at any time. Like that is not for all sorts of reasons. That is not realistic. That is not realistic if you believe in nations. If you decide that there are no nations, then you can do that. But if you don't, then that's a real challenge. So yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you.