 refugee debate to 2021 here on the middle way. And we have our regular co-host contributor, Chang Wan and Alexander Morava. Morava, I get that right. And both of whom have been on many shows here on the middle way. And today we're gonna talk about the immigrant and refugee debate. And I wanna read a phrase, so if I may. This to me for a long time in my life and maybe for others defined the beacon of the United States. And I can't help but having an emotional reaction to it. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest toss to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. Emelazarus, it's on the base of the Statue of Liberty, November 2nd, 1883. And it has stood as a beacon for many tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people who joined the country then and thereafter. And it has spoken to the world of a policy that defined until maybe now the United States. So welcome to the show, Chang and Alexander. Let's talk about American policy for immigration today. Chang, why don't you define the scope of the discussion as you see it? And why don't you introduce Alexander? Of course. For the let me introduce Alexander. He doesn't really need my introduction. He's a frequent guest on the program. But Alexander is most importantly, he's a dual citizen of Austria and the United States. He's a law professor, has been teaching in Switzerland, in China, in Brazil, and in other countries. And he is also a partisan attorney and a partisan international human rights law and international law with my form. And we are very honored to get to know Alexander more than a decade ago. And through all these years, I learned a lot from him, particularly international law questions. And we have co-authored an article for BBC about immigration and that was under Donald Trump. And we talked about the United States still a nation of immigrants because this term from JFK, JFK published a book called A Nation of Immigrants, defined the United States as a nation of immigrants built by immigrants and the conceits of immigrants. But recently, under our new president, President Biden, the immigration and refugee issue just to become debated again. So you mentioned the Haitian refugees and asylum seekers under the bridge in the southern border. And also during our previous discussion, we talked about a xenophobia. And there's a university Minnesota law professor argued that instead of United States as nation of immigrants, we are more of a nation of xenophobia. So I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the professor, but I think that is a good topic for all of us to discuss. Last but not least, we support to have another guest today, Justice Paul Anderson, who also previously on the show and he's traveling. So he has a little bit technical difficulties to be connected to our Zoom meeting. So we will see if I'm not, he can join us momentarily. But I'm going to leave this to Alexander to hear his insights and comments. Where are we Alexander? You know, from the time of Emma Lazarus, how did we get to this mean spirited place? I'm at this tour of history, long past, history, recent and considerations of the future. I think we have to always be careful when we come up with two sweeping judgments. I think we have to be cautious because our emotions and I understand immigration is an emotional debate. My family has multiple backgrounds of both migration and fleeing countries for persecution. It's actually with a child refugee from Vietnam. So this is an emotional topic, but emotional topics should not allow us to give us bleak, lint, brutal, emotional, emotionally influenced answers to questions that are actually required through a research and analysis and the look at what's really going on and whether we are still a nation of immigrants or a nation of skin and clothing. Do you agree with me that we've turned, do you agree with me that we've turned to a more mean spirited approach to immigration? We certainly list welcoming as a nation. I think it's a global phenomenon. If you look at terrible developments in Europe, that is a similar phenomenon. Many times, mass influx of migrants and refugees causes communities to become more inward with being more explosive, more using the term of sociologists to using other things trying to find the difference between them and everybody else more quickly and then jumping to conclusions and in order to remain safe, we have to exclude whatever is different. But let me give you a very practical example. Not my children go to school and usually makes it to the list of the top 10 conservative cities in the United States, Mesa, Arizona. Very large Mormon communities there. If you look at the community of first students, it is actually the archetypical melting pot of the United States. There is a representation of every single race, every single nation, every single background in a hotspot of conservatism. So we are the fact of a melting pot in the nation of immigrants. But are we still living up to the promises that you read from the Statue of Liberty there? And we're concerned that we might not. Well, so we talked before the show about how Trump had exacerbated xenophobia in this country. And we know it didn't start with him, but he certainly aggravated it. And by the end of his administration, I think there were a lot of progressive liberal people that wanted to see Trump's policies rolled back, especially with the Department of Homeland Security, which had been implementing his new xenophobia. But that hasn't really happened. We talked about that before the show too, and that President Joe Biden is in there, and one would expect that his more liberal approach to that and everything else would prevail and that the Department of Homeland Security would be reformed to exclude the policies that Trump had initiated. So that hasn't happened. And my question to you is, why hasn't that happened? Wouldn't you expect, didn't you expect? And didn't Chang expect that these mean-spirited, in my view, mean-spirited policies would be rolled back, but it hasn't happened. And these people from Latin America and Haiti, they're under a bridge, which seems very dehumanizing at the least. Why hasn't it happened? Well, let me... Go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry. No, go ahead. Let me just point out one thing. During the Trump administration, the mission statement of United States citizenship and immigration services was changed, was changed by Trump appointee, and basically eliminated the statement that United States is a nation of immigrants, that was deleted. Second major change of that mission statement was, USCIS was defined as a service agency, a government agency provide service. But the new mission statement basically redefined the USCIS, the government agency, as not providing service to immigrants, but rather to maintain, manage, and control the law for immigration process of the nation. So obviously we can understand why there's such a change because that the previous nutrition have a special soft spot of law for immigration versus illegal immigration. But that was a completely reversal of decades-long agency history and the parties. And the same, not only this, and according to the Immigration Lawyers Association to their calculation, there are at least 1,000 immigration related policy had been changed since Trump took office. So for the past year, four years, very fast speed, very effective, very efficient, they changed more than 1,000 immigration related policy, big or small. Now the question back to Jay's original question was why we can't just revert back to normal? It's not, it seems very simple, is if you broke with the president and you change the policy arbitrarily and capriciously, it is almost an obligation for your successor to correct the path wrong. But we have not seen, very few of them have been reversed, but most of policy change stay. So that is quite a surprise and the two many pundits and immigration lawyers. And we just simply quite understand why some of the difficult policy just stays. I think Justice Anderson adjusted that way in. And perhaps we can- I think I'm, you couldn't hear me. Yes, we can hear you, Justice. How good to have you on the program. Any video, but you have my audio. We have your photographs, so welcome back. Welcome to the show. We were talking just briefly about why the Biden administration has not or has not been able to reverse some of the xenophobic changes that Donald Trump made in immigration. And we were about to talk to Alexander Marawa about that essential question. Why hasn't that happened? This is obviously bad for the country. It's bad for the image of the country. It's bad for the whole notion of being a beacon for liberty and being a nation of immigrants in John Kennedy's words. It's bad for our image overseas. It's bad for our image of ourselves. And yet Joe Biden hasn't fixed it. Why, Alexander? Wait, can I answer that? You're asking Biden to do the impossible. You're asking him to turn back centuries of the xenophobic attitude. Trump has just revealed the lesser qualities of the American nature. So I think that's putting too much of a burden on Biden. So I'll now step back and get a response to that. Alexander? Well, just as Anderson, you made my job just a lot easier because you put your thumb exactly on the problem. It's not a breaking point between one administration and theater. It is a victory of development in immigration that happens in ways and changes with attitudes and changes also with the way we talk about immigration. And even the fact that now we talk about immigration not in lengthy treatises and thought-out discussions but in tweets and other short messages that do not lend themselves to sophisticated discussion, we hear much more of the one-sided xenophobic and othering approach that definitely defines that. So I think it's not the Biden problem. I agree. I mean, Biden should probably be more proactive in this respect, also a trend. I'm sure there's changes to practices behind the doors that we don't see. My new changes to what actually happens in individual cases. But it should feel a bit more front. It should feel a bit more radical, if you will. The other problem is it's easier to come up with policies that are not still legally found like the Berger administration does than to come up with reversal policies that actually have to make sense and have to be seen in the judicial challenge, possibly ultimately. Any of those policies can be challenged, not just by pro-immigrant agents but also by agents who want to curtail and limit immigration. And they also still have to be on solid ground in this respect. Well, Judge Anderson, your comment is provocative to me and suggests that, well, we have a divided country on so many things. Not too far from half-half. And it sounds like we have had and Trump exacerbated this division on immigration policy. And now Biden steps in and he finds the same division. He finds half the country would like to be xenophobic. This creates a problem. Do you agree with me about the division? Is that part of your approach to this, your view of it? I'm going to say is that a large segment of the population of the United States has been xenophobic for a long time. And I said that what happens with Trump, he's enabled and encouraged the, how should I say, the lesser angels of our nature and has permitted that nasty part of the demographic attitude to come to the fore. And those are the people who are speaking now. I mean, I think we can do something to overcome that, but it's going to be very hard because it's so ingrained in the American nature to dislike or be prejudiced with respect to people who are different from different countries. Well, it's not a grain of the people that, that I know that people are in Hawaii, the people who are largely immigrants. I suppose that the natural tendency of an immigrant, somebody who identifies his family as roots, as an immigrant roots, is going to favor a more humane policy. And so assuming that division that I mentioned, why wouldn't Biden do that? Isn't he risking losing the people who have supported him in his progressive approach? Shane, what do you think about that? Is this a mistake as far as Biden's policy is concerned? I wouldn't call it a mistake. And the administration is probably too busy with so many things on their plate. But I think it's very, under the current political environment and the international relations, it's just almost impossible to tackle the immigration and refugee issues in the right way, if you may. And there's one thing I do want to mention, and we do have immigration immigrants and refugee both in our program title. So the refugee is a very interesting word. And because once people have been labeled as refugee, and the individual immediately assume a new identity, and the previous identity is simply evaporate. Like if even your professor or lawyer, scientist, doctor doesn't matter, you are now just a refugee. And then we become easily become other, and we versus other, other ring other people. But look at the climate change, look at what happened in Louisiana, in Texas, in not only other parts of the world, but also in our own country, anybody can become a refugee overnight. You can become a, you know, because a storm can make hundreds of people refugee. And if there's a large natural disaster, you know, half million people can become refugee overnight. So we have to, I think it's worth matters. If we keep telling these people seeking a better life, seeking or fundamental basic shelter and protection, just label the refugee. We are wrong on impossible, we have an impossible time. I wonder about that. Alexander, what do you think? Is the United States big enough? Is the United States flexible enough to accept refugees from wherever source? Why can't we be the home for refugees around the world? We have lots of geography. We have lots of, you know, until now, we've had lots of institutions and kindness that can absorb them. Why don't we just say yes? Why don't we do that? Yeah, we have a tradition, I think we can. Now, let me go back pretty quick to what Jen was actually talking about. It's crucial, it's sort of the foundation that when we were talking about refugee, what is a refugee? We are operating on a legal system that was created after World War II. And that system understood the refugee to be a person persecuted by a government for a political opinion. All right, so all the people that Jen was listing of people fleeing natural disasters, climate change, violence from non-state accidents, we're not initially part of the definition of refugees. Nowadays, we still have a few traditional refugees, but the majority of people are fleeing things that are different than we had in the 1940s and 1950s. The mentality has changed, the mindset has changed, the law has not always changed. I remember the instance of female genital population for instance, which was a big debate in the 1980s and 1990s. It took until then to realize that women can actually be refugees because a private person mutilates her body. The government has nothing to do with that. It was the courts that ultimately set in multiple jurisdictions that expanded the notion of refugee. So I think we need to adjust our understanding of refugee a little bit to get back to a notion where we can all say, these are people who deserve shelter. I think if we call it that rather than refugee, we might have a larger population that actually agrees with the need to help people instead of lending our sovereign nation to people who come in for whatever the level and purpose, which is for the sake of migration right now. We're dealing with a classic political refugee, but the world is changing. We have climate refugees, we have economic refugees, and there's a lot of sub-groups to this whole group that's called refugees. They're not immigrants in the true sense because they're coming here escaping something and climate change, it's economics, and it's political. A Chang, you know, there's a program that's playing on MSNBC now about Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires is called it, and it's done by a reporter called Richard Engel, and he talks about something we all know about, he talks about the fact that there were hundreds of thousands of translators and people who helped the United States in the course of the 20 year war in Afghanistan and how much trouble they had with the State Department in terms of getting papers to come to the United States, not just in the last two or three weeks, but over months, even years, and the United States policy under Trump was really denying them, generally speaking, denying them their rights as those who could prove that they had helped the United States and were promised visas. And that's very problematic in the sense of, you know, the American image as a welcher on the promises. Where does that fit? I don't think it was a change in policy, it was a change in the speed of Trump's agencies in processing these requests and applications. You can deny something simply by delaying it, we all know that. What about that kind of, implicit, what kind of, I don't know, de facto policy? What can we, what should we do about that? I want to hear, Judge Anderson, the comments on this. I really do. Judge, what's your comments on this? Very different from the Haitian refugees, the Mexican refugees. The moral core of who we are as a country was really compromised in Afghanistan. I won't go there, but we have a moral obligation with those people from Afghanistan who helped us and put their lives on the line in the same way with respect among who we have a number of in Minnesota. We have a world-class moral obligation to do everything we can help. Yep, good. Well, okay, let me go to Alexander with advancing this discussion to what can be done. Let's assume that Joe Biden decides he wants to satisfy the progressive element in the country, that he's not interested in advancing or perpetuating xenophobia and he wants to liberalize or maybe I should say return immigration refugee policy to a more liberal time. How could he do that? And what, what steps should he take substantively to do that now? I would personally advise the president and I'm sure I just survived this poll. He talked about similar points to connect to dots that have been disconnected. The refugee problem, the fact that people fleeing countries because they're being persecuted and the fact that we actually as an immigrant nation need highly qualified immigrants today as much as we needed them in 1902. So if you link those two, it's pretty easy. Refugees, usually are individuals who are highly educated, very smart and therefore have a political opinion, right? That's why people are being persecuted. Why are people being persecuted in Afghanistan right now? It's a group of interpreters and aid of military assistance, of course, and I agree with Joseph Anderson, we have a definitive obligation to that group. But then look at beyond that, it will be educators, it will be women and it will be minorities in Afghanistan and will be the large group of people who have a legitimate plan to actually become a refugee. What's the common factor between all these groups? I would say we actually want them, right? There would be extremely well-adjustable and very, very valuable additions to the population of the United States. That's still the second best, I think with the, if you look at the global angle, but with the best solution would be if they would stay in Afghanistan and have a say in what the future of the country is. With the Taliban, the question is pretty much answered at this point in time, that women will not have a standing, they will not have a role in education, they will not have a role beyond the household. So we'll go back to medieval understanding of who women are. So women, by definition, are victims of bad regime there. And specifically those who stood out as leaders in the past 20 years who took up the challenge and said, we will become judges, we'll become university professors, we'll become police women. One of the first stories was about a police woman being executed by the Taliban, apparently, simply because she was a police woman. I'm judge, I wanna take a question that I asked Alexander earlier to another level. And that is this, I mean, you could say the United States has the resources, it has the, I don't wanna say history, but it has the capability of bringing in all kinds of immigrants and refugees into the country and finding a place for them and making a part of perhaps a more vigorous economy right now. And you could look at Afghanistan and say, gee, there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who consider that, who were exposed to a more liberal life in the past 20 years and don't like the return of the Taliban at all, they're afraid, and they would like to leave. And, you know, to some extent they are leaving. Many have gone to Pakistan, in fact, Pakistan has now shut the border. Many would like to leave Afghanistan. And you could empty out Afghanistan right now if you could give them a pass. And so the question is, you know, we have a lot of failed countries, not exactly like Afghanistan, but in the same genre of countries that really don't serve their citizens where people would like to leave. And if the Statue of Liberty, you know, and the nation of immigrants concept around the United States pervades, you know, we would like to take them. But if you do that, if you empty out Afghanistan and other failed nations and you bring them all to our shores, what's the global effect? How do you deal with a failed country and just take its citizens in? It doesn't sound like it will work over the long term for either side of the equation. What do you think? I think you're right on. We got to do the doable. And I mean, I mean, I go back earlier. I mean, we should win in Afghanistan. We have the most powerful military in the world. And we can't because it was beyond our capability. We got to figure out, I mean, but immigrants enrich this country so much. I've been involved in so many different immigrant things and they do bring good aspects of their culture. But, you know, if we try to solve all the problems of failed nations, it could take us to the breaking point and that really does worry me. Yeah. Well, let's talk about China for a minute because that's, I don't know if you could call it a refugee situation. It's a situation where the two nations are in attention. It's a geopolitical thing, you know, it's a competitive thing economically, militarily. It's a thing where the two countries are constraining, if you will, the flow of people, of information, of, you know, the general positive prospect that looked like it was going to happen in the early 2000s. And now that's been tightened, constrained. And of course it has a negative effect on both countries and I'm sure you and I would agree on that. But how do we deal with people who would like to come here but can't come here because of political constraints? And that of course would include Hong Kong. I mean, a lot of people would like to come here from Hong Kong too, but they can't do it. What is our role in that regard? Well, let's put that in a slightly different perspective because, you know, as you know, I am hesitant and to put myself in a position I'm not capable of to comment on, you know, more sensitive issues. But I do want to mention that we, these countries have a history of other other people. And so that we have to, before the program ends, we have to tackle the subtitle of our program that deja vu all over again. So China has been considered a strategic partner for a while and now obviously it's a competitor. And that mentality affected to our immigration policy and our foreign policy. And the Justice Anderson gave me a fantastic lecture the other day, talk about the history of immigration and refugees in this nation. And from German, Irish, Catholic and Chinese and Muslim and Japanese and now Chinese again. So if there's a why Alexander Professor Marava say that the subtitle of our program should be deja vu all over again, which echo Justice Anderson's historical lesson, there's nothing new in our current debate on immigration and refugee. It has been happened in the past in history many, many times and in many, many groups have been in turn to be labeled as other people. And the judge, if you are still with us, would you mind to just give us a very concise history about what you've been telling me in the past few days? Oh, well, I mean, I'm, I'm coming a little bit here, but I want to talk about the very people who are xenophobic now, they were the crowd eaters. They were the dirty Irish. They were the dumb Norwegians, the dumb Swedes. I mean, there's this human need to denigrate various groups and then they assimilate and then become part of the culture. We're seeing that in Minnesota where the Hmong people were ostracized and they excluded and now they're becoming such a part of our culture. I mean, we have an Olympic champion, you know, who's part of that culture. And so there's something that's natural about this whole process. And so when you talk about, I'm going to come back to Bush, I mean, to Biden. He has to use the bully pulpit. I think he can use it with respect to the Afghanis because they have been loyal to us and stood up for us. And, you know, maybe he has to pick and choose his battle sites, but I think he can overcome some of this xenophobia with his bully pulpit and selling how much these people can add and contribute when you talk about the Chinese. Go to Vancouver, see what a thriving community that came after the 1990 turnover of Hong Kong. They took in so many refugees and it's just invigorated that city, made it a world-class city. We're running out of time, Alexander Professor Marava. And I wanted to ask you a compound complex question if you don't mind. You were one for that. The first part, you know, we've talked about Joe Biden. We talked about how Donald Trump affected this and how Joe Biden is affecting it and could affect it. But what about the courts in this country? And I suppose I'm thinking about the, you know, the federal courts, maybe I'm also talking about the immigration courts, about what they could do to liberalize, to get back to a place that is more humane. That's the first part of my question. The second part of my question is, in fact, what's going to happen here? I'd like you to predict, take it all, all the things we've been talking about, all the historical and cultural and social changes in this country, the direction of the country, the circumstances in the world that affect that. Oh, where are we going on this? What's going to happen? Okay, can you break it down into answers? I'll try my best. Well, but the first thing with the courts is the set up of the immigration appeal process is very peculiar because we have immigration charges. We have a vote of immigration appeals and the next level is the federal court of appeal. And ultimately, but really the Supreme Court says something about immigration very frequently. The immigration charges that I was familiar with, and actually my law professor who taught me immigration law became an immigration judge afterwards, were highly committed federal administrative law judges, not full judges in that sense, but independent adjudicators of those cases who took great pains to decide those cases. It seems from what we see in the press nowadays, the immigration appeal process has become a rather staining exercise of the Niles of the Bible. I've seen that in the past in Europe than what's happened in the 1990s, 2000s and so on. When mass inclusive refugees happen. When you're overseeing, usually you don't come up with a sophisticated legal analysis and the quality of adjudication deteriorates. And I think we're seeing that in part. The Biden administration and that would also include the Attorney General, Mary Garner, would certainly be in a position to sit in and change that or at least built it in a way that we go back to the previous version. I do not believe quite frankly that I think predicts the future here. I think we're currently in a position that we could compare to about 2015 in Europe where there was a mass influx of 2 million refugees for asylum seekers, refugees for determination. There were people claiming asylum who were quite simply storming the borders and crossing the borders. There were ships straight through to the countries that would adjudicate their claims. Germany took up a lot of them and now the political landscape in Germany is very much influenced by the consequences of that action. Namely, increase in xenophobia and hatred towards immigrant communities. And that's not just the ones that actually came in 2015. That's now everybody who's different. So we have another clear instance of other ones. I think we are currently in that situation here to a certain extent exacerbated by not just the form of residence, but also by many people who were in this orbit to resending the same xenophobic message, mainly. We can't overcome that, but it will take some time. I don't believe we'll simply say now we have to be in the material world, now we have to, you know, the Biden's fully focused might work to a certain extent when it comes to Afghanistan. I don't think it will change our mindset that again has a history and has a semi-logical basis now, even the Afghanistan situation, even the Haiti situation and the southern border situation generally. So summary of the very long and not very concise statement I was trying to make here, I think we'll need to wait a little more to take baby steps towards improving the situation of immigrants generally speaking by making baby steps towards changing the mindset of the population. Not gonna be a sweeping all, changing all considerations tomorrow and all of a sudden we'll be opening our arms and say come back. Judge Anderson, last comments. Well, would you agree with Alexander? How do you feel about the future? I'm an optimist. I'm a, you know, glasses full. That said, I've never been so discouraged about the future of our country right now as I am. And we're gonna, you know, we're gonna go through a rather dicey period until we come out of it. But I am basically optimistic. I study history and, you know, the underlying goodness of the American people I think will finally prevail. I do wanna touch on that little question about, it's not a little question about judges and how they make decisions. I'm gonna be very, I gotta elect the right appointing official. You do not change the minds of these judges once they get appointed. They kinda get rigid, whatever. And, you know, they're not bad people. They can build a rationale for how they're making decisions. But you gotta have people who say, you know, it's more than just justice. In some ways doing justice so you can rationalize it anyway. We gotta get people who understand what it is to do the right thing. And it'll be the right thing from a humanitarian point of view. And I'm gonna be very frank. Hey, elect the right appointing officials and the judiciary will be better. Thank you, Judge. Chang, we're almost out of time. We are out of time. But why don't you close? Well, I have nothing more to add after Justice Anderson and Alexander and you just really appreciate the opportunity to revisit this topic. I believe that the history will keep replaying itself and we will have this debate on immigration and refugee again and again. But I really appreciate Judge Anderson's optimism that nothing you really in the current debate and we will just go in forward as normal and which depends on which angle you look at the issue. But I will keep my hope high. Your Lester's need to understand how enriched we are as a country by the people who come with us and their different backgrounds and experience. It is truly an enriching experience and we gotta figure out how to handle it. Right. Thank you, Judge Anderson. Thank you, Alexander, Professor Alexander Marama and thank you, Chang Wang. We really appreciate it. Talk to you again soon. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it.