 Now it is my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Elise Cohen, assistant professor of political science at UW-Shabuigan and UW-Manitowoc. She received her PhD in political science and international relations from the University of Delaware, and her BA in international relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. We're very pleased to have Dr. Cohen with us to talk about refugees and global migration. Thank you all, and thank you Dulcey for the lovely introduction. I just need to make one correction, and that's that Shabuigan and Manitowoc are now all part of UW-Green Bay. So my official title is actually associate professor of political science at UW-Green Bay. Otherwise, thank you for the rest of that. That was really nice of you. Thank you all for coming out on a warm September evening to talk about something rather depressing and grim when you could be in the sun strolling along 8th Street. So I really appreciate that you are dedicated to learning about this. So my goal tonight is to kind of start in a big picture way just with defining some of the key terms. What are refugees? What are migrants? Some of the words that often get jumbled in journalistic coverage and even by our elected officials. And then my goal is to move into some key principles that govern this topic, both in international law and then impacting our own US domestic law. And to get a sense of sort of how things are globally with this issue, why things are the way they are. And so those may seem like sort of ambitious goals, but I'm going to try to do that in a rather quick manner. So let's just start with the first one defining some key terms. Okay, so migrant and refugee. I'm going to put up a definition here and have it be a little interactive so you can see the definitions. An individual who has moved from their place of residence either across an international border or within a state. Let's start with that one. Does anyone have a sense of whether they think that is the definition of a migrant or a refugee? Very good. Yeah, so that is the definition for a migrant. Sometimes these things get confused because there's a lack of clarity. They get used interchangeably like migrants and refugees, migrants and refugees. And that's because oftentimes groups of people moving across borders are traveling in mixed flows of people. So just to be safe, you'll usually hear that like migrants and refugees. But the second definition is really important because it's very distinct from the first definition. You could see the first definition, they're just moving from a place of residence and we don't know why. So that could be any number of things, education, work, family, reunification. But if you look at the second definition, we're getting a very specific purpose of what has driven them into displacement. They have fled their country of origin due to a fear of persecution based on race, nationality, religion, political opinion, or membership in a social group. So still somewhat open to interpretation like what counts as membership in a social group? Does domestic violence count if women are part of a social group? There are debates, legal debates over that, but we get the sense that they are fleeing for their lives and safety, not just for better jobs or different opportunities of life. So that's one that I really do hope that you can leave tonight understanding that a refugee is a very specific term and this really is a humanitarian category and that's the way it should be used. To make matters even more confusing, you'll sometimes see asylum seeker and say, well now wait a minute, if I get migrant versus refugee, how does this one fit in? An asylum seeker, the first thing you might want to think about is refugee. Because an asylum seeker is sort of a defacto refugee, they just haven't had their status formalized. So they are pursuing refugee status, but they officially haven't been registered with the United Nations Refugee Office or whatever embassy of the country where they are seeking asylum. But they are claiming asylum, they are claiming that they are fearing for their lives and escaping violence and persecution and harm. So both refugees and asylum seekers are a special humanitarian category of immigrants. We would not want to lump them in just with any kind of immigrant or migrant. They are forced meaning that they did not have much choice at all in leaving their homes. So next, let's talk about why. The number may sound astounding, we have over 69 million displaced people worldwide. 25 million of those are refugees, so that sounds like a huge number. The reasons why are regional and global, I've just zoomed in on one region that really impacts asylum seekers coming to the US, and that is the Northern Triangle in Central America. So what this map is showing you, it's a map from the Council of Foreign Relations, is in the sort of darkish red countries there in the center, we're getting those Central American, they call them Northern Triangle countries that have the highest levels of violence, and we're seeing the homicide rate, basically the murder rate per 100,000 people, the deeper red is a higher murder rate. So I don't know how well everybody can see in the back, so I'll just read some of that out. El Salvador, which is a small country just below Honduras, it's 81 per 100,000, so that would be the annual homicide rate. To give you a sense of comparison, our most dangerous cities in the US, it's something like 16 per 100,000, so you would need to really multiply that to get 81 per year per 100,000 people. Honduras is 59, so also very dangerous. Guatemala and Belize, also in a deeper red, 27, 37 respectively, bless you. So El Salvador in 2015 was like the highest level of violence for some country that's not actively a war zone. So these are the kinds of conditions when we think about why would people be leaving Central America? Why would we want to maybe apply the word asylum seeker and refugee to them, instead of just the word migrant or immigrant? And some of what's going on here is kidnappings, extortion and violence by drug cartel members. A lot of the concern about being forced to stay in Mexico is they can't safely escape those drug cartel members, whereas if they are able to get safety and asylum in the US, they would have better protection for themselves or their families. So that's looking at one region. Another major center for forced migration is coming from a number of countries in the Middle East and Central Asia and even South Asia. But here are a couple examples from the Middle East and sort of Central Asia, which Afghanistan is Central Asia. Syria. Syrian refugees make up the largest and sheer number of refugees worldwide, over 5 million Syrian refugees globally. So Syria was one of the worst humanitarian crises, only sadly to be replaced by Yemen in the last couple of years, as now being the largest humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. Afghanistan, if you've even been following current events, you may have heard about just bombing after bombing, just sort of a relentless atmosphere of violence for the Afghani people. Syria now, we've seen that ISIS has mostly been forced out and lost their territorial control, but the Assad regime continues to use a lot of violence against what it views its opposition or rebels. Now, there's been some discussion with ISIS losing so much control and maybe then less mass atrocity crimes being carried out. Maybe it's safer for Syrians to return. The issues that they are facing when they try to return is that the Syrian government, the Assad regime, tends to view people that fled, those 5 million that fled, as opposition. Well, why did you leave? Why didn't you stay and fight for my army, the Assad army? And so the stories that have come out, even though it's very hard to get information, those are stories of arrests and torture. Another issue with returning is that Syria passed a law in recent years that they could just confiscate the property of anyone who fled as a refugee. So then they could also return and they no longer have a home. The final issue that they might face upon return is being forced into military service. Any mail between the ages of 18 and 49 when they return would be forced to join Assad's army and fight in a very brutal war that's going on within the country. So those are some of the reasons why, even though it seems like ISIS isn't controlling as much territory anymore, it's still very dangerous and deadly conditions for people. Yemen has also been a lot in the news, so I wanted to highlight that one, because of course the US has actively supported Saudi bombing campaigns against Houthi rebels there. So that's another aspect to think about is how... Did I lose? Am I still with you? That's another aspect to think about is how sometimes foreign powers have contributed to these conflicts that are causing the violence that people on the ground are now fleeing. Okay, so I've given you sort of some basic definitional stuff to understand on the ground, kind of a sense of a few examples of why these people become refugees and asylum seekers and not just migrants. So what responsibilities, if any, do countries have to them? And this is where international law has really played an important role since the Holocaust especially and the Geneva Conventions. There are four main principles I'm going to go through. There's a lot more, but I'm trying to summarize the main takeaways for this evening for you. So the first one that all countries, especially countries that have signed on to key legal instruments like the Refugee Convention, which the US has ratified, the Convention Against Torture, which the US has ratified, and the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights, which the US has ratified, is that we should not be returning these people that are coming saying that they claim asylum and that they're fleeing persecution. We should not be returning them back to the territory where they could face harm, torture, or persecution. So that's the first one. Actually the formal legal term is non-refoulement, which is, if you know French, it just means non-return in French. And so that's key. And not only that we wouldn't physically return them, but that we would prevent them from seeking asylum. That is really the spirit of the principle under international law. When the US ratified the Refugee Convention and its protocol several years later, we made our own domestic law passed through Congress that made that also US law in 1980. So we use this definition of a refugee I gave you earlier, and we also have non-return as a legal principle that's supposed to guide our US policy towards asylum seekers. Second is non-discrimination. So in addition to not returning back to the territory where they might face harm, persecution, or torture, we should not discriminate on flows of people coming as refugees and asylum seekers based on these kinds of categories. What is their race? What is their religion? Or what is their ethnic national origin? So the idea of saying, oh, anyone from country X should not be allowed to claim asylum, or anyone of a certain religion should not be allowed to claim asylum, that would be violating this core principle that world states have agreed to since the Holocaust. The third major principle is that we should not be punishing refugees and asylum seekers for pursuing an irregular path. The idea is even if they enter a territory without papers undocumented, what our politicians tend to call illegal immigrants, that if they are doing that because they fear their life and safety, they shouldn't be penalized in the legal system for doing that. So that's another issue that we see increasingly coming under scrutiny, is what does it mean to penalize them if they are pursuing asylum, but they did not have lawful entry across the border. The final one I'm going to talk about tonight is non-detention. We are also under international law not supposed to detain refugees and asylum seekers while their asylum application is underway. There are some exceptions to this, if it is deemed highly necessary for reasons of a threat to public order. But what the ruling there is, is that the country should determine that on a case by case basis, and there should be independent oversight, it shouldn't be blanket, like all of these people will be detained. It should be this individual, intelligence suggests, or we have a concern this individual is a threat, we must detain them. But it should not be blanket detention, it should be avoided as much as possible, and children should never be detained. There is also a family unity principle that comes into human rights law as well, that family should not be separated during the asylum process, but that also kind of relates to the non-detention. So I could tell from the vibe in the room, some people as I was going through these, you may have been thinking about current events and saying, I'm pretty sure some countries are violating that principle. Yeah, so our states, our countries, states fulfilling these responsibilities, and you're getting the kind of sense here, no, many of them are not. And so let's give some specific examples so we can kind of bring that to life, non-return, and I want to do some US examples, because that's really relevant to us, but also just to give you some examples from other parts of the world in global politics. So if we look at the Mediterranean Sea crossings, a lot of migrants and asylum seekers trying to flee Libya or trying to flee Syria, those areas have been crossing by boat to make it to Europe, to make it to asylum or safety in Europe. And this is kind of giving you some figures of the number of deaths each year with those crossings. I'll read some out, especially for people that might not be able to see this well. So in 2016, deaths at the Mediterranean by those migrants trying to cross, many of them to seek asylum, was around 5,000 people, and most of that is drowning, but some is also just exposure to elements while not being rescued and being stranded at sea. In 2017, it appears to have gone down a bit because it was 3,000 and 2018 down a little over 2,000, but actually the rates went up because the overall numbers of people crossing went down. So then the number of people crossing went down, but the rate at which those people crossing were dying actually went up. And part of this is very deliberate because those European countries partnered with the coast guards of countries like Libya to interdict them and prevent them from arriving on the shores of the European countries. This is what I call evasion. It's a way that you can sort of find a circumvention without directly violating. So Italy can partner with Libya and say, okay, we'll do an arrangement with you and give you aid. If your Libyan coast guard goes and interdicts all of these migrants, we don't want to make it to our Italian shores because then they could say, oh, actually we're claiming asylum and we couldn't return them. But if you do it for us on the sea with Libyan coast guard and then you just return them back to North Africa, then we didn't have to get our hands dirty as that European democratic wealthy country and we can't be directly charged with violating international law. So that's part of the story there. They reduced search and rescue operations and in some cases even deployed almost like anti-rescue, specifically to find them and return them without offering them shelter. There was some really powerful current events that came up. There was a case earlier this year, some of you may have heard about, where there were sick children that were stranded at sea for weeks because no European country would allow the rescue boat to dock in their port and allow the people to get off the boat. Again, because they didn't want them to officially be on their territory so they could claim asylum. And some of those people, the conditions on the ship became so poor that they were just throwing themselves overboard and trying to swim because they thought they would die if they were left to sort of rot on the conditions of the ship. So this was one that got really public media scrutiny and attention that all of these so-called democratic or wealthy industrialized countries are turning their backs and not allowing desperate people to claim asylum. Oh, I'm sorry about that. Shall I repeat? I was just saying that the European Union countries were coming under scrutiny for turning away these people that were very desperate and stranded at sea for several weeks. Yes, and I promise we will do full Q&A. And I'll get into some of the why, too. So maybe I might even anticipate some of your questions. So a U.S. example that many of you might also relate to is our own plan to return Central American asylum seekers. It's undergone a couple of names. So Remain in Mexico is one that's being used a lot now that we are sending them back to Mexico to then wait for their asylum process without actually being in the U.S. just have them stay there. Many of those Central American asylum seekers feel that they are still easily targeted by the drug cartels as long as they're in the Mexican territory. And so many of them give up in the process or end up being harmed in the process. And we're still learning a lot about where exactly those people are because they don't really have enough shelter set up for the number of people, especially families that are claiming asylum. The latest one is Safe Third Country, if anyone heard that in the news. That is just hot off the presses sort of the last month that the administration is saying they have a deal with the Mexican government so that they must first claim asylum in Mexico, basically. And if they don't claim asylum there, then they're not even eligible to apply for asylum here. So it's another really amazing tactic of evasion that you can say, well, we are giving this other alternative and it's like a loophole that enables us to not have to be held to these legal principles. And of course supporters of it would say they are addressing a loophole where people claim asylum just so they can get into the U.S. Non-detention, so this one has been so much in U.S. coverage that I bet a lot of people in the room heard of this in the last year or even two years. So the non-detention is supposed to again be something where it's not blanketed. It's on a case-by-case basis. It's also supposed to not be prison-like conditions, but the issue is that many of our detention facilities for people awaiting their asylum process are run by private prison corporations. So they end up being very much prison type of conditions. A lot of the research on why this is that it's considered a human rights violation to have prison-like conditions is especially for children. It's psychologically very traumatic and even physiologically the side effects of anxiety that come from this kind of concrete floors and those space blankets. If you've seen those, the foil blankets and the very harsh segregation and heavy surveillance, the basically lack of freedom of movement that has a very damaging mental and physical health side effects. And this is not new. So under the Trump administration there's been a lot of criticism of this but very similar photographs to these can be found from the Obama administration as well. There was less attention to it then so it has made its way more into mainstream coverage now but this is something that stretches back quite a long time. The U.S. has a long history of violating the non-detention principle when it comes to Central Americans especially but also Haitians and Cubans if you go back in our history. To give you sort of another example in global politics, Hungary got a lot of scrutiny from the United Nations and from human rights groups because it was absolutely violating non-detention. It was doing blanket mandatory detention for any asylum seeker, many of them children and some of the conditions which you can kind of see in this photo here they were shipping containers that they were sort of imprisoning those children and families in while they awaited their asylum process. So it's not only the United States, it's a lot of these countries that are doing the detention right now. Okay, non-penalization. So I think this is where it gets really confusing in American politics, there's a sense that well if they cross illegally then they simply have no rights or they should not have rights because they have violated a law by crossing the territory. So what we saw with the kind of crackdown on that and the sense that we should enforce the law and punish anyone who crosses illegally regardless of why they're crossing was called the zero-tolerance policy approach and under Attorney General Jeff Sessions who was there until last year now it's Bill Barr who's our current Attorney General this got a lot more media attention it's kind of fallen out I would say in the last few months but the separation of families got such public backlash it was halted after a few months and by executive order by President Trump he said we're not going to have that as an official policy anymore there's still controversy because the idea was to deter them from coming in the first place we should give them such a harsh punishment that we make them regret crossing to seek asylum so the idea of deterrence is another one that sort of directly violates that non-penalization because because why is it that the policy logic was intended to separate the families it was so they would think twice about coming in the first place to try and seek asylum in the United States so that would be a direct example of violating the non-penalization principle that is not supposed to punish if they are fleeing for their lives and safety and that's why they were sort of forced to take in a regular route that they couldn't wait to go through a regular normal process there have also been a tightening of the asylum policies in a way that punishes those who cross irregularly so this was one that came out last year the administration department of justice issued a rule that said immigration officers can actually penalize someone's application if the way they crossed was irregularly without documentation, without authorization so that's another example of this is really intended to punish to deter them from crossing for non-discrimination if anyone has heard of the Rohingya who are in South Asia it's very good to see some of you nodding along they are a Muslim minority group and this is a largely Hindu dominated and Buddhist dominated series of governments that are turning them away or violating their human rights and so the Rohingya Muslims of Burma and Myanmar have faced discrimination from countries like India which even though India is a democracy currently has sort of a Hindu nationalist party governing it under Modi and so the Rohingya have been scapegoated they have been denied a lot of basic rights education, housing in some cases they are UN United Nations refugee cards taken away from them to provide access to basic humanitarian services as well as forced deportation of the Rohingya so it's something that we see in all regions this problem of either religious or national origin shaping the way governments respond and treat different asylum seekers or refugees in the case of the Rohingya we actually use the term genocide to describe the conditions they are fleeing in Burma or what's also called Myanmar not only in cultural genocide but even like violence targeting them with physical violence to destroy them as a migrant or I'm sorry minority group we can see this with the national origin in something that I don't know how much people even remember now because it feels like a long time ago 2017 when we had the travel ban as it was called it got changed a few times in the battles in the courts but this is where it ended up and it is still in force today so that's an important thing to remember six countries blanket bans six countries blanket bans on migration from those countries including refugees and asylum seekers so that would be a blanket ban by national origin which is one of the tenets we are not what's up with the mic but this is one of the tenets that we are not supposed to be violating with this kind of legal order Venezuela is there but not for every Venezuelan just for certain Venezuelan government officials some people also argue there is a religious element because five of the six countries that were covered were Muslim majority again technically in the courts that didn't hold up because there are over 50 Muslim majority countries and not all of them were impacted by the ban but it just so happens that five of the six that have countries with blanket bans do send the most Muslim refugees or asylum seekers as part of the global forced displace ease this is probably the one that is on shakiest ground in terms of international law and cooperation and that is a principle of responsibility sharing it is in the refugee convention it is something that is expected of countries but was left very purposefully vague when it was written in the 1950s and even revised with the protocol in 1967 so we don't have a clear legal standard where we can say hey United States or India or Hungary or Japan you're not taking in enough refugees or you're not sharing your fair share of your obligations to help asylum seekers there is no number there is no percentage of your population or factoring in your wealth level there's nothing like that that's set in stone in international law so it really is leaving it open to each sovereign state each country to decide what its refugee policy and asylum policy will be for those types of migrants this is the only wording that we have in the actual refugee convention which these countries like the US have ratified there should be international cooperation and solidarity so I don't know how often you've been part of a group that needs to get something done and you say well let's just have solidarity and how well that goes for you in allocating who's going to do what we'll figure it out and we'll just all work together it sounds really nice but often it doesn't result in tangible allocations and division of labor of you know who's going to help and how many so that's part of the problem is we don't have something specific where we can point to that and tell a country oh you're violating this so really a country can take as few refugees and asylum seekers as they want as long as they find ways to not blatantly violate some of those principles perhaps and this is what we've seen as a global movement is to reduce the number of refugees that are accepted to find ways to prevent asylum seekers from even arriving on your territory so that they can't technically legally claim asylum from persecution on the left is an example from the Hungarian border where they've built a really high tech border wall with thermal dynamic like heat sensor cameras all of that stuff and they also closed their border a couple years ago just completely shut the border they're a much smaller country than a country like the US but they felt that there were too many migrants and asylum seekers coming from Serbia so they just even closed their border this is from an immigration protest on the right side in the US calls to close our borders because fear that we are having a crisis or unprecedented levels of people coming in and so there is a commonality actually in showing you those two the US and Hungary were the only two countries in the world forum on a global compact for refugees that voted no just in a general resolution of solidarity to do better about responsibility sharing the US and Hungary said no we're not even going to commit to the words of solidarity and responsibility sharing so they actually have that in common so what has happened with responsibility sharing of refugees and asylum seekers globally is that it's highly unequal right now roughly 87% of the world's refugees are hosted by the poorest or at least if not lowest income middle income countries that have less resources often have very fragile institutions so these are not the best and safest places for the refugees to be hosted but that ends up happening because those wealthier countries with more resources can do things like interdiction at sea or pay an ally country to block them from making it to their territory or do something like set up a safe zone and so it sounds nice to the public we're keeping them safe but also far away and so those are some of the reasons that we see that vast inequality of like who's actually doing the responsibility sharing is some of the poorest countries in the world this is just one example with Syrian refugees because again they're the highest number right now in total over 5 million Syrian refugees you can see 95% from this graphic are hosted just in those people of Middle Eastern countries and you know that surprises some people because they hear so much or at least in our election our last presidential election heard so much about Syrian refugees one might think oh you know just the Europe and Canada and the US are just taking them all but it's very very few of them most of them are in Turkey and Lebanon actually Lebanon right now every fourth person is a Syrian refugee so like 25% of their population right now is just Syrian refugees which they are not happy about here's another way visually of getting at that vast inequality and responsibility sharing of refugees where you can see the darker shade of the country means they're hosting more and so those countries hosting the most you might get that theme Pakistan they're taking a lot of Afghani refugees because after Syrians Afghanis are the second largest number of refugees worldwide Turkey and Lebanon hosting mostly Syrian refugees Ethiopia hosting a lot from Somalia where there's been terrible violence and humanitarian catastrophe and also South Sudan where there's been genocide and war crimes this is just a focus on our own countries since that's relevant to US foreign policy and really fits well with why we're here tonight thinking about these great decisions countries like the US are faced with in our policymaking and you can kind of see over time at the top line which is I think is sort of greenish the way I see it it's the number of refugees that the US accepted in every year as part of our refugee resettlement program which was very much a foreign policy kind of program for us it was sort of like if we like your government then we're probably not going to recognize your refugee but if we don't like your government then we would love to say your refugee and welcome on over here to show how bad your government is aka communist government right so that we could say those people are voting with their feet and they're leaving because communism is so terrible so over time we've had kind of an average of roughly 100,000 per year of refugees we would accept special humanitarian category of migrants it sort of dipped down for a little bit right after 9-11 as we reorganized our entire kind of homeland security system we created a department of homeland security we didn't have before that we redid all of our immigration and customs and border protection but then quickly kind of rebounded once we got the organizations in place and if you notice the very end that's the really fascinating part that's where a lot of my own research is focused right now and the book I'm working on is focused so what you can see at the very end is the major drop off and that's because we are at the lowest level of refugees we have ever accepted actually three years in a row now so to give you a sense of this we haven't taken so few refugees in since 1977 and it continues to decline like last year was ended up being around 4,000 whereas prior I told you the average was about 100,000 a year some people like that hello hello okay back with you alright we'll work together we'll switch we'll do what we need to do it's solidarity we'll figure it out okay so we continue to see that drop off for people that support that they say well that's a good thing that we're not taking in oh any game of thrones fans game of mics I don't know that was a bad one so what could be going on here it's very interesting when we compare our population size to the population of our neighbor to the north canada we have roughly 10 times larger population than canada but for the first time last year canada surpassed us in taking more refugees in sheer number so that's really amazing that we were taking in roughly 24,000 canada actually brought in 26,000 but they just have about 36 million people we have 330 million people that's really fascinating to see that kind of contrast and to recognize extent to which there really are not these clear standards there's no way to hold a government accountable to refugee responsibility sharing and so I want to get to sort of the why and I think this is where we might see more questions you know why would this be happening that there's this global trend of countries closing borders more wanting to find a way to prevent people from even seeking asylum in the first place on a technicality something like that I really think what I've learned from my research is that the first one is the overarching key driver and then number two and number three end up supporting the first one and so that is the domestic politics in that country whether it's India and Modi's regime there or whether it's Modi's government using Syrian refugees as a scapegoat in Lebanon or a US administration or elected officials here using Syrian refugees or Central American asylum seekers it really seems to be the uniting theme is that it is politically very helpful and expedient to say we should be taking less people migrants in general and that even applies to a humanitarian category it used to be that refugees were separate from the immigration debate but now they're part of it and so even refugees should not be free from that restriction that move towards restriction and that is something that's kind of changed in the last five years or so that refugees would now be viewed just like any type of migrant that they should really be restricted and not allowed into the country I don't know if anyone knows who this is on the right he's no longer in power technically because a scandal just happened with something last month does anyone know it isn't Italy if you know Italian maybe that was a clue Salvini Salvini was there as a minister with the coalition government but then last month he took a risky move and he lost and so now he's out but isn't that amazing his campaign stop the invasion sounds very much like a lot of politicians when they run on a kind of restrictionist platform that we should be taking less of these people in or that these people are a burden to us or that they are even a national security threat to us and so he used that invasion rhetoric which is very powerful and helped him he was able to basically triple his support at the political level when he focused on Italy should be taking less of these migrants you know put our people first that other idea of putting the native people the people that are born in the country before these migrants so that's something that really plays well to a political audience number one we do see after 9 11 that there has been sort of a global move to link immigration more to terrorism and national security threats that's kind of intensified but even the way it gets used ends up being for political purposes there's a lot of fear that you'll hear especially in US immigration debates about open borders while are some people just moving towards open borders do they want people coming freely everywhere without any safety and protection and so I find this graphic to be quite striking and thinking about whether open borders may be a danger at the moment and this is a study that was done that counted every border fortification every wall basically that has been erected for immigration control since 1945 so they went back to 1945 and then the study ended around 2016 and what you can see is that this is a recent trend some people will think about the Ming dynasty building the wall of China which actually had a lot of failures and has been some ways resurrected for tourism purposes but you can point to things in the Old Testament and so on and say well there's always been walls but national governments building walls to keep out immigrants is something kind of new just in the last few decades or half of a century and then I find it particularly fascinating that we get to about oh I can move now that's really cool I'm just pointing to where we're seeing a big spike and it's around 2008 so 2008 is where you see that the number of walls that they're telling in the study just spikes way up and so between that time I think in all of Europe the study said before that there were five border fortifications and then that went up to like 30 just in a matter of four or five years so this is the trend now and some people say it's very politically useful because you can just point to it if you're an elected official or some type of politician and say well look I've built a wall I've done something tangible that you can see and I'm showing you that physically I'm protecting our homeland security and protecting you so it's something that's kind of easy to do it's not that hard to construct you know and it really resonates with people they feel like it is tangible it brings people comfort and so that is part of the logic of why we've seen that as a tactic go up by governments it's just actually erect a physical barrier and that helps people feel much safer and feel like you've really taken action and done something when we think about why it is that we move away from humanitarian views why is it that refugees and asylum seekers have now become lumped in with undocumented migrants of all kinds it is something that's always been with us so I don't want to gloss over that and make it seem like there was this golden age where we were just opening our arms to all sorts of migrants that's actually a photo from 1930 that says you know Mexicans keep going we can't even take care of our own so keep walking so we have a lot of this in our history as do many countries but there is something new and intensified about the level to which they are being linked with national security threats or burdens to the economy it's sort of reaching new peaks so I would say it's been with us as a historical theme but it's really intensifying this was part of brexit, british jobs for british workers so again this is really expedient to say I'm protecting you the native born people of the country or the citizens of the country by protecting your jobs from being taken by these refugees or asylum seekers or any kind of migrant that isn't born here there is some cultural element though that works it's not just about sort of the economics there is also a sense of these people may be a threat in terms of the values or beliefs or identity so this was a billboard where we could see why support the travel ban it was a billboard put up in defense of that ban and it linked back to 9-11 but then it specified and it actually then sort of tacitly acknowledged the ban was in part about religion because five of the six countries were muslim majority so recognizing that is a way that we could prevent more muslim people from coming here as migrants linking those together muslims national security they sort of link the culture in that billboard with the security public safety threat and so that's another thing very effective people driving by thinking about that is a good logic not just security but also a religious element now this really depends what media outlets you consume and so I don't know I'm sure there's a lot of diversity in the room but this is rushlimba.com and rushlimba was using that language of invasion which is very powerful this was last year with the quote caravan if people remember that the migrant caravan and this was a group of people walking but there's an Al Salvador flag and so this photograph very powerful on the website that these people are not just coming in terms of an economic or security threat this is like a cultural threat they're going to invade the country with their own different values or different way of life or different language and so I think that's another thing depending on again what media you consume it will be interpreted very differently if an asylum seeker is deserving of protection or if they're just trying to commit fraud and sneak in like a Trojan horse to invade the country but regardless this is becoming more popular to kind of see that invasion language the way I like to sort of wrap up this evening is something that I feel often gets left out of this kind of presentation and that is that we don't really have the voices of actual migrants and refugees very often shaping our conversation they're more like props they're more used as examples or they're pictures that we especially elected officials love to have but what are their stories what are their perspectives that's actually a place I would say we could learn a lot more and bring them much more into this discussion this is just one example so the conversations about Central American asylum seekers or migrant caravan you really don't hear much about well who are some actual people that were refugees from Central America in the 80s and then made a life here what ended up happening to them what is their life like what did they contribute this is kind of a cool story that I like because that is the son and the father is also an artist the father did the painting in the top left and then the son did the painting in the bottom right and so his father came as a refugee a Salvadoran refugee in the 80s from the violence Central America and El Salvador in particular and then he grew up here so he's born here raised here but that refugee experience also shaped him and he continues his father's tradition doing art and he really tries to link his art to that refugee identity that came with his family when they fled for their safety you know what are the perspectives of people that have built their lives here that were refugees so this is actually a recent and very close geographically close example it's a family in Milwaukee that opened a refugee Syrian refugee run a restaurant and they even hire a lot of people in the area so they're kind of an economic contributor in that way so you know what is their story what is we don't really hear much for them right in these policy debates it's mostly people talking about them but we tend to not really hear what kind of experiences they've had I would say if you're interested in exploring and if you're open to hearing more of the stories from the people themselves instead of just people debating the policy of it this is Behrouz Buczani his name is at the top there he has a new book that came out last year No Friend but the Mountains and it won Australia's literary prize even though he is legally forbidden from entering Australia he spent five years writing it and you know as a professor and I'm writing my own book and I'm always working on research in addition to teaching I can easily complain about something you know I'm running out of time or whatever but he actually wrote the whole book by text message while being detained so I mean I really have like no excuse when I'm complaining because at least I have you know a computer at least I have a you know a computer and safety and freedom over my own movement so he actually had to sort of sneak that out by text message on different phones and it took him five years to write it but it's called No Friends but the Mountain he's an Iranian Kurd that fled Iran from persecution but then was detained on Manus Island Australia is another country that's violated the non detention quite a bit and they keep them on Papua New Guinea territories so they say we're not technically Australia so we're not technically refiling them returning them or violating principles and so he was one of those on Manus Island he's still there and he's able to access a phone occasionally and tweet and so forth but he still does not have freedom but his book No Friends but the Mountains is really powerful so if you are open you know after kind of thinking about this and want to hear something not just policy but more like what are the lived experiences of the migrants and refugees it's one that is really quite vivid so I think the last thing I'll say before I open it up to Q&A is that in American politics this whole conversation about migrants and refugees today is very much a partisan issue and it makes it very hard to talk about especially to talk about in civil terms because now so you can kind of see on the left it's basically just Republicans versus Democrats have taken these polar opposite stances on key issues about migration and even refugees which wasn't the case five years ago so it just makes it harder because once political identities are involved and political parties are involved you know people feel more of a personal emotional stake in the argument and so that's one thing that I think makes it a struggle for scholars and researchers is now this is all wrapped up in like the two competing major parties that we have and the one on the right is in the case there were some questions of just numerically what kind of crisis is there at the southwest border how does it compare to the past for people migrating or seeking asylum and you can kind of see the highest numbers peaked earlier in the 1990s was when we had some of the greatest numbers of people but I would say the biggest difference is a lot of them were single men whereas today a lot of it is families and children and even unaccompanied children so I put a little dot I don't know how well you can see it there's an orange dot that's my way of putting a little update that didn't exist in the visual but I still want to give you the visual but I looked up the actual numbers that's the latest fiscal year 2019 which ends this month so we can have like the latest data so it has really spiked it has spiked up to 800,000 apprehensions of people trying to cross in the southwest border of the US the issue is that 65% of that 800,000 according to our own government data those are families and unaccompanied children and that is something new that we're not set up for and a lot of them are claiming asylum so that really makes this especially challenging so I think now I'll open it up to Q&A thanks for listening that's hopefully microphone we'll try try to get them if you use the mic speak right you have to hold it right here yes otherwise if you hold it here you don't hear a thing questions anybody or comment nobody well one of the things that you said was that if a person's life is at stake and I'm thinking people that are starving because of climate crisis and there's not water for their crops and they can't feed themselves and they know that there's probably a good possibility that we'll at least have food in the richest country on the planet they would move this way and hope that we take them into our country with gentleness and kindness and generosity yeah that's a great question because one of the biggest areas of criticism about that definition I showed you at the very beginning of the presentation was the political nature of the persecution because only a government can persecute the climate can't persecute like under international law but then we know as you're saying the real lived experiences of people in many cases they are fleeing for survival so if we look at the pacific island examples like Kiribati where they will be underwater within a matter of years they're clearly to survive you would need to go somewhere else and get refuge but that is one of the biggest gaps that we see where those people truly lack even any legal protection that we would see refugees get and we already saw how hard it is now for refugees to be accepted climate refugees I agree with you that it is sort of the latest cutting edge global problem but we really lack any international solutions and countries don't even want to go there because they already don't want to have to be forced to share responsibility for the political persecution so then if you bring in the climate it creates other layers I would like to ask a question of the group how many of you have ever met a migrant an immigrant or refugee or did you ever have one in your family in your immediate family yeah I was wondering since we have these you talked sort of at the beginning about these sort of international treaties that we've signed on we've signed on the international treaties that we've signed on to is there any kind of attempt or way to enforce those do we have to storm the Hague so if we've signed on to these things how not just the United States but other countries for example Italy, France etc that is a great question so if you know about treaties a lot of times they have an enforcement mechanism some independent body that monitors and regulates countries like right now the discussion of Iran's nuclear program it's because the IAEA is a monitoring body that holds countries accountable if they violate the protocols of the non-proliferation treaty the NPT so the human rights treaty area the refugee convention is the only treaty that doesn't have an oversight enforcement body so there is literally no organ that you can go to to monitor and evaluate an issue yearly reports there's nothing like that we just rely on NGOs and basically the United Nations high commissioner for refugees who give statements you know and condemn certain things maybe but then it's really hard because countries like the US and the European Union countries they're the highest donors and the United Nations refugee commission is entirely voluntary donations from countries so if I really go after you and I criticize like those numbers I showed you with a huge drop in refugees or detaining asylum seekers then you could say oh fine well how about I give you $0 next year for your budget United Nations and so it's very hard to enforce because it's the situation with the United Nations and the treaty itself lacking any enforcement oversight agency it's a great question you had identified the major like there's a 65% increase in the southwest immigrants mainly families and single individuals what have you identified any contributing factors why this has come about whereas before there were mainly single men yeah great question so why is it that we're now at 65% of those border apprehensions being families and unaccompanied children so a lot of it is that it tracks really well with the rise in violence in the northern triangle countries there has been an uptick in violence by the cartel in those countries even countries that we have meddled directly in in the last decade we see they have widespread corruption themselves are very weak it means that people don't feel they can call the police and say look someone's threatening my family that they're gonna kill us if we don't give them you know half of the money we make from our store because they can't because the police will actually be in on that or they'll be corrupt or they will themselves end up trying to extort the family and so it really is an issue of the law and the institutions in those northern triangle countries are not equipped to deal with the drug cartel and U.S. policy is part of the story so I would just encourage people if you want to look back at our history in the 1980s and 90s of how we intervened directly like a lot of the weapons and circulation the cartel uses are left over from our sort of proxy wars to fight against what we thought left as communist sympathizing governments and then the widespread corruption and fragile institutions because of the remnant the legacy of when we were intervening so heavily to support dictators there the other part of it with the drug violence you know why is the drug violence gone up so much we focus so much on cracking down on drug violence in Mexico and Colombia that we just sort of pushed it into the Central American countries so like focus so much on let's eliminate Mexican and Colombian bases we actually just redirected it so they got a huge influx of drug activity that they didn't have maybe 15 years ago and you know 90% of the cocaine that's flowing through there is coming to meet our American demand for cocaine so that's the other thing our demand is also going up right now there's just so many contributing factors to why the uptick in the violence in Northern Triangle but I do encourage people to kind of dig into the U.S. history of our policies there because there is a hand to play so this isn't particularly a question but I am Angelica Zitlow and I am a teen in our community and right now I am working on a public event to help refugees and to help others understand the difference between migrants and refugees that are vulnerable and need our help and yeah here's my partner I'm helping her I am helping her and I don't know a lot about this but I appreciate her heart and I want to work at it and I guess why we're standing up also is because this event is going to be October 26th and she has gotten her theater teacher Dub Sable Williams to help and she has gotten a lot of people involved including her church will give her the money to host the event at the Senior Activity Center and it's going to be October 26th so I bought a website and I've been working really hard at it and I've come to a position where I feel like I put it out there but it's not as good as I would like it to be and I was just wondering if anybody would know how to help us with that part of it and what is the name of it Journey it's going to be Journey of a rough what is the name the website or the name of the event either one Journey of a refugee is going to be the name of it and she has gotten a couple Syrian teens involved refugees and they want to share their experience as a refugee and and she's been involved with theater and feels that this is a great way to teach our community about refugees and she I'm really excited about the event it's going to be an alternative to a haunted house and it's going to be thank you and the website I wrote it down somewhere in here but maybe we can talk about it later thank you very much and I think if people notice where they're standing and then after the talk people that are interested in learning more and helping out can make their way over to that part of the room and you can hang out there for a moment I think a lot of people would be interested to talk to you that's what I was interested in details you've given us the date the time, the place of what schools are you from I'm from North High School and it's going to be October 26 and there's going to be two times so like 30 and 3 o'clock at the senior activity site alright and where are you advertising this on your website flyers we've named flyers and we're handing them out as soon as that website is more free yes, wonderful thank you what are the numbers for actual applicants for refugee status and how have they changed over the last several years so I don't have the exact numbers I didn't pull that data for tonight but you can do a search where you do asylum applications and CBP and you can go directly to the customs CBP, Customs Border Protection website and they will tell you for fiscal year each year the number of applications should be publicly available because I get the sense that there has been a huge increase in the number of applications for refugee status and part of the reason for the drop in the number of legal recognition of refugee status is that they are all jammed up and tied up in immigration courts yeah, there is a tremendous backlog in the asylum hearings right now something like 800 judges short, or some estimates that I've heard that if we could even focus more on funds for more judges that that would be a way on the ground people that are dealing with the number of family units and the number of unaccompanied minors could process them for people to actually handle the cases but the other side of it is the judges we do have they just had new regulations go into effect on their own merit and career quality kind of promotion stuff the last couple years they have to increase the speed with which they hear every asylum case so that they end up just having maybe like a day or two in some cases three hours to issue their decision so even the judges have really pushed back that not only they're not enough of them but then they're forced to make decisions so quickly that they're not able to fully evaluate and hear out the person's evidence of persecution so yeah, if you really want to dig in the weeds of some of the problems there are so many but one of them definitely is at the judicial level in our immigration court system and the pushback there as I understand it and I don't know but intuitively I'm thinking are we able to say that there are more denials of application or are they just backlogged which then gets us back to the question of detention are people being detained simply because of the backlog and because of the overwrought circumstances on the facilities available it becomes incarceration it becomes a forced separation of families as opposed to a deliberate policy and if we are able to focus our resources or bring more resources to bear to address the situation in the court system to move them forward that should reduce the pressures all along the system there's a couple parts to that answer so on the denial of applicants there are actually studies published that have looked at that and the denial rate has gone up the denial rate has actually gone up since even 9-11 with a lot of things that don't correlate to evidence of persecution but even what is the language is the language the person speaks Arabic rather than French but the denial rates have gone up overall but the part about could we get around the detention if we just had more facilities in part that could help because we know we have a shortage especially for families and children and the proper kinds of care that they would need but then the other part is that we also have evidence that it is deliberate to punish them by putting them because we have the statements of the officials that are behind those policies saying and we need to make it so that they really are not enjoying their time while they're waiting so even if we had more I guess the thing is that maybe they wouldn't want to invest the resources you're bringing up if part of it is that they want to deter them from coming in the first place to claim asylum but yeah it is a very complicated series of things not just one thing excuse me I'm getting the impression of the last decade or so that we're getting okay I hope I won't blast people out I'm getting the impression of the last decade or so that we're getting an increase in bellicose nationalist governments headed by kind of a strong man kind of a thing I feel parallels with the 30s but in those I think they were more economic and getting the impression that refugees are being used as a tool to help such governments grow and increase and I don't see an end to that I'm looking at an increase and what are your feelings on that yeah that's another one where it's your fingers really on the pulse of a lot of latest research it's called populism this idea that you package the anti-immigrant message in a way that's like I'm helping the people the ordinary hard working people that are paying taxes just trying to make it but then these migrants are coming in and taking government benefits and that is very expedient and I think part of it is a learning process we're so globalized we're so interconnected with social media that it's very easy for one leader to learn from another very quickly oh that tweet was really successful that policy really produced a lot of support and love by their constituents I don't see whether it's Modi in India or whether it's Salvini in Italy or you know the Brexit rhetoric it really does have a lot in common with what we would hear from restrictionists so yeah it's like the globalization of populism I think you could call it, you're absolutely right do we have time for more can I have one question yeah oh is it is it possible that you is it possible if the United States of America us, the United States of America the richest country on the planet whose military pollutes more than any other organization on the planet and with all the money we have if we actually became aware of what the rest of the planet knows that climate crisis is here we haven't heard the scientists on our news stations say that we have 11 years to get this right and we haven't heard on our news stations the weather reporters say you know what they're experiencing right now in Puerto Rico or what they're experiencing in California or what they're experiencing in the Amazon these are all things that are contributing or made much, much worse because of climate crisis so when our country allows people to become educated is it possible do you think that this country with people that actually care about other people on the planet because there is only one human species and that's all of us do you think that it's possible we could change the way this looks become vegetarian that's another whole topic climate change thank you so much for coming, thank you Dr. Cohen for a wonderful presentation thank you all for coming out always look forward to your presentation