 Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Austria, or Turkey, or Japan, but you cannot become Austrian, or Turk, or Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the world can come to live in America and become an American. Welcome back to A Nation of Immigrants, a new talk show program featuring the lives of immigrants, knowledge, diversity, and inclusion. Brought to you by Kingsfield Law Office in collaboration with Think Tank Hawaii, we invite renowned immigrants to discuss their life stories, immigration adventures, and the contribution to cultural diversity. Live from Vienna, Austria, today's guest is our good friend, our co-host, and my law partner, Professor Dr. Alexander H.E. Marava. Dr. Marava combines international and transnational legal scholarship and practice in a career that spans multiple continents. A dual citizen of the United States and Austria, he holds a faculty appointment at American University of Washington College of Law in Washington, DC, and recently taught at McKenzie Public Terrain University School of Law in Paulo, Brazil, and the Chinese University of Political Science and Law, COPL in Beijing. His work in parties, including representations of petitioners in various international tribunals and a course established by the United Nations and the Council of Europe. In this episode of A Nation of Immigrants, Professor Dr. Marava will share his life story, immigration adventures, and his reflection on international law. Welcome back, Alexander. So happy to have you here. It's certainly my pleasure to be here. And hello, not Vienna. Yes, I'm just thrilled to interview my favorite Austrian-American from Vienna, Austria. I haven't been under this chance to spend a week in Austria. And I was hoping to sit outside to show the beautiful street things from Vienna. But now we are 10 PM in Vienna, so I have to stay inside. You are our co-host, and you have come to the show The Middle Way and A Nation of Immigrants. Many times recently, you co-hosted the Law and the War special program on Russian and Ukraine war with Jay, our president of Think Tank. But we haven't talked about yourself. Now I want to interview you, and hopefully you can share with our audience more about yourself and your immigration adventure. So please share us with a little bit about your family and how do they settle in Arizona in the United States. Sure, absolutely. I'll be happy to to the extent that people are interested in it. I'm honored, actually, that there is an interesting in my life story. From my side of the family, I'm really the only one who settled in Arizona, actually. My parents and most of my family are still back in the United States. We have a distant family in New York and another place in the US. But I'm kind of the only one who settled here. My wife's side is different. My wife actually was originally from Vietnam. She's a mixed Chinese Vietnamese individual who was a refugee, both a refugee as a baby, actually. And her family, by and large, all of them, actually. It's a large family, ultimately settled in either Canada or the United States, about half and half. So when I made her, we were in different places. She was working in Philadelphia, actually. She's a physical therapist by training, but she was working in pediatrics. I was working in Germany at the time. So we were kind of a long-distance relationship in many ways. We then decided to get married. One of the wisest choices I made in my life, I have to say, don't tell her, please, that's a similar trip. We got married in Pennsylvania, and then we moved to Virginia. At that time, neither one of us was US citizens, actually. We were planning on ultimately doing that. For being in health care, we had an easy avenue compared to many other professions into a green card, which were employed and ultimately applied for. And I have to say, in retrospect, I'm still flabbergasted. I think it took about three months for us to actually get the green card. I've never heard about that short period of time. And with that, of course, our sort of formal American adventure started, which ultimately led us to become US citizens quite a bit later, actually, in 2015. So we've only been US citizens for about seven years now. This is sort of a little bit of the background. As you mentioned, my country of origin is Austria, was born in Salzburg, and I went to school there. I did my equivalent to a JD there, actually. So I spent many years up to about 27 years all there, and then came to study in the United States at George Washington University. Did my master's and my PhD there. As they say, the rest is history. It's a typical American dream, but it's a ordinary American dream of Vietnamese, first-generation Vietnamese American and married of first-generation Austrian American and well settled in Arizona. You said your wife got her green card in three months. I believe she probably went through EB1B that Australian researcher and a professor dropped for EB1C, which is reserved for multinational senior executives. Do you happen to know which route she went to? I do believe it was second category. I think she was highly specialized worker in the field of health care. And I think one of the reasons why it went relatively easy was there was an absolute need for especially the medical health care providers in the field that she was working in. So that's also a reason why we went with her and not maybe just quite frankly, we're just as needed as healthcare professionals and let's be honest. We need a lot of healthcare professionals, definitely still. And if you're a healthcare professional from anywhere of the world, you come to United States and we need you that for sure. It appears that she probably applied under EB2 that maybe under a national interest waiver. But as a law professor and SJD, I do not know a lot of SJD because they're highly precious. It's very difficult in legal community. We always say that that is a real doctor. Our JD doctor is not a real doctor. Only SJD doctor of jurisprudence is a real doctor. And you are definitely qualified for alien with extraordinary ability in V1A as well. So you don't need to be too humble. I appreciate it. Absolutely. So you went to George Washington University and then you got your master's and then your SJD. But I believe you know, the reason we become good friend, bad friend in the past more than a decade because you were the associate dean of the University of Lucerne Law School in Switzerland. And I visited you. I can't remember how many times, probably five or six or seven times. And you spent 11 years or 12 years in Switzerland, but actually you'll always keep your very strong tie to United States, to Virginia. So should we consider your Austrian working in Switzerland or actually you or America working in Switzerland? Well, you know, legally speaking, I was an Austrian working in Switzerland because it's so much easier. Switzerland is not part of the EU but has, you know, it's part of the Schengen Agreement. So for all matters of work visa and legitimization, it's a lot easier if you're EU citizen. So I was an American Austrian Swiss resident in many ways for about 10 years to be honest. It was a fabulous experience. I think Switzerland is an interesting country. I always say there's more of a culture shock coming from Austria going to Switzerland because you expect it to be similar and then it ends up being absolutely not similar. Switzerland is a much more closed society in many ways. I mean, historically, of course, because they wanted to distinguish themselves as being neutral and being a hub for international law without being part of many things. Austria, on the other hand, is a traditional, more open country with a lot of different nationalities and ethnicity included in the population. So it was surprisingly, I have quite a culture shock working there. We made arrangements because as a dean, my responsibility was internationalization. So I have an agreement that I would spend half the year in the United States building partnerships, also teaching in the United States. So that ended up being a very workable arrangement because it was a fabulous time. Yeah, so I'm a little bit surprised to hear that you have culture shock and within Europe because in the Schengen area, for non-Europeans like me, I feel like the Schengen area is a pretty one unified space. And I can tell you, I was a little bit surprised when I come to Austria this trip and actually the past two trips, this is my third trip to Austria, every time I need to apply for visa, even as having US passport normally does not require a visa to enter Schengen place. But as long as the university compensates me in any way and I'm required to get a visa. And even my original plan is to stay two weeks in Austria and it's an Austrian consulate to only give me five days visa that is on the teaching schedule. I teach only five days. So the consulate said, okay, we only give you five days work visa and then the rest of you are a tourist. So I think it's great. It's the Austrians, my wife said, yeah, Austria everything is just fantastic and I love everything here and they're just like Swiss and the German but obviously we were wrong and there are a lot of cultural differences between Austrian, Swiss and German people. If you were just to educate us for our ignorance of the outsiders, what are the major differences you see different from Austrian society and culture versus German or versus Swiss? Well, Austria, Germany and Switzerland, I think that three countries divided by the same language. I actually mentioned that yesterday to a colleague, a friend of mine, I could talk to a German person for half an hour and that person would not understand a single word I'm saying because our languages are, if we go for it, we can sound very different and we can really be separated in many ways. Switzerland of course has Swiss German which is leans on German but it's really a foreign language in many respects. Cultural differences of course, Germany being a large economically dominant country has a different standing in the world compared to Austria and Switzerland. The relationships are of course on the formal political level very cordial and close. There's still a little bit of an underlying historical tension every once in a while. So, even within the Schengen area when you cross into Germany you have the cultural feeling you go somewhere else. And I'm not saying that's even bad actually. It's good that we keep our different cultural identities in many respects. Europeanization is a good thing but we should still be distinct cultures and have a right to be distinct in many ways even if you have the same language. So that's kind of my very makeshift and not very sophisticated beginning of an explanation of how there is differences. If you move to either one of those three countries you probably will feel that they're very similar as an outsider. Once you get to learn cultures a little bit better and interact with people I think you'll probably notice the differences. And then again within the countries there are many sections too and I'm the wooden German and the Bavarian are by no means culturally the same people. Absolutely. Even though I all speak English in the United States I think that we make a huge difference from Ohio in independent Minnesotans as in most Dakotans or Arizonians. Very much so. That's true but for an outsider it's very hard to distinguish the nuances. But you know I think you are not so I admire become a dual citizen of the United States of Austria. There's some countries do not accept dual citizenship and afford but fortunately both the United States and Austria do. So you'll have to have your two citizens of the United States and Austria. I'm just on the country. I'm just a Chinese Minnesotan. And two weeks ago I visited the Supreme Court of Minnesota and the Chief Justice of Minnesota said you know I feel like I'm 70% Minnesotan and 30% of Chinese American. And she was very pleased to hear that because she is originally from Minnesota and a big fan of Minnesotan history and culture. So I was wondering whether you could quantify the Austrian-American and Arizonian aspect in yourself. Yeah well let me first say you are very distinguished Chinese American Minnesotan. So you're not just one of those. I think you stand out in many respects through your career and also your personality in a way which is you know epitomizes the good version of an immigrant, right? Critical but patriotic, right? In many ways. By the way the dual citizenship is not on easy feet actually in Austria you would lose it automatically unless you prove to the government that they want you to keep the citizenship and that's really an uphill climb. I took a lengthy petition was costly as well to show to them that I had accumulated sufficient merits that they would actually want me to and ultimately they decided with my arguments that I'm important and if it was the first time in my life where I had to kind of argue that I'm an important individual that somebody wants to be a citizen of which was a little unusual. Well, to your question actually, Arizona is one of the states that is vigorously independent. The old gunslinger wild west mentality still survives in Arizona. That's why the majority of the voters actually are registered independents and I think that makes it easy for me to include myself in this community which is very diverse actually. It's increasingly becoming a melting pot of individuals coming here especially with nanotechnology and many other industries moving into the area. So I think Phoenix is becoming a very cosmopolitan area. Now it is in just 100 years. I mean 100 years ago this was basically a village of 5,000 people. When I'm in the US I feel more Austrian. When I'm in Austria I feel more American. I think that's kind of natural. Become more patriotic when you're not there and I feel all the time that I have to explain myself. I mean during the past five years especially the four initial of the five, we Americans always ran into a lot of questions when we traveled internationally and when it came to the foreign policy of the previous administration and the withdrawal from many things that especially are dear to Europeans like NATO and European Union, economic integration ultimately always got the questions what's going on with you Americans and then I felt I had an obligation to explain us a little bit with the understanding also why the questions were being asked. There were, I would even say desperate questions. People were saying what's going on? Why is this like this? Can we still count on you? And I tried to explain that yes this is a phase quoting Ruth Bader Ginsburg of course. It's just a period of time and we'll get over that and then there will be a coming back to normal circumstances. When I'm in the United States of course I try to bring in European culture and politics as well and explain things to Americans as well a little educational exercise too. That's a great point. And what you just said reminded me that I always tell my friends that I'm the Chinese because they think I'm too American to be Chinese and American friends think I'm too Chinese to be American but this is real. This is real for people like you and me live and function in two different cultures. But recently I spent in the two months in China last year as you know and I keep to reminding myself the paragraph I read from the book My Life in China and America authored by Yunwen, the autobiography of Yunwen the first Chinese student to graduate from American University Yale University. And in this book he wrote, would it not be exchanged if an Occidental education continuously exemplified by an Occidental civilization had not read upon wrote upon an oriental such an metamorphosis in his inward nature and to make him feel and act as though he was being coming from a different world when he confounded one so diametrically different this was precisely my case. And do you feel some reverse cultural shock when you travel back to Austria? And when was your last time in Austria? I understand you will come back to Austria next month but when was your last trip in Austria? And do you feel something different than the previous trip? Well, you know, that immediately brings up the term of the century COVID-19. Of course, when we traveled last we couldn't travel in 2020. So we have to postpone our customary summer in Austria which we always do. When school it's at, we pack up and go to the extent we can. We went back last year and the first thing that struck me was a relatively widespread willingness to deal and accept deal with and accept the restrictions that COVID imposes on our lives. So there was no questioning when you went into a supermarket you would just put your mask on or nobody said, I'm not gonna do that people would just do that. When you went to a restaurant you would have to show you proof of vaccination or recovery or couldn't go in, right? And you were prepared to do that. Once I forgot my phone, I said, it's my fault. I didn't bring the phone. I can't go with you right now. I have to go and get my phone. So there's much more acceptance of measures like this which is certainly a cultural phenomenon. You know, the Europeans by and large prefer regulation over litigation that would be the legal explanation. And they're a little bit less individualistic when it comes to measures that benefit the community as a whole. So I noticed that quite differently doesn't mean that there isn't conflict when it comes to COVID there's also a strong minority group that is very much an anti-vaxxer, anti-masker mentality but it's less prevalent, it's less visible in many ways. And then I really noticed how culturally haven't changed. People were trying within the constraints they were finding to live their culture live their literature, live their experience in a daily life you know, enjoy the outdoors to the extent possible. So I think that the non-change really was striking to me that people really were working towards recuperating from that disruption that COVID certainly was posing on us. Now you have seen it, most of the measures have been lifted basically you don't have to wear masks in public anymore except for certain locations like supermarkets and drug stores. And I'm sure when we land in Vienna in about two and a half week we will notice that things have gone back to more normal than we have experienced a year ago. I'm looking forward to that with also a little bit of anxiety because we're not in the past COVID period of time. It's still there. Ask the people in Shanghai and Beijing and they will confirm. And that was the idea of course I mean that's the last place where this crisis has erupted. Absolutely, but we have an effective vaccine and we have you know, therapeutic measures. I think that is the only scientific way to deal with it not from administrative pretty harsh draconian administrative measures but treating every positive case like a criminal that is not the way to do that. But that brings back to, you know, my next question. And we landed in Vienna last night and we transferred Amsterdam in Netherlands. Everything we saw that my wife commented that the civilization has fully recovered. That's her comment. I totally agree. It feels like the civilization has recovered and back to what we hope they could to be but I feel like I'm holding these pressures now I don't know this civilization can last a long and you are especially the international law and just look at what's happening in the world in Europe, in Ukraine, Asia. We know that the world can change overnight and what was the point of international order if some stocks and bullies can simply get violated and not only treating the other country badly also treating their own cities badly. So do you have a keep your positive attitude towards the common destiny of human being or you are also less confident that we will have a collective future in Europe and in Asia and in the United States? And minus the gift of prophecy which I do not possess I have to confess I'm really torn between those exact positions that you bring up between desperation and the one hand. If you look at the war in Ukraine right now and many other situations that you could list but it would take me 10 minutes to list. So let's just use the war in Ukraine, a collapse of the international legal order is not an impossible outcome of this entire process. And we have to bear that in mind. We have to always think about the worst-case possible scenario. I on the other hand am an optimist. I think out of this we already have seen international organization has become much more relevant. All of a sudden we rush to the European Union where we previously were kind of rushing away from look at Brexit, look at the criticism and the conflict with Poland, conflict with Hungary and urban has just been reelected still part of the European Union. We all of a sudden we realized that NATO is something that's not just dusting off all tanks. It actually has to do some real things to do and all of a sudden people come and want to join it because it gives them a feeling that security is a collective enterprise and that's not just a single nation activity. So we probably have to reinvent the international order. And quite frankly, we haven't reinvented it since 1945. Maybe it's time. We still think we can deal with a reality that basically had a hit where in the Moscow Selenium. Now to the extent that Putin resembles those two characters and he does to a certain extent, that's true. But there's also conflict and North Korea being probably one of the most prominent examples where totally new types of threats to international peace and security are daily occurrence. So we probably have to reinvent the machinery that works on those and international law has to contribute to that effort. Absolutely, fantastic point. It's rather like the autocrats who reinvent and upset the current peace order and we should just reinvent it. And we are running out of time. It's always fun to talk to you but we always end our show to ask our distinguished guest two questions. Question one, if you were giving some advice to yourself in your 20s, your time travel permitted, what would you say to yourself in your early 20s? Second question, is there a particular book and the movie you are enjoying right now you want to share with our audience? Yeah, I'll be honest. I'm not quite sure what I'm much smarter now than I was in my early 20s. That might mean I was a genius in my early 20s or I'm not particularly smart right now. So I'm not sure what I would have to contribute that much to my own future if I had the chance to go back in the past. Probably I would suggest to focus a career a little bit more on the safety and security of the personal future. I'm talking about issues like retirement and so on where a global career sometimes causes more disruption than there should be. So streamlining things a little bit would be probably a call that I would make to myself but that's a very personal remark here. Your second one, I can show you what I read last actually and it has to do with the topic that we talked about. It's a great successor. Yeah, it's a good book. Is it a novel or a fiction or nonfiction? Oh, no, no, it's a nonfiction book by Anna Feifelde. Actually, she's a former journalist based in Beijing actually, traveled from West Korea many, many times and it's the first real biography really of Kim the Younger and it shows a lot of interesting, it raises a lot of interesting questions about the personality and identity of a single individual who runs a country of 25 million people with an iron fist. And one of the questions that I've never been able to answer for myself is why are there Putin's and why are there Kim Il-yong's in the world? How can one rule 25 million and why do they follow? But I think that's the question that needs an entirely different show that would have to spend days if not weeks to discuss it properly. I agree, I definitely will check it out. It's a modern key. It's a pre-modern modern key and in the 21st century, it's just absolutely stunning to see that but in the foreseeable future, I do think that it will change that part of the world. But anyway, we run out of time. Thank you so much to be on the show, Alexander, today's Nation of Immigration, our distinguished guest is our co-host, law partner and good friend, Alexander H.E. Morava. A real doctor and you are too humble at the end there but thank you so much for sharing your story. And this is a nation of immigrants live from Vienna, Austria. Thank you. Thank you. It's always a privilege to be on the show and chatting with you is always a delight. Look forward to our next show. Take care. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.