Borders, Human Rights, and Identity: The Global Governance of Migration

welcome to today's panel borders human rights and identity the global governance of migration as part of the 37th annual norris and marjorie benson epic international symposium on problems without passports my name is bree mcgowan and i'm from family new jersey i'm a senior studying international relations and economics today we will explore the prevalent issue of global migration by its very nature global migration transcends borders and passports this global issue reflects what kofi annan describes as problems without passports problems that are transnational and require international cooperation to address when looking at this broad issue there are many different lenses through which we must analyze migration for one we should look at the concept of borders as as it applies to international migration which includes an analysis of the migrant journey as well as the global governance of migration furthermore he must take into account human rights which are often pushed aside in conversations that attempt to politicize migrants lastly we must recognize the humanity of refugees beyond the tendency to see migrants as statistics and take into account their needs as human beings conversation conversations like these are crucial to discuss particularly due to the pressing situation in ukraine recognizing that four million ukrainians have fled their homeland in just over a month since russia's invasion in addition to the continued and increasing displacement of individuals due to climate change i hope to touch upon many aspects of migration in our conversation today i'd like to thank our panelists for being here today before i introduce each panelist i would like to explain how the panel will run each panelist will first give an initial presentation of five minutes next we will have a moderated discussion among the panelists followed by a student presentation on cyprus and its refugee challenge finally we will close with the question and answer session with the audience without further ado i would like to introduce our first panelist dr patricia sassenau dr sasnal is a political scientist arabist and philosopher who holds a phd in political science she is head of research at the polish institute of international affairs and professor of migration at the college of europe she is an expert of the advisory committee of the united nations human rights council member of the european council on foreign relations and the polish ombudsman offices expert commission on migration dr sasnell we are delighted to hear you speak now thank you very much first of all i'd like to thank the organizers and it's my first time at tufts i'm really delighted to be here and it's such a great company um i i thought should i right yeah i i thought it would be most interesting for you uh to hear about what's happening with the refugees from ukraine because i'm coming from poland and so just to give you an idea how close uh we are to the crisis i'm gonna say that i was born in tarnov which is a city a town in the south of poland and there was a place initially in the first week of war shelled just 300 kilometers so it's like what 180 miles from from the place that i was born and it touches in poland right a place in ukraine was shelled so it touches on the on the issue of borders how different it is on the polish side of the border in terms of security uh the level of life um remember poland's neighbor member of nato and the eu while on the other side of the border all hell broke loose no security no membership in international organizations no security guarantees a humanitarian crisis so like briana said more than four million people from ukraine fled to neighboring countries most of them to poland more than two million people uh are now in poland uh but they also you know refuge people flee to the closest country to the to the safest country nearby so there's also refugeehood from ukraine in slovakia moldova romania hungary these are mostly the refugees in poland are mostly women and children because men between 18 and 60 cannot leave ukraine because they need to fight right so this also tells you about the uh characteristics of this refugee hood um there are and they came through land crossings either by car or by train because they cannot fly the the sky skies are closed um and there are only 29 small reception centers like official reception centers in poland um and so just to give you the the idea about the scale of the crisis if you think about the country that hosts most refugees i mean per capita turkey 3.5 million syrians today they came 3.5 million over a time span of years following the war in syria in 2011 whereas in case of poland you have more than two million that came in a matter of months on of a single month okay so it just i hope it shows you the the challenge um just two notes about the wording that that i want to use uh i want to talk about humanitarian crisis rather than a refugee crisis why because i don't want to give an impression that uh this crisis is caused by sort of refugees themselves because it's caused by war and i think um what differentiates this crisis is this clear cause of people fleeing and i think it touches upon what amali tower talked about yesterday that when it comes to refuge climate refugees it is very difficult to perceive the reason why people flee that usually when you talk to a person there are various reasons right there's no work there's no land to uh to cultivate there's no food the shortage of water so it's really really difficult to trace back the cause effect uh line whereas in this case in the social imaginary social imagination you can see what caused these people to flee they they left because they were scared because there's war and it also has a bearing on the attitude towards refugee hoot right that the how we perceive the causes of people who who flee um and that's i think how i'd explain uh this immediate automatic and unequivocally positive uh reaction of the polish and other european societies to refugees from ukraine and why do i talk about refugees from ukraine and not ukrainian refugees obviously because not all of them have a ukrainian passport there are people of various nationalities various skin colors so i i hope we'll touch upon that and the identity thing in this refugee in this humanitarian crisis a little later for example students from india right they also fled to neighboring countries the students in ukraine now big cities and smaller towns and local communities are the ones that face uh that or that better brunt of of this crisis this is something about governance right no global or even regional governance aspects are relevant here really apart from financing so it has to be said that the eu is the entity that immediately gave 500 euros to member states to face this challenge and this amount is to be doubled but shelter housing food basic needs all this had to be satisfied by volunteers uh private people ngos local communities businessmen and the societal response is incredible you know there's individual fundraising random centers being set up to exchange goods people are looking in in their flats to find things that they don't need that they can share and this happened in all my societal networks at work in my rowing sport club in my whatsapp groups everyone organized you know to to help the people and this is happening until now but no system was in place to respond quickly enough and on a scale that was needed to to this crisis and even though volunteers are doing the act most they are short of resources to professionally coordinate verify and adjust this aid to the needs refugees gather in railway stations in big cities so for example the central railway station in warsaw is an example of this challenge food drink blankets medicine all this has been distributed by ngos and volunteers even though city authorities could do a lot and this is i i want you to pay attention to that city authorities could do a lot in warsaw but the railway station is under the legal supervision by the voiver's ship the voiver chip is uh a you a a a but this administrative unit that is governed from the central government okay and the central government did not do enough so nothing could be done because the railway station is under their super legal supervision but so the city could not do anything structurally there in the railway station it had to be volunteers and ngos so socio about the something about the problem between local and central uh governance but on the 12th of march a special bill was adopted by the parliament it gave legal stay for the period of 18 months uh it can be prolonged for another 18 months so three years altogether to everyone who came to poland after 24th of uh february when the war started started although only to people with a ukrainian and ukrainian passport uh they but they have right to work free care you know we have free health care in europe uh education and benefits um there were two million ukrainians working in poland prior to the war so all together there are more than four million ukrainians in poland at the moment okay the people who had worked in poland before the war started they were not given the same rights with the bill that the ukrainians who came when the after the war started in on the 24th of february they were granted legal stay it was prolonged until the end of 2022 but no right to work nothing automatic uh that that the bill gives to the to the refugees from ukraine um so uh now even though you know on the global scale because we're here also to talk about global governance organizations such as unhcr or iom they have great expertise and they have a lot of data actually they are almost irrelevant in situations like these in they're on the ground i mean at least initially when when the conflict and the crisis uh break breaks out um refugees from ukraine do not apply for asylum i think it's important to to mention okay because an asylum seeker enters a long process procedure during which he she cannot work uh even though they are entitled to some small benefits and and uh health care plus the system in poland is not ready to process tens of thousands of applications not to mention you know millions of them therefore formerly refugees from ukraine are not asylum seekers do not apply for international protection um now it has to be said that uh there is a stark if i still have some time there's a stark difference between how refugees from ukraine now are treated and refugees slash migrants from iraq or syria are treated at the polish belarussian border okay you may remember that in the summer of last year there was this crisis that was instigated by the belarusian regime and alexander kashankar the the leader of belarus who facilitated p for people from iraq and syria and lebanon to come to belarus and they actually drove in cars the the belarusian authorities people to the border in poland to put pressure sort of weaponizing migrants to put pressure on the eu and poland uh to uh um uh you know to show the weakness of the of europe and uh try to get some leverage to to have sanctions reduce or uh sanctions that are that have been put in place on on belarus dr sesno in the interests of time would you be able to yeah i'll just wrap up i'll just wrap up this point um but it tells you something about identity right so um poland in response to that crisis then uh put up a fence and the people were not allowed to come in whereas and had a totally different sort of rhetoric narrative about the crisis whereas today uh there is you know an all-welcoming approach and people are allowed to everyone is welcome and they have all uh uh access to benefits and and legal protection um i hope we will be able to talk about that later on because i think it's important to to see what the political consequences of that are thanks thank you dr sasnow for your compelling remarks we will be talking a bit about identity uh in the moderated section of the panel today our next panelist is michael nikkenchuk program director for trauma and violent conflict at beyond conflict based in amman jordan mr nickenchuck oversees beyond conflicts research intervention design and policy work that addresses the role of chronic stress and trauma in the genesis and escalation of violent conflict and the role of trauma healing and conflict resolution efforts prior to joining beyond conflict mr nikkenchuk worked as an independent neuroscience consultant for international ngos as the emergency response coordinator for the syria crisis response for aquascope and in community development programs with reintegrated combatants in guatemala mr nick and chuck we are keen to hear your remarks now thanks free um in full disclosure heather asked me to do this last night so my remarks are written on this little piece of paper um i'm really eager to get to the moderated section of this because this is such a complex and really infuriating topic as it well should be i've spent the past 10 years of my life working with uh refugees from syria which is a very different situation than what we're dealing with now with uh refugees coming from ukraine for many different reasons the nature of the conflict is different it's farther away no matter how badly syria escalates it was never going to lead to a bomb a bomb being dropped on a european city fear is largely what drives empathy in the brain fear not love fear of this might happen to me and years of neuroscience research has shown that humans are wildly capable of overcoming their self-interest but they also are first and foremost self-interested in many states in many ways and even the altruism that we pursue is largely to protect our in-group out of love for those who look sound and think like us when all of you define what is a human what's your first point of reference how are you defining what a human is it's you what you see in the mirror and so everyone that extends farther away from that even in your brain's consideration from the time that you're a child receives less and less consideration of their humanity the less that they talk sound look and probably feel like you do i think of a young man named zakaria and i have permission to use his name and his story in syria he was conscripted into service he was sent a long way from his hometown in daraa in south syria to derazor he was given a gun put in his hand said you're going to have to use this there's a police officer wandering the streets of derazor he started to see more and more people from his own communities recruited into different positions in the military for this emergent conflict that was really outside of his control or outside of anything that was part of his frame of reference just a few months prior time he became discontent of not wanting to be involved in a conflict that he didn't choose to be a part of very few people choose war very very few people it's almost always men and it's almost always men in power he didn't choose to be a part of this so he left he did what many many other people did he went to jordan a place where he was at least safe but a place because they're not party to convention at the convention on the rights of the refugee from 1954 he was perpetually in this in the state of being an asylum seeker which is different than being a convention refugee it's not the same right it's not the same framework yes you are protected to a degree but it is not a life that any of you would want and he like many others wanted a life wanted wanted what you and i have so basically and one of the reasons why the asylum and refugee system is so complicated now and the governance system is so complicated now is because when you say refugee you are met with suspicion first and foremost and the browner you are the more male you are and the more muslim you are the more suspicion you're met with the reality is when i think of of families who have tried to exaggerate the health condition of their child they're subject to so many interviews and quote unquote extreme vetting i would embellish my child's illness if it could guarantee them a life that was better than the one that i had i would probably lie like that i've not been in that position would you lie to save your children would you faint an illness to earn your basic human rights would you know how to navigate us every day asks you are you worthy are you worthy of things that you and i take for granted every single day when this young man zakariya finally got an opportunity to leave the zapati refugee camp via a scholarship to mexico to get finally a university education at the age of 29. he went through a complicated process to get clearance to leave jordan to get a visa to mexico and when he arrived at the airport in mexico he was interrogated for 12 hours and put in deportation proceedings despite having a valid visa through a series of media campaigns and shedding light on this and basically shaming the government into what was happening on live tv on broadcast tv in mexico city he was released after 13 hours finally getting to the place that was supposed to be his new home where he felt wanted and from the moment he arrived there he felt completely unwanted that is what the life of so many asylum seekers is like going from place to place knowing that you are suspect and you are wanted but hoping that in some way shape or form your children will not have to go through what you went through so we know that the system is broken in so many ways shapes and forms it wasn't designed to accommodate 84 million people that are currently forcibly displaced in need of protection the system wasn't designed for that and no matter how much reform we do we're gonna eventually keep prioritizing you know smaller and smaller numbers and i'm not suggesting that the system isn't getting people to safety it absolutely is the resettlement system for example but okay we take a hundred thousand ukrainian refugees in the united states there are two million in poland right now we raise the cap to 125 000 in the united states wonderful we should do that but i had a young refugee not that long ago wondering if her rape was enough to earn her one of those 125 000 spots what would have had to have happened to me to be considered worthy of my case being expedited so the urgency of the refugee is very different than the urgency of our politics and until we close that gap we're not going to be doing it right and so i'm really excited to be able to talk about the governance of that system and the necessary reforms that can make the system equitable but also necessary to meet the demand that is only going to grow no matter how much deterrence we put in place because no matter what we do no matter what fences we put no matter what holes we shoot in boats people will move and they will continue to do so to find a better life for their children no matter what we do to them until we recognize that reality we're not going to be making the necessary drastic and dramatic policy changes that are going to prevent the loss of unnecessary unnecessary loss of life good thank you mr for your enlightening perspective on this issue we will now hear from dr karen jacobson the henry j lear professor in global migration at the fletcher school of law and diplomacy who directs the refugees and towns project at the feinstein international center at tufts dr jacobson's interests and areas of expertise include refugee and migration issues humanitarian assistance in developing countries urban impact and climate change and migration from 2000 to 2005 dr jacobson directed the alchemy project which explored the use of microfinance to support people in refugee camps and other displacement settings from 2013 to 2014 she led the joint idp profiling service at the united nations in geneva she consults and works closely with the unhcr and other un agencies and international ngos dr jacobson we are eager to hear from you now thanks thanks very much greetings everybody it's great to be here and i just have really a few a few points that i want to make um you'll forgive me because i'm actually just back and this is the first point just back from uganda where i suspect yesterday so i'm a bit jet-lagged so um but i want to talk a bit about my experience in uganda because it was um i think it's going to illustrate a bit some of the the main perspective i want to make here today which is that we tend to focus here in the us on ukraine now just as a few months ago we tended to focus on afghanistan and what we do not focus on ever is the experience i'm about to tell you now about what happens in other parts of the world that are not on our media all the time so i was in uganda working with unhcr on a project that's looking at the impact of climate change on informal settlements in in in the capital kampala as you know in formal settlements the cities of the world today are mostly populated by poor people who live in informal settlements around the city and so many of these these population of this population consists of migrants either from from rural areas or refugees and internally displaced people who are fleeing conflict and other civil disturbance and are moving into cities and so these informal settlements are where most of the world's refugees live today they do not live in camps they do not live in europe they do not live in the u.s that's for sure they live in africa in the middle east and south asia that is where most of the world's refugees live today but we don't ever really talk about those refugees so i was in uganda looking at kampala and looking at these informal settlements we're starting a research project there and i went with unhcr down to the border of the congo and uganda is an area in the south west where the borders of tanzania rwanda and congo and uganda come together this is one of the most conflict affected areas in the world the eastern democratic republic of the congo has is one of the most protracted civil uh protracted conflicts in the world and the number of people who've been killed and displaced in this area exceeds anywhere else for a very long time and it's not as if this war is just occasional so while we were down there in fact we had gone to the border to because we'd heard that refugees were were coming across the border in great numbers and while we were down there at the border this was a very dramatic in fact i've been in i've been working refugee areas for a long time but i've never actually been caught up in what is called a level one emergency a level one emergency in un speak occurs when there is active conflict and more than a thousand people coming across the border a day and we were caught up in this emergency because while we were down there we heard gunfire and then mortar fire mortars and people rushing across the border and for the first time in my life i had to run with i and my the u.n team i was worth had to run with the refugees as we ran from this gunfire that was occurring what's happening in the drc is is the rebel group called m23 is being supported by rwanda and the congolese government which is fighting the rebel group is being supported by uganda so we have this complex conflict that's happening here but what's happening is in those two days that we were there 15 000 refugees came across the border and there was act of shelling there was active um injuries and deaths and rapes as as occurs always in these kinds of situations and we were with these people who were running but then i you know two days later i'm one day later when i was back in kampala i'm searching for this in the news not a sign no not any sign anywhere that i could find in the western media of of this kind of this you know admittedly um yeah short-term emergency but still that was 15 000 people in a day that was caught up in shelling so the point i'm trying to make is that we focus on what the media gives us the media has given us the ukraine now this is not in any way to diminish what is happening in the ukraine and the displacement and refugees and terrible events that is happening there but that is all that people are reading about now and similarly two months ago it was exactly the same or three months ago with afghanistan we were only given what is happening in afghanistan and the terrible things that are happening there so we only get what the media tells us okay but we never get those long-standing protracted conflicts the drc there have been hundreds of millions of people displaced and tens of thousands and perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people who've been killed over the last few years we never hear about this conflict so um so yeah i mean even if we just focus on level one emergencies okay where there's active shelling and and active conflict armed conflict two other emergencies are in place right now that we never hear about we never hear about yemen which has been an ongoing conflict and war civil war for the past 10 years we never hear about ethiopia anymore there was a brief little and the second one is ethiopia we never hear about that it was a brief little little um spate of coverage a while back but that has been completely wiped off the off the media map so it's this is just the point i'm trying to make is that yes there are terrible things happening in europe but there's also a huge amount of resources going into the into the neighboring countries and to into ukraine itself and and and i think what we have to think about here is in terms of the response to refugees because one of the things that we need to understand is what's going to how do countries who receive refugees that is the neighboring countries how do they respond to those refugees and as we've heard poland has responded relatively positively to these refugees but poland's history here when we look back at how it responded to other refugee movements is not quite so great as i'm sure you would agree with me because it and so what does it depend on this this this response in one respect i would say it depends on two things the first thing it depends on that is on how well refugees are received by the host country the first thing it depends on is how long these people stay if they stay a relatively short time the response is always very is usually very sympathetic and people are helped and assisted there's a lot of media attention that stays on them and so there's a lot of a lot of good stuff that happens but the longer people stay the more that response tends to decline in terms of its positiveness and so so the temporariness of a refugee population is a big determinant determinant of how how how good that response is to them the second thing the second factor that might determine their response to refugees is as you might guess relates to two things race and religion and as has also been mentioned if you are white and christian and you're in europe the response is going to be a lot better than if you're not white and not christian as we have seen in other in other situations but as the point has also been made in in countries where most of the world's refugees are i.e in african and south asian and middle eastern countries what determines their response to refugees in those countries well in those countries it's not really an issue of race and religion although sometimes it is in those countries we i think are back to this issue of how long people stay and in if we if we look at syrian displacement the number of refugees who are in turkey in lebanon and jordan and iraq those are the countries that have absorbed the most iraqi refugees and what we're seeing now is this first factor coming into play which is how long are refugees there in a country like lebanon which has received per capita the most refugees per capita not in actual numbers lebanon's response to refugees is now becoming extremely negative and there is push there is a pressure on refugees to return to syria now even though in the beginning which was back in 2012 that revenant was fairly responsive to them so i think one thing we have to think about in looking at look at all of this i'd like to may just recap my two points one is it's not yes ukraine is in the news now as afghanistan was a few months ago but we have to think about these long-standing conflicts and long-standing displaced populations who are really struggling and have no resources uganda has 1.5 million refugees in it this is a poor country and the funding for this refugee program has been diminishing over the past two years and why because donors say to unhcr uganda's doing fine you know they're supporting these refugees they're doing fine we're cutting the program because we have other important and other important emergency to attend to and that's where the funding is going is to ukraine so yeah i think it's really important to recognize that there are it's not that we should go beyond these these emergencies and to look at what happens over time and uh and uh yeah i guess i'll stop there thanks thank you dr jacobson for your intriguing remarks last but certainly not least we have mr peter tinty who is a writer researcher and photographer covering conflict security human rights and organized crime with a particular focus on the sahel in latin america mr tinchy's writing photography and analysis have appeared in the new york times the wall street journal the atlantic foreign policy vice and world politics review mr tinty is currently a lecturer at the committee on international relations university of chicago and carries out research for a variety of research institutes international organizations and non-governmental organizations he is the author with tuesday retino of migrant refugee smuggler savior savior excuse me and was part of the team for foreign policy awarded the robert f kennedy book and journalism award new media category without further ado mr tinte we are excited to hear from you now thanks very much adriana i just wanted to start my timer because i have a tendency to go over so a little bit of holding myself accountable here uh first of all thank you so much for inviting me to participate and thanks to my fellow panelists who really set the stage here for some of the topics i wanted to discuss and that i hope will come up during the the moderated portion of this panel and also with questions from the audience very briefly i want to go over what i would identify and perceive as kind of the key themes when it comes to the ways in which states are responding to um the global uh what's been called the refugee crisis or migrant crisis i'm very much putting that in air quotes because i would posit that it's not really a crisis of refugees or migrants it's a policy crisis and at the heart of much of this is the um refugee convention which mr nick and chuck referenced that in principle states and i won't go into the legalese but grants the right for people to seek asylum and this um right to seek asylum can be is predicated on the idea that anyone who is fleeing their own country for lack of protection about whether it's war uh a natural disaster political persecution based on their race ethnicity religion potentially political affiliation increasingly more and more states are including things like lgbtq status as reasons to grant people asylum or at least gives people the right to seek asylum now that's in principle and many states are signatories to this convention not all and there are some key omissions here however in practice most states even those who are signatories to the convention have basically set up a system in which they say you have a right to claim asylum if you can get here please don't come uh now they don't say the please don't come part they just implement policies a suite of policies that make it very difficult for people to seek asylum through formal channels um so that's kind of the overarching system of how we've gotten here uh some of the key kind of trends i want to just highlight and then i can expand upon during q a people would like one is there's this very key trend of border externalization that is states primarily in the global north but really particularly north america and um much of europe is seeking to extend its border capacity border surveillance capacity either through building walls through partnerships with um transit countries to make sure that asylum seekers um or people who might just put under the broad category without editorializing on whether or not they should be granted asylum as irregular migrants right just preventing people from reaching in the first place um another key trend i think is instrumentalization of migrants and migrant flows uh or weaponization if that's a word you prefer in which we've seen states like with the case of belarus increasingly use the specter of migrant flows as a bargaining chip within within bilateral and multilateral relations belarus is only one example the morocco spain relationship has very much recently been uh shaped by migration uh the basically the eu's posture towards north africa and the sahel is very heavily shaped by the desire to limit um mixed migration flows in these countries and to also encourage these countries to harden and and militarize their own borders in the service of making sure that migrants and asylum seekers don't reach european borders and of course we've seen this in the ways in which the us government has interacted with governments in this hemisphere whether the whether it's the mexican government as well as various central american governments just recently the director of homeland security um my argus was was touting a new partnership with costa rica and costa rica is going to help the us uh the euphemism that we all love to use is manage mixed migration flows um another key trend here i think is uh surveillance um just the use of biometrics within the humanitarian sphere and also the ways in which um where governments some private organizations are constantly kind of cataloging and determining who is this this eternal debate or quest for determining who's a refugee who's not good migrant bad migrant collecting data quantifying people and trying to kind of take a technical approach to this is very much a trend um that i think is only starting to really emerge but i think is potentially quite dangerous and is going to have some some potential um negative repercussions okay i've gone over my time uh i'll take 30 more seconds if i can just to um touch on two more issues the other key trend that is emerging within these these conversations but is is not really um has not really had a coherent has not manifested itself in a way is this talk of having to engage the root causes of migration and the drivers of migration and that has usually just come in the form of bilateral aid and attempts at economic development but there is a broader question there of why is migration something that needs to be addressed at the root cause level why is it inherently a bad thing there's a very much mixed mixed conversation going on of are we talking about forced displacement or are we just talking about migration and the ways in which in our modern world people want to live work move and build communities that are that are global i'll stop there but thank you very much for your for for your time thank you mr chinti for sharing your thoughts on this issue and thank you again to all of the panelists for your remarks we will now move into the moderated discussion on global migration focusing on a number of key issues in this regard i'd like to begin by touching upon the issue of human trafficking often discussed uh in talking about global migration human trafficking is a major concern around forced migration and i'm asked i want to ask um what are the intervention points to prevent people from being taken advantage of and what are the ways that states can de-securitize their approaches from border security to detainment and in thinking about the millions of individuals namely women and children who have fled ukraine and have been welcomed into neighboring countries what role does identity play in refugee treatment and news coverage and i'll have any panelists wishes to begin and then we can jump in wherever we see necessary um i'm happy to jump into that first question because it's something that uh i end up having to discuss a lot based on a lot of my work and research has been on migrant smuggling networks and the um the processes by which migrants uh asylum seekers will use actors who we typically identify as smugglers to overcome these borders and to often reach asylum um both according to international law there's a clear difference between migrant smuggling and human trafficking um there are different crimes according to international law um again don't need to get into the legalese of it but when it comes to migrant smuggling that is more it's a willing buyer willing selling their willing seller scenario is i'm paying you for the service of taking me across this border um it's not inherently exploitative although exploitation often becomes a part of these arrangements and it of course has to requires crossing a border whereas human trafficking doesn't have to be across the border it can be internal and it is inherently exploitative right these are when we think of forced labor debt bondage schemes the kind of typical scenarios that we can think of that would fall under human trafficking um in terms of how to combat human trafficking i might just change tweak the the question just a little bit because one thing i would love for people in this room to understand and and take away from my little intervention here is that migrant smuggling and human trafficking are often conflated and that is often a result of people not necessarily knowing the difference or using the terms interchangeably or these terms can translate very awkwardly some language is the word for trafficking and the word for smuggling is the same word right so it can be tricky but oftentimes governments are using or will seek to leverage the universal disgust for human trafficking because there's really no one who supports human trafficking in order to promote policies that are really designed to limit irregular migration flows and so when people say we need to build a wall to fight human trafficking no no you're building a wall to prevent migrants from entering the country irregularly when you when many policies and agendas that are pursued often under the guise of fighting human trafficking probably deserve more scrutiny as if that's the real motive behind it um and of course the policy responses to fighting human trafficking versus combating migrant smuggling should be different um the last anecdote i'll just leave is we can talk about the scourge of migrant smuggling and the dangers that smugglers um might expose migrants to but the question is not who's putting migrants on boats it's why are migrants getting on boats in the first place um and in the case of germany for example which very notably and honorably took in over a million syrian refugees when that decision was made 99 of the refugees who were granted asylum in germany used smugglers in order to reach germany there was no legal path to getting there if there had been smugglers would not have been necessary in the first place it was for years there's this idea that because of the the protocols that there is a difference between trafficking and smuggling and legally as you say there is that's put out in the protocol however i would say that this distinction between traffic trafficking and smuggling is not so clear and in fact when we look at who's being smuggled and how the smugglers work the exploitation and the horrific treatment of migrants is the same whether you're being trafficked or migrant uh smuggled and there's really not much difference because the same kinds of dead bondage and other kinds of financial problems that are involved in being smuggled are the same as being as whether you're being trafficked or smuggled and there is some interesting work out now in the last few years that is really taking on this issue that there is a distinction between trafficking and smuggling and saying people who are being smuggled awesome jacobson can you just move your microphone a little closer just so we can hear you feel better so this is this that people who are being smuggled are struggling and suffering in exactly the same ways as people who are being trafficked and your example actually of of how people get to europe which is absolutely true that everyone who moves nowadays has to be smuggled because there's no flight you can get on because of the visa regimes everyone who's been smuggled is in great danger it's not if you pay that smuggler at the head at the beginning of your journey that's no guarantee that you're going to be delivered there safely not at all smugglers i have no interest it's a completely transactional um exchange that's happening and it's and smugglers are there to make a profit and if that profit involves abandoning you in the middle of the of the mediterranean that's what happened or in the middle of the sinai desert or in the middle of the sahel that is what happens and so these are smugglers these are not good guys who are helping people get to europe these are businessmen who have no compunctions about about abandoning and kidnapping people and converting a smuggling experience into a traffic experience we have many examples of how our people pay their dues to their smuggler and then get trafficked and kidnapped along the way so i i agree with you that there's this distinction but actually it's a distinction without really much of a difference yes of course um yeah i want to go back to the identity part of the of your question but i just want to say that i get i draw a conclusion from what mike said that the less time you have to prepare the better the presentation but cannons and peaches were also great to dominate yours but um so on the identity thing and that women and children other make up the majority of refugees from ukraine and they are the most vulnerable of course also in in terms of um migration migration flows in general but also of course minorities people of color so there's a natural positive attitude this is something maybe cultural maybe eurocentric that when it's a woman and then a child your attitude is good but the more male you are the more black the more muslim like mike said and karen the attitude is uh different and this goes actually for everyone i mean across the west um which is not the case in the south uh in the global south uh so um what i want to say actually about poland and touching on what karen said that in 2015 when the refugees slash migration crisis although it is a it was a policy crisis happened in pola in uh europe and syrians were coming to uh to europe indeed the polish attitude was um so what if you looked at the pulse service done in 2015. in april when polls polish people were asked are you in favor of accepting syrian refugees the majority would say and i think it was something like close to 70 percent would say yes and then a political debate prior to elections parliamentary elections happened uh and in that debate the rightist party that is now in government took up the issue of the refugees vilified them and you know this was the devil that we need to be afraid of this was their rhetoric and they won the elections and when the polls were done in november that year after the elections 51 percent of of the people polled say that they were against accepting refugees why i'm saying this is because karen pointed to two reasons about the quality and the of the response to refugeehood that's the time that they stay and uh the race really identity religion but that's the third one this is the political debate this is about the power of politics this is the about the power of politicians about the ideas that they disseminate and put into our heads we as people do not have an opinion about everything i have no idea if a river should be naturally should be artificially regulated or it should be let loose a particular river i should i cannot have an opinion about that because i'm not a specialist but a politician has an opinion about everything and we learn from them and we take opinions from them so by saying this and i'm this is not new i mean wrote about it not such a long time ago but it's about the power of politics it's part of culture it is part of what we have in our heads so it's up to the politicians really to have an employee a narrative that is not divisive that is compassionate and that also stirs sort of legality you know it's something about the geneva convention that we uh that people know that refugees and migrants are not good or bad these are large movements and mixed movements of people groups of people that have all vicissitudes of you know characteristics in them this is a small interjection here to add to just dump some gas on whatever fire was happening here earlier um smugglers are the bad guys no question about that like 100 absolutely yes it's disgusting the activities that they force people to do when they encourage a 15 year old syrian boy to burn off his fingertips and the woods in hungary not knowing how that's going to affect him the rest of his life when he's taken to a police station for a misdemeanor in berlin and seeing he doesn't have fingerprints he's assumed to be some sort of part of an organized criminal network so he can't get his prints taken that was a decision forced on him by a smuggler in the woods of hungary at some point they are the bad guys 100 percent but the decision-making that a refugee goes through being a refugee is possibly among the top most disempowering experiences that a human can go through because literally every choice is taken from you where you can take a is a choice that you don't even have anymore because your latrines are assigned to you in a camp where you can live where you can rent where you can walk what you can what you can wear very few decisions are yours and so we have to think the the necessary criminalization of endangering refugees whether it's because it's through trafficking or smuggling or the other many ways that we that we put refugees at risk those should be criminalized absolutely because those are behaviors that are against every possible framework of human ethics and human rights and the law but at the same time we cannot keep criminalizing those things without offering a more empowering route to decision making for refugees and migrants because whatever we criminalize there will be it's like whack-a-mole something else will pop up and we're just creating riskier profiles of possible decisions for people and i have i'm thinking of a whether it's my my friend muhammad who was sitting on the on the border of belarus in poland the sixth time he tried to go through he went through being chased after by german shepherds released by the polish military and had to hide in the swamp where he got frostbite and had to get some of his toes amputated at a hospital in berlin you know these are decisions that people are making there's an element of agency here and so how do we increase that agency while also criminalizing incredibly dangerous dehumanizing uh criminal enterprises and behaviors it's an incredibly tough balance and i applaud folks like dr jacobson and peter for and then of course doctors hasn't for trying to tackle those things through different policy regimes [Music] yes of course uh yeah totally not perceiving this as a fire but by any stretch no wonder your points are are very well taken uh both of you i just um and i don't even want to use the term push back against uh this idea that it's a distinction without real difference i think this this will be very context specific um in the case of say turkey uh close from turkey degrees for example there were some of the actors that that are smugglers and regardless of whether they're good people or bad people um there were things like qr codes that could be given out to the person who purchased a place on a boat and the money wouldn't get released because there was an escrow system because there were there's consumer protections now that wasn't because these smugglers are good people it's because they had a lot of competition with other smugglers and so they had to meet the demand there was a market um for smuggler services and the actors who wanted to meet that demand and operate within that system uh baked in these kind of consumer protections in order to get clients um that's just different right than those who would have been operating along a similar route but whose pure goal would have been one-off exploitation for the sake of making money or ripping someone off and the distinction of smuggler one other component of this is that in some of these contexts the kind of term or idea smuggler has more or less had to be manufactured and i'm thinking of the case of the sahara desert and really niger where these actors who had been transporters for decades and their role in society and their occupation was transporting people across the desert from egypt to libya these were this was not clandestine but it was irregular it wasn't particularly legal it wasn't illegal it just wasn't really something people paid much attention to but when europe decided that it's very important that they work with the nigerian government to stem flows through niger into libya for onward passage to europe there were new laws passed that now determined that these people were smugglers so it is it's complicated that's awesome yes can i respond to that yes of course i totally agree with you peter and it's so great that you're making this point about context and because it is this whole idea of smuggling is very complicated it's not like swanglas are all 100 bad guys not at all like he was saying they're long traditions of smuggling in the sahara and elsewhere where people it's just a livelihood that people do and then you you pay your guy and you get across and it's fine and then then there's the other end of the spectrum where these guys are really bad guys it's a whole range and a very much context dependent so it's not like there's just you know some simple way to think about i really agree and your book is really excellent on these on these details then secondly could i just say that to to um patricia i love that you're adding this third dimension because of course it is so much about the politics and the politicians who are determining the co the context for how refugees are received and and you you illustrated it beautifully with how in the beginning the polls were yeah let's take them on the syrians and then the politicians change everyone's mind with their skillful rhetoric we have had some extensive experience of this in our own country of where a politician can literally change people's minds about migrants and and call people who come from mexico a long-standing you know ally and partner and call them criminals and rapists and change people's minds about how we see migrants so i totally it's it's probably the most important factor i would say yeah thank you thank you everyone for your marks going off of the discussion of how politicians can change people's minds when we treat refugees and migrants as statistics and political talking points we can easily miss the suffering and trauma that accompany displacement so my question is two parts how might we effectively address these challenges across borders and with consistency and how could global governance evolve to better address contemporary migration issues in this regard why don't we start with mr nick and chuck if you're ready trauma yeah yes um yeah here's less passion more science on this one i promise um you know we've we've learned so much about how to deal with um the trauma of returning peoples of veterans and forced migrants over the past decades i mean the did you know that the first time that we heard the notion of post-traumatic stress disorder was actually quite late it didn't make its way into the diagnostic and statistical manual until 1983 until the third iteration of the dsm which is the american psychiatric association's diagnostic manual before that it had been labeled since the days of world war one of course as shell shock and these other terms that were used mostly for folks that were in active combat settings and returning to their homelands however the first mention of the symptoms associated with post-trauma responses or disruptions in the psyche and the body after trauma are actually from 5000 bc in the ramayana in ancient hindu texts so for across civilizations we have had so many different efforts to try to capture what happens to the brain body and behavior after we go through these life-altering or life-threatening experiences and the modern classifications of that are actually quite new when we look at the breadth and time spent of human history um not every person that lives through a war is quote unquote traumatized it doesn't mean that it doesn't deeply affect you but from a clinical definition as far as symptom presentation maybe between 35 to 42 based on current meta-analyses around 35 percent of refugees will go on to develop some sort of stress-related disorder as a result of their experiences of conflict and migration however the one thing that's changing dramatically as we've seen is that the notion of of the lifespan the life cycle of being a refugee is different a lot of the systems and policies and mechanisms that we have in place to address refugee trauma rest on the assumption that the trauma was the war the trauma was the thing that forced you to migrate in the first place while ignoring largely the potentially traumatic nature of forced migration experiences and long-term acculturation and adjustment issues as a migrant or a refugee in a new place there is a great study that came out in 2019 that was focusing on syrian and iraqi adolescents in germany that was looking at those who had clear traumatic memories from the war in syria and early adolescence and those who had such similar memories but also traumatic experiences including potential violations and assaults along the route of coming to germany and upon arrival to germany in collective shelters and accommodations and the those who had the greatest level of post-traumatic stress symptoms were actually those who are exposed to traumas in their new country of asylum not in the country of origin where the quote unquote big traumas the big t traumas took place so i think we need to reframe also how we consider the life cycle of refugee trauma and refugee stress moving away from exclusively a trauma-focused model and more to a stressed focused model that is appreciative of the complexities of the traumatic experience that forced migrants go through and not only does the global mental health system have to change to accommodate that and create better programs as a result that don't require the divulgence or the um the specificity of one or two traumatic events in war i think we also need policy frameworks that recognize for example in an asylum interview which can be very intimidating it is perfectly logical and normal that someone isn't going to recall the dates and times of events i've been privy and translated for different asylum interviews where the person feels quite interrogated and a lot of shame that they can't remember the details of what time of year a certain event happened which is a necessity for having a completed and believable asylum file as having clear recall of when and where things occurred yet because of the intensity of that stress and trauma the person might not be able to physically recall that for a number of clinically proven scientifically validated reasons because of what happens to your hippocampus your amygdala and certain parts of your limbic circuitry as a result of stress so we also have to have not just better mental health programs for refugees but also asylum and you know refugee status determination processes that are more inclusive and cognizant of the effects of trauma on migrants so it's a policy question as much as it is just a medical or program question would anyone else like to add on to that um just maybe two sentences i'm in no way am i an expert on this so i really not a scholarly comment but um i would recommend to you to the students uh to look at the at the work of the special rapporteur i mean when we talk about global governance migration uh the special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants uh felipe gonzalez morales on the coveted migration nexus and there's a stress on the on the health uh aspect of of migration so it's a good report and also encourage you to having listened to mike encourage you to read if you haven't done so yet the rest of the earth by franz fanon who was a psychiatrist and also a fighter although he never took up a gun on the site of algerians uh being french against the french and the the last part of the book is about the trauma of the of the colonized um so i guess it also somehow relates to to what mike said because it's a fantastic book and you have to know it doctor jacobson or mr timmy do you have anything to add i'm okay there no i'm fine great in the interest of time it seems we have time for just one more moderated question i hope we can continue and build upon these conversations in the audience q a section which will happen very short uh shortly the last question the very concept of refugee hood seems to call into question citizenship and sovereignty as it exists in our world today is there a need to reconceptualize borders and or the idea of citizenship i know it's a big question but i'm sure many students are curious your thoughts um yeah i can actually start um because this is something that i kicked off with i mean that the border between poland and uh and ukraine and and sovereignty so we're in the i think we think about sovereignty in those very archaic uh terms the sort of 19th century uh sovereignty concept you know it's a control over territory borders and people but i'm asking myself what control does italy have over large swags of land that are burning because of climate change what sovereignty does germany have over apple the company when it comes to gathering data and actually the strength of finance and all that and and and then what sovereignty does uh say um iran have over the border with afghanistan when you have an influx of people people coming in and this is something about migration so i have i think we have this phenomena migration climate change large corporations uh there are probably more that uh forced us to reshape the concept of sovereignty and sovereignty is actually about interconnectedness and cooperation in my uh mind and i'm coming from the european union and you know the european union itself reinvents the concept of uh sovereignty it's about one plus one making three not two right it's about synergy so you have a group of countries that have sort of given up although it's a very bad word part of the sovereignty in order to form a larger entity that has greater sovereignty right uh in order to face uh global challenges so and in terms of borders you know this henley passport index henley right passport index that indexes the strength of a passport the nationality of your passport and and it shows you how easy it is for you to cross borders with with with a with a passport and on top so the easiest it is for people to travel if you have a passport from singapore japan germany italy and the worst for you you will never get a visa to the us if you have a syrian iraqi afghani passport so i i think this index is an interesting tool to look at because it tells a lot [Music] okay i'll go should we do we need to reconceptualize borders i think it's fun exercise to think about how we can reconceptualize borders it's an academic exercise uh what you need to do is to go down to any border where there is a migrant crossing and you will have no no doubt about the power and and continuation of national borders when we talk about we should we conceptualize borders we sitting here as students and academics and whatnot we can have a lot of fun doing that when you talk go to the reality of the ground bearing in mind what you said about that there are you know corporations and and and yeah sort of conceptual yeah i mean definitely corporations and yeah who who who transgress these borders but we're on the on the ground when you talk about migrants coming into a border those borders are very solid well protected and and and enforced by by let's face it the host population i in my class that i teach we have a one class that looks at i my class on global migration one one of our classes has a debate on open borders should we have open borders okay should we allow all the migrants who want to come in all those poor refugees and poor migrants who are struggling and having such terrible experience should we just open our borders and let everyone cross and and not have to let them have visas and not and not and not to hold them back and let's just bring everyone in who wants to come in well let me ask you this how many of you thinks we should have open borders to the us how many of you think we should just drop all our immigration and let anybody come in who wants to all of those refugees sitting in ukraine should we just bring them over to the u.s two million of them and what about all the rest should we should we bring them in how about 40 million refugees should we bring them to the us should we just drop our borders and bring them i ask you this would you do you all think we should do that and if you do should they come to your community should they come and should they put up their tents and their houses and so forth in your high schools because that's what we have to think about the politicians for all their problems are are telling us what their people are telling them which is no we do not want all these these refugees and migrants and everyone else in our backyards yes we'll rather have them in someone else's country but not in ours so yes we think that we can reconceptualize borders but i ask you this are you willing to have a million people come into your community and then if you are are you willing to increase your taxes so you can support them are you willing to have them come into your schools and your health centers and your farms and take over your your jobs if that's all the case then great go to your politician tell him or her that you want open borders but i can guarantee you it's not going to happen because you and the rest of everyone else living in the countries of the west are not going to agree with that maybe you are because we're all progressive and liberal thinkers but most of the people in the u.s and most of the people in western europe are going to say no so i don't think we can talk about reconceptualizing but nothing is going to happen yeah mr trinty yeah i i think one thing to keep in mind is that we constantly are reconceptualizing borders um these are not you know as real as they are in terms of on the facts on the ground conceptually they're not natural i mean in some cases there are natural borders due to oceans seas uh rivers or or mountain ranges but um we have we are constantly reconceptualizing uh how we manage a border who can cross who can't i mean these are very dynamic political processes that have been going on for quite some time um you know what airports you can enter when you connect why you can fly to certain places these are these are constantly shifting policies um so i don't think we should necessarily accept kind of a fade accompli that you know these are just facts on the ground and they'll be there um the question of open borders though of course the the the there's the conceptual and and moral imperative of whether or not it should be done and then the real political challenge that it would pose um i think we do need to then at least acknowledge um what it what border maintenance means i mean it's a projection of power it's incredibly violent process of determining who gets to be on what side of the wall so it's not a politically neutral stance and it's one that i think when we talk about why populations move what are the drivers of force displacement and what role states who like to have very restrictive um border regimes play in exacerbating some of these mass movements um what their obligations are to accepting people who may be on the move as a result of their foreign policies or um various economic systems that have been put in place so when we talk about rethinking borders i just want to make sure that there's a enough space there for understanding that it doesn't need to be a kind of open border or closed border dynamic there's there's a lot that can be negotiated and reconceptualized even accepting uh if should you choose to that there's a nation-state system states have sovereignty over their borders thank you to all of the panelists for your remarks before i move into the audience q a we will hear a brief presentation on cyprus and its refugee challenge from tough students ian boldeston meg grieve and emma jennings of the middle east research group's recent fact-finding trip to cyprus [Music] i'll be sorry [Music] um [Music] and i'm the trip coordinator um for the middle east research group and we over spring break we're lucky enough to go to cyprus um there were eight of us there and three of us were um completing research on different refugee issues um and so emma's gonna start and tell us a little bit about the um history of cyprus and uh the refugee situation there and then ian's gonna talk about his research and then i'm impossible yes so cyprus is a very interesting case for migration because of the 1974 invasion by turkey so cyprus has two major ethnic populations there are greek cypriots and turkish cypriots and so the invasion wound up splitting the island along ethnic lines so since 1974 there have been large movements of greek cypriots who had lived in the north to the south and turkish the brits who lived in the south to the north so that has really influenced the ways that people in cyprus view refugees migrants asylum seekers coming in now which ian will talk about more in his research um there are also two british sovereign base areas on cyprus to just kind of complicate who has territorial control wear um which is seen as both a legacy of british colonialism and as a security buffer to turkey so there are kind of mixed views on those things in cyprus and then more on my research personally i'm focusing on the different regional and domestic influences um political influences on the creation of refugee policy in the republic of cyprus so the south um because the cyprus problem as they call it there um is the issue of reunification between the north and the south and kind of got territorial governance since the south doesn't exercise territorial control over the north and um the largest the reason i'm focusing on regional politics as well as domestic politics is because the most common pathway for refugees asylum seekers migrants to get to the republic of cyprus is actually through turkey into the north and then over the u.n buffer zone into the south um which has led to a a lot of rhetoric from government and the politicians in the republic of cyprus that turkey is sending these people to destabilize our government and our people they're not cypriots they're going to destroy our way of life that typical kind of xenophobic rhetoric but that has really started to impact the way that migrants refugees asylum seekers because they're often all lumped together in the way in the implementation of policy there are treated and viewed within communities and the way that they're leveraged as political tools for domestic gain of political parties and politicians in cyprus um so yeah that's a pretty basic overview uh yeah thanks yeah so my research um was kind of focusing in on the impact of partition policy and uh cypriot refugee attitudes on the management and experiences of migrants coming or refugees coming from abroad so because i kind of was initially motivated to do this because of the unique large population of displaced people as a result of the 1974 split that emma described and i was kind of curious to try and investigate if these people who see themselves as being displaced in refugees is kind of a large part of their identity the way that they relate to their conditions in their country would this make them more empathetic um and kind of more um welcoming to refugees coming from abroad and kind of like the politics in general the island the answer which i'm still kind of fleshing out is pretty complex and there's there's multiple different answers basically um what i learned is that a lot of them kind of view themselves as refugees but refugees in a bit of a different way than refugees coming from abroad and so there's kind of a disconnect between that and some see as kind of the the issue of reunification as needing to take precedence over then helping people um from abroad and i think as well sort of the history of the island as well in terms of colonial influences and have been such sort of a small member a small country at that sort of crossroads of the eastern mediterranean can kind of lead to narratives that uh can kind of frame large potentially large inflows of migrants from abroad as kind of an existential threat but at the same time there are many separate refugees who are involved with different community organizations and sort of migrant support groups as well on the island but overall kind of political affiliations uh media discourses as well kind of take precedence over um attitudes as or attitudes being influenced um by their refugee attitudes so yeah um and then my research was focusing on uh education for refugee students um and i was interested in this because after cyprus joined the eu um cyprus changed from more of a transitional country where people would come stay for a couple weeks and then go to europe into a place where people would come and stay for many years they would bring their families and so there's a growing number of students who needed to be educated and there was a shift in 2003 from a monocultural education system um to an intercultural education system but there's been a huge gap in the policy that has been created and the implementation of this policy which is a lot of what i looked at one example that sticks out to me is something called the zones of educational priority which are areas where their high number of refugee students and so the government gives these schools extra funding extra resources to teach students greek things like that but one effect of this policy was that um greek cypriot parents no longer wanted their kids to go to these schools because they were seen as special or different um and so they took these their kids out of the schools um and sent them to other schools with more greek cypriot students and so it just became schools with only refugee and migrant students and so it's just one of many examples where the policy that was created has actually created more problems for the refugees students instead of helping them [Music] thanks to all the panelists for talking about your uh different experiences working with this topic um just briefly i think it also relates a lot to our research what you guys are talking about like externalization of borders and securitization of migration has really influenced all of our research and is a very important topic for us all to talk about not just in cyprus but in the global system so thanks everyone for attending as well [Applause] thank you merge for that wonderful presentation i would now like audience members who have questions for the panelists to come up to the microphones on either side of the auditorium i would request that you keep your remarks to a short question directed at one panelist without any additional comments in the interest of time please try to keep it under one minute and please introduce yourself thank you was super interesting my name is nicole i'm from argentina i'm a visiting student at the tillett program so in argentina we have a very flexible migration laws our constitution states that basically any foreigner has the same rights as a citizen and we've received many migrants especially from venezuela and neighboring countries so my question is reading a book a few years back exodus by volcollier um my question is how can we still manage to keep the migrants identity but also try to adapt them not adopt them but to be part of the society and not losing their identity so that's my question anyone like to begin dr jacobson we have a project called the refugees in towns project that looks at the integration of refugees i think we have to make a big distinction between integration and assimilation in the old days america and other countries wanted to assimilate migrants that is to make them the same as them to make them into americans whatever americans were yeah now we don't talk about assimilation anymore we talk about integration and that is how can people retain their own identities as as national identities religious ever identity and yet still be part of this of a community a host society that i think what you've hit on is a really important issue and you know praise to argentina for keeping its its visa regime relatively progressive and and enabling that is great south american countries are doing really well on that not all at most um so yeah i think that's a really important thing and we don't really have a a formula for how this is done but we know two things that when we talk about integration it's it's both coming from the host society the host population who wants to enable people to become part of that town or community and it must come from the migrants and refugees so it's a two-way process a relational process in which both sides are trying to achieve something that works for for the town or whatever it is so it's a really important issue and i think really interesting because it it um varies a lot you know some countries are better at it or some even some towns it's not necessarily a national i think it's so i encourage you all to to participate and come and and create case studies for our refugees in townsford we'd love to have something from argentina thank you so much angeles hi my name is angelus i'm a political science student from greece thank you very much for your input on our symbolism um firstly i take the chance to say that migration uh isn't a new phenomenon borders are so i will put my question uh you mentioned instrumentalization so we see putin uh is bombing urban cities causing the refugee flows to towards western european countries so can we say that migrants can be used also as a hybrid war tool and uh another question how do we deal with uh leaders like putin an erdogan the european union is giving money to turkey to to hold the refugees in its territory but then we see erdogan um using migrants as a threat to our european union saying that if you don't if you if you do something that i don't like i will release the refugees and i will cause a huge political turmoil um that's my question thank you i can take that from that um thanks angela so i think we need to differentiate a hybrid threat uh in in the case of the war in ukraine is just a sort of a collateral effect right but putin did not uh stop this war to cause an influx of migrants to the eu he caused it because he wants ukraine in his sphere of influence um he thought they would welcome him and the russians with roses uh but in the case of belarus this was i think this was part of some kind of a hybrid threat instrumentalizing migration but then on the other hand the the narrative and the rhetoric that we had in poland put too much emphasis on this hybrid aspect rather than looking at the people who were really coming in because they were not artificial uh refugees they really did flee from uh from places where it's really hard to to live and they wanted to to go to a better place so that's the different side and how to deal with uh putin and i think we should i mean at least the european union relies on on some kind of values and the credibility rests on values if we if we try to there's always this tension between values and security usually there is if we try to stick to the values rather than uh really be scared all the time and there's research that shows that if we opened all borders there wouldn't really be such big flows of people um but that that may be different with climate change and all and all this uh does this book open borders uh mike clements i think is his name so yeah i think just sent us his own values i mean for the sake of time i need to stop here because it's such a big topic but um yes sorry just very quickly i think one you know what to do about actors like erdogan or i mean in the case of libya before his downfall gaddafi was very much counted on to do the dirty work of not allowing vibrant and he very much knew that was the game and would use very racist rhetoric to say uh you know italy price goes up otherwise more africans are coming towards the coast um these arrangements exist in a lot of contexts uh spain morocco being another one i think we should just always be careful when a refugee or migrant flow subsides to just kind of never confuse that what a solution has been found it just means for now the relevant actors have agreed to to collaborate or cooperate um and i just say that because the the roots to the canary islands from so west africa to the canary islands which are part of spain that was a migration crisis back in 2008 2009 it went dormant due to all sorts of bilateral agreements that were reached between spain and morocco spain and mauritania in spain and senegal and there were some papers written about how well this is a potential model for other states to use because there's a whole of government approach there's uh development aid there's security cooperation and then the roots reopened two years ago um and suddenly the sustainability of this whole government approach seemed a lot more ephemeral than maybe uh some of the people who were cheerleaders of it would have acknowledged at the time thank you thank you in the interest of time we'll have the last four questions asked uh back-to-back and then we'll have the panelists respond in whatever order they see necessary and panelists please keep your responses uh brief as possible hello my name is joseph lim i'm a student for the epic colloquium um and i'm conceiving a project to help north korean refugees um the factory is fleeing the country the uniqueness of uniqueness of the situation is china's defined them as legal economic migrants instead of refugees deporting them back into north korea where the refugees are sent into political prison camps for forced labor and the uniqueness of this situation is although i agree with mr um mike um uh regarding that smugglers um are sometimes do evil conducts like sexually exploiting some of their own um the migrants underneath their um influence i agree with professor jacobson that um there are um they are the only actors that are able to help the defectors flee to embassies or find out slum in other countries and so my question was are there strategies and tools for even defectors who there is a disproportionate asymmetric power for them to have leverage even over these smugglers for them to i guess find roots and ways for them to seek islam are there case studies that show that they were able to use some tools and strategies to get out of those situations thank you [Music] hello i'm nazarino cantos i'm with the argentine delegation and this is something that i asked mrs tower yesterday but i would like to hear more opinions on this topic how do we protect somebody that is being victimized with the financing of the country of the com or continent of destination are you even reading about the outlaw ocean project uh you probably know it um the project in the new yorker and in libya there are migrants and caches and incomes that are being [Music] tortured and killed by paramilitary groups that get money from the eu for the european union and how we protect these people or how do we punish the global so good morning my name is felipe i'm part of the brazilian delegation and i'm a law student from the university of sao paulo and i wanted to know if you think that the legal framework of refugees that date back from the after the second world war is sufficient nowadays mainly considering the difference between the flow of migrations in the different parts of the world like from the middle east but also like it's really different when you see the migration flows like in venezuela to brazil and other south american countries i think hello my name is janis i'm from greece i am a senior of international relations in athens i was thinking about the refugee crisis that happened in europe and like as an example i thought about the maurya camp that was built for 3000 people and ultimately before the fire was hosting 13 000 people and we had stories from that count that even 10 years old children were attempting suicide and i was thinking that how the european convention of human rights is interpreted in situations like this and how the right to dignity is secured when it is violated or which is the regulation that even the european justice the court of human rights or other institutions about human rights can do things in situations like this thank you all right we could have someone jump in and then we kind of bounce off of each other to try to answer these four questions so whoever feels ready i'll go with the uh a brazilian question okay that was uh which was illegal whether the 1951 convention is still relevant so this is a big question that's out there because as you know it was it was it was devised in 1951 to protect refugees from the second world war and was expected that that need would disappear in in the 1950 and in fact the un unhcr's mandate has been renewed every five years since then and continues to be so but even even the u.n itself debates whether this a very important treaty it's a treaty document so for all the countries that have signed and ratified it they have to implement this treaty it's really important so the question is as you say it was designed to address the second world war displays people after the second world war um is it still relevant well it was changed as you know there's a protocol that takes away the the constraints the temporal and geographic constraints to europe and makes it relevant to the whole world so that's that's good even though some countries like turkey have only signed the 1951 convention not the protocol so it only thinks of refugees as people who are in europe which is sort of interesting now to think about how it's going to think about ukrainian rep people from anyway but the issue around this it's been widely debated as to whether we should take apart that treaty and start again right let's come up with a more relevant treaty one that does include people displaced by climate and disaster with the current refugee convention does not include persecution as a result of climate and disaster it does include people who are displaced by war because the current 1951 convention does not include people who are displaced by war it only includes people who are persecuted on an individual basis right so if you are running away from because you're a villager shell you're not you're not in this you don't get asylum for that right so is there a way to improve this convention that's a big huge important issue and to be honest the answer that most people come up with is if we change this treaty if we change this convention if we say okay scrap it and start again what will happen is something worse or something more restrictive more aggressive because the current climate for migration globally is not a progressive let's let's let everyone let's let's let more people be defined as ref not at all it will become much worse and it will give countries an opportunity not to sign this not to ratify this new convention so everyone agrees that for all its problems and for all its and there are many well i mean i in my class on on refugee law spends hours debating the problems with this convention but for all its problems if we if we if we abandon it and come up with something new it'll be worse for the refugees and so so the issue is so no one wants to touch it because you touch it it's gonna get it's gonna create problems [Music] briefly uh the question about libya from angelo cena i'm sorry i forgot your name about the um the symbolia i remember being in moriah twice in 2019 and in 2016. um it's it's really the most convenient thing that a refugee can do for its host government is to is to either go back home or kill himself that's the sad truth because no one will care alan kurdi when he washed up on the beach people cared for about two weeks and we talked about ukraine we talked about prior to that afghanistan no one will care no one cares if if lebanon you know if a refugee is forced out of lebanon back into syria no one will ask you're no longer lebanon you just solved a small problem for them and syria is a black hole of media so no one's going to ask what happened to you um the reality is that there's a a problem in the policy where we don't actually because we're so scared of migrants and refugees right now it's really difficult to take a critical look at sort of the chain of causality of how different deterrence policies and lack of integration are actually forcing 10 year olds to want to kill themselves so we're not at a place i think that where the the general public has the capacity to really critically to meaningfully debate that topic because there's still such a tremendous fear around migrants and refugees and no question that whatever policies we develop now are probably going to be a hell of a lot less welcoming than things that were developed after the second world war why because the second world war affected power holders and right now mass migration is not affecting power holders as it was after world war ii so in many ways we should we should honestly just continue to encourage and the the enforcement of of the convention and of having innovative visa schemes as well it's not all about getting convention status as a refugee you know many venezuelans are in colombia or in brazil or different places not as asylum seekers or convention refugees but under different levels of flexible visa policies that allow them the right to work so i think it's going to be up to states to innovate both in in in putting their money where their ethical mouth is and creating alternative schemes that hopefully can be at least friendly towards neighbor countries and countries that there's some level of cultural political you know short-term and short-term stays type of things so i mean i hope that we can see more alternative schemes that aren't exclusively reliant on large conventions and enforcing those [Music] i think that in the interest of time we're going to have to conclude the panel um for today okay um okay so if any of the panel panels want to answer any of the other two questions feel free to do so now i can take a crack at the libya the north korea question in the libya question so with the north korea question yeah i'm not really going to answer your question directly because that's just out of my realm of expertise but when you said what do migrants do to um i guess maybe mitigate the relationship with smugglers or or move more safely across various borders uh one thing to to keep in mind and you know many of these these people are coming from incredibly situations of extreme vulnerability uh unimaginable vulnerability as as mr naked chuck has has very like eloquently described um and sorry mike my dad okay sorry mike as mike has um has has described um and yet within within these contexts there's still degrees of agency when trying to move right but migrants are all and asylum seekers are very oftentimes not always and it can depend on the roots and and various contexts but oftentimes are very um active in trying to figure out what is the best route how can they mitigate risk communicating with other with each other and communicating with people who've already done the journey um trying to sometimes there are very kind of informal systems of vetting of smugglers right i went with this guy and it worked i went with this guy and he you know robbed and beat me don't use this guy so this can often be a very and again it's not directly answering your question about north korea but the process of movement is a very social process in which entire communities are often involved in helping facilitate those journeys um just going to the eu libya question about these um um with these detention centers i mean we could spend a whole a whole panel just on those i think the a lot of humanitarian agencies and ngos and governments that are directly involved in helping implement these programs have a lot to answer for and there's really a question of how we even got to a place where there are prisons being run by militias that are receiving funding from either the european union or individual european member states and additionally uh are receiving are also working with the humanitarian community and deriving some sort of legitimacy and their actions through that and that's a very complicated question but there are definitely questions that need to be asked about some of the incentives here organizations like iom they need to find projects they need to find justify their programming and and find opportunities to be active in the field and that can oftentimes lead to like very interesting arrangements in how they work and very tough moral dilemmas of like should we be even present in this uh particular context are we harm are we reducing harm and helping migrants and or are we potentially like aiding and abetting a pretty nasty system um that's something that i don't think has received nearly enough scrutiny um and and definitely deserves more attention do you like to add yeah so on libya i mean let's assume would it be better if the eu was completely not present in libya and it's a country torn by war there are five centers of authority uh there is a terrible situation the country is almost non-existent right and so in these circumstances you're trying to navigate and finance something uh at least i think there's there are audits and uh after a period of time there will be an audit of the official funding like there were audits previously for example with aid to egypt a european court of audits found that 51 percent of uh funds given to egyptian authorities organizations could not be accounted for there was not a single receipt so the money was either embezzled or the system is such that you just just do not get a receipt for something so i think at least in this situation and i'm not saying that you know externalization of of the issue is a good thing but at least there is a mechanism for to audit and monitor the thing and once this is done i i hope we hope because of the noise in the media this will not be repeated and just a word about the geneva convention i i just wanted to echo what karen said and just tell you that this perhaps something that you might not know that when the then the when the convention was negotiated you know this was the cold war so there were two camps right there was the soviet uh socialist camp and the in the liberal western camp and there were two opposing views i mean just to make to make the story simple uh who is a refugee so the western camp wanted a refugee or refugeehood to be to be based on individual expressionist values right liberal values while the socialist camp wanted the refugee to be someone you know but based on the socialist values someone who doesn't have money and now let's and the the western idea won right so that that's in the convention so let's think for a minute what would it be wouldn't it be an interesting idea for for a refugee to be someone who's who's uh uh traveling for for better life because of poverty right this is something that we have today and this is something that we have in the in the language some people we call labor migrants uh if they are for example a filipino uh a uh house uh uh aid in lebanon and some people we call expats if they are german uh i.t specialists in in in singapore uh so i mean just uh as a story i i think i'm right about that i'm not completely sure about what what happened prior to 1951 are there any other comments from our panelists great thank you to our panelists for providing a nuanced insight into the global governance of migration among other issues also a big thank you to our audience for being so engaged with the panel next we will have expert-led small group discussions happening at 2 30 p.m in various locations on topics of human trafficking preventing and responding to food insecurity and global supply chains inequity and the apparel industry and the responsibility to protect sorry um check out the program for more information about location after that we will reconvene for our final panel at 4 30 pm here in acn auditorium on development finance and trade in the context of globalized inequality again thank you everyone for your participation here today you