Global

Richard Haass, Sergio M. Alcocer, and Yul Sohn assess the degree of deglobalization and the dynamics behind any trend, whether the COVID-19 pandemic significantly accelerated developments, and the implications for international cooperation moving forward. The Council of Councils (CoC) is an international initiative created by the Council on Foreign Relations to connect leading foreign policy institutes from around the world in a dialogue on issues of global governance and multilateral cooperation. The CoC is composed of twenty-eight major policy institutes from some of the world’s most influential countries. It is designed to facilitate candid, not-for-attribution dialogue and consensus-building among influential opinion leaders from both established and emerging nations, with the ultimate purpose of injecting the conclusions of its deliberations into high-level foreign policy circles within members' countries.

Anne C. Richard, distinguished fellow and Afghanistan coordination lead at Freedom House, will lead a conversation on refugees and global migration. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the final session of the Winter/Spring 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Anne Richard with us today to talk about refugees and global migration. Ms. Richard is a distinguished fellow and Afghanistan coordination lead at Freedom House. She has taught at several universities including Georgetown, University of Virginia, Hamilton College, and the University of Pennsylvania. From 2012 to 2017, Ms. Richard served as an assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, and before joining the Obama administration she served as vice president of government relations and advocacy for the International Rescue Committee. She has also worked at the Peace Corps headquarters and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and is a member of CFR. So, Anne, thank you very much for being with us today. With your background and experience, it would be great if you could talk from your vantage point—give us an overview of the current refugee trends you are—we are seeing around the world, especially vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, et cetera. RICHARD: Thank you so much, Irina, for inviting me today and for always welcoming me back to the Council. And thank you to your team for putting this together. I’m very happy to speak about the global refugee situation, which, unfortunately, has, once again, grown yet larger in a way that is sort of stumping the international community in terms of what can well-meaning governments do, what can foundations and charitable efforts and the United Nations (UN) do to help displaced people. I thought we could start off talking a little bit about definitions and data, and the idea is that I only speak about ten minutes at this beginning part so that we can get to your questions all the more quickly. But for all of us to be on the same wavelength, let’s recall that refugees, as a group, have an organization that is supposed to look out for them. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is the title of the number-one person in the organization, but the entire organization is known by that name, UNHCR, or the UN Refugee Agency. It also has a convention—the 1951 Refugee Convention—that came about after World War II and was very focused on not allowing to happen again what had happened during World War II where victims of the Nazis and, as time went on, people fleeing fascism, people fleeing communism, couldn’t get out of their countries and were persecuted because of this. And there’s a legal definition that comes out of the convention that different countries have, and the U.S. legal definition matches very much the convention’s, which is that refugees have crossed an international border—they’re not in their home country anymore—and once they’ve crossed an international border the sense is that they are depending on the international community to help them and that they’re fleeing for specific purposes—their race, their religion, their ethnicity, their membership in a particular social group such as being LGBTQ, or political thought. And if you think back to the Cold War, these were some of the refugees coming out of the former Soviet Union, coming out of Eastern Europe, were people who had spoken out and were in trouble and so had to flee their home countries. So what are the numbers then? And I’m going to refer you to a very useful page on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees website, which is their “Figures at a Glance” presentation, and we’re going to reference some of the numbers that are up there now. But those numbers change every year. They change on June 20, which is World Refugee Day. And so every year it hits the headlines that the numbers have gone up, unfortunately, and you can anticipate this if you think in terms of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. It’s usually June 20, 21, 22. So June 20, that first possible day, is every year World Refugee Day. So if you’re working on behalf of refugees it’s good sometimes to schedule events or anticipate newspaper articles and conversations about refugees ticking up in—at the end of June. So if you were paying attention last June for World Refugee Day, UNHCR would have unveiled a number of 82.4 million refugees around the world, and so this upcoming June what do we anticipate? Well, we anticipate the numbers will go up again and, in fact, yesterday the high commissioner was in Washington, met with Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and they met the press and Filippo Grandi, the current high commissioner, said that he thinks the number is closer to ninety-five to ninety-six million refugees. So, clearly, a couple things have happened since last June. One is that so many people are trying to flee Afghanistan and another is so many people have fled Ukraine. So if we went back to that $82.4 million figure that we know we have details on, we would find that this is the figure of people who are displaced because of conflict or persecution around the world. The ones that count as refugees who have actually crossed an international border is a smaller number. It’s 20.7 million people that UNHCR is concerned about and then another close to six million people who are Palestinians in the Middle East whose displacement goes back to 1948, the creation of the statehood of Israel, and upheaval in the Middle East region as Palestinians were shifted to live elsewhere. And so—and they are provided assistance by a different UN agency, UNRWA—UN Relief Works Administration in the Near East—and so if you see a number or you see two sets of numbers for refugees and they’re off by about five or six million people, the difference is the Palestinian, that number—whether it’s being counted in, which is for worldwide numbers, or out because UNHCR cares for most refugees on Earth but did not have the responsibility for the Palestinians since UNRWA was set up with that specific responsibility. So what’s the big difference then between the eighty-two million, now growing to ninety-five million, and this smaller number of refugees? It’s internally displaced persons (IDPs). These are people who are displaced by conflict or are displaced by persecution, are running for their lives, but they haven’t left their own countries yet. So think of Syrians who, perhaps, are displaced by war and they have crossed their own countries and gone to a safer place within their own country but they haven’t crossed that border yet. Others who have crossed into Lebanon or Turkey or Jordan or Iraq or have gone further afield to Egypt, those would be considered refugees. Who’s responsible for the IDPs then? Well, legally, their own countries are supposed to take care of them. But in my Syria example, the problem is Syria was bombing its own people in certain areas of the country, and so they were not protecting their own people as they should be. People can be displaced by things other than war and conflict and persecution, of course. More and more we talk about climate displacement, and this is a hot issue that we can talk about later. But who’s responsible then when people are displaced by changing climactic conditions and it’s their own governments who are supposed to help them? But more and more questions have been raised about, well, should the international community come together and do more for this group of people—for internally displaced persons—especially when their own governments are unwilling or unable to do so? What about migrants? Who are the migrants? Migrants is a much broader term. Everyone I’ve talked about so far who’s crossed a border counts as a migrant. Migrants are just people on the go, and the International Organization for Migration estimates there’s about 281 million migrants on Earth today—about 3.6 percent of the world population—and one of the big issues I’ve pushed is to not see migrants as a dirty word. Unfortunately, it often is described that way—that migratory flows are bad, when, in fact, lots of people are migrants. Students who travel to the U.S. to take classes are migrants to our country. The secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, who was himself for eleven years the high commissioner for refugees, he says, I am a migrant, because he’s a Portuguese person working in New York City. People hired by Silicon Valley from around the world to work in high-paid jobs, legally in the United States, they are migrants. More concerning are vulnerable migrants, people who are displaced and don’t have the wherewithal to, necessarily, protect themselves, take care of themselves, on the march or where they end up, or also if they’re seen as traveling without papers, not welcome in the places where they’re going, that can be a very, very dangerous situation for them. So be aware that migrants is a really broad all-encompassing term that can include travelers, businesspeople, as well as vulnerable and very poor people who are economic migrants. Finally, immigrants are people who set out and migrate because they intend to live somewhere else, and when we were talking about the Trump administration’s policies to reduce the number of refugees coming to the U.S. we also see that immigration to the U.S. also was decreased during that administration as well. So both the refugee program and a lot of the immigration pathways to the U.S. are now being examined and trying to be not just fixed, because a lot of them have needed care for quite some time, but also put back on a growth trajectory. And then asylum seekers are people who get to a country on their own, either they have traveled to a border or they pop up inside a country because they have gotten in legally through some other means such as a visitor visa or business visa, and then they say, I can’t go home again. It’s too dangerous for me to go home again. Please, may I have asylum? May I be allowed to stay here and be protected in your country? So that’s a lot of different terminology. But the more you work on it, the more these terms—you get more familiar using them and understand the differences between them that experts or legal experts use. So ninety-five to ninety-six million people, as we see another eleven million people fleeing Ukraine and of that four million, at least, have crossed the borders into neighboring countries and another seven million are internally displaced, still inside Ukraine but they’ve gone someplace that they feel is safer than where they were before. When we looked at the eighty million refugees and displaced people, we knew that two-thirds of that number came from just five countries, and one of the important points about that is it shows you what could happen, the good that could be done, if we were able to push through peace negotiations or resolutions of conflict and persecution, if we could just convince good governance and protection of people—minorities, people with different political thought, different religious backgrounds—inside countries. So the number-one country still remains Syria that has lost 6.7 million people to neighboring countries, primarily. Secondly was Venezuela, four million. Third was Afghanistan. The old number from before last August was 2.6 million and some hundreds of thousands have fled since. And the only reason there aren’t more fleeing is that they have a really hard time getting out of their country, and we can talk more about that in a moment. The fourth are Rohingya refugees fleeing from Burma, or Myanmar. That’s 1.1 million, and the fifth was Southern Sudanese, 2.2 million, who have fled unrest and violence in that country. So we know that we have not enough peace, not enough solutions, and we have too much poverty, too, and dangers. In addition to the Venezuelans, another group that has approached the U.S. from the southern border that were in the paper, especially around election times, is from the Northern Triangle of Central America, so El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These are people who could be fleeing because of economic situations and could also be fleeing from criminal violence, gangs, warfare, narcotraffickers. And so if they are fleeing for their lives and approaching our southern border, we are supposed to give them a hearing and consider whether they have a case for asylum, and the—unfortunately, that is not well understood, especially not by folks working at our borders. The Customs and Border Protection folks are more and more focused on, since 9/11, ensuring that bad guys don’t come across, that terrorists don’t come across, that criminals don’t come across. And we heard in the Trump administration conversations about Mexicans as rapists, gang warfare being imported into the U.S. from Central America when, in fact, some of it had been originally exported, and this sense that people from the Middle East were terrorists. And so really harsh language about the types of people who were trying to make it to the U.S. and to get in. Some final thoughts so that we can get to the question and answer. The U.S. government has traditionally been the top donor to refugee and humanitarian efforts around the world. The bureau at the State Department I used to run, the Population, Refugees, and Migration Bureau, was a major donor to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees—UNRWA—the International Committee of the Red Cross, and also the International Organization for Migration, which used to be an independent organization and is now part of the UN since 2016. We were also the number-one resettlement location, the formal program for bringing refugees to the United States, and when I was assistant secretary we brought seventy thousand refugees per year to the United States, invited them to come through a program that took eighteen months to twenty-four months, on average, to get them in because they had to be vetted for security reasons. They had to pass medical tests. Their backgrounds had to be investigated to see that they were who they said they were. And that number went higher in the last year of the Obama administration to eighty-five thousand refugees and, in fact, the Obama administration proposed some very strong additional measures to help refugees. But the Trump administration threw that all into reverse with a completely different set of policies. So the numbers then became reduced every year—fifty-three thousand in the first year of the Trump administration, 22,500 the next year, thirty thousand in 2019, 11,814 in 2020, a similar number in 2021, and slow numbers coming today, this despite bringing so many Afghans through an evacuation exercise last summer. Many of the people who were evacuated were American citizens or green card holders. Afghans who had worked for the U.S. but did not have their formal paperwork yet were brought in under what’s called humanitarian parole, and the problem with that program is that it’s no guarantee for a longer-term stay in the United States. So there’s a bill in Congress right now to address that. A lot of the people who worked on that, especially within the U.S. government, are proud that they’ve scrambled and brought so many people so quickly—120,000 people brought from Afghanistan. At the same time, those of us who are advocates for refugees would say too many people were left behind and the evacuation should continue, and that’s a real concern. In terms of resettlement in the U.S., it’s a program run—public-private partnership—and we’ve never seen so many volunteers and people helping as there are right now, and initiatives to help welcome people to the United States, which is fantastic. I would say the program should be one of humanity, efficiency, and generosity, and that generosity part has been tough to achieve because the government piece of it is kind of stingy. It’s kind of a tough love welcome to the United States where the refugees are expected to get jobs and the kids to go to school and the families to support themselves. So let me stop there because I’ve been just talking too long, I know, and take questions. FASKIANOS: It’s fantastic, and thank you for really clarifying the definitions and the numbers. Just a quick question. You said the U.S. government is the top donor. What is the percentage of DVP? I mean, it’s pretty— RICHARD: Tiny. Yeah. FASKIANOS: —tiny, right? I think there’s this lack of understanding that it may seem like a big number but in our overall budget it’s minuscule. So if you could just give us a— RICHARD: Yeah. It’s grown in the last few years because of all these crises around the world to ten to twelve million—I mean, ten billion dollars to twelve billion (dollars) between the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, which was bigger. It was around seven or eight billion (dollars) when I was the assistant secretary five, six years ago. But the important part of it was it provided the whole backbone to the international humanitarian system. Governments, some of them, saw Americans sometimes as headaches in terms of we, Americans, telling them what to do or we, Americans, having our own ideas of how to do things or we, Americans, demanding always budget cuts and efficiencies. But the fact is the whole humanitarian enterprise around the world is based on American generosity, especially the big operating agencies like World Food Programme, UNHCR, UNICEF, UN Development Program. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. So now we’re going to go to all you for your questions. Hands are already up and Q&A written questions. So I’ll try to get to everybody as much as I can. I’m going to go—the first question from Rey Koslowski, and if you can unmute yourself and give us your institution that would be fantastic. RICHARD: Hi, Rey. Q: All right. Rey Koslowski, University at Albany. Hi, Anne. Good to see you. I’d like to pick up on the use of humanitarian parole. So, as I understand it, it’s being utilized for Afghan evacuees, Afghans, who you mentioned, who didn’t—weren’t able to get on the flights and were left behind, but also for Ukrainians. You know, President Biden announced a hundred thousand Ukrainians. I mean, a very—we’re using other channels but we’ve had, I believe, three thousand at the U.S.-Mexican border and, I believe, they’re being paroled for the most part, right. As I understand it, we’re—one DHS letter that I saw said that there were forty-one thousand requests for humanitarian parole for Afghan nationals. But I’m wondering about capacity of the USCIS to handle this, to process this, because, you know, normally, I think, maybe two thousand or so, a couple thousand, are processed, maybe a couple of people who do this, and also in conjunction with the challenges for processing all of the asylum applications. So, as I understand it, back in the fall there was some discussion of hiring a thousand asylum officers—additional asylum officers. I was wondering, what are your thoughts about our capacity to process all of the—the U.S. government’s capacity to process the humanitarian parole applications and the asylum applications, and if you have any insights on new hires and how many— RICHARD: Well, you know, Rey, at Freedom House now I’m working on a project to help Afghan human rights defenders and— Q: Right. RICHARD: —the idea is that they can restart their work if we can find a way for them to be safe inside Afghanistan, which is very hard with the Taliban in charge right now, or if in exile they can restart their work. And so we’re watching to see where Afghans are allowed to go in the world as they seek sanctuary and the answer is they don’t get very far. It’s very hard to get out of the country. If they get to Pakistan or Iran, they don’t feel safe. They have short-term visas to stay there, and the programs that might bring them further along like resettlement of refugees are—take a much longer time to qualify for and then to spring into action, and so they’re stuck. You know, they’re afraid of being pushed back into Afghanistan. They’re afraid of becoming undocumented and running out of money wherever they are, and so they’re in great need of help. The humanitarian parole program sort of—for bringing Afghans into the U.S. sort of understood that our eighteen- to twenty-four-month refugee resettlement program was a life-saving program but it wasn’t an emergency program. It didn’t work on an urgent basis. It didn’t scoop people up and move them overnight, and that’s, really, what was called for last August was getting people—large numbers of people—out of harm’s way. And so when I was assistant secretary, if we knew someone was in imminent danger we might work with another government. I remember that the Scandinavians were seen as people who were more—who were less risk averse and would take people who hadn’t had this vast vetting done but would take small numbers and bring them to safety, whereas the U.S. did things in very large numbers but very slowly. And so this lack of emergency program has really been what’s held us back in providing the kind of assistance, I think, people were looking for the Afghans. I was surprised we even brought them into the United States. I thought after 9/11 we’d never see that kind of program of bringing people in with so little time spent on checking. But what they did was they moved up them to the front of the line and checked them very quickly while they were on the move. So it was safe to do but it was unusual, and I think part of that was because the military—the U.S. military—was so supportive of it and U.S. veterans were so supportive of it and we had, for the first time in a while, both the right and the left of the political spectrum supporting this. So the problem with humanitarian parole is I remember it being used, for example, for Haitians who had been injured in the Haitian earthquake and they needed specialized health care—let’s say, all their bones were crushed in their legs or something. They could be paroled into the U.S., get that health care that they needed, and then sent home again. So we’ve not used it for large numbers of people coming in at once. So what refugee advocates are seeking right now from Congress is the passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would give people a more permanent legal status. They would be treated as if they were—had come through the refugee resettlement program and they’d get to stay. So you’re right that the numbers being granted humanitarian parole at one time is just not the normal way of doing things. You’re also right that the—this is a lot of extra work on people who weren’t anticipating it, and more can continue with the hundred thousand Ukrainians who the president has said we will take in. And so the thing is when we have these kind of challenges in the United States one way to deal with it is to spend more money and do a better job, and that seems to be an option for certain challenges we face but not for all challenges we face. With these more humanitarian things, we tend to have tried to do it on the cheap and to also use the charity and partner with charities and churches more than if this were sort of a more business-oriented program. So we need all of the above. We need more government funding for the people who are working the borders and are welcoming people in or are reviewing their backgrounds. We need more assistance from the public, from the private sector, from foundations, because the times demand it. And it’s very interesting to me to see Welcome US created last year with three former U.S. presidents—President Bush, President Clinton, President Obama—speaking up about it, saying, please support this, and people from across the political aisle supporting it. I wish that had existed in 2015 when we were grappling with these issues at the time of candidate Trump. So the needs are greater. Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean we have to just suffer through and struggle through and have long backups like we do right now. We could be trying to put more resources behind it. FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next written question from Haley Manigold, who’s an IR undergrad student at University of North Florida. We know that the war in Ukraine is going to affect grain and food supplies for the MENA countries. Is there any way you would recommend for Europe and other neighboring regions to manage the refugee flows? RICHARD: The first part of that was about the food issue but then you said— FASKIANOS: Correct, and then this is a pivot to manage the refugee flows. So— RICHARD: Well, the Europeans are treating the Ukrainians unlike any other flow of people that we’ve seen lately. It goes a little bit back and reminiscent to people fleeing the Balkans during the 1990s. But we saw that with a million people in 2015 walking into Europe from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan—mix of economic migrants and real refugees—that Europe, at first, under Angela Merkel’s leadership were welcoming to these folks showing up, and then there was a backlash and the walls came up on that route from the Balkans to Germany and to Sweden. And so in the last few years, Europeans have not been seen as champions in allowing—rescuing people who are trying to get to Europe on their own. You know, especially the Mediterranean has been a pretty dismal place where we see Africans from sub-Saharan Africa working their way up to North Africa and trying to get from Libya across the Mediterranean to Europe. These are mostly economic migrants but not solely economic migrants, and they deserve to have a hearing and, instead, they have been terribly mistreated. They get stopped by the Libyan coast guard, the Europeans push boats back, and they are offloaded back into Libya and they are practically imprisoned and mistreated in North Africa. So that’s a terribly inhumane way to treat people who are trying to rescue themselves, their families, and find a better life. And another point to the Europeans has been, couldn’t you use these young people taking initiative trying to have a better life and work hard and get on with their lives, and the answer is yes. Europe has this sort of aging demographic and could definitely use an infusion of younger workers and talented people coming in. But, instead, they have really pushed to keep people out. So what’s happened with Ukrainians? They’re seen as a different category. They’re seen as neighbors. There’s a part of it that is positive, which is a sense that the countries right next door have to help them. Poland, Moldova, other countries, are taking in the Ukrainians. The borders are open. If they get to Poland they can get free train fare to Germany. Germany will take them in, and that’s a beautiful thing. And the upsetting thing is the sense that there is undertones of racism, also anti-Islam, where darker-skinned people were not at all welcome and people who are not Christian were not welcome. And so it’s probably a mix of all the above, the good and the bad, and it’s potentially an opportunity to teach more people about “refugeehood” and why we care and why it affects all of us and what we should do about it and that we should do more. FASKIANOS: Thank you. All right, I’m going to take the next question from Kazi Sazid, who has also raised their hand, so if you could just ask your question yourself and identify yourself. Q: Hello. So I’m Kazi. I’m a student at CUNY Hunter College and I happen to be writing a research paper on Central American and Iraq war refugee crises and how international law hasn’t changed the behavior of a state helping them. So my question is, how does confusion and ignorance of migration and refugee terminology by state leaders and the general populace impact the legally ordained rights of refugees such as having identity documents, having the right to education, refoulement, which is not being sent back to a country where they are danger? One example is like Central Americans are termed as illegal immigrants by the right wing but the reality is they are asylum seekers who are worthy of refugee status because gang violence and corruption has destabilized their country and the judicial systems. I think femicide in El Salvador and Honduras is among the highest and—so yeah. RICHARD: Yeah. Thank you for asking the question, and I have a soft spot in my heart for Hunter College. Only one of my grandparents went to college and it was my mother’s mother who went to Hunter College and graduated in the late 1920s, and as we know, it’s right down the street from the Harold Pratt House, the home of the Council on Foreign Relations. So I think a lot of what you—I agree with a lot of what you’ve said about—for me it’s describing these people who offer so much potential as threats, just because they are trying to help themselves. And instead of feeling that we should support these folks, there’s a sense of—even if we don’t allow them in our country we could still do things to ease their way and help them find better solutions, but they’re described as these waves of people coming this way, headed this way, scary, scary. And if you follow the debates in the United States, I was very alarmed before and during the Trump administration that journalists did not establish that they had a right to make a claim for asylum at the border. Instead, they talked about it as if it were two political policies duking it out, where some people felt we should take more and some people felt we should take less. Well, the issue that was missed, I felt, in a lot of the coverage of the Southern border was the right to asylum, that they had a right to make a claim, that we had signed onto this as the United States and that there was a very good reason that we had signed onto that and it was to make sure people fleeing for their lives get an opportunity to be saved if they’re innocent people and not criminals, but innocent people who are threatened, that we’d give them a place of safety. So I agree with you that the lack of understanding about these basic principles, agreements, conventions is something that is not well understood by our society, and certainly the society was not being informed of that by a lot of the messengers describing the situation over the past few years. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So I’m going to take the next question from Lindsey McCormack who is an undergrad at Baruch—oh, sorry, a graduate student at Baruch College. My apologies. Do you see any possibility of the U.S. adopting a protocol for vetting and accepting climate refugees? Have other countries moved in that direction? And maybe you can give us the definition of a climate refugee and what we will in fact be seeing as we see climate change affecting all of us. RICHARD: I don’t have a lot to say on this, so I hate to disappoint you, but I will say a couple things because, one, I was on a task force at Refugees International, which is a very good NGO that writes about and reports on refugee situations around the world and shines a light on them. I was part of a task force that came out with a report for the Biden administration on the need to do more for climate migrants, and so that report is available at the Refugees International site and it was being submitted to the Biden administration because the Biden administration had put out an executive order on refugees that included a piece that said we want to do a better job, we want to come up with new, fresh ideas on climate migrants. So I don’t know where that stands right now, but I think the other piece of information that I often give out while doing public speaking, especially to students, about this issue is that I feel not enough work has been done on it, and so if a student is very interested in staying in academia and studying deeper into some of these issues, I think climate migration is a field that is ripe for further work. It’s timely, it’s urgent, and it hasn’t been over-covered in the past. I admire several people, several friends who are working on these issues; one is Professor Beth Ferris at Georgetown University who was, in fact, on the secretary general’s High Level Panel on Internal Displacement and she made sure that some of these climate issues are raised in very high-level meetings. She was also part of this task force from Refugees International. Another smart person working on this is Amali Tower, a former International Rescue Committee colleague who started a group called Climate Refugees and she’s also trying to bring more attention to this; she’s kind of very entrepreneurial in trying to do more on that. Not everybody would agree that the term should be climate refugees since “refugees” has so much legal definitions attached to it and the people displaced by climate don’t have those kind of protections or understandings built around them yet. But I think it’s an area that there definitely needs to be more work done. So I think the basic question was, did I think something good was going to happen anytime soon related to this, and I can’t tell because these crazy situations around the world, the war in Ukraine and Taliban in charge in Afghanistan—I mean, that just completely derails the types of exercises that the world needs of thinking through very logically good governance, people coming together making decisions, building something constructive instead of reacting to bad things. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from raised hand Ali Tarokh. And unmute your—thank you. Q: Yes. OK, I am Ali Tarokh from Northeastern University. I came here in the United States ten years ago as a refugee. And I was in Turkey—I flew Iran to Turkey. I stayed there fourteen, sixteen months. So this is part of—my question is part of my lived experience in Turkey. So one part is humanitarian services, helping refugees move into the third country, OK? The one issue I—it’s my personal experience is the UNHCR system, there is many corruptions. This corruption makes lines, OK, produce refugees—because some countries such as Iran and Turkey, they are producing refugees and there is no solution for it, or sometimes they use it as—they use refugees as a weapon. They say, OK, if you don’t work with me—Turkey sent a message to EU: If you don’t work with me, I open the borders. I open the borders and send the flow of refugees to EU. Even some—even Iran’s government. So my question is, how can we in the very base on the ground—the level of the ground—how can we prevent all these corruption or how can we work out with this kind of government, countries that are—I named them the refugee producers. And by the time there is two sides of the refugees—one is just humanitarian services, which is our responsibility, United States playing globally there; and other side it seems refugees issue became like industry. In Turkey, the UNHCR staff, some lawyers/attorneys, they take money from people, they make fake cases for them. Even they ask them: Hey, what country—which country would you like to go, United States, Canada, Scandinavian countries? So what is our strategy? What is our solution to help real refugees or prevent produce refugees? RICHARD: Well, there’s several things that are raised by your question. Turkey and, now we see, Russia have both been countries where we have seen instances where they can turn on the flow of refugees and turn it off. And Turkey was watching people walk through Turkey, cross the Mediterranean is very scary, dangerous trip between Turkey and Greece in these rubber boats in 2015, 2016, and then they would make their way onward, and then, because of this big EU-Turkey deal that involved 3 billion euros at the time, all of a sudden, the flow stopped. And then in further negotiations going on and on, Turkey would say things that seemed like it came right from a Godfather movie, like, gee, I’d hate to see that flow start up again; that would be a real shame. And so it was clear it was sort of a threat that if you didn’t cooperate it could play this very disruptive role on the edges of Europe and deploying people, as you said, which is so cruel not just to the people who are receiving them but to the individuals themselves that they’re not being seen as people who need care but instead as a problem to be deployed in different directions. And we saw that also with Belarus and Poland and now also it may have been part of the thinking of Vladimir Putin that by attacking Ukraine, by going to war with Ukraine that there would be exactly what is happening now, people scattering from Ukraine into Europe and that that would be a way to drive a wedge between European countries and cause a lot of not just heartache but also animosity between these countries. So what the Russians didn’t seem to appreciate this time was that there would be so much solidarity to help the Ukrainians, and that has been a bit of a surprise. So you’ve also talked about corruption, though, and corruption is a problem all over the world for lots of different reasons, in business and it’s embedded in some societies in a way that sometimes people make cultural excuses for, but in reality we know it doesn’t have to be that way. But it is very hard to uproot and get rid of. So I find this work, the anti-corruption work going on around the world, really interesting and groups like Transparency International are just sort of fascinating as they try to really change the standards and the expectations from—the degree to which corruption is part of societies around the world. So UNHCR has to take great care to not hire people who are going to shake down and victimize refugees, and it’s not—there’s never a perfect situation, but I know that a lot of work is done to keep an eye on these kinds of programs so that the aid goes to the people who need it and it’s not sidetracked to go to bad guys. And the way I’ve seen it is, for example, if I travel overseas and I go to someplace where refugees are being resettled to the U.S. or they’re being interviewed for that, or I go to UNHCR office, there will be big signs up that will say the resettlement program does not cost money. If someone asks you for money, don’t pay it; you know, report this. And from time to time, there are mini scandals, but overall, it’s remarkable how much corruption is kept out of some of these programs. But it’s a never-ending fight. I agree with you in your analysis that this is a problem and in some countries more than others. FASKIANOS: So I’m going to take the next question from Pamela Waldron-Moore, who’s the chair of the political science department at Xavier University in New Orleans. There are reports in some news feeds that African refugees from Ukraine are being disallowed entry to some states accepting refugees. I think you did allude to this. Is there evidence of this, and if so, can the UN stop it or alleviate that situation? RICHARD: We saw before the Taliban took over in Afghanistan that some European countries were saying it was time for Afghans to go home again, and the idea that during this war it was safe for Afghans to go back—and especially for Afghans who are discriminated against even in the best of times in Afghanistan, like the Hazara minority. It’s just—I found that sort of unbelievable that some countries thought this was the right time to send people back to Afghanistan. And so at the moment there’s a weird situation in Afghanistan because it’s safer in some ways for the bulk of the people because the active fighting has—in large parts of the country—stopped. But it’s deadly dangerous for human rights defenders, women leaders, LBGTQ folks—anyone who tries to stand up to the Taliban—you know, scholars, thinkers, journalists. And so those are the folks that, in smaller numbers, we need to find some kind of way to rescue them and get them to safety while they are still inside Afghanistan or if that’s outside Afghanistan and in the region. The borders—the border situations change from time to time. For a while they were saying only people with passports could come out, and for most Afghan families, nobody had a passport or, if they did, it was a head of household had a passport for business or trade. But you wouldn’t have had passports for the spouse and the children. And so this has been a real dilemma. We also see a whole series of barriers to people getting out; so first you need a passport, then you need a visa to where you’re going, and then you might need a transit visa for a country that you are crossing. And what has come to pass is that people who are trying to help evacuate people from Afghanistan—a smaller and smaller number as the months go on; people are trying to make this happen because it’s so hard—that they will only take people out of the country if they feel that their onward travel is already figured out and that they have their visas for their final-destination country. So the actual number that’s getting out are tiny. And the people who have gotten out who are in either Pakistan or Iraq are very worried. And they’re afraid to be pushed back. They’re afraid they will run out of money. They are afraid—I think said this during my talk before—they’re afraid that there are people in Pakistan who will turn them in to the Taliban. And so it’s always hard to be a refugee, but right now it’s really frightening for people who are just trying to get to a safe place. FASKIANOS: And in terms of the discrimination that you referenced for refugees leaving the Ukraine, I mean, there have been some reports of EU—discrimination in European countries not accepting— RICHARD: Well, like African students who are studying in Ukraine— FASKIANOS: Yes. RICHARD: —who were not treated as if they were fleeing a country at war— FASKIANOS: Correct. RICHARD: —but instead were put in a different category and said, you know, go back, go home. FASKIANOS: Yes. RICHARD: Yeah, that’s—that is quite blatant— FASKIANOS: And there’s— RICHARD: And that was happening at the borders. FASKIANOS: Is there anything the UN can do about that, or is that really at the discretion of the countries—the accepting countries? RICHARD: Well, the—yeah, the UNHCR has these reception centers that they’ve set up, including between the border of Poland and Ukraine, and I think the other neighboring countries. And so if one can get to the reception center, one could potentially get additional help or be screened into—for special attention for needing some help that maybe a white Christian Ukrainian who spoke more than one language of the region would not need. FASKIANOS: Great. So let’s go to Susan Knott, who also wrote her question, but has raised her hand. So Susan, why don’t you just ask your question? And please unmute and identify yourself. KNOTT: OK, am I unmuted? FASKIANOS: Yes. KNOTT: OK. I am Susan Knott, University of Utah, Educational Policy and Leadership doctoral program. I am also a practicum intern at ASU, and I’m also a refugee services collaborator. And I’m engaged in a research project creating college and university pathways for refugees to resettle. I’m just wondering what your feel is about the current administration efforts in seeking to establish the pathway model similar to ASU’s Education for Humanity Initiative with Bard, and is there helping lead the Refugee Higher Education Access program that serves learners who require additional university-level preparation in order to transition into certificate and degree programs. And I just—I’m not just—and all of this buzz that’s going on since all of terrible crises are occurring, I’m not seeing a whole lot that—based on my own experience working with refugee education and training centers at colleges—on the college level, and learning about the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Ed and Immigration. I’m just wondering—and they’re saying let’s have this be more of a privately funded or partnerships with the university scholarships and private entities. What about a federally-funded university sponsorship program for refugee students given that the numbers or the data is showing that that age group is the largest number of just about every refugee population? RICHARD: That’s a really fascinating set of issues. I’m not the expert on them, so I’m going to disappoint you. but I appreciate that you took a little extra time in how you stated your intervention to add a lot of information for this group, which should very much care about this. I get a lot of questions every week about university programs that Afghan students could take advantage of. I don’t have a good handle on it, and I’m trying to do that with—I’m overdue for a conversation with Scholars at Risk in New York. Robert Quinn is the executive director of that, I believe. And so I’m glad you raised this and I’m not going to have a lot of extra to say about it. FASKIANOS: Anne, are there—is there—there’s a question in the chat in the Q&A about sources for data on U.S. initiatives toward refugees. Where would you direct people to go to get updates on the latest programs, et cetera? RICHARD: Sometimes I’m embarrassed to say the best summaries are done by not-for-profits outside the government than by the government. The best source for data on resettlement of refugees to the U.S. is a website that is funded by the U.S. government called WRAPSNET.org—WRAPS spelled W-R-A-P-S-N-E-T dot-O-R-G. And in double-checking some of the things last summer, I felt that DHS had better descriptions of some of the programs than the State Department did, and that’s my bureau that I used to—run, so—but they are responsible for determining who is in and who is out of these different programs, so maybe that’s why they do. So there’s a lot on the DHS website that’s interesting if you are looking for more information. And one of the things the Council does, it has done a number of these special web presentations: one on refugees that I got to help on a couple of years ago, and I think there’s one up now on Ukrainians. And this is the type of public education function that the Council does so well I think because they fact-check everything, and so it’s very reliable. FASKIANOS: Thank you for that plug. You can find it all on CFR.org—lots of backgrounders, and timelines, and things like that. So we don’t have that much time left, so I’m going to roll up two questions—one in the Q&A box and one because of your vast experience. So what role do NGOs play in refugee crises and migration initiatives, particularly in resettlement? And just from your perspective, Anne, you have been in academia, you’ve worked in the government, you worked at IRC, and now are at Freedom House. And so just—again, what would you share with the group about pursuing a career in this—government, non-government perspectives and, what students should be thinking about as they launch to their next phase in life. RICHARD: Yeah, that we could have a whole ‘nother hour on, right? That’s—(laughs)— FASKIANOS: I know, I know. It’s unfair to, right, do this at the very end, but— RICHARD: NGOs play really important roles in both the delivery of humanitarian assistance overseas and the help for resettlement in the United States. In the U.S. there are nine national networks of different groups; six are faith-based, three are not. They are non-sectarian, and they do amazing work on shoe-string budgets to—everything from meeting refugees at the airport, taking them to an apartment, showing them how the lights work and the toilet flushes, and coming back the next day, making sure they have an appropriate meal to have, and that the kids get in school, that people who need health care get it, and that adults who are able-bodied get jobs so they can support themselves. The other type of NGO are the human rights NGOs that now I’m doing more with, and I guess if you are thinking about careers in these, you have to ask yourself, you know, are you more of a pragmatic person where the most important thing is to save a life, or are you an idealist where you want to put out standards that are very high and push people to live up to them. Both types of organizations definitely help, but they just have very different ways of working. Another question for students is do you want high job security of a career in the U.S. government—say, as a Foreign Service Officer or as a civil servant where maybe you won’t move up very quickly, but you might have great sense of satisfaction that the things you were working on were making a difference because they were being decisively carried out by the U.S. or another government. Or do you prefer the relatively lean, flatter organizations of the NGO world where, as a young person, you can still have a lot of authority, and your views can be seen—can be heard by top layers because you’re not that far away from them. And so, NGOs are seen as more nimble, more fast moving, less job security. Having done both I think it really depends on your personality. Working in the government, you have to figure out a way to keep going even when people tell you no. You have figure out—or that it’s hard, or that it’s too complicated. You have to figure out ways to find the people who are creative, and can make thing happen, and can open doors, and can cut through red tape. In NGOs you can have a lot of influence. I was so surprised first time I was out of the State Department working for the International Rescue Committee one of my colleagues was telling me she just picks up the phone and calls the key guy on Capitol Hill and tells him what the law should be. That would never happen with a junior person in the U.S. government. You have to go through so many layers of bureaucracy, and approvals, and clearances. So, really, it depends on the type of person you are, and how you like to work, and the atmosphere in which you like to work. I can tell you you won’t get rich doing this type of work, unfortunately. But you might be able to make a decent living. I certainly have, and so I encourage students to either do this as a career or find ways to volunteer part-time, even if it’s tutoring a refugee kid down the block and not in some glamorous overseas location. I think you can get real sense of purpose out of doing this type of work. Thank you, Irina. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. And I have to say that your careful definitions of the different categories—and really, I think we all need to be more intentional about how we explain, talk about these issues because they are so complex, and there are so many dimensions, and it’s easy to make gross generalizations. But the way you laid this out was really, really important for deepening the understanding of this really—the challenge and the—what we’re seeing today. So thank you very much. RICHARD: Thank you. Thanks, everybody. FASKIANOS: So thanks to all—yeah, thanks to everybody for your great questions. Again, I apologize; we’re three minutes over. I couldn’t get to all your questions, so we will just have to continue looking at this issue. We will be announcing the fall Academic Webinar lineup in a month or so in our Academic Bulletin, so you can look for it there. Good luck with your end of the year, closing out your semester. And again, I encourage you to go to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research analysis on global issues. And you can follow us on Twitter at @CFR_Academic. So again, thank you, Anne Richard. Good luck to you all with finals, and have a good summer. (END)

Let us introduce a new series we are launching to spotlight individuals within the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program. Drawing on the enormous amount of talent and expertise within the Council’s Term Member Program, this series will feature a term member in conversation with a fellow term member discussing their career path, how they got to where they are, the challenges they have faced along the way, and the current work they are doing. We hope this regular series will provide an opportunity for Council term members to better engage and learn from one another, draw upon shared experiences within the group, and connect across geographies. Our first installment in this series will feature third-year term member Nishant Roy, chief of strategic operations at Chobani, in conversation with fifth-year term member Alex Yergin, data strategist at Booz Allen Hamilton. For those of you who do not yet know him, Nishant’s impressive career has included serving in the United States Air Force and being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, working as an analyst in the private sector for Goldman Sachs, joining government as special advisor to the Administrator at USAID, and now working with Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya as chief of strategic operations.  

Michael Vazquez, independent policy advisor, discusses LGBTQ+ rights around the world and the Biden administration’s efforts to promote and defend these rights at home and abroad. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Social Justice and Foreign Policy webinar. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record and the audio, video, and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Michael Vazquez with us today to talk about LGBTQ+ rights around the world. We have shared his bio with you, so I will just give you a few highlights. Michael Vazquez is a public theologian, community organizer, and communications strategist. He serves as an advisor to government institutions, political candidates, religious and spiritual leaders, and nonprofit organizations on issues at the intersection of religion, politics, and social justice. Mr. Vazquez served as communications director at the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at USAID, the religion and faith director at the Human Rights Campaign, and as a fellow at Faith and Public Life, and founder of Brave Commons. He was also an advisor to the faith engagement team for the Biden-Harris campaign. So, Michael, thanks very much for being with us. I would like it if you could set the table and talk a little bit about what is being done to promote LGBTQ+ rights in the United States and around the world, and how faith communities can contribute to this. VAZQUEZ: Absolutely. Thank you again for having me. Hi, everyone. Want to wish everyone a happy Lunar New Year to everyone who celebrates, and a happy Black History and Black Futures Month. I want to begin by talking about the role that faith communities, particularly faith leaders, have always held in communities throughout history as truth tellers and storytellers, right? That’s one of the principal roles that faith leaders have held, and not just clergy but cantors, singers, choirs, artists. Their role has been to disseminate truth and to tell a story about community in order to edify a community towards a particular end. Typically, throughout faith traditions, that’s towards the common good. How do we ensure that every member of our community and those that serve the communities that surround us experience equity, experience justice, safety, and security? And storytelling is a means of achieving that, and truth telling is a means of achieving that. One of the truths most religious traditions hold as central and core to their faith is that every individual has inherent dignity and value. You find that Islam. You find that in Christianity. You find that in Judaism. You find that in Hinduism. Across traditions, you find this core belief that every individual in the entirety of creation has inherent dignity and value. And so while there might be disagreements about policy, while there might be disagreements about positions on gender and sexuality broadly speaking, every tradition has maintained that there is dignity in every human person. And I think that’s a critical thing for us to set the table with because as we look at how faith leaders and faith communities both domestically and globally can engage in advancing LGBTQ rights, we need to go back to the core tenets that these communities hold and uphold and call on them to draw out of those traditions in order to advance justice for the LGBTQ community and, as a result, advance justice and equity for all communities. Pope Francis speaks on this by saying that disagreements of a philosophical or theological nature between faiths or between particular groups and people of faith are not obstacles to uniting to pursue shared goals as long as everyone involved shares a concern for the common good. And so I think the first and foremost thing that religious leaders and faith communities can do is tell the truth, right? Tell the truth that I might have my own thoughts and beliefs that I was raised in, that I learned in my church, or in my synagogue, or in my temple, but I do believe  that every person has dignity; thus, if everyone has dignity, then everyone should have the same rights ascribed to them and those rights should not be taken away. That should be the foundation, right? I think that what we have seen, is as this story has been told both in the U.S. and abroad, as this—the reality that LGBTQ people—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer people—have human—basic dignity, and thus have—should have access to the full diversity of human rights available to everyone else. As this has been shared, we have seen an increase—the data has shown—Pew shows there’s been an increase of acceptance globally for LGBTQ people and rights that should be afforded to us. Likewise, the Public Religious (sic; Religion) Research Institute has shown that the majority of people of faith in the United States support comprehensive protections against discrimination for the LGBTQ community. So I think the beginning is just tell the truth. Tell the story, right, that people—everyone should have access to rights. That should be foundational, right? And thus, if we start with the fact that I have inherent dignity, and you have inherent dignity, and everyone listening to this call has inherent dignity, then the immediate response that should be, then, we need to make sure that our policies reflect that we all have that dignity, that we all should have access to rights. So this begins with looking at the hard truths—the hard truths and then the hopeful things, right? The hard truth is that there has been a campaign globally by the religious right based in the United States and elsewhere, but primarily in the United States, to advance anti-LGBTQ policies, to support—whether that’s the anti-sodomy laws that we see in the Middle East and Africa; that’s—or we see throughout Africa some other anti-LGBTQ laws that are promoted by Catholic bishops, particularly in Uganda as an example. Throughout the world we see these, first, colonial holdover laws, colonial anti-sodomy laws that were left behind by European colonial powers and that have remained on the books ever since these colonial powers left these regions. And then you see, right, outside groups—outside conservatives—conservative religious groups pushing for the maintenance of these anti-LGBTQ laws, whether that’s banning relationships, whether that’s making being LGBTQ against the law and punishable by imprisonment and incarceration, or by death. We see that a lot of the advocacy for these laws come from minority religious groups in the United States and elsewhere. And we saw in order to help sustain this, in the previous administration we saw Secretary Pompeo—Secretary of State Pompeo institute the Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, right? There’s a close connection between this idea that LGBTQ rights must be prevented that these conservative religious groups are pushing, and this idea that religious freedom must be protected from, over, and against LGBTQ rights; that religious freedom, particularly I would say conservative religious freedom, was under threat globally and must be protected by—against or from the advancement of LGBTQ rights. And so the Ministerial on Religious Freedom elevated religious freedom above other rights or made a claim  contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that gives us a broad array of equal—coequal human rights, this ministerial and the previous administration claimed that there was—there’s religious freedom and then there’s all other rights, right? And we need to reframe that. Now, part of that comes from religious leaders coming into the room and saying, no, we believe that all rights are equal. The new secretary of state, Secretary Blinken, refers to this and says religious freedom is coequal with other human rights because human rights are indivisible, right? We need religious leaders to stand in that also, not to say that our rights as religious people or people of faith are greater than the rights of other people. In order to safeguard LGBTQ rights and to advance LGBTQ rights globally, we have to get to the heart of this debate that there is religious freedom and religious rights in opposition to LGBTQ rights. What we see, again, is that the growing—the data shows a growing support amongst people of faith for LGBTQ rights. And we also have to recognize that LGBTQ people are also, they, themselves, people of faith, right? Myself, as a person of faith, have worked alongside a lot of other people of faith who identify, who are also LGBTQ. And so when we come into the conversation, we’re often forgotten as people who have value to add to this conversation on human rights. And we’re forgotten as, it’s only religious people over here and LGBTQ people over here when, in fact, there’s a greater diversity in humanity, and thus our rights should be contextualized in that way. Religious freedom is a major global issue. I will say that. It is a major global issue that we have to address with the rise of anti-Semitism, with the rise of Islamophobia, with the crackdowns on religious minorities around the world, there’s work that we have to do. There’s critical work that we have to do to ensure that religious minorities are protected, but we need to be able to distinguish between protecting religious freedom for religious minorities who are actually being persecuted, and the attempts by certain communities to use religious freedom as a weapon against other minority groups, which is what I believe we see in this battle for LGBTQ rights both domestically and abroad. There are two major policies I want to speak to briefly and then we can get into it a little bit more later. But we have the GLOBE Act introduced by Senator Markey and we have the Equality Act, which passed the House for the second time last February. So we’re coming up—it was at the end of last February, so we’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of the Equality Act, which would provide comprehensive civil rights protections in matters of public accommodation, housing, employment, credit, et cetera, for LGBTQ people. Passed the House last February. We’re still waiting to see what its fate will be in the Senate. But I want to speak to this one first before getting to the GLOBE Act because I think what we’ve seen is a large group of religious support for comprehensive LGBTQ civil rights protections in the United States. And as the United States has pushed forward LGBTQ rights domestically, we have seen a direct correlation to the expansion of civil rights and human rights for LGBTQ people around the world. Passing the Equality Act would provide a foundation for nations around the world that have not advanced comprehensive rights either to just look at, here’s a blueprint for what we can do to ensure that our own people are protected, right? Regardless of what some of our neighbors might believe and think about gender and sexuality broadly speaking, we want to ensure that our neighbors who are LGBTQ are protected and afforded the same rights as everyone else. And so the Equality Act provides—simply by saying, the United States wants to be a leader, which is what the Biden administration has said. It wants to be a leader in the advancement of LGBTQ rights both domestically and globally. What we need to do as a country is to enshrine civil rights protections by passing the Equality Act, which would ultimately put LGBTQ people under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other civil rights legislation. The GLOBE Act, on the other hand, would make preventing and responding to discrimination and violence against LGBTQ people a foreign policy priority. It would permanently create a special envoy within the State Department to protect the human rights of LGBTQ people, which we did see. The Biden administration appointed Jessica Stern as that special envoy, and Jay Gilliam, a former colleague of mine, as the senior LGBTQI coordinator at the USAID. And so these two appointments, outside of the passage of the GLOBE Act, are indicators of the work the Biden administration is doing to move along our foreign policy priorities, but passing the GLOBE Act would cement the rights of LGBTQ people globally as a major foreign policy priority for the country beyond the Biden administration, which is critical. There’s a lot of issues that we’re facing globally in the rights of LGBTQ people who are being persecuted. Whether it’s those anti-sodomy laws I alluded to earlier or the global fight to finally end HIV/AIDS, there’s a lot of work that remains to be done. And so what we need is legislation that religious leaders can stand behind, as they have for decades in the United States and globally, to push these pieces of legislation forward. “In the long run”—I’m quoting Marie Juul Petersen from the Danish Institute for Human Rights—“In the long run, the insistence on incompatibility between freedom of religion or belief in gender equality has the potential to destabilize and delegitimize the broader human rights system.” Agreeing with her, I believe that the work that we have to do as religious leaders, as theologians, as religious communities is to speak up and tell the story, tell the truth about the fact that we are people who comprehensively and overwhelmingly support the rights of LGBTQ people in policy and within our communities, and allow that to help move these critical policies forward and cement human rights for our community. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much, Michael. That was terrific, and apologies for the technical recording prompts. VAZQUEZ: That’s OK. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: And not prompts. So, in any case, we’re going to turn now to all of you for your questions and comments. And if you want to raise your hand, I will call you. Don’t be shy. And you can also write your question in the Q&A box. If you do that there, please say who you are so we know where you’re coming from. There is a written question right now, which is by an anonymous attendee, and it’s very long. I’m going to first go to Bruce Knotts. He has raised his hand. Bruce. And please say who you are and unmute yourself. KNOTTS: Hi. My name is Bruce Knotts, and I direct the Unitarian Universalist Association office at the United Nations. And we’ve been working on LGBT rights at the United Nations for a long time. And I’m just wondering if you have any ideas or thoughts about what the United Nations can do to better protect LGBT rights. And let me just further say that it’s my impression that I’m noticing somewhat of a diminishment of energy around LGBT rights lately than we had in earlier years. So I’m somewhat concerned in that way. Thank you. VAZQUEZ: Yeah, no, thank you. I appreciate that question, Bruce. I think that there are a couple things. I want to speak to the second thing you mentioned first, is that I think when you look at the broad spectrum of issues, even just domestically, that we’re facing in the United States, I believe there’s a lot of passion and desire to move, let’s say, the Equality Act forward, to move LGBTQ rights forward. Last year was the highest year on record again for violence against the transgender community, for fatal violence. So we’re in a critical moment where we need action. But I do think that with the issues threatening American democracy, with the shaky foundations that we’re facing, with the divisions in the country, a lot of what are also LGBTQ issues are democratic issues. Preserving American democracy protects LGBTQ people in the United States. And so I think there is some of that that I’ve seen. Let’s shift our focus as advocates to preserve voting rights so that therefore we can ensure the Equality Act does pass. Let’s ensure that LGBTQ rights have a right—LGBTQ people have a right to the ballot box, et cetera. So I do think there’s some of that dynamic, but I do think there are a lot of ways—if you look at some of the polling numbers, a lot of people think when it comes to the Equality Act that these rights already exist. And so part of the public education that needs to take place is reminding folks that just because we got marriage equality in the United States, or in certain countries around the world, doesn’t mean that we’ve achieved the pinnacle of human rights, and LGBTQ people are just happy and throwing parties and everyone’s just content, and everyone can go home now, we’re fine. I think there’s a reframing, right? We have this—a victory today, but we have all these losses the next day. And how do we continue fighting? And part of that is the way that we message, right? We still have work to do. And I think some people have gotten exhausted, and they thought—and some people think we’ve achieved it. I think on the matter of what the UN can do, I believe the United Nations have for some time a working group of faith leaders partnering with the UN to advance LGBTQ rights globally, and how to navigate the complexities that can arise in those conversations. And so I think having a greater foundation of religious engagement on the matter would support the work that the UN is trying to do around the world to advance LGBTQ rights. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. All right, so just looking now, I’m going to call upon Julie Schiwal, who is at the—she’s a program specialist at the Religion and Inclusive Societies Program at U.S. Institute of Peace, USIP. So, Julia, can you unmute yourself and ask your question? SCHIWAL: Yeah, for sure. I guess I’m just curious because I deal with religious actors very frequently at the religion team at USIP. And we are working on an approach to include gender and sexual minorities in peacebuilding. And pretty much I agree with you that many religions have a sense of universal dignity, right? But I think that in our work when I talk to people about this who have disparate views on GSM inclusion—and I just use GSM for LGBTQ because it internationally works. Dignity is not the ground I’ve made progress on. It’s not even really about that. It’s more about cultural history and the needs of people. And I feel like you can kind of circumvent that whole theological debate and work with religious actors a little bit more effectively if you kind of take  a more pragmatic approach that doesn’t get into the grounds of, like, dignity in Islam, right? You just talk about public health and HIV, right? You talk about women’s groups in Pakistan that are already working with trans women. You just stick with the local, pragmatic approach. So I guess have you had success using this sense of universal dignity in a global LGBTQ context? Because I haven’t. And second off, I guess, I’m just looking for  your thoughts, since you’re familiar with me, on  how are we going to be doing global LGBTQ rights in the future? Especially considering that this human rights approach has largely failed over the past decade? It doesn’t get enough pull. VAZQUEZ: Oh, absolutely. I agree with you 100 percent, Julia. I think if we had more time I could have gotten into that some more. I think for me, I think I’ve seen dignity, both in the U.S. and in Latin America, be a strong motivating factor in these conversations. But even Latin America is a good example of where recontextualizing the language has been hugely successful. In communities where language around family and community is more important than dignity, we shift the dignity conversation to that. It doesn’t mean we stop talking about the inherent dignity in every person, but we use localized language. And so I think some of the struggle I saw at USAID, and I think remains in a lot of global development work outside of federal government, is that folks are not willing to do the historical work—some of what you’re referencing, the cultural contextualization work you’re referencing—to be able to get—be in community, and talking in a way that makes sense for folks. It doesn’t shift us away from dignity, but we still contextualize, right? A lot of our global human rights and development work has been incredibly Western. It’s been very much, white folks show up elsewhere and say: This is how this should pan out, and this is what this should look like, because it worked in Ohio. And that’s not helpful, right? I think Administrator Power has been a good example of trying to push for more localized development, but some of the bureaucratic issues we face in government is limiting the ways that I think we can achieve what you’re talking about, right? I still think it’s critical, because I think ultimately if we don’t address dignity and the inherent value of individuals, we end up having is, OK, we addressed—and this has happened. I’ve seen this with the ways in which certain Catholic actors have engaged globally, is we might work and push for access to the right HIV preventative measures and medications, et cetera, but not engaging in the fundamental theological conversation around, these people have inherent dignity, even though the Catholic—the catechism of the Catholic Church says that you’re intrinsically disordered, right? And this gets, in part, to mental health issues and mental health crises for people who maintain their faith traditions even alongside their LGBTQI+ identities. We need to be able to say, no, you still have worth and value, right? It's not like we’re helping you in spite of gender sexual minority status. We’re helping you because you are human, you’re my neighbor, you’re my community, you’re my family. Thus, you are worthy of the support we’re giving you. So I think it’s both/and. I think a lot of religious actors need to be able to have that framing to get to some of the core issues that are proliferating a lot the issues we’re facing. FASKIANOS: I think—just to follow up on that—do you have the stats on the mental health issues for the community? It is very significant. VAZQUEZ: Yeah, I don’t have them off hand. I can tell you that the suicidality rates are somewhere around four to eight times higher for transgender individuals in the United States than for non-transgender folks. The number shifts depending on race and ethnicity. But it’s drastic, right? And a lot of times—I mean, when you look at youth homelessness in the United States, for example, 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ. The majority of those folks—of those kids, right, babies—are on the street because they come from a highly conservative religious family who has kicked them out because of identifying as LGBTQ. And so I don’t have all of the data, but that’s the one that’s most striking to me. The mental health issues  amongst homeless youth are majority LGBTQ—or, close to majority LGBTQ, is exacerbated by conservative religious ideology. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Steven Paulikas of All Saints’ Episcopal Church of Park Slope. So, Steve, if you can unmute yourself. PAULIKAS: Hi, Irina, great to see you. And thank you, Michael, so much. I really appreciate your theological framing and the idea of dignity of the human being. And it’s really great. There was a group of faithful mostly LGBTQ-affirming folks in the Republic of Georgia, in Tbilisi, who formed an Episcopal community there. And you might be aware that over the summer during Tbilisi Pride, the Georgian Orthodox Church organized a mob which attacked the Pride celebration and ransacked the offices of Tbilisi Pride. And our community went into hiding because it was so dangerous. It was really totally heartbreaking. But the thing we kind of learned from that was that the Orthodox folks were consulting—actively consulting with American religious actors, who sort of helped them organize this. And I’m sure you’ve seen this pattern around the world. And it kind of occurs to me as you’re speaking that kind of to get to the nut of the problem, I think that the main parties that need to be given this message are actually American religious organizations who project and export a sort of colonial-based anti-LGBTQ agenda. So that’s kind of the incredibly difficult thing to do. But have you found any successful strategies for being able to engage with the actual American religious actors who are sort of fomenting hatred around the world? VAZQUEZ: Yeah, absolutely. A couple things that immediately come to mind—first, thank you for that. I feel like that gets right into  a little bit of what I shared earlier about the issues of religious freedom globally being much more dynamic and complex than particularly the previous administration attempted to paint, and what conservative—primarily Evangelical and conservative Catholic American groups attempt to paint, right? This idea that Christianity globally is under assault, and we must protect Christianity at all costs, and that this fight for LGBTQ rights is an assault on Christianity, to summarize. I was grateful, for example, to Administrator Power, who issued a statement in response to not what happened in Georgia, but what happened referencing what was taking place in Ghana in recent years. Her quote is: That we also call attention to government crackdowns on LGBTQI-affirming faith communities in Africa, listing that among other religious minority groups that need to be protected. And that was on International Religious Freedom Day this past October. I think some of what, first, passage of the GLOBE Act would do is make it possible to—in the United States sanctions regime to include the protection of LGBTQ rights, being able to sanction foreign governments for not protecting their own citizens from these kinds of assaults that you’re referencing, what took place in Ghana, et cetera. I think when it comes to engaging with U.S. actors who are the—I agree with you—are the principal players pushing forward this anti-LGBTQ agenda globally, what I’ve—the thing I found most interesting is private dialogue, which is in a lot of ways, I’ll just be absolutely honest with you all, is incredibly annoying, right? We don’t all have the time to sit down and have one-on-one conversations with every individual conservative faith leader in the country in an attempt to persuade them to do otherwise. But that is part of what I’ve seen to be successful, seeing Catholic bishops move from far-right to center-right.  I’ve seen some Catholic bishops move from center to center-left, some issuing—like Bishop Stowe of Kentucky—issuing a statement in support of the Equality Act, the first time a Catholic bishop in U.S. history has supported LGBTQ rights legislation. That has come as a result of these kind of private dialogues with these leaders. That is not, in and of itself, sufficient enough to achieve what we need to achieve. But I do think we need to have a greater conversation about how much power is afforded to these groups. On the contrary, I think we don’t give enough attention to the religious left. The religious left is incredibly powerful and active. The Center for American Progress Faith Initiative released a report, I believe it was, last year, if not it was 2020, on the ways in which this conversation and this dialogue is portrayed in the media. And oftentimes the data’s shown that while there is an overwhelming support for LGBTQ rights amongst religious people, that when this conversation is portrayed by major news networks and print media, et cetera, what you see is conservative religious people and secular LGBTQ people. So part of what we need to do is a communications and messaging strategy, and shifting the dialogue. Actually, the majority of people of faith, the majority of religious people actually support LGBTQ rights. So let’s stick to that. But that also means working with media partners and encouraging them or pressuring them, exhorting them, whatever language you want to use, right? Whatever fits your approach, to shift the conversation from one of this false dichotomy between religion and support for LBGTQ people, and showing as one as, no, the majority of people support and identify and recognize the dignity of LGBTQ people and their rights. That, again, is not the whole picture, but I think passing legislation, changing the way that we message, helps reframe and thus remove power from these institutions—conservative religious institutions that are proliferating here and around the world. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the written question from Luciano Kovacs, who is the area coordinator for Middle East and Europe at the Presbyterian Church and a member of the Presbyterian Mission Agency LGBTQIA+ working group. And his question is: What is your suggestion of how to navigate our affirming advocacy work for queer people across the globe, and the need to not harm partners globally where anti-LGBTQ laws may affect them, if they were associated by their governments to our advocacy work? VAZQUEZ: Absolutely. On the first issue, I think what—one thing that I would love—I would personally love to see, and I think would be incredibly effective and helpful, is providing more resources to affirming LGBTQ faith groups, both domestically and abroad. Some of the biggest issues they face—even though we see a larger population of both—particularly domestically, we’re seeing a locus of issues, an export of hate, et cetera. I think if we were able to fund, support, resource more affirming LGBTQ faith groups that already exist, right? We don’t need to create new ones. We don’t need to start another nonprofit, create another NGO, create a new bureaucracy. What we need to do is resource those that exist to do the work they’re already doing. So a lot of these groups are incredibly under-resourced. When compared to an organization within the infrastructure of the religious right that are incredibly well-funded, incredibly well-established and -resourced, both in media, financially, et cetera, we need to be able to shift and redistribute resources to support what is the majority opinion in protecting the human rights of LGBTQ folks. And I’m not seeing the question in the chat. Do you want to— FASKIANOS: Sure. I’m sorry, I dismissed it because I asked it. VAZQUEZ: It’s OK. FASKIANOS: And so it—how to navigate our affirming advocacy work and then need to not harm partners globally where anti-LGBTQ laws may affect them if they were associated by their governments to our advocacy work. VAZQUEZ: Right. I think that, again, not to harp on legislation, because the legislation isn’t the end-all, be-all, it is a critical component of our advocacy work. It is one piece of broader human rights organizing globally. I think, again, the GLOBE Act would provide the provisions for the U.S. government to respond in scenarios where, let’s say, it’s the Republic of Georgia cracking down—or, supporting the crackdown on LGBTQ-affirming faith groups or other LGBTQ groups. Being able to respond in any number of ways, sanctions regime, et cetera, would—those are tools that we currently don’t have and are not equipped to respond to. And so it’s often—you see attempts to support advocates on the ground, advocates globally. But we can’t, because those resources aren’t in place. I think it is more critical, right—in particular regions it is critical that we support in private as much as possible. I’ve seen a lot of advocates even in the United States that work particularly with transgender individuals and transgender groups needing to work in secret. And we need to continue to provide that safety net to those groups. We cannot—there is, thankfully, a lot of freedom now which did not exist even twenty years ago in the United States. There’s a lot of freedom now to be  out and proud in a lot of spaces in the United States. There are parts of the country where that’s still not the case. That is not true elsewhere. That is not a blanket statement we can say for everywhere. That there are just Pride parades that have happened—y’all know this, right? And so I’ve seen a desire of certain advocates. We want to be out, and proud, and be free. In places where that is a threat to the life and safety and dignity of the individual, we can’t, right? And so work in secret needs to continue to happen. And finding ways to provide the resources necessary, whether that’s educational resources, financial resources, asylum resources for these individuals and communities should be on our priority list before trying to push folks into a more public setting. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to Ani Zonneveld, who has her hand raised. Ani, president of Muslims for Progressive Values. Oh. OK. It looks like she lowered her hand. All right. So moving on— VAZQUEZ: Hi, Ani. (Laughter.) An old colleague. FASKIANOS: OK. That’s too bad. I’m going to go next to Dominic Bocci, who is at CFR, and also at the Council for Global Equality. So, knowing that there’s a significant amount of work that needs to be done about domestic and international LBGTQ+ rights, what would you suggest the Biden administration focus on in terms of their global approach? Decriminalization, increased funding for LGBTQ+ civil society groups? And what is the likelihood of the passing of the GLOBE Act, given the gridlock that we’re seeing in Washington? VAZQUEZ: Right. The likelihood of the GLOBE Act passing is right alongside the likelihood of the Equality Act passing. I think it’s caught up with a lot of critical civil rights legislation beyond LGBTQ rights. It’s similar—in a similar situation as voting rights reform, criminal justice reform, et cetera. And so I’m not a pessimist, though. I believe that anything is possible, right? And so I’m hopeful that we will still be able to push along, right, these critical pieces of legislation to transform the experience and lives of LGBTQ people, both in the United States and abroad. I think in terms of what the Biden administration can focus on globally, I think decriminalization is absolutely a priority and is the global fight to end HIV/AIDS. I think those two come immediately to mind, because those are things that are threatening the literal lives of our community. And so before we can get to—I think there’s—as a case study perhaps, I think a lot of attention was given the marriage equality battle in the United States and in other countries around the world. Unfortunately, I think, marriage was least of our priorities. It was important. I think marriage equality is a critical right. It’s a victory that we achieved, and we celebrate. It’s critical that folks around the world are able to access that same right. But compared to other issues, like when folks—when trans folks are under assault in the United States and around the world, right? There are folks living in countries that have criminalized just simply existing as an LGBTQI person. That is a major issue and those should be major priorities. And so I think making sure that the—we look at victories like marriage equality is yay, great, awesome, amazing. But then we truly refocus on what is threatening the actual lives of individuals and how can we protect them and end those things? So more investments—which we’ve seen the Biden administration make some significant moves towards particularly the fight on HIV/AIDS. And I think some more work under criminalization should really shift this battle globally. And I think also the way in which—Secretary Blinken has already done this in the reframing of the religious freedom language, but additional work to reexamine and shift how we’re engaging in the conversation around religious freedom globally will significantly help some of these issues that we’re facing when it comes to LGBTQ rights as it pertains to religious actors being involved. I think you’re still on mute. I’m sorry. FASKIANOS: How long have I been doing this? OK. VAZQUEZ: It happens to all of us. (Laughter.) FASKIANOS: Barbara McBee has written a question on—Barbara, would you like to ask it yourself? MCBEE: I think there might be two there. Hi. FASKIANOS: There are. (Laughs.) That’s why we’d like you to ask it. (Laughs.) MCBEE: Which one? Thank you. I’m Barbara McBee. Soka Gakkai Buddhist Organization. And I think what’s pressing and marvelous is that you started off your dialogue with the inherent dignity of life. That is literally written into our core values. But if you really don’t feel that, which I think is at the core of the justification for abusing GLBTQ people. I am also gay, so I have a particular interest in your thoughts about how in our dialogues—and I have done much of that—how in our dialogues, one-to-one, they are helpful, they are not the be-all, end-all. And perhaps they affect a larger scope. In some cases, they are negated. But my questions are two: If you sincerely do not believe in the inherent dignity of—and value of all, how, particularly faith-based people, can we encourage further the development of that across all religions, Abrahamic included? And what are the current laws? If last year was the worst year in our history of trans murders, what are the laws on the books? And what is being done to protect trans men and women? Thank you. Nice to see you, Irina,you look great. And thank you, Michael. FASKIANOS: Thank you. VAZQUEZ: Thank you, Barbara. I appreciate that so much. I think absolutely. I think I will come back—I always come back to this. I know a lot of folks in the field always come back to, we have inherent dignity and value. And I think the Abrahamic traditions absolutely have this in their core value. You look at Genesis, which is a text shared by Jews and Christians, as saying that God made humanity in God’s image, right? And so that’s page one, right? That’s on the first page. Every individual created reflects the image of their creator. That’s the theological assertion on page one. And so that means you share the image of God. I have the image of God. My neighbor has the image of God. That person that cut me off this morning, they have the image of God in them too. Or even the people that frustrate us most, people who are the most different from us, they all have in them—the bear the image of God. That’s one example of many that we could point to. And thus, if someone bears the image of God, no matter how different they are from me, I have a duty and responsibility as someone who cares about the common good to protect them, right? And there are myriad of examples of folks with this text as a core text and tenet of their faith, who have done horrific things. Who have used that same—these same scriptures to advocate for slavery, to advocate for the forced removal of indigenous people throughout the world, and particularly in the North and South America. There are a lot of folks who will twist their scriptures and their sacred texts in order to support these horrific atrocities that they’ve committed later on. I think the same goes here. I think there are some folks that we absolutely can engage with and shift from a position of, no, we need to be—we need these anti-sodomy laws globally, or we need to not pass anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ community, et cetera. There are folks that can be moved from that position to a position of support, or even a position of neutrality, which is progress, right? It’s not perfect, but it’s progress, right? It gets us closer to where we’re trying to go. And I do absolutely believe that there are people who cannot be convinced, unfortunately, or who refuse to be convinced. But when the majority of people of faith in the United States have arrived at a point where, even amongst the most conservative people, it is in the—or 50-something percent—sorry for the not precise number off the top of my head—50-something percent of Evangelical Americans, white Evangelicals, the most conservative group in the United States, support LGBTQ rights like the Equality Act. If the most conservative group—where it goes up to 81 percent of Latino/Hispanic/Latinx Catholics who also support LGBTQ comprehensive civil rights protect for LGBTQ people. So we’re seeing a broad spectrum of support moving that direction. If we still have a small subgroup of people who disagree with that but are not able to influence policy to the degree to which it takes away your rights or my rights, I’m fine with that. I want to keep working on those issues, and I’ll get to that in a second, but I’m fine with that, as long as our rights are protected, the rights of our neighbors are protected, the rights particularly of transgender women of color, who are the most targeted and the most victimized by fatal violence in this country, Puerto Rico being one of the biggest epicenters for violence against the trans community. What I think that communities of faith can do beyond legislative advocacy, beyond media messaging, communications, beyond  the global advocacy work that we’re talking about, is intercommunal dialogue. Which does take place, right? You will find pockets of that. I think there just needs to be more of that. I want to see more progressive Christians sitting down with more conservative Christians and pressing the issue. Those conversations need to continue to happen. But in the meantime, while those conversations are happening, we’re trying to bring more people along. We deserve civil rights. We need our human rights. So that conversation will happen while the work is happening. In the long run, we need to continue educating our faith communities. And that starts from the beginning. Early childhood education is the locus where this all begins. You can see this. The data will show this. Research will show this, whether it’s on issues of racial justice, or LGBTQI justice, and gender equity and justice. Across the spectrum, when you start with children and you begin educating children from an early age about the inherent dignity of all people, the rights of all people, and why we secure those rights, that’s where we win. Which is why we see legislation around—at the state level around the United States—trying to prevent conversations, to ban conversations around racial justice and LGBTQI justice in schools. Because we know people who want to prevent this from happening know that if you teach children from an early age that when they become adults, they will advocate for legislation that reflects the dignity and human rights and civil rights that we’re pressing. And that is what we need. That kind of legislation is what we need to protect trans folks. I think to get to that last piece of the question. There’s minimal—when you look at—or, last year there were over thirty state legislatures around the United States that were pushing forward anti-trans bills, whether that was anti-trans sports bills, anti-trans medical bills. Several were successful. This year we’re seeing a new slate of hate across the legislatures trying to achieve the same ends. Trying to prevent trans kids from playing in sports. Trying to prevent trans folks from getting access, particularly trans children, from getting access to the right kind of medical attention and care that they need, that affirms them and their gender. Fighting against those and pushing for the right kind of hate crime legislation at the state and federal level will help protect trans folks in the long run, but it does come back, I think, to how do faith communities educate their own communities to stop this kind of violence from taking place? FASKIANOS: Thank you, Michael. Let’s go to Bud Heckman. Bud had written a very long question. So, Bud, if you could ask it yourself, I would appreciate it. And he’s with the Interfaith Funders Group. And it would be great to hear from, Bud. HECKMAN: Thank you. I just will make it shorter. I understood when there was a success in making a change in the U.S. context with regard to how people felt about LGBTQ issues, that there was a concerted effort on the part of LGBTQ rights organizations to stop framing things in terms of rights, and to start framing them in terms of trying to build empathy on a one-on-one basis. And that it was only when that sort of shift happened that there was a seismic shift in U.S. culture around LGBTQ issues. I’m wondering about your sort of understanding of that, and how that plays out in other contexts now. In terms of the use of language, how do you frame the issues both here in the U.S. and then in other countries? Assumingly so it’s on a country-by-country and culture-by-culture basis in terms of the tactics and the ways you go about doing it. VAZQUEZ: No, absolutely. I think part of the issue is that the United States for a long time, there has been this false idea that if you afford rights to a group that has previously not be afforded those rights, that in order to do so you must take away the rights of another group, right? Which is why you often see the pushback against movements for racial justice and equity for racial minority groups around the United States. The pushback often in white communities  there is a fear—there is a real, felt fear—a documented fear that giving Black people basic fundamental human rights is going to take away from the rights of white folks, right? I think the same thing has happened with LGBTQ rights similarly. In that if we give LGBTQ people rights then straight people aren’t going to have the same rights. Or if we let you—if we let y’all get married, then my marriage means something different,  or it means something less than. And so I think of the issues around the rights language and messaging has been around this fundamental idea—this pervasive idea that I need to give up rights in order for someone else to gain them, instead of being, if we all get human rights, or if we all get fundamental human rights afforded to us, then we all have that. No one is losing out on civil rights protections because someone else was given them, right? And so the empathy languages worked significantly because it reframed some of that for folks. And I, as a communications specialist and strategist, I absolutely support shifting our language and our—the ways in which we message things in order to achieve our ends. As much as necessary. As long as we don’t miss the heart of the matter. I don’t think that shifting our language to soften it—which is not what I’m saying what you’re suggesting here—but softening our language or shifting it that gets away from the point, that people deserve rights is ultimately helpful. Because I think we need to—I think America in particular needs to grow up and understand that giving human rights to all people is not a threat to American democracy, but it is what upholds America and what makes America the nation that it claims to be. And I think that—again, recontextualizing that for a global context, I think that’s a particular issue in the United States, where in other countries it’s going to be significantly different. We were talking about earlier with Julia’s question, where pragmatic and contextualized, 100 percent. But at least when it comes to the United States, I think we need to hold onto this language because of rights advocacy, because if we don’t, we lose the heart of what we’re pushing for. Not just for LGBTQ people, but our broader spectrum of advocacy for civil rights protections. FASKIANOS: Great. Waiting for additional questions, but, Michael, as we’ve seen what’s gone on in this country  around Black Lives Matter, the killing of George Floyd, that has really affected our credibility and our standing in the world, that we’re—we are not abiding by human rights here at home. And so what should we be doing to put us back or try to take back this space as a leader on the stage in promoting human rights, and the fundamental rights and dignity of all people? VAZQUEZ: Yeah. Thank you. I love that question because I think we’ve always—the United States has for a long time tried to position itself as a leader on human rights globally, while we see an epidemic of violence against transgender people, specifically transgender women of color. An epidemic of violence against the Black community. State-sanctioned police violence that continues to take the lives of our community. And yet, we’re sanctioning, or condemning foreign governments for their human rights abuses. And I think what has allowed other human rights abuses to take place globally, even when the United States has condemned them, is these nations look back and are, well, look at what you do to the Black community in the United States. How dare you come and tell us what to do with our minority groups, or with these people that we don’t like? Because y’all don’t like a whole list of people, right? And you treat them like you don’t like them, or you treat them horrifically, right? So, again, I’d say legislation is not the end-all, be-all, right, cure for our advocacy work. It’s not the end-all, be-all of our organizing work. But I do think legislation like the Breathe Act, which would reimagine—which reimagines and reframes criminal justice and how we respond to the needs of our communities,  that would help end, again not the end-all, be-all, but that would help shift and end in some ways the violence we see—police violence we see against the Black community, and move forward an agenda of justice and equity. Likewise, the Equality Act would do the same for LGBTQ people of color, LGBTQ people more broadly. And what it does—when we say, I’m going to make sure that everyone has voting rights, or I’m going to make sure our criminal justice system is not one that arbitrarily murders people in the street for no reason and no justification, and then gets away with it. I’m going to make sure that LGBTQ people aren’t kicked out of housing simply for being LGBTQ, right? When the United States itself does that, it sets a standard for the rest of the world in what it means to be a nation that upholds human rights. I think the United States could be that. I absolutely think that this could be the place. But there are other nations that are beating us out on this. There are other nations in Europe that achieved LGBTQ human rights before we did and are pushing the human rights for LGBTQ people much faster and more comprehensively than the United States is. And so if we want to be a leader in the world of human rights, not just on LGBTQ rights but broadly speaking, we need to make sure that our legislation, our practices, reflect the same rhetoric that we are pushing on other countries. We cannot in good faith—this is my opinion, I welcome pushback here—but we cannot in good faith condemn Ghana, or the Republic of Georgia, or other countries that have cracked down on LGBTQ people when we have our own epidemic of violence against transgender people, when we have states where it is legal to kick someone out of housing, or it has been legal to fire someone simply for being transgender. Where in matters of public accommodation people can be denied services simply for being LGBTQ. What right do we have to condemn foreign governments when we ourselves have not gotten our act together? And so I’m absolutely with you. I think if we can move these pieces of legislation forward and reframe our own human rights and civil rights practices at home, then we could actually become the human rights leader globally that we claim to be. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And we’re coming to the end of our time. And I just, as you know, we have a lot of religious leaders on this call and have faith-based organizations. You started talking about the power of the storytelling and truth—being the bearers of truth in this community. So as we close, what would you say to this group about the most important information they share with their communities to safeguard the rights of the LGBTQ+ community? And maybe even just how to work across faith traditions and really reach out to the religious right, who may be pushing the anti-LGBTQ+ agenda? VAZQUEZ: Absolutely. For folks—I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, particularly for the folks here who have been in this work for quite some time—probably longer than me—I want to thank you. First and foremost, thank you for the work that you’ve done in your particular context, within the U.S. or around the world, thank you. And please don’t stop. That’s the most critical thing I’ve often told folks. We need people to keep going, which means if there are any funders on the call, please fund the people who are trying to do this work. The resources necessary to continue this work is essential. I’ve often seen folks leave this work particularly because the resources to do it don’t exist. Which is why—the battle against the religious right’s advocacy against LGBTQ people domestically and globally has been so successful. That is something that they’ve invested in heavily. What we need to do is invest heavily  in what is the majority opinion that LGBTQ people have inherent dignity and value, and thus are worth having their rights safeguarded and enshrined in legislation, et cetera. To other folks who are maybe thinking about getting into the work—like, oh, I just came here to find out a little bit more, maybe. Please do it. Or please mobilize your community. Please challenge your more conservative partners and colleagues, or folks across the aisle, or across the pews from you. And encourage them. Have the challenging conversation  I have often heard from folks who say, well, I know so-and-so is a prominent conservative leader and they’re teetering on their opinion, but publicly they’re still anti-LGBTQ, et cetera. I’m, like, well, did you challenge them? Have you pushed them? Have you pressed them? It’s, like, no, it’s just so sensitive. I’m like, what is sensitive is the fact that there are so many transgender deaths that we have to report annually. What is sensitive is the fact that there are still countries around the world that will execute an individual for being LGBTQ. What is sensitive is that it is a crime still places, or there are domestic issues that are still at hand. That is a sensitive issue. Someone who is not LGBTQ feeling a type of way and shaking on their position is not sensitive. They need to be encouraged, and challenged, and pressed forward to change their opinions and to advocate publicly for a shift on human rights, both domestically and abroad. FASKIANOS: That is a great way to end. Thank you very much. We really appreciate your taking the time to be with us today. It was a rich discussion. Thanks to all of you for your comments and questions. I encourage you to follow Michael Vazquez on Twitter at @mvsebastian. So please go there. And as always, follow our Religion and Foreign Policy program on Twitter at @CFR_Religion. And please go to CFR.org for research and analysis on other issues. So we look forward to reconvening again. But as always, send us your suggestions for future webinars to [email protected], and other feedback you’d like to provide. We look forward to your continued participation. And again, Michael Vazquez, a big thank you for doing this. VAZQUEZ: Thank you. Thank you, everyone.