Latin America

Brian Winter, vice president of policy at Americas Society and Council of the Americas and editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, leads the conversation on U.S. relations with South America. CASA: Welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Brian Winter with us to discuss U.S. relations with South America. Mr. Winter is the vice president of policy for the America Society and Council of the Americas and editor in chief of Americas Quarterly. An influential political analyst, he has followed South America for more than twenty years and has served as a correspondent for Reuters in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Mr. Winter is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé. He is a regular contributor to television and radio and host of the Americas Quarterly podcast. Welcome, Brian. Thank you very much for being with us. WINTER: Thank you, Maria. Thanks for the invitation. CASA: Can you begin with a general overview of current U.S. relations with South American countries? WINTER: I can try and actually, as a matter of fact, today is an extremely fortuitous day to be doing this and let me tell you why. A couple of weeks ago on February 10, Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made a one-day trip to Washington. He met with President Biden while he was here. He brought his foreign minister with him as well as his chief foreign policy adviser, his finance minister, a couple other members of his Cabinet. One of the biggest sort of concrete results of this trip that Lula made up here was a U.S. donation to the Amazon Fund of $50 million. That is million with an M. Well, today, Lula leaves for China with about half of his Cabinet and a delegation of approximately two hundred and thirty leaders from Brazil’s private sector in what Brazilian media are calling the biggest foreign delegation ever to leave Brazil for another country. They will be in China for six days and there is a whole roster of deals on the table ranging from financing to infrastructure to education, environmental, and so on. So the point I’m trying to get across here is one of clear asymmetry and it really reflects kind of the new moment for U.S. relations with South America overall. As Maria mentioned, I started my career in the region as a reporter a little more than twenty years ago. I was in Argentina for four years. I was in Mexico for one year and Brazil for five, and in the course of that relatively short period of time we’ve seen kind of the power balance in how we think about Latin America but specifically South America. We’ve seen a significant change in how we think about that region. Back the early 2000s, certainly, during the 1990s, these were the final years of the so-called Washington Consensus, a period characterized by kind of the unipolar moment that came with the end of the Cold War, a certain consensus not only around democracy but around a certain set of liberalizing economic policies as well, and that ran its course. But really, it was around 2003 when everything started to change for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is the one that I’ve already referenced, which is the growth of China as a trading partner for the region. China had always had a presence in Latin America. In fact, for the magazine that I run, Americas Quarterly, we ran a piece two years ago about the Chinese presence in Mexico going all the way back to the 1600s when they operated barber shops and other sort of forms of commerce. But what’s happened over the last twenty years is really remarkable. In numbers, Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean overall went from 18 billion (dollars) in 2002 to a stunning 450 billion (dollars) in 2021. China is now the largest trading partner for Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, and for South America as a whole if you take all those countries in the aggregate China now outranks the United States. When you look at Latin America, by the way, that includes Mexico. If you take that grouping then the U.S. is still the number-one trading partner but, again, that’s almost entirely because of that relationship—that trading relationship as a result of the former NAFTA and now USMCA. Along with that big growth in Chinese trade have come other changes. We’ve had a lot of talk in the U.S. media in recent days about the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq war. That was something—and I was living in Argentina at the time and you could really feel how that even then carried a cost for the U.S. reputation in some of these countries. I think that with the failure of the—the failures of the war over time I think that that only accentuated the view that—not only a long-standing view that the U.S. was an unwelcome, meddling, and in many cases imperialist presence but it also accelerated this narrative that the United States was in relative decline. More recent years we’ve seen kind of other things contribute to this diminished reputation of the United States and throughout many countries in the region—everything ranging from not just the election of Donald Trump, who, of course, was not popular in most of the region; but also specific decisions that were made by his government, such as the withdrawal from the TPP—the Trans-Pacific Partnership—that, of course, is the trade deal that was negotiated under the Obama administration that included several Latin American countries, including Chile and Peru—but also the weaponization of tariffs; and, you know, Trump’s repeated threats to even cut off Mexican imports. They did—those threats did have the effect of kind of forcing, first, President Peña Nieto in Mexico and then his successor, Andrés Manuel Lόpez Obrador, to cooperate with initiatives like management of migration policy. So in the short term, they, quote/unquote, “worked” but in the longer term it showed Mexico as well as other countries in the region that the U.S. was not a particularly reliable partner. Some of you may be listening to all this and thinking, well, this sounds like the viewpoints espoused by governments in the region that are leftist and have never really cared for the United States in the first place. But another interesting thing about this latest trend and the way that things have changed over the last ten years is that this desire to forge a middle path between China and the United States as their strategic competition escalates is shared by leaders across the ideological spectrum. South American countries in particular are not unlike the United States when it seems like virtually everything is polarized, and yet in this area and specifically the need—the perceived need to have closer relations with—I’m sorry, closer relations with China while maintaining a civil relationship but not siding too much with United States, some of the most enthusiastic proponents of that view in recent years have actually been governments on the center right and right such as Sebastián Piñera, the former president of Chile, Iván Duque, the former president of Colombia, Guillermo Lasso, the current president of Ecuador, who has worked extensively with China, and even Jair Bolsonaro, who was until recently the right-wing president of Brazil, ended up essentially going along with Beijing and allowing Huawei to participate in the recent auction of 5G mobile communications technology there. And so what we end up with as a result is a policy in many countries across the region that some are calling active nonalignment, the idea that governments in the region, regardless of their ideological stripe, need to seek an equidistant or middle path between Washington and Beijing, essentially taking advantage of their relative distance from not only potential conflicts between the U.S. and China but also looking at what’s happening in Ukraine right now and saying, look, we need to maintain our independence, not side too strongly with either of these emerging blocs, and see if we can benefit from this by selling our commodities to everybody, keeping in mind that these are economies, especially in South America, that rely extremely heavily on the sale of commodities exports to drive their economic growth. So, you know, in conclusion for these initial remarks that is a huge change in the course of a generation. We’ve gone in a little more than twenty years from this assumption that most Latin American countries are in the U.S. sphere of influence, to use a very outdated term, which I detest, that they were part of our, quote/unquote, “backyard” to an increasing realization in DC, and I think people are still getting their heads around that, that automatic support, automatic alignment, can no longer be expected whether it is in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, and then on down into South America, which I know is our focus today, governments like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, another country where we’ve seen a lot of change on this front even in the last couple years and, again, not just because there’s a leftist president in Colombia now because his predecessor, who I’ve already mentioned, Iván Duque, was one of the main people pushing this change. So that’s a lot to digest. I’m happy to take any questions and hear from you. So thank you. CASA: Thanks, Brian, for that comprehensive introduction. Now let’s open it up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) Our first question is a written question and it comes from Andrea Cuervo Prados, who is an adjunct instructor at Dickinson State University, and asks, what is your perspective regarding the new leftist president of Colombia and U.S. relations? What is the risk that Colombia could turn into another Venezuela? WINTER: Right. It’s a good question. I think that we are still figuring out exactly what Gustavo—not only who Gustavo Petro is but what his ambitions are for both Colombia and for his relationships with the rest of the region and the rest of the world. There is some distance between what he has said he wants to do and what he may be able to do. This is a president who, you know, talks in these grand sweeping terms but ultimately has to get things through congress, and to just cite a result or an example of this that doesn’t directly have to do with Colombia’s foreign relationships, he said—he gave a very dramatic speech at the UN General Assembly last September in which he talked about the need to legalize narcotics across the board, including cocaine. But then—it was a speech that generated a lot of attention in capitals all over the world and all over the region. But then in ensuing weeks when he was pressed on this he didn’t really have a lot of detail and admitted that it was not something that Colombia could do unilaterally, which is all to say that, again, there’s this gap where I think it’s important to pay careful attention to the gap between the rhetoric and what’s actually possible with Petro. I don’t personally—you know, the question of could X country become another Venezuela it’s a question that people have been asking all over Latin America for the last ten years. I think—I understand why people ask it because what happened in Venezuela was so awful and dramatic, not only with the country becoming a full-fledged dictatorship that represses political opposition but also the humanitarian crisis that has forced some 7 million people or about a quarter of the country’s population to leave the country. But, look, Petro is Colombia’s first president on the left and I don’t think it necessarily follows that—in fact, I’m certain that it doesn’t follow that every person on the left wants to go down the path of Venezuela. So I suppose I’m a little more optimistic not only that Petro is a pragmatist in areas like the economy—for example, his finance minister is a quite pragmatic figure, a Columbia University professor who is well respected by markets—and I’m also somewhat optimistic about Colombian institutions and their ability to stand in the way of any truly radical change. CASA: Thank you. Our next question comes from Morton Holbrook, who is an adjunct professor at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Morton? Q: Hello. Yes, I’m here. Morton Holbrook, Kentucky Wesleyan College. University of Louisville also. Thanks for your really interesting comments, especially about China’s relationship with Latin and South America. Can I turn north a little bit to Russia? Considering particularly the Brazilian president’s upcoming visit to China do you think he might want to go to Russia, too? Bearing in mind that the International Criminal Court just issued an arrest warrant for President Putin, how might that affect Latin American relations with Russia? Do you think some of them might now have second thoughts about Russia or inviting Putin to visit their countries? Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela have all signed the ICC statute promising to cooperate in the carrying out of arrest warrants. Thank you. WINTER: That’s a great question and one that is—I can tell you is very front of mind for Brazilian officials and I think others around the region right now. I was just in Brazil two weeks ago working on our—our next issue of Americas Quarterly will be on Brazil’s foreign policy and what it means for the rest of Latin America. This is a question that’s very front and center. Brazil’s foreign minister did say in the last couple of days—he did explicitly almost word for word repeat what you just said, which is that Brazil is a signatory to that treaty. That would seem to eliminate any possibility of Vladimir Putin visiting Brazil. I’m not sure that that was really on his list of things to do anyway. But it was not only a practical signal but a diplomatic one as well. Lula’s position on Russia and the Ukraine war has been inconsistent. He said during his campaign last year that Zelensky and Putin bear equal responsibility for the conflict. My understanding is that after that statement, you know, nobody wants to contradict the boss openly and sometimes not even in private. My sense personally based on conversations with others in Brasilia is that at the very least his foreign policy team regretted that he made that statement. Brazil has, in other form, condemned the Russian invasion. Other governments including Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and others have done the same. However, these are countries that, like most of the Global South, are firmly opposed to any sanctions and so their position, again, ends up being I suppose you could call it nuanced. They believe it’s important in part because of their own experience as nations to condemn invasions of one country by another. I, personally, think that it’s fair to think of what Putin is doing is a kind of imperialist aggression, which these are countries that have certainly objected to that when it’s the U.S. over the last, you know, 200-plus years and so you would think that it would be in their DNA to do so in the Ukrainian case as well, and in fairness most of them have. I would just add that, you know, the Brazilian position, I think, though, gets influenced also by two other things. One is, again, this notion of nonalignment. Most people talk about nonalignment in Brazil and Argentina, in Chile and Colombia, and they think about the U.S.-China relationship, as I noted during my introductory remarks. But they also think of it as a helpful guide to thinking about the conflict, the war in Ukraine, as well for reasons that are not firmly rooted in morals or values, let’s say, but in interests as, you know, foreign policy often is. To say it in a different way, I had a conversation a couple of years ago with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who I helped him write his memoir in English back in 2006. He was president during the 1990s, and in talking with him about the China question he said, we have to take advantage of our greatest strategic asset, which is that Brazil is far. (Laughs.) And to just unpack that a little bit, I think the meaning of that is clear to all of you. But these are countries that really see an opportunity right now just by virtue of their geographic distance from these conflict zones to avoid being dragged in and also to potentially, at some level, benefit from it through strategic superpower competition for their support as well as through higher prices for some of the commodities that they produce. There’s one added element in the case of Brazil, which is that Lula, I’m told by people close to him, sees himself as almost a Nelson Mandela-type figure. He’s back now for his third term in the presidency twenty years after he was president the first time. Of course, I’m sure people on this call know that he went through some real struggles in the intervening years including nearly two years in prison over—on corruption charges that were later thrown out and, you know, he may see his presidency as an opportunity to kind of write the last chapter or two in his biography, and there’s talk that he wants a Nobel Peace Prize and that he sees potentially helping negotiate a peace deal for the Ukraine war as the best opportunity to do that. I actually think that that idea, which is—tends to be dismissed in Washington as well as in European capitals, I personally think that idea is not as crazy as some people here in Washington think. But maybe I can go into that a little bit later if anybody wants. CASA: Thank you. Next, we have two written questions from the same university that we can take together. They’re from Marisa Perez and Trevor Collier, who are undergraduate students at Lewis University. They would like to know what world leaders such as the United States can do to prevent deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and how they can do so without compromising Brazil’s sovereignty. WINTER: Well, it’s a really great question, in part because it mentions an issue that Americans don’t often think about, which is precisely the sensitivity on the sovereignty issue. Brazil, and specifically not only Brazil’s military but Brazil’s foreign policy establishment, have a long-standing concern that is part of their doctrine, I suppose you could say, that is concerned always about the possibility of territorial loss and about foreigners gaining influence or, in some cases, even control over the Amazon. And I have to say, you know, this is another one of those ideas that I think—I wish we were all together in a room. This Zoom is kind of the next best thing. I could see your faces that way. But sometimes when I talk about this I see people kind of roll their eyes as if it was some sort of imagined conspiracy. But the truth is that as recently as 2019 when the—the first year of Jair Bolsonaro’s government when the fires in the Amazon really became a huge controversy, driven in large part by social media and tweets from people like Justin Bieber and Cher, who, to be clear, were, I think, justifiably and quite heroically shining light on what was happening there. In the midst of all that Emmanuel Macron actually proposed that perhaps some sort of international force in the Amazon was necessary, that that deployment of that would be a good idea if Brazil was not capable of taking care of the Amazon itself. That proposal was disastrous because it just reinforced this long-standing fear that so much of the establishment in Brazil has always had, and it’s true that Bolsonaro was on the right but you, certainly, in conversations, I think, with people across the ideological spectrum this is something that people think about. So OK. So back to the original question, how can the U.S. help. Well, the U.S. could help by providing both logistical and financial resources beyond the $50 million, which is, you know, the equivalent of about seven seconds of what we’re spending in terms of supporting Ukraine right now. I don’t know—Norway is the biggest sponsor of the Amazon Fund. I don’t have that number in front of me but I think that their contribution is upwards of at least a billion dollars, probably more. Ultimately, though, I do believe that the Amazon is a local challenge and I know that can be unsatisfying to hear in forums like this where we’re sort of designed—you know, this is a CFR event. We’re supposed to be thinking of ways that the international community can get involved. But it’s going to be a big challenge. The good news is that Brazil has shown that it is capable of getting its hands around this problem before. During Lula’s first terms in office from 2003 to 2010 his government was able to reduce the level of deforestation by upwards of 75 percent. It was a very dramatic difference in a very short period of time. This was done through a variety of means, both things like satellite monitoring and new technology that let the authorities follow this in real time. They were also able to step up environmental enforcement agencies like IBAMA, whose inspectors are necessary. It’s necessary to have them on the ground in order to, you know, stop—actually stop illegal loggers from setting the fires that are the main driver of deforestation. They were also able to build political consensus around the need to reduce deforestation during those years. I don’t think it’s going to be—in fact, I’m certain it will not be as “easy,” quote/unquote, this time around. A lot has changed. The upwards of 60 percent increase that we saw in deforestation during the Bolsonaro years had the support, unfortunately, in my view, of local populations who believe essentially that slashing and burning will lead their day-to-day economic lives to improve. In the election that happened in October where Lula won and Bolsonaro lost but by a very small margin—the closest margin in Brazil’s modern democratic history—the strongest support nationally for Bolsonaro was in areas that have seen the most illegal deforestation over the last four years and what that tells you is that, again, these are local populations that believe that this will lead to greater wealth and greater well-being for all of them, this being deforestation. So that’s a big challenge for Lula with a—you know, at a time when resources are fairly scarce. It’s not like it was during his first presidency when all of this increase in Chinese trade was really boosting the amount of money in Brazil’s coffers. So he’s going to have to figure out a way to dedicate financial resources as well as convince local populations that this is in their interest to do it. It’s not going to be an easy road. CASA: Our next question comes from Mike Nelson, an affiliate adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Mike? Q: Thank you very much for an outstanding overview of what’s going on in U.S. relations to South America. I study international technology policy and data governance but my question is about corruption. You mentioned corruption in Brazil but it’s a problem throughout South America, and my three-part question, is it getting worse or better; are there any countries who have really done the right thing and have taken serious measures to address it; and how can the internet and some of the technologies for citizen journalism help expose corruption and make leaders less likely to dip into the public fund? WINTER: OK. Yeah. No, great questions, and reflective of if you look at opinion polling and remember that these are countries that many of them have been dealing with rising crime, rising homicide levels, economic stagnation, the pandemic, which hit Latin America by many measures harder than in any other region in the world at one point—I haven’t seen updated numbers on this but it was fairly consistently throughout the pandemic Latin America, which is about 8 percent of the world’s population, was accounting for about 30 percent of the world’s confirmed COVID deaths. Anyway, amid all of that, and the economic stagnation that has been such a problem over the last ten years, in a lot of countries and in public opinion surveys, the thing that people identified as the number-one problem in their country is corruption. That was not always true. If you look back at public polling twenty years ago, people tended to identify kind of more, what’s the word, basic needs—think, like, unemployment, hunger, misery, which often is kind of asked as a separate—that’s one of the boxes you can check. Twenty years ago, those were the issues. And as the region became more middle class, especially in the 2000s because of this China-driven economic growth that described during my introduction, a lot of people were able to move beyond their basic needs and focus on essentially what was happening to the money that they paid in taxes, keeping in mind that many people were paying taxes for the first time. Some of it surely was also driven by these things, as you mentioned, mobile phones that not only things like videos of people carrying suitcases of cash, but also the attention that was given to big corruption scandals. Previously in a lot of countries, governments were able to make pacts with newspapers and TV channels, and kind of tamp things down a little bit, and lower the temperature. In an era of Facebook and Twitter, that was no longer as easy for them to do. All of this culminated in several corruption scandals at once in the mid-2010s, the most emblematic of which was the so-called Lava Jato, or car wash, scandal, which originated in Brazil, but eventually had franchises, if you will, in almost a dozen countries throughout Latin America and the world. That story is complicated. Politicians all over the region went to jail. Business leaders did too. Lula was one of them. That was the case that put him in jail. In intervening years, we’ve discovered that there were abuses and procedural violations, both things on behalf of the prosecutors and the judge involved, who the Brazilian Supreme Court decided, I think in 2021, they ruled—maybe it was earlier than that—that the judge overseeing Lula’s conviction had not been—or, rather, it’s easier to say—had been partial in his rulings. And so that’s left us in a place today where populations are still angry about corruption, as I mentioned, but it is no longer driving conversation in most countries, like it did before. I still believe—and you can probably tell, this is something I’ve thought about a lot over the years and continue to watch. The first question you asked, in some ways, is the most important one. Is corruption getting worse or better? It’s impossible to know for sure. My hypothesis is actually corruption is about the same, and may in fact be getting better, which flies in the face of all of these headlines that we’ve seen. But to me, the operative question over these last ten years or so has been, you know, not why—I’ve heard people say, well, why are these—why are these countries so corrupt? And to me, the real question is, why are we suddenly seeing these cases of corruption? Because I think it speaks to not only the technological changes that I referenced, but also the improvement—(audio break)—these are countries many of which transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s and early 1990s. And therefore, it really took a generation for independent prosecutors to show up, to have the training and political support that they needed to go after some very powerful people. So, in sum, I am a believer in the story of rule of law improving in many countries in Latin America. I would recognize, again, that it’s a very complex story, in part because of some of the problems around not just Lava Jato but in other countries, such as Peru and Guatemala. But progress is rarely linear. (Laughs.) And I still think that this is something that is likely to get better with time. CASA: Our next question is a written one from Mary Beth Altier at New York University. She asks: What role do you think misinformation and disinformation play in citizens’ perceptions of the U.S. versus China and Russia in Latin America? What could the U.S. do better from a strategic communications perspective, if anything? And then—I can repeat this other question later, which is kind of a follow up. So you think— WINTER: Yeah, maybe. Well, that first one—that first one is worthy of a book. All of these are—these are great questions. They’re difficult to answer in pithy fashion in three minutes. I am continually impressed by the quality of Russian propaganda in Latin America. Those guys are really good. You look at RT en Español—(changes pronunciation)—RT en Español—it has one of the biggest social media followings of any “media company,” quote/unquote, in the region. Even people who I know are—who I know to not be pro-Russia, let’s put it that way, I see sharing content and videos from RT, which, of course, is just as pure a propaganda arm as you can get of the Russian government. But also, you know, have a whole network of sites that are more subtle and that push very sophisticated and sometimes, you know, not particularly obvious narratives that are designed to undermine the United States or promote the views of China and Russia. I would recognize at the same time that—I referenced this during my introduction remarks, sometimes the United States does not need any help with it comes to undermining its reputation in the region. I mentioned some of the, quote/unquote “own goals” that we’ve seen over the last five to ten, even twenty years, going all the way back to the Iraq War. As far as actively pushing back, all I can say is this: You know, I think that they’re—on the one hand, I think there are concrete steps that are being used. We’re still trying to get our heads around this problem to fight misinformation. But I was just in a different forum this morning where I was asked, what—how can the U.S. help the cause of democracy in Latin America. And my answer to that is that the best thing the United States can do to help democracy in Latin America is to get its own house in order, to move past the polarization, the misinformation, and the scorched earth politics that have put our own democracy at risk over the last several years, and try to, you know, recapture some of the consensus, at least around basic democratic rules of the game and how we hold elections that characterized most of the previous two-hundred-plus years of our history. Because I do think that while—you know, look, I lived ten years in Latin America. I know that people roll their eyes at the notion of the United States as being kind of the shining city on the hill. And I understand why. And that was always true, in part because of the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America often showing, you know, some of our worst behaviors. On the other hand, as a Brazil specialist, I’ve seen how some of the tactics and even some of the same people that were behind our own democratic decay of the last five years, some of those same tactics were repackaged and exported to open arms in Brazil. So I do think that it makes a difference on the ground in places like Brazil, potentially, and other countries as well, when a strong democratic example is being set in the United States. And I think that’s the most powerful thing we can do. Some of the other stuff, like what’s happening on RT and Telesur and some of these other outlets is relatively outside our control. CASA: We have a complementary question from— WINTER: There was a second part of that question. CASA: Oh, no, you did end up answering, I think, what could the U.S. do better from a strategic communications perspective. I think you kind of covered that. We have another question from Gursimran Padda, a student at Stony Brook University, who asks: Does China’s strategy of gaining influence in Latin America differ from its tactics in Africa? And if so, why? WINTER: Gosh, all these great questions. China—I have to start from the beginning. I am not an African specialist. But I can tell you kind of the narrative of what happened in Africa through Latin American eyes, if that makes any sense, because this is a conversation I’ve had a lot over the years. The perception is that China went into some of these countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and engaged in infrastructure projects and other things that had abusive terms. In many cases, China imported its own labor to do some of these projects. They also engaged in some predatory lending practices. And that was all—essentially the takeaway from actions like that in places like Buenos Aires, Bogota, certainly Brasilia, was that the Chinese would not be allowed to come and engage in those same behaviors in Latin America. And I think, in practice, it seems that the Chinese have realized that. There have been examples, such as the construction of a dam in Ecuador, where the terms ended up being perceived as something of a debt trap. But my sense—again, and this is not so much my sense; it’s repeating what I’ve heard in numerous conversations about this subject with leaders across the ideological spectrum and throughout the region—is that they understand the risks involved in working with China, in part because of the experience throughout parts of sub-Saharan Africa. And they’re determined to not let those things happen in their home countries. You know, I know that that’s a view that, in places like where I am today—I’m on in the road in Washington, participated in this other conference this morning. That’s why my Zoom background is not quite as put together as it sometimes is, by the way. I know people roll their eyes at that notion here, and are constantly warning—you know, kind of wagging their finger a little bit at governments throughout South America, and saying that they need to be eyes wide open about the risks of engagement with the Chinese. The problem is that here in the U.S., I think they’re underestimating, in some cases, the sophistication of foreign ministries and trade ministries in places like Peru and Chile when they make those comments. Which is to say, I think that there’s something both visually and in terms of the context a bit paternalistic about it, that everybody picks up on and tends to make people in the region justifiably crazy. (Laughs.) And then, the other part is that the U.S. is not really offering much in the way of alternatives. We’re at a pretty unique moment in the history of the United States right now where we have both parties—the Republican and Democratic Parties—are pretty much closed to the idea of new free trade deals. That, in my lifetime, has never happened before. I mentioned the fact that Trump dropped out of TPP. Well, Joe Biden has not picked that back up. I think there are domestic political reasons that explain that, but what it means in practice for our relationships with governments in Latin America is that Washington doesn’t have a whole lot to offer. Because, unlike the Chinese, we can’t just order our companies to go invest someplace. That’s not how our economy works. It is very much how the Chinese economy works, where they can decide to make these decisions. They are not necessarily for a short-term economic payoff, but for medium-term reasons, or even decisions that have very little to do with dollars and cents or ROI, return on investment, and everything to do with geopolitics. So wanting to have beachheads in terms of, say, ports in places like El Salvador. So, you know, again, without that—without trade and without that ability to kind of dictate investment, there’s not a lot that’s left in Washington’s toolkit for counteracting this kind of influence. CASA: Our next question comes from Daniel Izquierdo, an undergraduate student at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Daniel. Q: Good afternoon, sir, ma’am. Thank you for taking the time. I just had a quick question on the increasing tensions between China and the U.S., and how that will kind of develop itself in Latin and South America. So given the strategic interests of Latin and South America, and the persistent political unrest, along with increasing tensions between China and the U.S., what do you believe the likelihood to be of proxy conflicts or foreign meddling, similar to what occurred during the Cold War, occurring in the region? And if not, how do you foresee the U.S. and China competing for influence in the region? WINTER: So another very good question. Thank you for that. Look, I think some of this ground we’ve covered already, but I would say that, you know, you’re the first to mention—I had not previously mentioned this idea of a new cold war. And this—you know, this is another reason why so many countries across the ideological spectrum are opting for this policy of nonalignment. Essentially because they believe that the first Cold War went badly, very badly, for Latin America. It resulted in all kinds of traumas, from the wars in Central America during the 1980s to U.S. support for coups in places like Chile, to, you know, Cuban meddling in places like Bolivia and elsewhere around the region during those years, which led to the rise of guerrilla movements like the FARC, that ended up killing very high numbers of people. And so essentially, you know, not to be glib about it, but the reaction that today’s generation has is: We want no part of this. Because it didn’t go well for us the first time. I think there are obvious differences between a conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union back in the 1950s and 1960s, and this strategic competition between Washington and Beijing, that thankfully has not quite reached those heights, at least not yet, here in the twenty-first century. But I have to tell you, and again this is based on conversations I’m having all the time, the fear is real. The perception is that the world may be headed back to that kind of conflict, being driven not only by what’s happening in the Ukraine but the increasing speculation of potential war over Taiwan. So this, again, as far as—as far as how it could play out in practice, I think it’s still early. I think it remains to be seen. Right now there is—you know, there are clear cases where I think the Chinese are, as I alluded to in my previous answer, making investments not for economic reasons but for strategic ones, with a long-term horizon I mind. Things like the, quote/unquote, “space base” that they’ve established in Argentina, which really is deserving of the full air quotes when we say the phrase “space base.” I think everyone senses that—you know, that that conflict—or, that competition, if you will, is likely to define the next twenty to thirty years. And I think there’s a determination in most countries, it makes a lot of sense to me personally, that they don’t want their countries used again as a chessboard amid that larger conflict. CASA: Our next question comes from Damien Odunze. He’s assistant professor at Delta State University who writes: Ideas in the long run change the world. Do you think a closer educational collaboration between U.S. universities and those in Latin and South America could help shape and strengthen liberal democratic values in those countries? WINTER: What an interesting question. Look, let me talk first about kind of the—that equation today. There’s already quite a lot of connectivity, especially at the—at, you know, not a word I love to use, but at the elite level, the elites in government and business and U.S. education systems. Which is an unnecessarily wordy way of saying that a large percentage of people in South America come from the elite classes and get educated at universities and sometimes even at high schools in the United States. That is one reason why, again, many of these governments are likely to at least forge a middle path between China and the United States, rather than going full-fledged in the direction of China. I think there’s a cultural affinity, family ties, cultural ties, educational ties, and other things that are probably kind of the strongest connection that the U.S. has with a lot of these countries right now. As to whether a strengthening of those educational ties would improve dedication and the strength of democracy, whew. It could, but I watched with dismay as poll after poll suggests that younger generations, not just in the United States but across the Western world, are less committed in theory to both democracy and democratic institutions than their predecessors. And so I wonder just—I don’t have an answer to this—but I wonder if even, quote/unquote, “even” within the United States, if we’re properly instilling an appreciation for democracy in today’s generations, which then raises the question of whether we’d be able to do so amongst the youth of other countries as well. I’m not sure. I think this is another area where, you know, in the U.S. we have some work to do at home before we start thinking about what’s possible in other countries. CASA: Our next question comes from Mary Meyer McAleese, who is a professor of political science at Eckerd College in Florida. Mary. Q: Yes. Good afternoon and thank you for this opportunity. I have, well, two questions. I hope they’re quick. The first one is, what do you think the effect will be on Latin America or South America with regard to the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank? I read that a lot of Latin American businesses have had investments in that bank, so I wonder if you could say a bit more about the banking situation and the longer-term effects there. And also, gender violence, of course, is a horrible problem all around the world, but especially in Latin and South America. What do you think the United States and the Americas Society could do to support groups in the region that are fighting against gender violence? Thank you. WINTER: Well, thank you for both questions. Both very good questions. There’s been a lot of talk about SVB and possible effects in Latin America. What I’ve heard from people who are far more knowledgeable about the financial—excuse me—the financial system than I am, is that as long as it does not spread and become a more systemic risk, it should not pose much of an issue for Latin America. In part because—and this is another area where just like—where we were talking about the courts having, I think, been engaged in a thirty-year long process of improvement—I think the same can be said of banking and financial systems around most of Latin America. My first job was covering the financial crisis that Argentina went through back in 2001 and 2002. Which, for the uninitiated, that saw five presidents in two weeks, a freeze of bank deposits, and a 70 percent devaluation of the currency. It was quite a traumatic thing to be a part of. And during those years, we saw similar—well, not quite as bad—but at least thematically similar crises in Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere, following other crises in the 1990s. Which is all to say, Latin America has been curiously quiet this time around in terms of financial contagion. The economies aren’t doing well, for the most part, but at least we’re not talking about a financial meltdown. And that is because of lessons learned. These are banking systems that now have stricter capital requirements than they did in the past. And the macroeconomic fundamentals, generally speaking, are better than they were twenty years ago. Argentina, of course, is kind of in trouble again with an inflation rate that just passed 100 percent. And that’s terrible. But again, the depth—(laughs)—everything’s relative. And the depth of just financial devastation is, thankfully, nothing compared to what it was when I was there twenty-plus years ago. So, you know, we’ll see. If the bank run spreads and we start seeing other banks come in trouble here in the U.S., then my sense is that, with the whole Credit Suisse thing, and we’re not out of the woods yet. But if it stays more or less contained, then the consensus, at least so far, is that Latin America should be fine. Your question about femicide is an excellent one. It has driven the political discussion in Brazil in recent years. It’s something that President Lula has spoken movingly about. It has also been, on the other end in Mexico, the feminist movement that has had femicides as one of the main areas of concern, has been one of the most effective opposition groups to President López Obrador, who has often been, sadly in my view, dismissive of the seriousness of that problem. As far as what the United States can do to help, or even what my own organization can do, I think that in a lot of cases these are—you know, like a lot of problems—there are things that the international community can do to help. And certainly, I see things from a journalist’s perspective, even though I’m more analyst than journalist these days. I think that shining light on these problems, using vehicles like—platforms like Americas Quarterly, which is the small publication about Latin American politics that I run, that’s, you know, my own insufficient contribution to looking at his problem. But it’s certainly one—I mean, we look at the numbers in places like Brazil. I don’t have those numbers on my fingertips, but it is just an incredibly serious problem, and one that deserves more attention. CASA: Thank you, Brian. We have so many other questions. I’m really sorry, though, we have to cut off now. We’re at the hour. But this has been a very interesting discussion. And you’ve covered an enormous amount of ground. Thank you to all of you participating for your great questions. I hope you will follow Brian on Twitter at @BrazilBrian. The next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 29, at 1:00 Eastern Time. Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, will lead a conversation on media literacy and propaganda. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/Careers. Follow at @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you, again, for joining us today, and we look forward to you tuning in again for our webinar on March 29. Bye. WINTER: Bye. Thank you. (END)

Nick Zimmerman, senior advisor at WestExec Advisors and global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute, and Amy Erica Smith, liberal arts and sciences dean’s professor and associate professor of political science at Iowa State University, discuss Brazil’s recent presidential election and the ensuing protests, U.S.-Latin America relations, and how Lula’s presidency will affect religious pluralism and democracy in Brazil. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. This series convenes religious and faith-based leaders in cross-denominational dialogue on the intersection between religion and international relations. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of 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 CFR’s website, CFR.org, and on the iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Amy Erica Smith and Nick Zimmerman with us to discuss Lula’s Presidency and the Future of Brazil. You have their bios in full, but I will give you a few highlights. Amy Erica Smith is an associate professor of political science, as well as a liberal arts and sciences dean’s professor at Iowa State University. Her research examines how citizens understand and engage in politics in democratic and authoritarian regimes, with an emphasis on Latin America and, specifically, Brazil. Dr. Smith has published numerous articles in top peer-reviewed outlets in political science, and authored or coauthored three books, including Religion and Brazilian Democracy: Mobilizing the People of God. Nick Zimmerman is a senior advisor at WestExec Advisors, and a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute. He previously served in the Obama administration in a variety of national security capacities, including as a senior policy advisor to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the White House National Security Council director for Brazil and Southern Cone affairs. He’s been cited, interviewed, and published in an array of media outlets in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. So thank you both for being with us for today’s conversation. Amy Erica, I thought we could begin with you. We just saw the election in October in Brazil. Lula became president. Can you talk about that election and the implications of the protests that we then saw in January, and where we are now? SMITH: OK. And you’re specifically interested in the religious angle on this, right, Irina? FASKIANOS: And the religious angle, but we could set the stage and then we can come back and focus in too on religion questions as well. SMITH: OK. So Brazil’s current president, President Lula, as I think probably most of our viewers know, is maybe the oldest political figure in terms of longevity on the Brazilian scene today. He was a part of the resistance to the military regime, and then has been running for president almost continuously since the return to democracy. Or, one of his proxies has been running for president in a few elections. So he is a longstanding, classic figure in Brazilian politics who Obama once referred to as “the most popular politician on the planet.” He’s highly charismatic, was extraordinarily popular during much of his presidency. So popular that he was able pretty much singlehandedly to get his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, elected to office in 2010. And then Dilma Rousseff was reelected in 2014, and subsequently impeached, and major scandals and political meltdown. In any case, so Lula was in office from January 1, 2003 through the end of 2010. So eight years. He has, of course, been out of office since then and is now back in the presidency, an older, wiser man, one might think. He was, historically, a member of what at one point was something close to a radical left. I don’t know if radical would be maybe an overstatement. But he was pretty far left at some point. And substantially moderated over time. As president, he had a relatively center-left government. And, speaking of religion, he had good, amicable relations with religious groups on the right, center, and the left. Subsequently, towards the end of his administration, and really under Dilma Rousseff, his successor, we had a rise in culture war politics in Brazil, which was really focused on issues of sexuality. To some extent abortion, but Brazilian public opinion is pretty conservative on abortion, relative to the United States, and there was never a lot of movement on abortion. Though, what little movement there was in terms of policy debate Lula was perceived as being more to the left than other politicians. But most of the culture war politics that arose kind of at the tail end of the Lula presidency and then afterwards was about—it was really focused on gender and sexuality—LGBTQ issues, in broad terms. The rise of sexuality politics in Brazil was associated with a religious backlash against the left. So while Lula had been really quite successful in marshalling support from religious actors all across the political spectrum, subsequently we started to see religious groups moving away from the left under Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, particularly upset about things like anti-LGBTQ bullying initiatives, and things like that. So the center and right were responsible for coalescing to impeach Dilma Rousseff in 2016. And all of this is associated with the rise of now-former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected to office in 2018. Jair Bolsonaro was long known as highly conservative, to the point of being, I think, by many people’s standards, reactionary. He was a supporter of the military regime—he had been a supporter of the military regime during the military regime. And he continued to defend the military regime in ways that were outside the political mainstream during his long career in public office, before he was elected president. So it was rather shocking to the political system to see someone who was an open proponent of the military regime be elected to office in 2018. Bolsonaro was elected in part with support of Evangelical groups. So the best analysis suggest that he would probably have narrowly lost the election in 2018 if it hadn’t been for the support of Evangelical groups. Of course, it’s hard to assess these kinds of counterfactuals, but it’s clear that Evangelicals were much more strongly supportive of Jair Bolsonaro than were members of any other religious group. A number of studies, including my own work, suggest that the support for Jair Bolsonaro is, I would say in some sense, spontaneous and sincere among Evangelicals, in that there were Evangelical leaders who came on in support of Jair Bolsonaro, but really the base of his support among religious groups, among religious conservatives, was driven by Evangelical masses, by Evangelicals themselves—lay Evangelicals, that is to say. So we had this Evangelical support for Bolsonaro that appeared to be really strongly related to Jair Bolsonaro’s conservatism on sexuality politics issues. These were the major issues that seemed to drive Evangelical support for him. So he was elected with strong Evangelical support in 2018. He was less popular among Evangelicals once he had taken office than he had been running in the election. He had a number of performance-related issues as president, including poor management of the COVID pandemic, economic malaise that was exacerbated, of course, by the pandemic. So he was not incredibly popular—he continued to be more popular with Evangelicals than he was with other religious groups, while not being a terribly popular president among Evangelicals either. He was, of course, defeated with little over 48 percent of the vote—close to 49 percent of the vote; more like 49 percent of the vote—in the second-round election of 2022. In that election, again, he was able to count on strong support from Evangelicals, though somewhat less than in other times. So what we found was that Evangelicals continued to be more attracted to Bolsonaro than were members of other religious groups. And at the same time, Evangelicals were less supportive of Bolsonaro in 2022 than they were in 2018. And a large part of this, again, is concern about performance-related issues. We, once again, in 2022 saw Evangelical leaders also climb onto the Evangelical bandwagon that was supportive of Bolsonaro. One of the major differences though, between 2018 and 2022, is that once Bolsonaro had lost and Lula had won, we saw religious leaders generally trying to build a truce with the Lula administration. So it doesn’t appear that religious groups are going to be a strong oppositional force against a Lula presidency, for the most part. Does that give an overview? Or is there something more that you’d like from me, Irina? FASKIANOS: That’s great. Why don’t we go to Nick and then we can come back to you. So, Nick, we see next week will be the first meeting between Presidents Biden and Lula. Or, actually, it’s happening this week. Is it happening this week? Next week, OK. So next week. So what do you expect the relationship to be? You worked in the Obama administration when Lula was president for part of that time, and I’m sure have studied it during the Trump years. And now what can you say—talk about a little bit about what we should expect the relationship between the U.S. and Brazil to—how will it evolve from where it's been? ZIMMERMAN: Sure and absolutely. Well, thanks, again, Irina, for having us, and putting on this event. It’s quite an opportunity. And I’m always happy when people are Brazil interested which, admittedly, has been happening more often as of late, given that it’s been having a prominent role in the headlines, it seems. Lula’s visit to the White House is happening upon a broader political backdrop that, in many ways, is quite eerie in how, within their own contexts, of course, and certain idiosyncrasies, these two countries’ political bodies have mirrored each other over their respective last several political cycles. This is a story of profound polarization, disillusionment with democracy as a form of government, a suspicion that the system is rigged, rife with corruption that range from the normal type of money laundering public corruption that might come to mind, to election fraud. And so if you take a step back, I think we need to look at this visit and the elections that just happened—both in the United States and in Brazil at the end of 2022—in the broader context of a moment in which global democracy is really being pushed, challenged, and stressed in ways that had not been the case in recent decades. And I think that both leaders are going to try to sit down and discuss that very topic. And it’s hard to get one’s arms around, frankly, in terms of government bureaucracy, how exactly can two countries that have been suffering from similar political dynamics in terms of their negative, in my view, impacts on their democratic fiber—what can they do together both in their respective countries, and then in other democracies around the world, to learn certain lessons? And so in many ways, I think this is going to be Lula and Biden trying to figure that very thing out, create a framework for cooperation. It’s very early on for Lula, obviously. It’s been literally one month. So I think that they’re going to try to touch on some really central topics, like the state of democracy in the world, like climate change and how they can lead together on that existential challenge, a number of human rights. Sort of more traditional foreign policy issues, like what’s going on in terms of the political crisis in Haiti, the ongoing political migration, refugee crisis in Venezuela, the complete disillusion of democracy in Nicaragua. And Lula has started to be very public about the fact that he envisions a role for Brazil as a mediator of some sorts, as a representative of the global south, perhaps, as a member of the G20, what have you. To try to engage also with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So there’s going to be a really rich agenda. I think it’s going to be more frame setting than a laundry list of deliverables and initiatives. But these are two veteran leaders. And Professor Smith spoke about Lula’s long history and trajectory in Brazil. Obviously, President Biden has a similarly long trajectory in U.S. politics. They knew each other. Their teams knew each other. There’s a lot of overlap, obviously, in the Biden-Harris administration and the overlap between the Obama-Biden administration, and the last two years of the Lula one, as well as the overlap that occurred after Lula departed and Dilma Rousseff took office. So we’ve got a lot of wily negotiators on both sides, to include the new Brazilian foreign minister who’s formerly the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, actually, when I worked at the White House. So I think they’re going to start to try to put a frame, so to speak, on the house, and try to fill it up as time goes by. I did just want to mention—as just a brief tangent—that I do see the trajectory bit of how we got here in Brazil, specifically, in terms of the polarization to not be as singularly driven by sexuality politics and gender ideology as perhaps Dr. Smith does. I agree, it was a driving factor, particularly I think in his second election—Bolsonaro’s reelection campaign, Bolsonaro’s reelection campaign. But we just can’t tell the full story also if we don’t talk about the legacy of corruption, and the fact that tens of millions of Brazilians across any slew of socioeconomic factors that you want to look at—from education and literacy rates to food insecurity rates. We’ve seen tremendous backsliding, after decades of success. And this was a corruption scandal, of course, that gets at the very core and root of the other part of Lula’s governing legacy, which were successive corruption scandals involving really all levels of the government apparatus, which actually netted him himself in prison. I mean, you can’t tell the full story of Lula if you don’t talk about the rise, the depth of the fall, and now where we are again here today. And the judicial overreaches and biases that led to his release do not also erase that legacy of corruption that led to, I think, a broader disillusionment that allowed someone like Jair Bolsonaro, who had been considered outside of the Brazilian mainstream previously, to not only rise in prominence but rise all the way to the presidency. And despite having a very, very bumpy tenure as president, as Dr. Smith outlined quite well, almost won again. Not unlike what we saw here in the United States in 2020. I’ll stop there for now. FASKIANOS: Maybe we can talk a little bit about the insurrection that we saw there and the links to what happened here on January 6, and just that interplay. SMITH: Sure. Are you asking Nick or are you asking me? FASKIANOS: I’d love to hear both of your perspectives. So, Amy Erica, why don’t you go first? SMITH: OK. Well, first of all, thanks to Nick for the really very good explanation. And I absolutely agree. And thanks for the correction. (Laughs.) You can’t really talk about the history of the past twelve years or the past twenty years in Brazil without talking about corruption scandals, and Lula’s strong association with corruption scandals. As far as where this insurrection came from, they were among the most telegraphed, feared outcomes. On the one hand, nobody expected them on the day they happened. And on the other hand, there had long been concern that this kind of thing would happen. Jair Bolsonaro had effectively announced that he was going to try to have this kind of thing happen. (Laughs.) And at the same time, the system wasn’t ready for it at the moment that it actually happened—which is how it happened, really. So as I said, Jair Bolsonaro had long been known as something of—somewhat ambivalent towards democracy in certain ways. He had been an apologist for the military regime, defender of the military regime’s use of torture. And this was all outside the military—or, outside the political mainstream, I would say, during the time that he was running for office. As he was running for office in 2018—that is, when he was running for office the first time. As he was running for office in 2018, he ran a nontraditional campaign in many different ways. But among the nontraditional components of it was that his skepticism of electoral procedure. So Brazil has a highly professionalized electoral administration service—or, a tribunal, court—which runs an electronic voting system that runs across the country and is consistently shown to be quite secure, and really quite free and fair. Elections are run efficiently smoothly, highly professionally in Brazil, and are widely recognized across the political spectrum in Brazil and across international circles as being really highly competent, and highly democratic in the sense of counting everybody’s vote. In any case, he raised skepticism of the election in 2018, of the electoral procedures in 2018. Claimed, without evidence, that he would have won in the first round if it hadn’t been for fraud in the first round. He ended up winning the second round of 2018. And then continued to beat that drum, off and on, throughout his presidency. And as in the lead-up to the 2022 election, started to make lots of claims about fraud, potential corruption, all kinds of issues that he said they were going to face in the 2022 election. Again, without what most independent parties thought was much evidence at all, and with a strong opposition of the Brazilian Supreme Court, which runs the Superior Electoral Tribunal. The Superior Electoral Tribunal is effectively an offshoot, a branch of the Supreme Court. So he went head to head over and over again with Supreme Court justices over whether elections in Brazil could be trusted. He ended up getting some members of the military to, I would say, not exactly endorse, but help to support his story about the potential of corruption. There were members of the military—high-ranking members of the military who, for instance, put forth a memo asking for a whole bunch of changes to electoral procedure, which were widely perceived as being irrelevant, or distracting, or harmful to election procedures in Brazil. In any case, so there was lots of electoral skepticism and attempt to foment the perception in the public that elections were rigged. There was also, along with this, skepticism of polls. Skepticism of polls fed on itself, where it appears that certain members of—some Bolsonaristas, some of the people who were most strongly attached to Bolsonaro, were less likely to answer polls because of skepticism of polls, which then led to polls to underrepresent support for Bolsonaro, in some cases. So we have all of this skepticism, perception of fraud going on. Following the election, there had been concern that Bolsonaro was going to try to stage a coup, or—most observers—most people who were observing most closely didn’t think he would actually try to stage a coup. But there were attempts that something along the lines was going to happen. That there might be a potential attempt at coup. That there might be some other kind of major unrest immediately following the election. Immediately following the election none of that materialized. He never acknowledged—he never conceded the election, and at the same time allowed his administration to proceed to work with Lula to plan the transition. So there was a grudging, if not true acceptance of the result, at least willingness to go along with Bolsonaro stepping down. At the same time, protests were proceeding across the country that were not directly spearheaded by Bolsonaro, though certainly Bolsonaro allies were involved, and Bolsonaro was maybe tacitly supporting some of these protests. One of the things that was different between 2022 Brazil and 2020 U.S. is that in the Brazilian case the allegiances of the armed forces were more in question. While the armed forces were clearly not going to support an overt coup—or, I think most people believed that they were clearly not going to support a coup, and in the end they did not support a coup—there were definitely members of the military who strongly supported Bolsonaro and were really highly sympathetic to the claims of election fraud, and the general disgruntlement among Bolsonaristas. And so a lot of these protests were happening outside military bases with effectively the tacit support of many of the people inside the military bases. Tacit, or non-tacit—or, overt. So all this heads into January 8. And in this run-up we also have an attempted bombing of a petroleum refinery. We have truckers who are blocking roads. And in some cases, we have members of the military themselves who are blocking roads, though that’s not supposed to be happening. So we have all this sort of social unrest heading into January 8. I think after Lula had taken office there was a perception that things were going to calm down, that the protests were going to calm down. The system appeared not to be ready for what happened on January 8. There were groups on Telegram and other social media sites that were organizing the protests of January 8. It was clear that this was going to happen, people knew it was going to happen, and yet the system was not ready to stop the protestors on January 8. There are real concerns about certain members of the military possibly having subverted the reaction—members of the military and other officials, having possibly subverted part of the response to January 8, which was what allowed it to get so out of control. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Nick, do you want to share your perspective? I mean, you did talk about this, the democracy piece in your opening, and what Lula and Biden will talk about vis-à-vis the protests—insurrection, I should say. ZIMMERMAN: Indeed. In many ways, for many of the reasons that Professor Smith cited, January, in retrospect anyway, seems like an inevitable—the inevitable, hopefully, culmination of really a multi-year, extremely sophisticated disinformation apparatus that has also played a huge role, I think, in polarizing the country. So Jair Bolsonaro really begins his national rise at a time when the way that one conducts politics in Brazil completely changes. Since Brazil returned to democracy, the way that you won elections was essentially by growing through a party system. There are many parties in Brazil. Many of them have fused, many have died, many have evolved. But nevertheless, you come up through them because you get access to public resources in a way that doesn’t exist in the United States, that enables you to grow a state-wide, or city-wide, or nation-wide profile. Because Brazil has always allowed for, during political campaign seasons, a certain amount of free advertising time, both on television and radio, on the basis of party’s representations in the legislature. And this was really the means by which Brazilian politicians introduced themselves to the populace. And for most of that period of time, there were really only two or three television channels and radio stations that dominated those mediums. And that’s all gone now, with social media. Jair Bolsonaro had very little public airwave time in the election that got him all the way to the presidency. But he has developed an incredibly sophisticated social media political messaging apparatus—YouTube, WhatsApp, Telegram. In 2018, it was these mass messages being sent around, and then being forwarded around by family members via WhatsApp. Sort of the second evolution of using social media for the express means of political disinformation, after the 2016 U.S. campaign where Facebook was the primary mechanism for it. And part of that was talking about how the system was rigged. Part of that was talking about all of this corruption that we just discussed in the governments prior. And part of that, yes, was that we can’t even trust the election results. And so this fraud narrative, as Dr. Smith said, it started before the last presidential cycle. And it was maintained as a narrative even though Bolsonaro became president, against all the odds. And increasingly the rhetoric ramped up, as he looked to be in trouble from COVID, from a decimated economy, from polarization that he can’t fully control and that had a counter reaction that also helped explain, in part, Lula’s restoration after he had really sunk to new lows in terms of his own political negativity ratings within the country. So much so that someone like Bolsonaro was able to win for exactly that reason. And so as part of the final stage of the campaigning, it became: You cannot trust the elections. And we are citing very obscure and, admittedly, sort of poorly worded language in the Brazilian constitution, ushered in after the dictatorship—some of which is a relic, frankly, of when there was a king from the Portuguese empire. It talks about, in Article 142 of the Brazilian constitution, a “moderating power.” This used to be the aristocrat, poder moderador, but which has been interpreted as a potential mechanism by which the military, of called upon by the president, or the judiciary, or congress to step in to reestablish order, could lead to some sort of new constitutional process, annulling Lula’s victory, potentially restoring Bolsonaro, or something else. But at least something else that wouldn’t be as left or anathema to what these groups want to see in the executive branch. And so all the conjecture about some sort of uprising, in some way or form, it was very clear to many of us what it was going to look like and what it was hoping to accomplish. But in broad strokes, there was a sense that if we can create enough of a ruckus, if we can create enough disorder we can create a public rationale to bring certain elements—it was never monolithic—of the intelligence establishment, security establishment, perhaps the military, other sub-regional leaders along with in saying: “Hey, something’s really awry here. We need to create a different type of constitutional order, election process, rethink how we check these things.” And that was sort of the vague rationale for doing something. Everyone thought that would, of course, happen while Bolsonaro was still president. No one still, as far as I know—it’s an unfolding investigation, so many chapters still to be written—no one fully knows why it happened after the transition had happened. I’ve heard everything from that was always the plan to it was literally that security was too tight on the day of, and that January 8 was the first day that they could penetrate the public buildings. I think that’s a story still to be told. And at some level, yeah, this was an attempt to create enough chaos to see if enough elements of Brazilian society would consider some sort of never fully defined plan B. And it was their version, although their process and the timing was totally different, of going after the electoral certification process at Congress and Vice President Pence at that time, in the U.S. context. Those were the objectives, at the end of the day. FASKIANOS: This is fantastic. I’ve got more questions, but let’s go to our group. You can either raise your hand and I’ll call on you, or else you can write your question in the Q&A. There are a couple in the chat. So if you want to write a question or make a comment, put it in the Q&A box. But I will read those. So I’m going to first go to John Chane, who has raised his hand. If you can unmute yourself. You still need to unmute yourself, John. OK. Let’s see. I’m going to give him one more—that is not working. If you want to type your question. There is in the chat a note from, let’s see, Rita Hipolito. And she says: It’s important to mention the growth of religious hatred that members of African-based religions suffered during the Bolsonaro government. So much so that the first law that Lula signed established a day of religions of African origin in January 6. Is this something, Amy Erica, you can talk about? SMITH: Yeah, briefly. So this animosity between religious conservatives, especially Evangelical groups—especially within and among Evangelical groups, especially neo-Pentecostal groups, and members of African-based religions is longstanding in Brazil. It predates Bolsonaro. There has been intense skepticism between these groups—well, with the skepticism more strongly on the side of Evangelicals being skeptical of Afro-Brazilian groups. And effectively, Evangelicals and Pentecostals framing Afro-Brazilian religious groups as “devil worship.” The animosity has intensified in the past five or six years, as the sort of culture war has built up. One has to at least briefly mention the longstanding racial discrimination and racial prejudice in Brazil, which is certainly part of this. But it goes beyond racial discrimination and racial prejudice, to sort of, I’d say, a very religious kind of debate over revealed truth and those kinds of things. So this hostility has reached the point where—well, actually, twenty years ago—a major Evangelical leader, Edir Macedo, the bishop of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, destroyed some African icons on TV. This is the first major incidence of interreligious, I guess, violence—a form of interreligious violence in Brazilian public media. But the incident, in which Edir Macedo destroyed Afro-Brazilian religious icons on TV was only sort of echoed and continued. That kind of interreligious conflict continued to be a part of Brazilian political culture. And it has intensified. We now have periodic violence against not just attacking religious icons and religious symbols, but actually temples for Afro-Brazilian terreiros, they’re called. So effectively, religious facilities for Afro-Brazilian groups, sometimes attacking actual religious services of Afro-Brazilian religious groups. So, yeah, there’s been a fair amount of religious violence. And it has been gradually increasing in Brazil, substantially increasing now over the past few years. The establishment of a day of religions of African origin, an official day to recognize religions of African origin is, of course, important. And it’s also not by itself going to stop violence against these groups, in part because the violence is lawless. More needs to happen in order to stop that violence. FASKIANOS: Nick. ZIMMERMAN: Sure. And I’ll try to add to that one, and also I see we have questions about Bolsa Familia and the environment as well. So I’ll try to take all in one. I agree with really most of what Professor Smith just said. I would argue—or, not argue—I would just add that it goes even beyond, of course, notwithstanding the focus of the question, it goes even far beyond Afro-Brazilian communities and beliefs. We are talking about one of the most religiously pluralistic and diverse [places], and ethnically too. I mean, I think we’re all increasingly horrified by the reports coming out of the Amazon right now, which leads to the climate question, and the opening, burgeoning investigation by the Brazilian judiciary into the Bolsonaro administration, now past, possibly on suspicion of genocide for the way that they treated and provided public assistance to the Yanomani tribe. So, a number of other minority communities in Brazil have traditionally historically had a pretty rough run of it. And as Dr. Smith just alluded to, that’s an entirely separate conversation and area of rich academic research and focus. But it permeates, I think, throughout today. And so much of what’s involved in the polarization of public discourse is, of course, pitting groups against each other—us versus them—in sort of increasingly demonizing ways. And I think we’ve seen in many different political, cultural, religious contexts around the world that, unfortunately, there’s a very real correlation to that and violence, societal violence. Brazil, I think, is no exception. So that ties, I think, a bit to climate and Bolsa Familia. Bolsa Familia is no longer called Bolsa Familia. We’ll see if Bolsa Familia gets named back. Bolsonaro changed it as part of his marketing campaign to try to own and improve his standing politically, support levels with lower-income Brazilians. It’s been—it was expanded during the pandemic through emergency spending measures. Bolsonaro had indicated if reelected that he would bring it down a bit, and that that temporary expansion would not be permanent. Lula was able to secure, as really his first negotiation with Congress, an additional year of that expanded funding. To be clear, it will never go away. We’re talking about what level does it get funded at. And this is a major, major piece of his political platform. Undoing the backsliding that Brazil has seen in terms of anti-poverty, I think, as you write, is probably his single highest domestic priority. Eliminating food insecurity, upping education levels, investing in education, public health care. These are all things that have traditionally really animated and motivated (inaudible) as well as his broader political movement and party, the Workers’ Party. If that’s a preferential option for the poor, I’m not sure I would use exactly that language, but I think that using the levers of the government to ameliorate socioeconomic disparity has always been Lula’s top domestic priority throughout his entire trajectory as a politician, dating back to his time as a union leader, which Dr. Smith alluded to at the beginning of our conversation. So, preferential or not, it’s what he considers his base, socioeconomically. There is an objective need by most any macroeconomic indicator that you want to look at over the last couple years. And I would expect that space to be very busy in terms of his domestic focus in these initial years. In terms of climate, I’m somewhat optimistic, though Lula’s track record on climate is mixed, historically. This is, I think, a politician and a president who believes in climate change, doesn’t deny its devastating impacts. That’s, at least, a good place to start. When he was president [previously], he enacted a number of policies that were really effective. We saw sustained declined in rates of deforestation under his presidency, almost for a decade straight. But that stalled, and then started to reverse. And that was before Bolsonaro, although then it got far, far worse under him. Again, it just shows that it’s a constant fight. It need a lot of attention. A lot of the government agencies that work on that, which are some of the most specialized in the world, were hollowed out in terms of staff and budgeting. And not unlike some of the reports we heard about what happened in federal agencies in the United States, like the EPA, for example, in years past. So this is going to take a while. He’s putting in a lot of people who have a good track record, who believe in this. And I think he realizes that it is also a gateway to him reestablishing Brazil’s global leadership. And that is something that he very much wants. He wants Brazil back amongst that first tier of countries dealing with the world’s issues. And I think that he saw how much Bolsonaro’s track record, or lack thereof, on climate, made Brazil a pariah, along with a lot of the other issues that we’ve been talking about. But climate was also first and foremost, right? And so I expect to see a bit of a change. Though he will never do anything that could be construed as compromising Brazilian sovereignty, which is always the international debate over the Amazon. And in the past, this motivated decisions from him that were controversial, that led to deforestation, like the creation of the mega Belo Monte Dam, which occurred under his and Dilma Rousseff’s government. And which he saw as vital to sort of the socioeconomic development of a region which is the poorest sub region in Brazil. I think it’s a new day. I think that we have reason to believe that we will again start to see falling rates of deforestation in the Amazon. But it’s a Herculean effort, and one that, appropriate within a Brazilian context, does require, I think, international support and intention, and for many years to come. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. SMITH: Can I just briefly answer? FASKIANOS: Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. SMITH: Can I briefly answer Ralston Deffenbaugh’s question as well? FASKIANOS: Yes. SMITH: Because I think the core of the question is, what is the role of the Catholic left in the policies of Lula’s early administration. So to answer Mr. Deffenbaugh’s question, I looked at his bio. I think you’re at the Lutheran World Service. To answer Mr. Deffenbaugh’s question, there were historically strong ties between the Catholic left and the early days of Lula’s political activism and of the Workers’ Party, and his early presidency. Would we say that the Catholic left is directly responsible for Bolsa Familia? I would not say that. But I would say that notions such as a preferential option for the poor were part and parcel of the milieu. They were inherent in the milieu of the early days of the Workers’ Party. And Lula has long had strong ties to a number of liberation theologian thinkers. And so, yeah, I would say that—can be considered a preferential option for the poor—that I’m not sure that I would say that this is specifically a policy of the Catholic left. But I would say that it is something that grows out of an administration that was strongly tied in its early days and in its development to the Catholic left. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Reginaldo Braga, if you could unmute yourself. BRAGA: Yes. Thank you so much. FASKIANOS: And identify yourself, please. BRAGA: Absolutely. Reginaldo Braga. Native of Brazil. U.S. citizen after almost thirty years. Faculty of religion and education at an African American institution here in the South. I’m very curious. Our take on the political and social processes of Brazil started, I would say, rather recently. I’m very curious on the comments also, as we would bring together our domestic policies, as you, Nick, suggested, and our foreign policies and our, United States—or force of the United States—interested on what has been going on in Brazil. Take, for instance, if you look at the upcoming relations of Brazil-U.S., I would be very curious. Many of us would still remember the NSA case that pried on Dilma Rousseff. Many of us would remember the case that was made to Lula in the times of Bill Clinton, even, to disarticulate arguments of Brazilian further international policies. And the questions of the deep-sea reserves. Which ended up bringing to us, all of us, a sense that effective regime change ended up happening in Brazil with Dilma Rousseff. And a very curious aspect of the effective invalidation of the popular vote, which since the time of Citi Group, Citi Corp reports on plutocracies, has posed the question of are we really going into this reengineering of democracy and enabling the ability of individuals as such. So I’m very curious of these forces. If you think about religion, for years then monies and articulations, there is a big back and forth from right-wing, or more on the religious side—on the right-wing religious side of the United States, going also to the United States. I’m curious to see that conversation of our own forces’ participation and where we are with our domestic policy and foreign policy intersecting. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Who wants to take that, start? Nick? You’re unmuting first. ZIMMERMAN: Yeah. I mean, I’d be happy to. I mean, Reginaldo raised a number of issues in the bilateral relationship. I confess, I’m not sure I heard much of a question in there. I’m not sure—you’re just curious about how the leaders will talk about issues of democracies, given that there have been tensions in the relationship in the past? Do I understand you correctly? Is that right? BRAGA: I think that we can go with that. I’m concerned with the engineering and the perceptions of our own senses of defense of democracy. Because it’s not just a matter on the Brazilian case. The Brazilian case, as Roberto DaMatta would probably say—you probably have encountered him already—there is an underside, or there is a distorted mirror to the U.S. democracy too. I mean, you can raise the question. To me, it’s very concerning to see that an entire election, and following the demise of Dilma Rousseff, the very invalidation of the social mandate that the elections were given were systematically disassembled. And that’s— FASKIANOS: Thank you. OK, thank you. ZIMMERMAN: OK, I think I have a little bit of a better sense. So first of all, I would agree with Reginaldo that a lot of inflection and reflection needs to occur in the United States with respect to the state of its democracy. I actually think that’s where I started my comments, when I talked about how much the political bodies of the two countries have increasingly reflected each other, at least dating back, I would argue, four or five presidential cycles. And so in no way was I suggesting that—and I never said this—that the conversation about democracy between President Biden and President Lula should only be about Brazilian democracy. And in fact, based on the comments that I’ve seen from both leaders, that is the intent of neither for the conversation. It’s actually to kind of come together, and commiserate, and talk about what can be done about these issues. The U.S. Congress, Democratic congressional leaders, have talked about, for example, sharing their lessons learned now that it’s concluded into how they conducted their investigation into January 6, if that would be of some sort of interest to their counterparts in Brazilian Congress. That’s one possibility. Perhaps Brazil and the United States can work together to start strengthening, through resourcing and technical capacity training, right, beef up election monitoring and observing organizations to make sure that we’ve got more of an infrastructure, both on the ground but also in terms of communications to debunk some of the myths about election fraud. All of these are examples. I have several others. But they’re based in real conversations that are being thought through and discussed at various different levels in the capitals of both countries. So just want to clarify there. I think Reginaldo perhaps interpreted my commented in a different way, because actually in many ways I think we agree. And the fragility that we’ve seen in the last several years about U.S. democracy in part is why I think the Biden administration has come out repeatedly in public, unlike many of Brazil’s other closest parties, to defend its electoral process, quickly recognize Lula’s victory, and make it such a priority to have him come up in the very first weeks of his presidency. I think the traumas that the two countries’ democracies have experienced in years past is why there might be an opportunity for a new kind of relationship, which has always been marked by great tension, as Reginaldo and others have noted, and also profound areas of collaboration. That’s the nature of the beast. Democracy and geopolitics is complicated. And when you’re talking about two of the five or six, depending on how you classify it, democracies in the world, their interests are never going to fully align. That’s the case with the U.S. and India, China, the EU. That has been, it will continue to be the case, with Brazil. That’s all the more reason for why it’s important that this visit’s happening now. And I hope there are many more to come. I’ll stop there. I know we’re running out of time. I’m sure Dr. Smith will want to jump in too. FASKIANOS: Yes, well, I’d like to get in one more question, if we can. And Katie Burns, who’s at the U.S. State Department. Based on your analysis, how might the Lula administration engage, or not, on questions of indigenous spirituality as an arm of how it engages on freedom of religion or belief policies, or otherwise? Climate, environment, protection of sacred land, for instance? Especially considering the establishment of Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and burgeoning investigation into abuses against the Yanomami community. There’s a lot there. We don’t have very much time, but. Amy Erica, do you want to go first? And maybe sum up— SMITH: Oh, that’s a huge question. And it’s a fantastic one. How might the Lula administration engage? I anticipate that the Lula administration will be highly sympathetic, certainly in terms of sort of the level of policy rhetoric will be highly sympathetic to support for indigenous spirituality. This is part of the historical tendency of the Brazilian left and center-left, is support for non-Christian religious groups and spiritualities. I also see that the support for indigenous spirituality will go along with support for indigenous rights and indigenous lands, more broadly. One of the things that’s happened in Brazil is that there’s a very strong association—I think this is underlying Katie’s question—is that there’s a very strong association between support for the indigenous and support for the environment. There are studies that show conclusively that protection of indigenous lands and territories is really, really good for the Brazilian environment. The more demarcation you have, and the more empowered indigenous groups are to protect that land, the better things are for the Brazilian Amazon, and the rainforests in general, beyond the Amazon. So, yes. I anticipate that the Lula administration will, at the level of rhetoric, strongly support indigenous spirituality, and also support demarcation that’s related to indigenous understandings of—when I say “demarcation,” I mean demarcation of territory. Demarcation of indigenous reservations. So support for demarcation of indigenous reservations, that’s driven, in part, by indigenous understandings of spirituality. I would say there is a tension here that just occurred to me. That there’s also going to be a tension with Evangelical groups, because Evangelicals perceive their mission as being—or, one of their missions—as being evangelization within indigenous territories, and possibly that there are potential conflicts that will emerge from this. I suspect that Lula’s going to try to thread the needle and work with Evangelical groups, while also ultimately siding with indigenous groups, for the most part. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And, Nick, do you want to add to that? ZIMMERMAN: I just—yeah, thank you. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: Fantastic. And we are at the end of our hour. So, unfortunately, we can’t get to the final question there. So my apologies. But thank you both for this really terrific conversation, to everybody who joined with their written questions and verbal questions. We appreciate it. You can follow Amy Erica Smith’s work on her website at amyericasmith.org, and Nick Zimmerman’s work at wilsoncenter.org. So go there to see what they’re writing about and saying. And you can follow CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy Program on Twitter at @CFR_religion. And please do reach out to us. Write to [email protected] with any suggestions or questions. Thank you, again. We hope you will join us at our next Social Justice Webinar on social safety nets. It will take place on Thursday, February 23, at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time. You will get that invitation under separate cover. So, again, thank you to Nick, and Amy Erica, and to all of you. Have a great day. SMITH: Thank you, everybody. Bye.

Heidi Altman, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, and Ernesto Castañeda, director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and associate professor of sociology at American University, discuss policies and laws pertaining to immigration, integration, and repatriation in the United States. Edward Alden, CFR’s Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow, moderates. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Social Justice Webinar Series. This series explores social justice issues and how they shape policy at home and abroad through discourse with members of the faith community. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record and the audio, video, and the transcript will be made available on CFR’s website, cfr.org, and on the iTunes podcast channel Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. I am pleased to have Ted Alden with us to moderate today’s discussion. Ted Alden is the Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at CFR, specializing in U.S. economic competitiveness, trade, and immigration policy. He is also the Ross distinguished visiting professor at Western Washington University. He is the coauthor of the forthcoming book, When the World Closed its Doors: The COVID Pandemic and the Future of Border Control. And he has served as a project director for several CFR-sponsored independent task force reports, including one on U.S. immigration policy. So, Ted, thank you very much for doing this. I’m going to turn it over to you to introduce our distinguished panelists. ALDEN: Thank you very much, Irina. It’s great to be here with you. It’s great to be with all of you here on the call. I’m Zooming in from the West Coast, so I apologize if I take an occasional sip of coffee. It’s still reasonably early here. So I am really pleased and privileged to have two superb guests with us today to talk about the many complexities surrounding current immigration issues in the United States. And particularly questions of asylum and access for people fleeing violence and persecution. First, we have with us Heidi Altman. Welcome, Heidi. Heidi is the director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center. Previously, she was the legal director for the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition. She has worked extensively on providing services to those in immigration detention dealing with deportation and removal cases, and a whole other range of rights issues with respect to immigrants here in the country. So welcome, Heidi. It’s great to have you here. I am also pleased to introduce Ernesto Castañeda. Ernesto is the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. He’s the founding director of the Immigration Lab, and a graduate program director of the MA program in sociology, research, and practice at American University. He has written extensively—I tried to review some of the literature. I didn’t even get close. But he’s written books and papers on a wide array of immigration issues, including immigrant integration, ethnic political mobilization, urban issues, health disparities, and marginalized populations. Their full bios are in your material, and I encourage you to have a look at the many things they have done in this area. Ernesto, I’d like to start with you to frame this set of issues a bit. We have all been reading the paper, heard a lot about the record number of what they today call encounters at the southern border, with people arriving across the border from Mexico. You’ve written an excellent piece on some of the challenges in counting these numbers accurately. We hear numbers like two million and three million. I worked on this about a decade ago at CFR, to try to come up with a system for measuring entry between the legal ports of entry, but it was a different time back then. It was mostly Mexican citizens crossing. We have a very different situation today. So frame this a little bit. What’s going on at the southern border? How does it compare/differ from what was happening in the late 1990s and early 2000s? So over to you, Ernesto, to get us started here. CASTAÑEDA: Excellent. Thank you very much, Ted. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today and talking about this important topic. And kind of answering this great question, we have an immigration situation happening in the U.S., like it has always happened. Since the first people arrived with the Mayflower, there’s been always people coming to the U.S. So I’d like to start with that historical context, that there is not a particular crisis that we’re facing in a security or national security sense, as the United States. There is indeed a humanitarian crisis. And religious groups, churches, nonprofits, government offices have been helping a lot of immigrants that are new arrivals. And there’s an issue of asylum seekers, refugees. So that’s a pressing issue that we see in the streets in many of our cities. And that’s the pressure. And that’s why it’s great to have so many people in the audience that know people in this situation. So it’s a human phenomenon. It’s a people phenomenon. And it’s something we can do a lot to help through nonprofits, through churches, through universities, organizations. And it’s also that governments can improve or make worse. So it’s good to have this conversation today. In terms of numbers, that’s a great way to start because in the media there’s a lot of emphasis on these record numbers. And whenever somebody says that about immigration, let’s—you always have to remember that for the most part of history, the human population has kept growing. That may change in the near future, and that’s not the case necessarily for the U.S. and other countries. But there’s always more people in the world. So by definition, there will always be more people on the move. What is interesting is that since World War II it’s only around 3.5 percent, 3 to 4 percent of the global population who actually live in a country different from the one that they are born. And that is constant. So, again, there’s no crisis in terms of numbers. We see such high number of people counted because the state said now—very recently, starting with the pandemic and the beginning of Title 42—rather than measuring apprehensions and then deportations, so putting people in prison with their numbers and their names and all that. And the government, because of the pandemic, was allowed for public health reasons to send people back to Mexico. And often they are not keeping track of who they even were. So all the numbers that we have been reported since the pandemic, so with Trump and with Biden, are for apprehensions, which are very different. So we know for a fact that it’s the same individuals encountered over and over and over again. How many times this person? Nobody knows. So we cannot say, OK, the real number is this or that, because that is almost impossible to do. But we know for a fact—and that’s the reason I brought it in the conversation—is that the official figures of two million or two million and a half since Biden became president, it’s an over count because it includes people coming legally from Afghanistan, from Ukraine, and we can talk about later, but it’s also including a lot of people from Central America and Mexico that are repeatedly trying to turn themselves into us for asylum, and they are saying: “No, thank you. Go back and wait until we reopen the door.” So those numbers are not true. Probably we are at numbers similar to what we saw at the beginning of the Trump administration and what we saw with Obama, and even Bush. So that’s a fact. The numbers are not out of control. But it is true that the immigration system doesn’t work. That’s a bipartisan agreement, that the immigration system that we have in the U.S. is broken. So a couple more things about that, and I’ll wrap it up. So it’s an issue that we don’t have a lot of legal pathways to welcome people. And that’s something that the Biden administration is working on, and we’ll talk about later. But to conclude this opening answer, this is an issue pretty much of international relations. So I’m glad the Council on Foreign Relations is hosting this, because a lot of the movement that we’ve seen lastly has to do with the return to the Taliban from Afghanistan and people coming that were our allies and helping us. The situation in Ukraine, the invasion by Russia of Ukraine, has moved a lot of people that are escaping for their lives. So that’s a new phenomenon, and Europe and America are helping in that effort. But also, we have situations that are not that different, because of internal political issues and economic pressures, that are pulling a lot of people from Venezuela, from Haiti, from Cuba on the move. And they are arriving to the border. And those are the numbers that we are seeing. The people coming for economic reasons from Mexico actually are lower. They are not zero, but they are much lower than historically. So, again, it’s good that we’re going to have today the conversation. It’s all about other issues happening around the world and how the U.S. can engage constructively to help the people and address the situations in those countries, and how this becomes part of geopolitics and international relations of the U.S. Thank you. ALDEN: Fabulous. Thank you very much, Ernesto. That was a superb framing of some of the dynamics at the southern border. Heidi, I want to turn to you. I mean, most of these people who are arriving at the southern border are requesting asylum, protection in the United States. Very clear obligation for the United States under international law, clear obligation under our domestic laws to have a due process that’s carried out for people who arrive to determine their eligibility for asylum. But what we’re seeing today, the way you’ve described it, is a real erosion of the norms around asylum. You were on a press conference listening to Democrats this morning. The Republicans in the House have introduced a bill that would effectively block all asylum claims at the border. Ernesto mentioned Title 42 during COVID, which was put in place during the Trump administration but continued under Biden, which blocks many, many of the claims that would otherwise have been sought by those arriving. So what’s going on here? Why have we seen this erosion in what are really quite longstanding laws and norms surrounding those seeking asylum here in the country? ALTMAN: Thanks, Ted. And it’s such a pleasure to be here with you, and with you, Ernesto. And thanks to everyone who joined. It is a moment that I think the word “inflection point” seems to be one that is tossed around a lot, and I think is correct. I think having to get here is such an interesting question. My career started in practice. I was in deportation defense. And I can say that since the first day I set foot in immigration court, it’s always been clear that the United States immigration policy is oriented around enforcement. That’s the center. And that’s a problem that we should talk about today. But there were certain norms that were sort of still respected at the heart of that. And certainly, the right to ask for asylum when arriving at a border was one of them. How did we sort of move astray from that? I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the power of dehumanization. During the Trump administration we saw for the first time language that was explicitly and emphatically dehumanizing about immigrants coming from not just the mouths of elected officials, but the mouth of the president of the United States. And so there’s so much social science out there about what happens when groups of people are referred to in nonhuman ways. And so that’s an invasion of migrants at the border, a flood of migrants at the border, or referring, as the former president did, to migrants as criminals, as rapists. What happens is that people start to feel that they cannot have empathy for that group of people, and it becomes easier to commit violence or to support policies that are inherently violent. When the Biden administration came in, we really felt that there were two paths available to them. I think there still are. (Laughs.) The first path would have been to really sort of carry forth the commitments that were made in those first few weeks and on the campaign trail, and to just get out there and to really embrace the United States history and values as a place that welcomes asylum seekers, a commitment to due process, and to a true sort of revamp, rehaul of this immigration system that for too long has been punitive. The other path was to take a look at these policies that the Trump administration instituted and allow them to become normalized. And I think, in short, the answer to your question is that we are at real risk of anti-asylum, inherently violent policies on the border and in the interior of the United States towards migrants becoming normalized in U.S. policy. ALDEN: I’m going to ask you both, actually, to expand on that a little bit. Maybe I’ll go to Ernesto and then back to Heidi. I mean, the approach I think predates Trump, honestly. I’ve been paying pretty close attention to this stuff since 9/11, and even before. I think can take it all the way back at least to the 1990s in California and Texas. I mean, the approach has been, do you call it, Heidi, prevention through deterrence. I’ll start with you, Ernesto, and then the same question for Heidi. Do we have any evidence that deterrence is at all effective when we’re dealing with the sort of people who are arriving at the border? And there’s a sort of secondary question, is deterrence appropriate when you’re talking about asylum seekers, right? Because they are pursuing a right that’s actually protected under our laws. I hate two-part questions, but that’s a two-part question. (Laughs.) So let’s start with effectiveness and then, since this is a Social Justice Webinar, the rights question of it. Go ahead. CASTAÑEDA: Yes. On the moral aspect, it is their right. It violates international law and it goes against a lot of religious principles of helping people in need, helping the other. But also, in terms of practice, and in terms of policy, in terms of budgeting, in terms of governing, research time and time again in different countries and places shows that this forced deterrence doesn’t work. If people need to migrate to live again with their mother or with their children, they’ll find a way. If people have to escape genocide or war to save their lives, they will find a way to get out of the dangerous place. And, again, we see examples throughout history and throughout places. And the data for the U.S. is just very clear. Building the wall, all the policies that Bush did, Obama, you name it—this has been going on for decades—they cannot stop immigration, undocumented immigration. It’s just a fool’s errand. You just put people at risk. They’re going to come anyway, and you make it harder for them to get settled, to get established. They have to pay $10,000 to a coyote to get from Central America, a smuggler, to get to the U.S. It’s a lot of money that they spend instead of on housing and all that. So if they get deported, they have nothing back home. So if, instead, they could come with a visa and they could use their first $10,000 to rent an apartment for a few months, to get them settled while they get a job, it would be better for America. It would be better for them. It would be better for small businesses. It would be better for renters. So many resources are wasted and so many people’s lives are at risk, so many people die attempting to cross the border or in the ocean coming to Cuba. And, again, the same issue with Africa coming to Europe. Many people die every year in the Mediterranean. And that’s almost a policy by design. That’s one of the internal goals by some people who design these policies to say that an immigrant who realize that by leaving their countries and going to the global north they could die, that they wouldn’t do it. But that is not true. The people that are leaving are not leaving for fun. They are not leaving—most people are not leaving. Most people cannot leave. But the people that have the resources and the networks and the bravery to leave, they’re going to leave anyway. So deterrence doesn’t work. So we’re wasting time and we’re violating the right of asylum, which was already very restricted. It was very hard to prove that you have probable cause, that you were escaping political persecution. It existed, and it was useful for Cubans, for people from Eastern Europe and other cases. But some—coming from Mexico, for example, unless you had a recorded history in the media of being a journalist persecuted for your political views, it was very hard to get asylum. But it was possible. Now even that right to apply for asylum is being denied in the border, when otherwise we act like the pandemic is over but we still pretend that it’s happening at the border. So it is a big issue. I mean, that is the new what is getting worse, as Heidi was saying. ALDEN: Heidi, same question for you. And I have a quick follow up as well. So, the whole prevention through deterrence approach. What is your take on it? Go ahead. ALTMAN: Ernesto, you said it all so beautifully. I’ll try to maybe zero in on a few specifics. One thing that I was reading recently about looking back at some of the early papers, when prevention through deterrence, as they call it, sort of first became formalized, which was in ’94. What you find is that the government and CBP, Customs and Border Protection, and its predecessor Border Control, at that time was very aware of the fact that prevention through deterrence meant that people would die on their way to the United States. And that’s actually written and recorded, this was not something that people discovered later. Government officials didn’t sort of come to realize that if they put these really cruel, harsh border policies in place it would mean that people would be harmed and killed. It’s sort of baked in. And so it is, as Ernesto has said to both of your questions, it’s wrong and it doesn’t work towards its stated purpose. So first, it doesn’t work towards its stated purpose, I just wanted to note specifically under the Biden administration one of the central prevention through deterrence policies is migrant prosecutions. And sometimes you’ll hear the secretary refer to that as a consequence delivery, which is sort of another version of prevention through deterrence. So migrant prosecutions is when someone arrives at the border, and they attempt to enter without permission—usually because they’re going to seek asylum—in addition to going through the civil immigration detention and deportation process, they also face a prosecution under federal law, and can face sometimes months or years in criminal custody before then they just go back to the immigration system. We did a survey at our organization, my colleague Jesse Franzblau went down to the border and talked to about 150 people who were facing prosecution. Most of them didn’t know if they were in criminal or immigration custody. They just knew that they were sort of in this system, and that it was miserable and depriving them of their rights, and their liberty, and their ability to see their family. But they were sticking it out because they needed to be here because they had fled. So I think it’s this idea that people who were forced to flee violence have this very specific idea of what the policies are on the border is just wrong. The other thing I’m just going to say is that it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter if it decreases the numbers. And this is a question of metrics. How do we measure success? And so yesterday you may have seen the Department of Homeland Security put out a statement sort of lauding the success of some of the new limited pathway programs that we’ll talk about that they have put out. And the basis for this celebration is that in a short period, some of the numbers on the border, the government claims, have decreased. Another way that you could frame that same announcement is that these policies have resulted in more people who are in need of refuge and asylum in the United States being turned away at the border, without any ability to express that here, and sent back to harm, right? And so why does our government look at it from that first lens rather than the latter? And that’s the fundamental disconnect and where we’re sort of fundamentally at risk of back to the sort of erosion of norms question that we began with. ALDEN: Why don’t we turn—and, Heidi, I’m going to stick with you for a minute. You raised the Biden administration’s limited pathways initiative. We’ve been talking here—this is a short conversation, so we’ll go back in some more detail, I’m sure, when we get questions from the audience. But talk a little bit first about what the Biden administration is doing, and your assessment of what sort of legal pathways might be necessary to actually deal with this problem in a more thorough and human way than we have been able to do as a country. ALTMAN: Sure. And for those who have been following the incredibly complicated web of policies that are now in place at the border, the limited pathways we’re talking about are a series of parole programs—parole, being a method for people to enter the United States with, essentially, permission to remain for a limited period of time—one or two years, usually. It’s not asylum. It does not offer a pathway to citizenship. It doesn’t offer stability, in that sense. So, I mean, to answer your question, I think these programs are limited in numbers. They’re limited in the permanence that they provide. They leave people in the United States in a very vulnerable spot. And then the eligibility requirements that the administration has put in place for these programs are further restricting and sort of make the programs inaccessible for those who need it most. You must be able to get a passport. You must be able to seek—to apply for the program from the country you need to flee. So to answer your question, the biggest overall answer to your question is that asylum access needs to be restored at ports of entry. When someone arrives at the southern border having fled, making the decision that Ernesto says, any of us can think about. What would it take you actually get you to leave, right? To pack up real fast and leave your loved ones, your school, your job, your community? It’s not a win. So when people arrive, there needs to be the ability to go to a port of entry and say, I’m here because I need to seek asylum, and be processed through. Right now it’s a crapshoot whether you’re going to actually get access. And so that’s what forces people into these very dangerous pathways. And that’s why last year had the highest number of reported deaths of migrants at the border. So obviously access to asylum. There are other executive actions that the administration can and should have already taken. Temporary Protected Status, for example, is a way to provide more meaningful and lasting status for people from countries where it’s not safe to return, for any of a number of reasons. There are other parole programs that would lead to more permanent stability. And there’s a number of other sort of executive actions that could be taken that would allow some protection short of what Congress should be providing, of course, which is a pathway to citizenship. ALDEN: OK. Excellent. Ernesto, I’m going to ask you the same question, but maybe with a slight twist before we go to questions. Which is, are there things going on, either at the governmental level or the community level, that you find hopeful with respect to this issue? I’ll throw out one on my own. I was very heartened to see the Biden administration’s announcement of the creation of this Welcome Corps. Now, that’s a somewhat different population. You’re talking more about traditional refugees. I grew up in Canada. I’ve paid close attention for many years to the Canadian private refugee sponsorship program. My sister’s church has sponsored five Syrian families, I think. I was very encouraged to see the administration embrace that model, if initially on a fairly small scale. But do you see things out there that you find hopeful in dealing with this set of challenges? CASTAÑEDA: Yeah, exactly. I mean, the American people want to help. Churches are helping the people that manage to get here, across the border. For example, in Washington, DC, where many of us are at, it was very heartwarming to see how people were, largely through churches, organizing to get furniture, clothing and stuff for the Afghan families coming from Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. Same thing, a lot of mobilization in schools and everything to help students from Ukraine, and things like that. And then, yes, the welcoming program, where citizens, families, groups, churches can sponsor newcomers from Venezuela, from Cuba now, from Afghanistan, from Ukraine, following the successful model from Canada with Syrians. It’s a good way for civil society, that has always been very strong in America—or very well-organized, very well-funded, which you don’t have in France, for example—to actively participate in immigration, integration, and welcoming. Unfortunately, these groups don’t set policy. And it’s still—for somebody to get to the border, it depends on the council of people, on the people at the border, people doing the interview on the access to legal services, et cetera, for people to be successful in their arrival to then be welcomed. So it’s a good move in the right direction. People want to help. Also, we have the need for employers. And Laura mentions that in the question, or I peeked at it. The American population is getting older. We have deaths with COVID. We are growing fast in the recovery. As you see over and over, construction, restaurants, et cetera, agricultural workers, there’s not enough people. We need people. And we’re not talking about millions. We’re talking about half a million every year. That would be great for the economy. So employers are ready to welcome them, neighbors are ready to help, churches are ready to help. So some conservatives would say we just need the government to get out of the way and let people take care of business. ALDEN: Yeah, I mean, just to mention Canada, this is the overall immigration stream. This is not just refugees and asylum seekers. But they’re planning to take half a million a year in Canada, which has about one-tenth of our population, about the size of California. But they’re looking at demographics and they say, look, we have no growth in our labor force from births here in the country. And we need a large immigrant stream. But that’s a broader debate. Irina, Rivka, I want to turn it over to you and see what sorts of questions, comments we have from our audience. OPERATOR: Thank you, Ted. (Gives queuing instructions.) Our first question is from John Chane. CHANE: Thank you, very, very much. My name is John Chane. I’m the retired Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC. So I know some of the stories, Ernesto and Heidi, about life there. I also come from an immigrant family. I live in Southern California now, retired, and it’s a wonderful experience because you can speak Spanish here and we have a wonderful culture, which is very, very ethnic-centered and much, I think, embraced. The issue for me is, how do we change the political narrative? I mean, churches, temples, mosques, even, are very much engaged in this process. But how do you change the rhetoric? I can talk about immigration and embrace it, even though we’re going to build a thirty-foot high wall here at Friendship Park, right here along the ocean and along the Mexican border. When I go to other parts of this country to speak and I talk about immigration, literally I get hammered about all those people that are coming into this country and taking jobs from Americans. It’s crazy. It’s a lousy narrative. How do you move the political needle to make a difference? Because the politicians are the ones who are being—using it as a way of moving forward in their own careers? ALDEN: Heidi, it’s not an easy one. But why don’t you start us off on that one? ALTMAN: Yeah, thank you. Thank you, John, for being with us. Right, this is the question. (Laughs.) It really requires political courage. And I think I just this morning was at the press conference that Ted referenced. And I tweeted it. I tweeted out the different beautiful statements that we heard from Senator Booker’s soaring rhetoric about welcoming and the faith-based commitment to asylum in the United States. And I just before we started speaking looked at my Twitter thread and saw that I had a mention where someone had written back: “Asylum? Obscenity, this is an invasion.” And people are hearing that from governors. They’re hearing it from elected officials. And the thing is that there’s not a strong enough counter narrative coming from the party that is in power right now. So there may be small policies that are being announced so that we can embrace—I think that the sponsorship policy is really exciting, I agree. The private sponsorship policy. But we need the president—we need Democratic leadership in the Senate and the House getting behind the microphone and talking about the values—the values of asylum, the values of welcome, how this is—has a tradition in so many faiths. And that’s not what we have, right? So when we have the president—when Secretary Mayorkas goes out on the Sunday talk shows, they’re using the language of deterrence. They don’t use the word “invasion,” but they’re, again, looking to these metrics of decreasing numbers as the outcomes that they want. And we really need that counter narrative at a leadership level. And from where we sit, we need to be demanding that of our leadership. We need to be demanding the positive policies and the change in rhetoric urgently. Because we don’t know who’s going to be in office in two years. We try not to make this too political, so maybe Ernesto will help. (Laughs.) ALDEN: Ernesto, do you want to add anything to that, quickly? CASTAÑEDA: It’s an important question. Yeah. I mean, this is a disinformation campaign that has been going on for decades. We had historical precedents, but since the last immigration reform of Reagan in 1986, there was this, “OK, we’re going to recognize these people, but we don’t want more people to come, and we’re going to penalize, we’re going to have punishment for the people that employ them or the people that come.” And that hasn’t worked. But we had that rhetoric that has been used time and time again, first in California by a candidate for governor and then nationwide. Because people like Trump think, and it does work on the short term to get elected, to get attention, to get there. But also want we have to remind politicians that want to be opportunists, is that in the long term, people catch up and it doesn’t work forever. So even for the congressional elections, when Trump was president, it wasn’t as successful for the candidates to use that as a main platform. And even Trump—(inaudible)—to Black Lives Matter and other topics in the reelection campaign because immigration wasn’t as successful to get him beyond the base. Most Americans, whether they’re Democrats, Republicans, or independents, are in favor of DREAMers, in favor of immigration reform. So it’s something that politicians have used for their own purposes on the right. And it’s something that, as Heidi was saying, a lot of centrists and even Democrats are afraid that they cannot touch immigration, they cannot be seen openly as pro-immigrant because they are going to be destroyed and they’re going to lose. But that is not true. Most of the American population have a more nuanced and more moderate view on immigration. So this is just a culture that immigrants have been terrified by very loud voices that are anti-immigrant, that have demonstrated, and are very vocal and very loud. So it’s important for the Council on Foreign Relations and all of your churches and places that we change the rhetoric. That’s a big homework that we can do. And I think we can do it little by little, change the way we think about these issues. Because all these facts that we hear often about immigrants are just not true. ALDEN: Thanks very much. I’m going to use the moderator’s prerogative to add one small thing. I was in the—I was a reporter for a long time, in the media thinking a lot about public opinion. And I’ve been outside of DC for four years now. And I think some of this has got to come from a grassroots level. And that’s partly why I’m excited by these private refugee sponsorship programs. They’re very small at this moment, but I think part of what needs to happen is when people know immigrants, when they know asylum seekers, when they know refugees, when they’re in their communities a lot of the dehumanization that Heidi talks about, that stuff goes away. And I think there are ways in which we need to make the reality of an immigrant society here much more accessible to people. And so it’s not just coming from the top down; it’s coming from the bottom up. And it has to happen at both directions. Riki, let’s go to the next question here. OPERATOR: Our next question is a written submission from Laura Alexander from the University of Nebraska, Omaha. She writes: Groups in my home state of Nebraska have recently been holding conversations about the possibility of a more robust welcome for immigrants at the statewide level. This initiative includes business and agricultural leaders, as well as religious and community leaders, because we’re in such dire need of workers in our state. There’s a limit to what this coalition can do, since immigration policy is largely a federal matter. But have you see individual U.S. states crafting policies or advocating with the federal government in a way that could lead to a more humane, a more effective, and more sane immigration policy? ALDEN: Great question. Thank you. And shout out to Nebraska. I was just there a couple of months ago for a wonderful conference at the university in Lincoln. Ernesto, do you want to start us off there? I know you’ve done some work at the urban level, at the state level. Are there things that can happen at the state level that can make a real difference here? Or things that maybe are already happening already? CASTAÑEDA: They should, and they can. But I think my short answer to that question will be, no. States are not doing enough to welcome. I think Utah has sometimes some good ideas about this, but in New York, for example, it’s always been an immigrant, a very diverse city. I would characterize their policies as laissez-faire. They let immigrants figure it out, but they provide very little support in reality. So I think we can do—the states and the cities, the governors could do more to welcome immigrants and try to push for better policies. Like what they are doing right now. It’s a shame that even the Mayor of New York and democratic governors are complaining about the new arrivals of people coming in buses, and that they cannot offer them any help or resources. And because governors and mayors are used to letting immigrants take care of themselves—which they do. They are coming here to work and their families are going to support them. Or civil society, churches to support and provide that welfare in the beginning. There’s very little support compared to Canada or Europe. So to ask for them to do that, it’s a big stretch, but we should keep pushing that. ALDEN: Heidi, do you want to add anything on that one? ALTMAN: I think what I’ll just add is that there’s this whole—there’s a whole roster of welcome policies as Ernesto is referencing. Access to benefits, shelter, services. But there’s a flipside too that I think we have to not lose sight of. Chicago, where my organization, National Immigrant Justice Center, is headquartered, has a really robust sanctuary policy at the city level. And I think that you just have to remember that once immigrants are in our communities, and a robust part of our communities. And that it is equally as important for cities and localities to say that they will not work in collaboration or cooperation with the federal government on enforcement issues. Because when that entanglement happens what it does is it erodes trust at a very general level among immigrant communities who then become afraid to—who lose trust in all public institutions, not just the police, and become afraid to send their kids to school, become afraid to go to the DMV. So I think that having that real clear red line, or wall, whatever you want to call it, between federal enforcement and the work of state and local law enforcement agencies is equally critical. ALDEN: Excellent. Thanks very much. Riki, next question, please. OPERATOR: I’m going to combine two questions. The first is from Christina Kilby from James Madison University. She writes: What risks or fragilities do you see with the new Welcome Corps, or private sponsorship program for refugees? For example, will religious groups only sponsor refugees who share their religion? Or will refugees feel pressure to convert in order to be attractive to private sponsors? How can we welcome more refugees while mitigating potential downsides of this new program? Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons from the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty asks a question: Are there examples of religious support for immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in other countries that have made a difference in public opinion and policy that those of us in the U.S. could learn from? ALDEN: Which of you wants to start off with that one? ALTMAN: (Laughs.) Go ahead, Ernesto. CASTAÑEDA: OK. (Laughs.) So I think Christina raises important issues. And that will be for the audience to help the stranger, whatever religion they have and whatever tradition, which we saw with Afghans. It wasn’t only mosques helping them, or it wasn’t only helping Christians or other religions, Afghans. It was helping across the board. And that was important. And I think it will be important for people here to not see this as a direct opportunity to proselytize or to evangelize, and more of an opportunity for the congregation or the church to do a service to other human beings. Because, talking about other countries, I’ve also have done work in Spain and in France. And in France, the churches are not allowed to do all this work. And they don’t, or a large part. There are exemptions, but it’s not as active as in the U.S. But in Spain, I saw many examples of nonprofits and churches that had a Christian or Catholic brand. And a lot of Moroccan immigrants that were Muslim felt that tension and that pressure to convert to apply for asylum or to receive services. It wasn’t a direct thing. But, for example, something as basic as giving thanks or having a prayer before having a meal in a soup kitchen, that was a tough issue for some of the immigrants and the refugees. So I would invite all of you that are helping to try to create that wall between the religious and the service sector, so that people choose to become part of the church later once they are settled in your city, rather than making that as a mechanism to attract them. And unfortunately, the welcome package it has to be—I mean, civil society have to keep alert so that small churches don’t take this as an opportunity to increase their numbers. It’s good that you raised that up, thank you. ALDEN: Thank you. That’s a very thoughtful answer. Heidi, did you want to add anything, or should we  move on? The only thing I would just add quickly on the Welcome Corps initiative, which I’ve been looking at, the potential for community sponsorship is much broader than the churches. The churches, obviously, have historically played a key role here, but any group of five people, and they’re encouraging workplaces, and universities, and schools, and civic organizations. So the potential here I think is to go well beyond the churches, even though the churches, of course, have historically played a really big role in this area. Riki, back to you. OPERATOR: Our next written question is from Holly Atkinson from CUNY School of Medicine. She writes: Physicians, psychologists, social workers, and other health care workers are involved in conducting forensic exams for asylees and submitting affidavits to immigration officials, which we know statistically increases the odds of asylum being granted. But besides doing these exams, how can the medical profession specifically partner with the legal community to advocate for more human immigration policies? ALDEN: Heidi was this something you—oh, go ahead, Ernesto. I was thinking Heidi might have encountered this directly in some of the work she’s done in DC. But either of you, go ahead. CASTAÑEDA: Heidi, please, yeah. ALTMAN: No, no, go ahead. Get started, I’ll follow you. CASTAÑEDA: No, no, I was going to say that I’m going to let you answer that. (Laughter.) ALDEN: Well, I think you’ve worked on the ground at that level maybe more than Ernesto, so I was going to throw it to you, yeah. ALTMAN: I just have to say that it is—the gratitude, as legal practitioners, that we feel to the doctors and the therapists who are willing to give of their time to do these forensic evaluations. And this goes to the point that you made earlier, Ernesto, we’re talking about access to asylum, but then actually getting asylum is a whole other story. It’s incredibly difficult. The law is so complex. And we are still living in a system where if you’re seeking asylum on the basis of torture, you have to prove that you have scars from that torture. And that’s re-traumatizing, and it often involves a medical examination that can be re-traumatizing. And so working with doctors who come to that work from a place of having been trained on how to deal with people who are experiencing trauma, who come from a place of compassion, it just makes all the difference in the world. One thing I’ll say is that if you’re looking for a place to contribute, it is often very difficult for people to find practitioners who are willing to do those examinations in detention, for people who are in ICE detention. And that’s where the need is even greater. And so it’s an experience, getting to go to immigration detention. I would just say, if that’s something you’re interested in doing and you want to be connected with an organization in your area, reach out to me. I’m happy to make that connection. But then the other thing I would say is that there are such rich partnerships and advocacy at the federal level. Physicians for Human Rights I think is a great example of an organization that is looking at what is happening on the border with Title 42, with—they looked a return to Mexico, all these policies, and talking about it as a public health issue. That when you have the equivalent of essentially refugee camps on the Mexico side of the border because of these policies, that’s a public health issue. There’s no access to health care. There’s no access to certainly mental health care. So there’s just a lot of work that can be done there. And at least I can say from the immigrant advocacy community we’re always looking to partner with associations and organizations that are looking at this issue from that lens. ALDEN: Thank you. That was a very rich answer, with a lot of good, actionable items there. I actually just want to spin this out into a slightly broader question, you talked about this in this answer and I think we talked about it in other places. The categories under our asylum law, the sort of persecution or violence that you need to be fleeing and that you need to prove in order to be eligible for asylum, these categories essentially came out in the wake of World War II. Are they at all appropriate anymore? Even the sort of stark division we have between asylum seekers and economic migrants, which I think is often not clear cut at all. I realize this is not on the political agenda at the moment, but do we need to be thinking more broadly about whether these categories that we’ve been locked into for a long time are really an appropriate way of understanding and responding to this set of migration challenges? Ernesto, maybe I’ll throw that to you first, because Heidi was just on the spot, but. CASTAÑEDA: Exactly. So part of the challenge, and the solution, is to get away from these very strict categories that are legal. Meaning, they’re created by bureaucrats. They’re created by the state for their own purposes, and they don’t often reflect the reality on the ground. So to continue answering that question, I see also that Don asks, why do asylum-seekers often cross several countries to get to the U.S. rather than stopping in another country along the way? And that’s why we have to keep—both things at the same time. So people escaping Venezuela, let’s say right now, or Cuba, they may dislike the government. They may disagree with the policies of the government. They may have gone to a protest to show discontent. And because of that, they may be having threats from local police or local authorities as dissidents. And then they may have a political reason to leave. But also because of the dire economic situation, partly because of economic sanctions of the U.S. that are affecting the population and, again, on the foreign relations aspect we can also do a lot to help or make the situation in Latin American or other countries worse. But if the situation is really bad and there’s political discontent and the family is suffering economically, they have to move for security reasons and for economic reasons. So this is already a mixed thing. And then once somebody leaves their country, they have to look for safety. That can be in the country next door, but the reality is also they have to really have safety, which is not the case if you’re in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala. And if you are Haitian, for example, and you are Black, or if you don’t speak Spanish because you are from the Middle East, you will have people extorting you, trying to kidnap you, police trying to bribe you every five minutes. It’s not safe, unfortunately. It’s a reality. It should be different, but it is the case. And they also need to get a job. And it’s very hard for an economic—for Nicaragua, also with a lot of issues, a Venezuelan, it’s going to be very hard for them to go to Nicaragua along the way to the U.S. and say: “I’m going to stop here because I got a job and I’m safe.” The people that do, do. And that happens. But many of them are trying to meet somebody already that they have—a brother, a sibling, a family member—somebody they know that is going to offer them a job as soon as they come here. So they not only are going to be safe, but they also have to be economically safe. They have to have a source of income so they can feed themselves and they don’t have to depend on charity forever, and also a lot of the times they cannot bring everybody back. So they have to make enough money to send remittances, to send money to support the grandma who’s too sick to travel but needs to buy medicines. So they need to have a job. And the U.S., Canada, Europe, they are the economies that have this need for labor, and paying hard currency that goes a long way in Cuba and El Salvador. So it’s always an economic and a political issue, and an issue of safety. And for example, Mexico has a very small percentage of immigrants. It would do better as a country if it had more immigrants, but it’s very bad at providing asylum papers and refugee status to as many people as they should, and to provide jobs. There’s a community, but it could be bigger. But arriving to Mexico is not enough for somebody from many of these countries to say I’m safe, and I have a job, and I don’t need to go to the U.S. They need to keep traveling further to accomplish their goals of being no longer persecuted by any state actor and to have access to their family and to economic resources. ALDEN: Thank you, Ernesto. Heidi, do you want to add a little bit to that? ALTMAN: Yeah. I’m so glad you asked this question, because the grounds for asylum and then the evidentiary standards that have to be met. I wish that when we encounter clients at NIJC we could say: “You have a strong claim. We feel confident.” Often there is very little correlation between the strength of your asylum claim and whether you’ll actually win in court. And so you have to meet the definition of a refugee to win asylum. In order to do so, you have to show you’ll be persecuted on the basis of your race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or being a member of a particular social group. That’s where we fit things like a woman who fled domestic violence and her husband is a member of the security forces, right? She’s going to have to show that she’s a member of a particular social group, because the police won’t protect her from domestic violence.  I sometimes wish I had a picture of the hundreds of pages of evidence that our attorneys file for one asylum case. Literally hundreds of papers. And remember that more than half of people seeking asylum in immigration court don’t have a lawyer. So how are they doing that, in their second, third language? Very quick anecdote. I remember right before the pandemic, I was visiting an immigration detention facility in New Mexico. It’s a private prison, as many of them are—huge, private prison. And I was volunteering basically helping out with the local organization that provides a know your rights orientation to people detained there. And I ended up sitting with a group of men who were all from western Africa. One of them in particular spoke an indigenous language. So I was trying to communicate with him sort of through French, and he was looking—he was trying to understand the actual asylum application. And he pointed to a particular social group. And he said what is this? And I’ve done a lot of KYRs, know your rights presentations in my time. And just in that moment it really struck me that I’m trying to explain in French to a man who doesn’t speak French, or English, what is a particular social group. How can I communicate this clearly enough that he can then go to the immigration judge, this young, sweet, twenty-year-old guy, and say: “My tribe is a particular social group, and because of my membership in that particular social group, I’m going to be persecuted if I go back, and it’s connected to my political opinion?” It’s impossible. We are really setting people up to fail. And so we really hoped to see a lot of regulatory change under this administration to simplify and also clarify the ways that categories can be fit more cleanly into those groups. And we haven’t seen that yet. ALDEN: Excellent. Thank you both very much. Riki, back to you. Are there additional questions? OPERATOR: Yes. We have a question from Thomas Walsh from the Universal Peace Federation. Who writes: Are there nations you can point to that have managed immigration more effectively and compassionately with better policies and best practices than the USA? ALDEN: Who wants to start off with that one? CASTAÑEDA: Unfortunately, in many ways in practice on the ground, in terms of acceptance of religious diversity or freedom of religion and all that, the U.S. is a leader. And we have a proved history of making Americans out of people from around the world. Our policies leave a lot to be desired, though. I like a lot the practical and the policies on the ground of Barcelona, for example. They are more likely to approve somebody for asylum in Spain overall. They have a tradition of human rights. They’ve been growing a lot in the economy because of people coming from other parts of Spain and internationally, so they know that their economy requires that. They have been very successful in making sure that all the children of immigrants that are in their schools learn Catalan. And soon enough, they become Catalan, because they have also this issue between Spain and Catalonia, that immigrants could be a tricky issue. I interviewed hundreds of immigrants living in Barcelona from different parts of the world, and they feel that they belong to the city, to Catalonia, and therefore to Spain and Europe. So it’s very, very successful in people getting access to jobs, to rights, and to this sense of belonging I think that is key. And the way that they do that is that they, first and foremost, protect the rights of the people. Welcome them actively. For example, there was this program where they have staffing and funds for that. For example, there will be kids doing family reunification. So the mother from Peru has been living in Spain, working legally for a while. Now she’s asking for her kid to come from Peru legally. The kid, a teenager fourteen years old, is going to now live in Barcelona. So the kid will be invited with other youth to the opera. They mayor will welcome them, give them a speech, give them a little letter that say now you’re a citizen of Barcelona. So it’s a small thing that costs very little, but then the reunified youth feels literally welcomed by the mayor to their new city. So that goes a long, long way. And, again, it’s not tons of resources. But it does a lot. So we can do a lot of things like that at the local level. And the other thing that Barcelona does really right is that they start by respecting the language, the religion, and the culture of that person coming. They say, “OK, you identify as Bolivian. OK, you want to organize the group as Bolivian immigrants in Barcelona? Here’s some funds to do cultural activities. OK, you’re a Muslim? Here’s money so that you can do stuff around religion openly with no persecution,” et cetera. So that’s a very good way to do what America does, but with intention, with government support, and with resources, and with the staffing, and less fear of being stopped by the police and deported than we have in some places here. ALDEN: Excellent. Thanks very much, Ernesto. Heidi, do you have other countries or jurisdictions that you look at and say maybe they understand some things that we don’t, and do this better? ALTMAN: Yeah. One place I would look specifically, where the United States is sort of egregiously out of step with international norms, is the reliance on incarceration and immigration detention for processing. So we use private prisons and county jails to manage immigration, asylum seekers. The way they are greeted in the United States is often through detention. So I think that there are a lot of examples around the world of countries that have developed, in partnership with civil society, case management programs that are really community based that allow for a phase out entirely of the use of detention. And these programs have really high efficacy rates. They’re obviously much less expensive than detention. Colombia is a country that recently has been held up as actually doing this quite well. And they are, of course, receiving significant numbers of refugees from Venezuela. They are not using detention for that population. They are instead using a case management-type approach, combined—and this is probably the key—paired with regularization. They are providing status for these refugees when they arrive. And that assists with integration which Ernesto has spoken to beautifully. There are many other examples. But it’s an important place to look for models. ALDEN: Yeah. I think that’s a really important one. I mean, two areas where I find it quite depressing that the evidence seems very clear that there are better, of course, alternatives to detention is one. There’s been a lot of good research on that in the United States. Much more effective than keeping people incarcerated. And the second, which you hinted at, Heidi, providing legal counsel to asylum seekers, which we don’t do. Again, I think the evidence is pretty clear, would make the process much more effective and efficient and controlled than it is. I think one of the reasons you get the public reaction that you do in this country is just the sense that the system is not in control. So those were both excellent examples. We just have a couple of minutes left before I turn it back to Irina. Any last words? You’ve got a one-minute quick closer for each of you. Ernesto, any last thoughts you want to leave us with? CASTAÑEDA: Yes. I’m so glad that Heidi brought up Colombia. They’ve been doing a terrific job with a neighbor going through a lot of turmoil, accepting large numbers of people, and regularizing them. Giving them papers so they can work there legally has gone a long way. And because of that, those people are not coming here. They are staying in Colombia. They will become Colombians, and their children will too. We can support through foreign policy that more consciously, and we can start policies like that, and make it reality on the ground. And just to close, along that to remember the promise of immigration reform, which will be that to provide amnesty to people in the U.S., DREAMers and others, that have been living here often for more than ten years. And they live with us, they go to our churches, they pay taxes, they have a job, they feel at home. But they don’t have papers to travel and visit family members, and all that. We’re always fighting Title 42 and the parole and all these issues that are at hand and are emergencies. So I think it will be important for advocates, like many of you here, to keep the pressure to take care of the people that are already here, to go the Colombia way. If we make them citizens, everybody benefits. And I stay away from this how can we stop people from coming, how can we push people away. That’s not going to work. And if it worked, it would be bad news for the U.S. ALDEN: Thank you very much, Ernesto. Heidi, I’m afraid you’ve got thirty seconds. So go, last thought here. ALTMAN: We just have to keep doing what we’re doing here today. We have to talk about this issue even around the dinner table, Thanksgiving table, and in a nuanced way, and in a way that acknowledges humanity. And check our friends and our colleagues when they use terms like “flood,” or “wave,” or “invasion,” and remember that we’re talking about moms, dads, kids, loved ones, people who have left communities behind and are seeking safety. And I am so glad that we were able to really do that, I think, in a nuanced way today. So thanks, Ted. ALDEN: Wonderful. Thanks to both of you for an incredibly rich conversation. Back over to you, Irina, for a closing note here. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. This was a wonderful conversation. And we will be sharing with you all a link to the video and the transcript. I hope that you will share it widely with your community, because there was a lot of important information discussed today. You can follow Heidi Altman on Twitter at @heidiraltman, Ernesto Castañeda at @drernestocast, and Ted Alden at @edwardalden. And of course, you can continue to follow us on Twitter at @CFR_religion. Please do share any feedback with us on topics or speakers for further Social Justice Webinar sessions and for the Religion and Foreign Policy Program more broadly at [email protected]. Our next webinar will be on Lula’s presidency and the future of Brazil on Thursday, February 2, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. So you should be receiving that invitation momentarily if you haven’t already. So, again, thank you all for today’s conversation and we hope you have a wonderful day.