Social Issues

Chris Howard, the Harriman professor of government and public policy at the College of William & Mary, and Arohi Pathak, director of policy for inclusive economy at the Center for American Progress, discuss policies regarding social safety nets, the extent to which they are alleviating poverty, and their accessibility to Native communities and communities of color in the United States. Donna Markham, president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA, moderates. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Thank you. 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’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record. 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 Sister Donna Markham with us today to moderate today’s discussion on social safety nets. Sister Donna Markham is the president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA, and the first woman to serve in this role. Throughout her forty-year career, she’s led efforts to reduce poverty and provide for people at risk. At Catholic Charities USA, Sister Donna has focused on advocacy efforts, on affordable housing, integrated health, food and nutrition, immigration, and refugee services, disaster services, and workforce development. She is an Adrian Dominican Sister and board-certified clinical psychologist. Donna, thank you very much for doing this. I’m going to turn it now over to you for the conversation. MARKHAM: Thanks, Irina. And it’s my joy to introduce our two principal presenters this afternoon. First, Chris Howard. Chris Howard has worked at the college of William & Mary since 1993 and is currently the Harriman professor of government and public policy. He specializes in history, politics, and U.S. social policy. Dr. Howard is the author and coeditor of five books, most recently Who Cares? The Social Safety Net in America. He’s also written numerous journal articles and book chapters. He’s a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Scholars Strategy Network, and has won a campus-wide teaching award and an outstanding faculty award from the State of Virginia. Dr. Howard earned his PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thanks for being here, Chris. It’s great to have you. HOWARD: Thank you. MARKHAM: And Arohi Pathak. Arohi is the director of policy for the poverty to prosperity program at the Center for American Progress. She has twenty years of policy experience in social and economic justice on a variety of issues related to family economic security, workforce policy, the social safety net, early care and education, and asset building. Before joining the Center for American Progress, Arohi worked at Prosperity Now, mobilizing community-based organizations to address economic mobility and low income in communities of color, while helping to scale up innovative practices that build long-term and enduring financial security. Her work stretches across all communities of color, including native ones, bringing a lens of racial wealth equity to policy and programmatic solutions. She has worked on federal and state advocacy, focusing on family economic security and workforce issues at the Service Employees International Union, Voices for America’s Children, and People for the American Way Foundation. So welcome, Arohi, it’s great to have you with us too. PATHAK: Thank you. MARKHAM: Such impressive presenters. So I’ll just offer a few opening remarks, and then we’ll hear from our presenters. We’re all profoundly aware of the importance of the social determinants of health and wellbeing as foundational for poverty alleviation. Things such as a safe place to live, a job that provides a living wage, a social network, access to health care, et cetera. And for many of us who work in the social service sector, we recognize the import shift from primarily providing emergency services—such as food, clothing, shelter—to now emphasizing the development of social enterprises, providing for workforce development opportunities, and moving from emergency shelters to permanent supportive housing, to just name an example. We will always need to be providers of the emergency services, but I think the shift is really important in addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. And that balancing is really critical to poverty alleviation strategies. So just to offer that from my perch at Catholic Charities USA, and what we’re involved in every day. But, Chris, maybe start with you, and just ask you if you could share with us a little bit about what constitutes the social safety net in the United States, and how we compare with other parts of the world in similar ways, OK? HOWARD: Sure. MARKHAM: Thanks. HOWARD: The usual way among policy experts and academics when they talk about the safety net is they usually equate that with government programs that are targeted at people with low incomes. So Medicaid and public housing would be classic examples. I think the safety net is broader in a couple of ways. One, among the sort of government programs, there are also a number of inclusive government programs/social insurance programs that have substantial effects on people with low incomes. Social Security is the best example. Social Security does more to lift millions of Americans out of poverty than almost any other social program out there. Medicare, and Disability Insurance, and Unemployment Insurance also help a broad range of people, but including people with low incomes. So when I think of the safety net I think of both these targeted programs and the inclusive programs. Now, that’s sort of what I think of as the public safety net, what government is in charge of. I think of the social safety net more broadly, as including that public safety net—which in many ways is the biggest part of the overall social safety net. But there’s a second part of a charitable safety net that is prominent in a variety of areas, particularly food, medical care, sometimes homelessness as well. And then a third component, what is sometimes called the family safety net, extended relatives and sometimes close friends who can be important, particularly in areas of long-term care, which is often provided uncompensated by family members, and sometimes in housing as well, as people double up because they can’t afford to rent or they can’t afford to buy their homes. So I think of the safety net as being these sort of three pieces—the public, the charitable, and the family—all of which sort of united about trying to collectively provide for people who are dealing with material hardship. In terms of boundaries, because I’ve certainly got a broad notion here, in my notion of the safety net, I really do think of this as a place to catch people after they’ve fallen on hard times. The kinds of educational and training programs that Sister Donna mentioned I think of as being crucial, but is perhaps, if we continue with metaphors, as either sort of ladders or springboards out of poverty. And that both safety nets and these sort of ladders or springboards are crucial. In terms of sort of comparing us, just sort of broad brush, to other countries, other affluent democracies, probably three things stand out about the social safety net in this country. One is that we tend to rely more on charities than you will find in a lot of European countries, or Canada, Australia, Japan. A second is within the public safety net we tend to rely more on those programs targeted at people with low incomes. Other countries are more likely to have a national health insurance rather than separate Medicare and Medicaid programs. And, third, just in terms of the impact, our safety net tends to let more people through the cracks, through the holes. That we tend to have higher rates of poverty and need in this country than in other places. And we have, more or less, decided that it’s acceptable to have more hardship than you would find in a number of other affluent democracies. MARKHAM: Thanks. Arohi, I’d like to ask you if you can pick up a little bit on that, given the communities that you focus on in your own work. Could you share with us how you see these social safety net programs assisting in poverty alleviation, especially for communities of color and the native communities? PATHAK: Yes, absolutely. Let me actually put a little bit of context around what I am going to say. So, as Chris mentioned, there’s kind of multiple different ways of looking at safety net programs. I’m very specifically going to focus on the public safety net. So I’m going to be looking at the public programs that catch people when they are struggling with economic precarity, such as if they lose a job or if they have unexpected medical debt or other kind of crisis situations come up. The one really important thing that I think we need to start off by acknowledging is that poverty is a policy decision. In this country, we’ve made a decision that we’re going to be OK with poverty. And so we have poverty. But that’s not to say that we have not been working on declining poverty. So if you actually look at the last thirty years you’ll see that poverty has declined quite considerably—by something like 59 percent over the last thirty years. And this is because we’ve made some really profound changes through the safety net programs. On one hand, there are policies like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). I think you’ll all remember in 1996 this was reformed under the Clinton administration. And the reformation of TANF really kind of reduced cash assistance to parents without jobs, and really kind of pushed families to kind of get into the labor force and really start to be more self-sufficient. And on the other hand, while we were reducing cash assistance, we were also putting considerable federal investment into spending that really impacted poverty, such as education, and childcare, and food assistance. The Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Unemployment Insurance, health care, these are just some ways in which the federal government over the last thirty years has really focused on alleviating poverty. Now, back to your question, Donna, about communities of color. What we find in this country is that communities of color generally do not have the same levels of access to resources that most other communities do. And, as a result, we see higher levels of poverty, higher levels of racial wealth inequity, higher levels of the lack of economic opportunity in those communities. And oftentimes these communities are rural communities where at one point there used to be a manufacturing base, but that has gone away, and there isn’t a big employer or a big jobs program to help people build this economic security. And so they’re kind of just stuck there. Or, in other instances, it’s the policies that put people on tribal reservations in this country, for example, on lands that have no natural resources, are disconnected from infrastructure like roads and cars, and disconnected from economic opportunities. And so we really do still struggle with poverty. Even though we’ve made enormous strides over the last thirty years, I want to be very clear when I say it is still an issue that impacts us. The social safety net in the country, I think, has done a lot to make sure that the worst of poverty has abated. But we still have a ways to go. There’s still things that we could do to really invest in our people, in our communities, and in the social safety net to ensure that no person in the country goes to bed hungry, or no person goes to bed without having a safe house over their heads, or a safe community to live in. So I’ll pause there, Donna. MARKHAM: Thanks. I think one of the questions that comes to me is, you talked about the poverty level, that it’s going down. And I know that we often measure it through the official poverty line as the benchmark. And I’m wondering, Chris, whether you think that’s really an effective way for us to be looking at this. HOWARD: Yeah. So the decline that Arohi mentioned is hard to see if you use the official poverty line. It’s easier if you use what’s called the supplemental poverty measure, which technically is a more accurate measure and has been reported by the Census Bureau for about the last decade or so. So if you look the official poverty measure, that’ll show you a big drop in elderly poverty in the 1960s and 1970s. If you use the supplemental poverty measure, you’ll see, for instance, a big drop in child poverty over the last thirty-or-so years. So of those two measures, the supplemental measure is the better one, partly because it takes into account the taxes that people pay, partly it takes into account better the sort of geographic cost of living differences. But there are reasons to think that even it may be somewhat understating the amount of distressed out there. A number of people on this session may be familiar with the ALICE measure from the United Way that tries to capture sort of Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, particularly the working poor. The thresholds they have for what do you need to have a decent life around the country are often a good bit higher than in the supplemental poverty measure, and indicate that even that measure might be understating what you really need to get by around the country. There are also other measures, like food insecurity, and housing cost burden, and uninsurance, where you’ll find many of those people who are below the official poverty line, but a substantial number of them who are somewhat above the poverty line, 150, 200 percent as well. And so if you look at these other measures of need, they don’t always correlate easily or directly with poverty. Many of those people will be below the poverty line, but many of them will be somewhat above that poverty line as well. MARKHAM: Thanks. That’s helpful. One of the issues that I think we struggle with on the front lines is that the public safety net is so sensitive to whoever’s in the administration and the government. And so then the charitable sector, with the charitable safety net, we’re either really helped by what’s going on or the administration changes and all of our agencies crash under the burden of trying to pick up where the government pulled out. So in this country, it seems like we’re really—without anything that’s really been structured on a permanent basis—we’re really at the whim of what’s happening in the government, which places vulnerable communities and the charitable sector in really difficult situations. Because we can’t make up for what the government does. So I’d be interested in either of your reflections on that dynamic, especially maybe Arohi from the front lines. PATHAK: Yeah. You are so absolutely correct. It’s almost like we don’t have an intentional strategy. Well, we don’t. Our poverty alleviation strategy is really kind of patchwork of different programs that kind of target specific and unique needs. But the one thing that I want to talk about that I think might put some nuance around this is if you look at the pandemic, right? You look at a time that created enormous amounts of economic uncertainty in this country. People lost their jobs. They lost their life savings. Daycares and childcare facilities were closed. Schools were closed. Parents were really struggling to be able to balance work, and childcare, and even having a job. And the one thing that the Biden administration did that was huge was it put a huge amount of government aid to help Americans weather the effects of the pandemic. It put a lot of money into these same safety net programs that we’re talking about, to expand those programs. Now, the expansions were just temporary but money went into Unemployment Insurance, into SNAP, which is the food stamp program, into health care. There was money that went to—that went out as cash assistance through programs like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, but also the three economic stimulus payments that everyone got. All of these collectively really helped people make sure that they had enough money to pay for their utility bills, their rent, their food. If they lost their jobs they didn’t have to use all of their savings. Now, I’m not saying that the Biden investments necessarily impacted everyone the same way. As we all know, there were some people during that pandemic that literally lost their shirts, and are still struggling to recover. And there’s others that were able to weather this a little bit more securely because of the money that the Biden administration put in. But what I am trying to say is these programs exist for a reason. And the pandemic offers just a perfect example of how when the world literally is on fire the federal government can step in, increase funding to these programs, and really provide a safety net to all of the most vulnerable people. And it did that. And it did that very effectively. And I just want to use one program as an example. It’s the Child Tax Credit. Under the American Rescue Plan, which was one of the first pieces of legislation that the Biden administration passed, the Child Tax Credit was made permanent and it was—I’m sorry—it was expanded and it was made refundable. And what that did is it made sure that the lowest-income Americans, for the first time, were getting a monthly check that they could use for whatever they needed. And it also made sure that the amount of credit the parents were receiving was actually expanded. So they were getting a little bit more money than they ordinarily would get. And what this did is it alleviated poverty for 2.1 million children, just within the span of one year. It stabilized the finances of more than thirty-six million families. And that includes nearly sixty-two million kids. And the reason I bring this example up is because the impacts of that are just staggering. When we do it correctly, when we invest in our safety nets correctly, we can see the impact and we can see how they really provide the economic boost not only that families need, but our economy needs to survive, or even be thriving. The one additional thing I want to say here, and then I will pass it on to Chris, is a lot of the expansion that I just spoke about, a lot of the funding expansions for safety net programs under the American Rescue Plan, these were temporary. They have all expired or are expiring. And, as a result, what we’re going to see now is the people that are still struggling with economic security, that are still struggling to make ends meet, to pay their rent, put food on their table, et cetera will still be struggling with poverty as they have even less government support to help provide some support to them. MARKHAM: Chris. HOWARD: Yeah. Just to sort of circle back, Donna, to your point about sort of the safety net varying from administration to administration, I mean, in my line of work I tend to think of social policy and the safety net as its sort of own little realm, but of course it’s not in the real world. So one illustration would be when Trump was president he spent a lot of time criticizing immigrants and immigration policy was something that he focused on very heavily. One of the consequences of that for the safety net is that a lot of immigrants, a lot of recent legal immigrants, hesitated to go apply for food stamps or other kinds of social benefits because they worried that somehow doing that would get them on the government’s radar screen and make them more likely to get hassled as immigrants. And so immigration policy did have effects on social policy, because it discouraged people from getting help that they otherwise would have been eligible for. MARKHAM: Absolutely. And with the rolling back of some of these programs, it’s overwhelming to the people on the ground trying to still care for the people, whether those are children who need food, and we take—and the Child Tax Credit goes away, or the migrant issue and the border failures that we have in place. And then, again, the charitable sector is trying to make up for it. And it’s just not a good model. But I wonder if either of you sees any advocacy efforts that we might engage in that would help to challenge that a bit, to stabilize and maybe make permanent some of these programs? PATHAK: I think for the organizations that are on this call, those are our priorities, right? We want to make sure that the programs that really support the lowest-income and working Americans every single day, these are the programs that we continue to invest in. Making sure that people have the supports they need in order to take care of their families’ life, in order to go out and look for a job, to keep the job, et cetera. Donna you started saying this earlier—we’ve seen over the last couple presidencies, administrations come and go, priorities change. And what we really saw within the Trump administration is a large-scale rolling back of the priorities that the Obama administration had put in. This is—in some regard, it’s very dangerous, because it doesn’t allow us to build out a sustainable system. It allows us to build a system maybe that lasts for four years or less, and then someone comes in and changes it out. And in the long term, this is not going to be helpful to our economy. This is not going to help us grow. And it certainly is not going to support our residents in the way that people need to be supported. But I think it is important to acknowledge that we are in a very polarized political era right now. And unfortunately, polls after polls show that Republicans want less government spending. They want more local controls and more rules that require people to jump through hoops and obstacles in order to get basic supports. And we have a divided Congress. We have Republicans in the House that are already saying that for programs like SNAP—there’s a reauthorization of SNAP under the farm bill that will happen this year. The House Republicans are already saying they’re interested in cutting funding for those programs, that have provided this really critical safety net. And what happens in those kinds of instances then, Donna, is if a government is not able to provide a strong enough public safety net, then it falls to the charitable organizations to pick up that slack. And I think already you are probably seeing a lot of communities that are coming to you for resources. And this will just only continue to increase. I’m not sure if even the charitable organizations have the bandwidth to be able to sustain that over the long term. So I think we need to have some conversations about how do we sustain some of these changes and how do we do so in an era where the very conservative Republicans are just not interested in doing anything but rallying behind their caucus and their caucus’s priorities. MARKHAM: Chris, do you want to have a magic bullet for this one? (Laughs.) HOWARD: No, is the short answer. (Laughter.) When I was doing this research on the safety net, one of the things that I heard a number of times from charitable leaders, secular and religious, that they saw their efforts as being the safety net to the safety net. And that they realized that the public safety net had far more resources than they ever would have, but that it had holes in it. And that the charitable sector would come in where the public safety net fell short. So if you think of the public safety net as the first line of defense, I think one thing that we have seen is that programs that are targeted narrowly at the poor and that have no third-party constituency tend to be political orphans. So the example I’d give would be like public housing. So one strategy that people have adopted, and you can see this in both Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit, is to try to stretch the eligibility to people somewhat above the poverty line, to build a constituency that’s broader, that has more voters, that has more people that are going to matter to folks in Congress. And a second and related strategy is to work on programs where you have some sort of third-party constituency—whether that’s the doctors and hospitals who are providing Medicaid, whether it’s small businesses who appreciate the Earned Income Tax Credit because it takes some of the pressure off them to pay higher wages, or some of the pressure off communities to raise minimum wages. Those seem to be sort of strategies. But it’s sort of saying that the technically most efficient approach, which might be, we’ll just set all of the money for people who are below poverty, politically that’s hard to sustain. MARKHAM: Right. Good. Good insight. Before we move it over to our participants that are online with us, I did want to just ask a little bit about where, Arohi, maybe you start with this, about scaling up innovative practices that build financial security for low-income people. Because I think that is so critical to this conversation. The safety net is part of it, a big part of it, for sure. But then you’re also focusing in on help people as part of the springboard, I guess. But where do you see real innovative practices that are helping people get on their feet financially? PATHAK: Sure. That is such a good question. I think where innovative practices are concerned, it’s probably at the state and the local level. Let me give you one example. The federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25 an hour. It’s been at that level for over a decade. But if you look at states, and I think probably some cities have changed this at the city level as well, but if you look at some, there’s a fairly large number of states across the country that have realized that $7.25 is going to do absolutely nothing for their labor force, and have higher minimum wage rates in their states and in their cities. And it’s because they need to attract workers. It’s because they need to pay workers self-sufficient wages. It’s because they need to provide benefits, et cetera. And so, while the safety nets are really important, I think one of the things that we need to remember is there are other mechanisms that we need to use in order to build financial security and in order to build an economy that works for everyone. So I’m talking about good jobs that pay well. I’m talking about jobs that have benefits, like health care, like paid time off. And so if you have a sick kid you don’t lose your job because you need to take a day off. I’m also talking about workforce training and employment and education opportunities that allow people to upskill their skills, I guess, so that they can get that better-paying job, so that they can be on a career ladder that actually allows for economic mobility and progression. I think when we think about financial security, we have to think broadly. We can’t be just looking at one program. We need to be looking at infrastructure to see how infrastructure allows people to connect their communities where they live to jobs. Are there free buses? Or is there cheap transportation that gets them to their jobs? If not, then they’re not able to get to their jobs. They’re not able to build that financial security. So what I’m trying to say, rather inarticulately, is we need to be much more holistic and comprehensive in thinking of the solutions that we pull together that help underpin not only our economic growth and progress, but also underpin kind of the building financial security for individuals and families in our country. And for too long, I think we’ve relied on service sector jobs. As manufacturing jobs moved overseas as globalization happened, we saw a lot of jobs kind of moving. Good, middle-class, union jobs moving from the United States to foreign countries, where labor is cheaper. And so we kind of focused more on the service economy. We focused more on gig economies and people cobbling together minimum wage jobs that really didn’t allow them to build financial security. But one of the things that we’ve seen over the last couple years, which has been really, I think, hopeful, are a couple of big pieces of legislation that the Biden administration passed, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, and then the CHIPS and Science Act. And all three of these are intended to spur job creation, to spur manufacturing, and to bring competitiveness back to American soil. And so when we think about our economy and the potential that we have to grow our economy, I think we also really need to really think about what are all the supports that people need in order to make these good jobs, and make these jobs and industries family-sustaining, so that we can build wide-scale financial security for everyone that lives here? MARKHAM: Great. Chris, is there anything that you’d like to add to that before we open it up to our audience? HOWARD: Not much. I agree with much of what Arohi said. I think the main thing I’d say is that there is a genuine debate among policy experts as to just how much effort you ought to be putting at the state and local level. There are definitely examples, like minimum wage, where you can get the states moving ahead of the national government. But we’ve also seen with Medicaid expansion and the ACA that there are times when if you give states a lot of latitude, even given them substantial incentives to change, many of them won’t. And so it's not clear to me exactly when’s the right time to look to the states to take the lead. I know that it’s sometimes, but I don’t have a good sort of rule of thumb for when you should be looking to the states and when you ought to be looking to the national government and doing things like expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit or things of that nature. MARKHAM: Thanks. Thank you both very much. And now, let’s see what we’re going to hear from our participants. We’re going to shift over to the chat and the Q&A. OPERATOR: Thank you, Sister Donna. (Gives queuing instructions.) Our first written question comes from Whitney Bodman. Who writes: The inevitable question is how do you pay for all of this? Simply raising taxes on the rich won’t even cover the future of Social Security and Medicare, as a recent New York Times editorial argued. MARKHAM: All right, Chris, you want to start? (Laughs.) HOWARD: Yeah. I mean, back to the question of sort of Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on the rich won’t take care of the entire problem. It would make a substantial dent in the problem. And we have seen, in the case of Medicare, that there is no salary cap on the payroll taxes for Medicare. And health care didn’t end, and the rich didn’t revolt, and life sort of moved on. And so treating Social Security the same way would be a sensible thing to do, in my view. But the larger question is about sort of resources here. And I think that a lot of folks, including in my sort of policy area, tend to focus more on the benefits side of things and less on the tax side of things. When you ask Americans about their appetite for paying for various programs, you will find an appetite particularly for the broader, more inclusive programs. So I think there are a lot of people out there who are feeling the pinch on childcare, and long-term care, and housing. Those are the areas, big budget items, where people are really having trouble. And the idea about sort of, I think, shared sacrifice for problems that affect millions and millions of people, I think we’ve struck those sort of bargains at other times in other sort of social policy areas. And I think that’s got some potential. That sort of circles back to my point about how it’s hard to build constituencies for programs that are targeted narrowly at the poor, because for a lot of folks they’re, like, well, that’s my tax money going to somebody else. It seems really overtly redistributive. I’m not sure how much goodwill and public spiritedness I have in order to fund that. And the funding questions often lead people to start advocating for more inclusive programs, to recognize that lots of people are affected by these needs. PATHAK: I think, just to build on what Chris said, I agree with everything there. I think another issue is it’s how we prioritize in the United States. So our defense funding, for example, is a huge pot of money. And in fact, the defense spending for this fiscal year I believe Congress authorized more money than the defense community even asked for. Now, I’m not suggesting that we—(laughs)—particularly as we’re entering a possible cold war with China and have some other very big concerns looming on the horizon with Russia—I’m not suggesting that we nix defense funding. But defense funding is a giant piece of the pie. And there might be ways in which we rethink how we allocate resources, in addition to taxing the rich. Taxing the rich is certainly not going to solve all the problems, it will make a dent, as Chris said. And I think, again, it’s a matter of prioritizing what we care about as a country and as a community versus kind of prioritizing corporate profits over everything else. MARKHAM: How about another question? Because we want to get—OK, Chris, go ahead. HOWARD: Just one other thing I’ll just add is that the top income tax rates on the rich right now are lower than they were under Ronald Reagan. So we’ve had times in this country when tax rates were higher and the economy did not go to hell. And there are a number of other countries that operate with higher levels of tax rates where economies are humming along just fine. So I don’t buy that the current sort of levels that we’re at now are somehow natural or inevitable. MARKHAM: Thanks. OPERATOR: Our next written question comes from Forrest Clingerman from Ohio Northern University. He writes: You have raised the challenges that the U.S. has recently faced due to an increased political polarization. I would be interested to hear you reflect on whether the U.S. is a bellwether or an anomaly for future global questions around the safety net? PATHAK: I think we have to confront modern challenges. I think increasingly we’re seeing the impacts of climate change, we’re seeing weather-related disasters every year decimating communities, decimating jobs. We are seeing things like the war on Ukraine by Russia, issues with China, et cetera. All of this does impact how we operate. It impacts the cost of things that we sell and are available in our country. It impacts our bottom line. It impacts our ability to be competitive globally. And so we do need to be responsive to that. And I think one of the things that perhaps we need to be better about is really thinking through our programs like food stamps, for example, a big food safety net program that is currently being reauthorized through the farm bill. So as we have these opportunities to really rethink whether or not these programs are doing what they’re intended to do, are serving the people they’re intended to serve, and helping the people that they’re intended to serve, I think we also need to be very mindful of are we addressing the emerging challenges that we’re seeing? And are we creating the system that will be sustainable and equitable in the long run? And I think that that’s something that everyone is grappling with. I think the pandemic really kind of opened up a set of issues that maybe we hadn’t thought about as connected before, but now we’re kind of seeing them all together. Just to give you an example of that, the high cost of food. The high cost of food is connected to the supply chain issues, it’s connected to the high cost of gas, it’s connected to climate change that is resulting in droughts across Asia and across Africa. All of these things impact the cost of food. When we’re thinking about our systems, when we’re thinking about our social safety net programs, we really need to think about kind of the bigger, the global context in which these issues are emerging, and think about how we address them in a sustainable way so that we don’t bump up against this in a couple of years. MARKHAM: Thank you. HOWARD: Yeah, back to the bellwether question. So I made a promise to myself years ago not to get into the crystal ball business. So I really don’t do predictions generally. And I figure, if meteorologists have trouble telling me the weather a week from now, I have trouble telling the safety net ten years from now. I do think that many of the challenges that we’re facing in this country are also being faced by countries all over the world, and that there is the potential for some learning. And you’d have to sort of drop the pretense of American exceptionalism, that we are so different and unique we have nothing to learn from other countries. But I think other countries are dealing with industries that disappear, and workers that need to be retrained into some other area. They’re dealing with an aging population and pressures for better answers on long-term care. So I have no clue if what we’re doing is somehow a bellwether, but I think that there are many countries that are going through stresses similarly, and potentially have ways from learning from each other. MARKHAM: Thank you. OPERATOR: Our next question comes from Robin Mohr from the Friends World Committee for Consultation. Who writes: Do you see subsidized childcare as both a form of a safety net for young children and enabling labor force participation for low-income parents? Why does it not appear more prominently in the wider discussion of social safety nets? PATHAK: Absolutely. Childcare is critical for working families. It is critical for parents to find a job, to keep a job, to go to their job every single day, to be able to have financial security, to be able to save for the future. In terms of why childcare has not gotten more traction, I think that that is a huge problem. I’m not the expert on childcare, but what I will say is that over the last two years, last three years actually now, I’m forgetting how long this pandemic has lasted, the one thing that we saw was the enormous need for a high-quality, safe, and affordable childcare system. And there has been a lot of movement, a lot of advocacy to push for increased childcare funding, for childcare to become a bigger, more structured, more professional program, et cetera. As we saw in the Build Back Better bill, which was a set of priorities that the Biden administration was considering moving forward but ultimately did not have enough votes to be able to pass, childcare was a very big piece of that. And in the six, or seven, or twenty-five iterations of the Build Back Better bill, the childcare piece stayed in that bill every single time, which just underscores the need for it. In DC, I will say that childcare is part of every conversation when it comes to family economic security. It’s always in the orbit. And childcare, to be fair, has actually received increased investments not only during the pandemic, through the Biden administration, but even before. I think it got a big boost under the CCDBG dollars maybe a year or two before the pandemic. So this is not to say that we’re not investing in childcare, but not to the extent that we need to be. That said, we just need to keep screaming it from the rooftops until someone in Congress, or lots of people in Congress, make a change, and really do something substantial and worthwhile around childcare. Because, absolutely, it’s one of the most important pieces for working parents and young kids in this country that we have just not cracked. HOWARD: Two quick additions. I think in terms of sort of the politics, being a parent isn’t really a political identity in this country, right? We’ve got an American Association of Retired Persons. We don’t really have an American Association of Parents. So it’s not like parents are an active constituency that are present and organized in Washington to lobby for things like childcare. The other thing I’ll mention is that the connection between work and childcare was something that was embedded into the 1996 welfare reforms. So the TANF provisions give communities the ability to sort of move money around. And in fact, most of that money now goes to services rather than cash assistance. So we have—we do understand the link there at some point. But I think that that sort of may have stopped there because we think that those very poor, single-parent families don’t really have any other resources. But when we get to other families, we assume—perhaps sometimes correctly—there’s a family safety net to sort of take care. There’s grandma and granddad will sort of take care of the kids afterwards until mom and dad get home from work. Or there’s an aunt that might be able to pick up some slack on the weekend, or something like that. And what they don’t sort of realize is that family safety net is also highly stressed right now. And it’s difficult to make that work. And when kids get sort of left in between with either unstable, or unreliable, or unqualified childcare, that’s not only sort of hurting their performance in schools and their general wellbeing now, it’s probably not setting them up for success as much into the future once they get to be working age. MARKHAM: Thank you. We’re getting close to the end of our time. So maybe this will be our last question, and then we’ll be turning it over to Irina. OPERATOR: Our final question comes from Mufti Nayeem Ahmed from New York University. Who writes: Given that various bills have been proposed in the U.S. Congress and the current administration with artificial intelligence taking mainstream, with ChatGPT, which is an AI tool, what are innovative ways to upgrade the skills and capabilities for all Americans across the country, given the changing nature and characteristic of domestic economics? MARKHAM: Hmm. (Laughs.) I’m not sure I fully understand it, yeah. (Laughs.) HOWARD: I’m going to answer this kind of, sort of, but not really. (Laughter.) I think that there’s often sort of a promise that, well, if you could take poor people and retrain them into high tech jobs you’d sort of figure and solve the problem. But I just don’t think there are enough of those jobs out there. And there’s still going to be a need for somebody to be working at 7-11, somebody to be working at nursing homes helping people get in and out of bed. There’s still going to be a lot of essential jobs that don’t require college training or even specialized technical training that you could get in six months. And we’re going to have to decide whether we want to pay those people a decent wage or not. Those are sort of service jobs that are really hard to automate. They require a personal touch. And so we’ve got to decide what’s going to become of those workers who may, in fact, be underemployed, given their skill set, but these are the jobs that are available. MARKHAM: You want to add anything to that, Arohi? PATHAK: No. This is outside of my area of expertise. (Laughs.) MARKHAM: I think Chris says it well. There’s such a need for some of the positions to be filled that are at lower levels, but people are not being paid sufficiently. And it’s when we, sometimes as employers, make that decision to say we’re going to figure out how to pay a livable wage rather than a minimum wage, and bring them—so those jobs are attractive to people, and really accord them the dignity that’s their due. I know that’s one of the big struggles we’re having at Catholic Charities, both with our own employees and with the employees that are working on some of the social enterprise initiatives. So very critical conversation to continue. I’m going to bounce it over to Irina, if there are some final comments you’d like to make on this, Irina. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you all for doing this. We really appreciate it. And to all of you for your questions and comments. We encourage you to follow Chris Howard’s work at wm.edu. You can follow Arohi Pathak at americanprogress.org. And Sister Donna’s work at catholiccharitiesusa.org. So go there for more information. And you can also follow CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy program on Twitter at @CFR_religion. And also, do write to us. Send us an email at [email protected] with ideas, suggestions for future topics and speakers, and any other thoughts that you would like to share with us. So, again, thank you all for your participation in today’s really informative discussion. We appreciate it. HOWARD: Thank you. PATHAK: Thank you. MARKHAM: Thanks, everybody.  

Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown distinguished chair for leadership in global affairs and professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin, leads the conversation on how to teach the history of American democracy. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to CFR’s Higher Education Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Thank you for being with 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. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Jeremi Suri with us to discuss teaching the history of American democracy. Dr. Suri is the Mack Brown distinguished chair for leadership in global affairs and professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin. He has received several accolades for his research in teaching, including the Pro Bene Meritis Award for Contributions to the Liberal Arts and the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Texas at Austin. He writes for major publications and is the author and editor of eleven books on contemporary politics and foreign policy. And his latest book is entitled Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy, which was published by PublicAffairs. So, Jeremi, thanks very much for being with us. I thought we could begin by just diving right in, for you to tell us about what you think about when you’re teaching the history of American democracy, and what it means to you. SURI: Thank you so much, Irina. It’s really a pleasure to be here with so many fellow educators, CFR members, and various others—even some former students of mine, I think. And this is a great time to be teaching American democracy. It’s not necessarily a great time for democracy, but it’s a great time to be teaching American democracy because I think one of the things we do well as scholars is to help people understand and make sense of the confusion in their world. We don’t offer solutions. That’s really the world for policymakers to try to come up with solutions. It’s our job to help people understand the complexity and confusion in their world, to provide narratives. And, what we as historians do most of all, to provide people with an origin, a deeper understanding for what they confront today, which helps people to think about then alternatives for moving forward. We study the past, not because the past repeats itself—it doesn’t—but because the past opens up other opportunities for thinking about the present. If you don’t understand the past of our democracy, you think we’re stuck with all the problems we have today because they seem unavoidable. But if you go to the past, you can study the choices that our society has made at different moments and how those choices—which might have made sense in their own time—can be rethought today. So you’re not playing Monday morning quarterback, but you’re rerunning what Stephen Jay Gould calls the tape of evolution. And you’re rerunning that tape to see how there are alternatives in the past that can be alternatives for our present as well. So you study the past to look forward. And this is a great moment to teach the history of American democracy, because our students—and I mean students broadly defined, not just our eighteen to twenty-one year old students, our graduate students, our public students, various others—they see democracy as a topic that needs analysis as they might not have thought before. It’s not a topic now that’s prima facie fixed. It’s not a topic that’s prima facie set for us in the world. And what I try to do is begin by making the point to any group I’m talking to, like this group, that democracy in the United States has always been a work in progress. There was no founding definition of democracy. Different founders thought about it differently. And, yes, they thought we were a democracy. Let me make that absolutely clear. They thought we were a democracy that was also a republic. But they believed that we were a democracy. But they differed on what that meant. There’s no one single totemic document. The Constitution itself is not a totemic document on this. Our democracy’s always been a work in progress. And it has had peaks and valleys in the nature of its development. We’re in one of those valleys now. I think three questions that I always like to teach and pose that I think are at the core of the historical evolution of our democracy. First, what kind of democracy are we going to be? Back to Jefferson and Adams, of course, there was a debate right there as to whether this would be a democracy that would be built upon the yeomen farmers that Jefferson revered—even though he really wasn’t one himself—or a more deferential democracy as Adams thought about it, with a more Brahmitic—Boston Brahmitic elite that was able to set the standards. That debate, of course, goes on through Jacksonian America. And, from my recent book, the Civil War is the second American Revolution. I take that term from James McPherson, the great Civil War historian. It’s the second American Revolution, because it’s the moment when initial compromises on what our democracy should be are fundamentally rethought. And the question coming out of the Civil War, that remains unresolved today, is the question of what role should the federal government have versus state governments. Everyone on this call I think knows that coming out of the Civil War the apparent losers, the former Confederates, make a very strong argument for states’ rights. They even try to remake the war into a war over states’ rights. Which it wasn’t. It was a war over slavery, obviously. But the argument against federal power, in fact, grows in some ways. But the reality of federal power grows as the argument against federal power grows. Welcome to our world today. And one of the things I like to point out to students of all kinds is that this is an ongoing debate that has meant different things in different times. And we can understand both positions today, even if the actors themselves don’t as legacies, as extensions of that debate. And people play into it. The rhetoric that gets used—often horrible rhetoric—seems legitimate because it has been there for a long time. I’ll give you one example. Claims of fraud in elections, especially when the federal government steps in to different states that are not running fair elections, that is an old trope that has been used repeatedly. Used by Democrats, as I show in my book, in the 1870s and 1880s, used, of course, by some Republicans today. Second question: Democracy for whom? Democracy for whom? And this is a central element of my book, something I became deeply interested in, watching the difficulties of the last five to seven years and our society today. Democracy is, in a sense, the standard discourse of American society, but for whom has not been resolved. And the Civil War leaves that deeply unresolved. As I show in the book, very vividly I think, many figures who were former Confederates come out of the Civil War still believing that democracy is only for certain white men, or other groups. But fundamentally, that certain groups should be excluded. Ben Tillman is one of many examples. President Andrew Johnson is another example. Many, many figures. I show in the book that there are a lot of figures who never even accept that they lost the war. It’s not even a lost cause. It’s a continued cause. And their argument is a very simple one. That if I’m in a community that has ten white slave owners, or former slave owners, and there are a hundred slaves, and we go to a system of actually single person franchise across races, I, the ten white people, are losing our democracy. We’re losing our say in our community. Or that’s how it’s perceived. That, ladies and gentlemen, of course, is the same argument that’s going on about replacement theory, immigration today. It’s an argument, of course, that continues in the late nineteenth century. The multiracial argument also grows in strength, of course, after the Civil War. It’s the argument of the then-Republican Party. It’s the argument of Ulysses Grant. And it’s the argument of many communities that come into the United States. But I think it’s important for us to see today that our debate is drawn on exactly those lines, and to see how the exclusionary, non-multiracial democratic argument—although many of us might have thought that was a creature of the past—has resilient power. And you see that in its history across time. We shouldn’t undercount that. Most of us on this call probably lean towards the multiracial democracy argument, but it’s not only crazies who see the exclusionary, non-multiracial argument. And we have to be conscious of that and think about how, from history, we can learn to be better and more persuasive about that. And then the third point, the one that I really want to underline and that my book tries to underline, is how we’ve never really resolved how change should occur, when we want to change our democracy. The amendment procedure is very difficult. Hardly ever works. Impeachment never works. I talk about this in the book, and we’ve learned that more recently. Elections don’t resolve our differences. I point out in the book that from 1870 to 1900, all of our elections are closer than the last two presidential elections—closer, and unresolved. And that’s one of the reasons we don’t even remember who the presidents were between Grant and William McKinley. And so these things that we think that we’re taught in civics class that resolve our differences, don’t. Two things resolve differences in our history. One is the force of legislative supermajorities. And I want to remind everyone, and I want to remind all of my students always, that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments, three of the most important amendments in our history, right, ending slavery, equal protection under the law, and all that follows from that in the Fourteenth Amendment, at least in theory, and, of course, voting rights—or, prohibition of stopping some voting based on race. Those three amendments passed with zero Democratic votes. It takes a Republican supermajority to push those through, similar to FDR’s supermajorities during a New Deal, and similar to Lyndon Johnson’s supermajority in 1964 and 1965 to get us the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. We have this vision that there was this bipartisan moment when people came together. This is the Cold War narrative, the Cold War myth that many of us, as Cold War historians, bought into for a long time. Change doesn’t happen that way in our system. Change happens with supermajorities or change happens through violence. And we are a very, very violent democracy. Gun ownership is only one version of that. Recently when—I forget the name of the gentleman who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house and attacked Paul Pelosi—when he was—when he was discussing why he did what he did with the FBI, the affidavit’s available online, he said—he used words that were exactly the same, exactly the same, as the words I quoted, before he did this, by Ben Tillman in my book. Ben Tillman was a South Carolina white supremacist. And what the man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house said was: I wanted to break her knees and wheel her into Congress so that the Democrats would see the results of their action, and act differently. Ben Tillman said in 1870 in South Carolina that he wanted to cut off the arms of all the Republicans and Black men who voted so that they would show other Black men and Republicans what happens if they try to vote. Bullying, and of course lynching, is the semi-institutionalized way this goes on until the 1960s in our country, and one could argue might still go on within some elements of criminal justice today. Bullying and violence is, unfortunately, another way that change happens in our society. Sometimes, as in the Civil War and the Union Army, violence is somewhat necessary. But the nonstate violence, the non-Weberian violence in our society. So supermajorities and violence are two parts of our history. We should today, as we’re looking at our democracy, not be surprised that we see problems with both, and that both are elements of what’s happening. I think many of us believe that we need supermajorities to get things changed in many parts of our society. Certainly, if we want to have voting rights we’re going to deal with the gerrymandering. And we also have seen an uptick in violence. And we shouldn’t be surprised by that. We need to be ready. I would say I think our democracy will survive, but we’re going to see more violence, I think. The historical record would lead us to think, not less. The last point I want to close on, because I know people have so many more smart things to say and ask about, but the last thing I want to close on, it’s a statement I make in the book toward the end. And I really believe this, and it’s strange for me to quote myself but I want to make sure I get the words right. (Laughs.) I think the historical record shows that democracies do not come together when they glorify their past. That’s an easy way to become a cheerleader, but they don’t come together that way. They come together when they strive to repair their past. I’m an American patriot. I’m the child of immigrants. I couldn’t do what I do if the United States had not taken in my immigrant parents and grandparents from Russia and from India. So I love this country, but I kind of approach it, and I think historians should help us to approach it, as good parents approach parenting. Which is you love your country and your kids, you support them, but you hold them accountable. And you say, because I love you, I want you to reach the values we believe in. I love my country. It’s the role of historians to point out the good things we’ve done—reconstruction of Germany and Japan that I’ve written about myself after World War II—but also the things, the places where we’ve not done well, and how we can do better. Not because we want to trash our country, but because want us to live up to our values. I think that’s crucial for our foreign policy. And I’ll close it on this point. In my study and my writing on the Cold War, and I’ve written a lot on U.S. foreign policy for prior books and articles, it seems to me we’ve been at our best, just as George Kennan predicted, when we’re setting an example for the world rather than running the world. And if we want to have the influence and want to return to a democracy agenda internationally, which I hope we return to at some point, we got to get our own democracy doing better. Our work in progress has to improve, learning from this history, if we want to have that influence in Ukraine, and elsewhere, going forward. So thank you for listening to my opening. That’s all I have to say for now. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: Jeremi, that was fantastic. Now let’s go to all of you for your questions, comments. (Gives queuing instructions.) Which we have our first question from Todd Barry, who’s an adjunct professor at Hudson County Community College. In light of the fact that many of America’s founding fathers were slaveowners, how can we encourage our students to still feel patriotic? SURI: Great question, Todd. And I get that question a lot, especially as, I’m sure many of you do, when Thomas Jefferson comes up. And it’s not just that they’re slaveholders. They’re hypocrites, right? And we can find for any figure—(laughs)—certainly ourselves—but certainly any figure who deserves more reverence than us, we can certainly find evidence of a gap, a big gap, between ideals and behavior in our history. And so I don’t think we should apologize for the slavery of Thomas Jefferson and others, but I think what we should do is, first of all, we should show how many Americans struggled with this, as probably some of us struggle with environmental issues today. My kids think I don’t do enough to deal with climate change. They’re probably right. They don’t like the fact that I fly on planes too often to go and give talks places because it’s bad for the environment, right? They want me to do more through Zoom. I don’t think they want me more at home, they just want me to not fly. (Laughs.) Not fly as much, because it’s bad for the environment. And I think we struggle with that. I feel guilty sometimes, right, about some of our wasteful habits. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about the environment. It doesn’t mean that Thomas Jefferson didn’t care about human rights and civil rights. But it means he himself was dependent upon the slaves on his farm. He was trying to work his way through that. That does not apologize for his behavior, but I think it shows the humanity of the individual. And I think we have to avoid trying to create men of marble, but we also have to avoid trashing men of marble also. We have to treat them as human beings. And so I try to avoid getting people to say he’s a slaveholder and horrible or we should excuse his slaveholding because of the times he’s in, and more to understand the struggles of the individual. And then for us to think about, and as a scholar of leadership what all leaders struggle with, which is your ideals and your reality. I don’t think we should hold people in condemnation because they live short of their ideals. We should judge them on how well they try to reconcile their ideals with the world they’re in. And here, then I would stand with Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter Onuf, and others. I think figures like Jefferson deserve our reverence for the thoughtfulness with which they approached these problems. But they also deserve our criticism for the moments where they fall into exploitive behavior that they don’t need. That’s the whole Sally Hemings story, right? That was not economically necessary for Jefferson. So I want people to be patriotic by seeing good people struggling even when they do bad things, believing in our ideals, and giving us models how we can struggle today. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Jennifer McCoy, who has raised her hand. Jennifer, if you can give your affiliation that would be great. Q: Hi. I’m a political science professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Thanks, Jeremi, for that great overview. When I talk to groups or to students about, you know, how we can get out of this current situation that we’re in, you know, we face the chicken and egg thing. How can we make the changes when the institutions are so rigid and our polarization is so rigid. So I wanted to ask your two solutions of violence and supermajorities, to get supermajorities, again, would require a realignment, it seems. But it seems there may be a third one. I wanted to ask you about this as well. What about bottom-up pressure? Although, I believe most of our problems are elite-driven, I’m thinking back to the Progressive Era, when bottom-up organization could be effective. So I wondered how you view that and how you kind of teach that. What I’m trying to do is give people hope that they can do something, empower them basically. (Laughs.) SURI: I have hope. And I’m a hopeful person. And I think—I often tell people, I’m hopeful most of all because I think the last few years have unmasked deep problems that many of us didn’t pay—myself, I didn’t pay enough attention to. Even as someone who’s paid to do it, even as a historian, I didn’t pay as much attention to these—to some of these issues. So I think that’s the gift of the last few years. I think—let me just go through your points here, which were so well-said, Jennifer. Our institutions are rigid. They’re designed, in a sense, to be rigid and hard to change. And then people double down in power that’s organized around that. But they are changeable, still. And that’s the thing about democracy, unlike an authoritarian or autocratic system. They are changeable. And, first of all, I think we have to be deft at finding the ways where we can make changes. And often that occurs, and maybe this connects to your bottom-up point, by starting local, starting within cities, and states, and places like that. And that is the progressive tradition, right, to use the city and the state as the laboratory. Now, that’s not going to work in the state of Texas, where I am. But it does work, to some extent, in the city of Austin. And it can work in other communities. So I often tell young people to really double down on learning about these issues at the local level, because you can start to make change there that can have a huge effect upon people. And that is one of the strengths of our system, of a federalist system. And it’s also a strength of learning the details, learning procedure, learning political science, learning actually how institutions operate, taking that seriously. It’s not good enough to just be right. You’ve got to figure out how to work through the institutions, what Rudi Dutschke called two generations ago, right, the long march through the institutions. I think when I talk about violence, there I’m obviously not advocating violence. I’m not even advocating peaceful revolution. What I am advocating, though, is the use of state power and, when necessary, with controlled violence in the Weberian sense, to control those who break the law, and to recognize how violence is being used by those who want to prevent change and want to harm our institutions, and to use law enforcement, true law and order, in that way. One of the best things I think we’ve done since January 6 is actually prosecute those who broke the law on January 6 as part of an insurrection. And we need to do more of that. And let me state very clearly, I think the historical record shows that if we want law-abiding behavior, we have to hold everyone accountable. And so if the evidence rises higher, as it might, we need to hold other individuals accountable. And those who have information must be required to share their information with regard to criminal behavior. So I’m getting a little—I don’t want to get lost in this. But I do want to say, the former Vice President Mike Pence will be in Austin on Friday. And if I have a chance, when I’m at an event with him, I intend to ask him this. Why will he not testify as a patriot about what happened? I’m sure I know the answer, but I think we need to press people to be part of the law enforcement process, because that’s how you deal with violence. And that is the legitimate use of the force of the state to protect our institutions and to protect against the bullying. I am for bottom-up change. I wrote a book about this years ago, actually, on the 1960s. I revere a lot of the bottom-up work that was done by civil rights activists in the U.S., activists in Germany, and France, and elsewhere, activists in the Czech Republic, or it was Czechoslovakia, that led to such important change. So I revere that. But I think that has to work by also getting into the institutions. And that’s what I mean by supermajorities. By getting into the institutions, by getting elected to office, by taking ownership of our institutions. What worries me, even though I’m optimistic, is when I hear young people say: Well, we’re disillusioned. You can’t do this through our institutions. No, I think we have to work through the institutions. We have to be supportive of that in one way or another. And I actually don’t think we’re that far from supermajorities on certain issues. Certainly where we stand as a citizenry, right? On many issues, there’s 75 percent agreement in our country, for example, that if a woman is raped that she should have the choice over whether to give birth or not. Seventy-five percent think that eighteen year olds shouldn’t be able to buy AR-15s, right? There are places where we have a supermajority of opinion. We have to force that in, and—this is the last point I’ll make, Jennifer—I think a lot of that comes through generational change. A lot of that comes through generational change. And that’s where our students have to be the next set of bottom-up leaders who get in and make a difference. FASKIANOS: Thank you. We’ll take the next question from Muhammad Kabir, who is a faculty member at Queens College. What do you think of the idea that political parties are gatekeepers in American democracy? SURI: Great question, Muhammad. Of course, they are. It’s a very learned and accurate question. They have always been gatekeepers. They still are gatekeepers. But they gatekeep in different kinds of ways. Right now, I think they’re gatekeeping more for those who can raise the most money. There was a time they were gatekeeping for certain ideological positions or certain various other interests, often related to money. It’s not unique to this—to this moment. But there’s no doubt that parties play a gatekeeping role. And some gatekeeping is good. Some gatekeeping is good, I think. We have to have a debate over what that gatekeeping should look like. I think the problem now, I’m going to say the obvious, is that for both parties, but particularly for the Republican Party, a very, very small group of people do the gatekeeping deciding in primaries. The primary system, as everyone knows, was created to open up parties, to get rid of the smoke-filled room. And I, as a historian, am not nostalgic for the smoke-filled room. If we went back to the smoke-filled room, we’d have an even less representative group of people. So I don’t want to go back to the smoke-filled room in choosing candidates for parties. But the primary system has turned out to actually be a pathological way to prevent representative figures from becoming party nominees. Let me just give you the numbers on Texas, which are extraordinary, right? So, in Texas, there are about thirty million citizens. About one million people—one million, probably a little less, decide who the nominee—the Republican nominee—for governor is. So one million people chose Greg Abbott in a state of thirty million people. That’s a real problem. That’s a real, real problem. That’s not democracy. Again, the smoke-filled room’s not better, because that’s going to be five hundred people choosing someone. (Laughs.) We need to have a system that’s more inclusive. And the parties need to be gatekeeping in a way that’s more representative—not purely majoritarian—but representative of our society. So what would I do? I would change the way our primaries work. I would open it up in ways that make it much easier for people to participate in the choosing of who leads the parties. I would require that the person running in the primary get enough votes that they’re actually representative of something like a large proportion of those in the state. And we could go on and on. We could take the gatekeeping process and make the gatekeeping process more inclusive, to still be gatekeeping. We’ve all learned to do this, right? We all are on search committees. And it used to be a search committee was run by three men who looked the same, and they chose someone who went to the same graduate school who they knew. Now we have procedures to make sure—it's not perfect—to make sure we have representative search committees. They’re still gatekeeping. But they’re doing a job that’s designed to be more representative. And we need to have that conversation about our primaries. This is an ongoing debate, back to the history, that’s been going on in our history for a long time. FASKIANOS: OK. Going next to Jin In, who has a raised hand. Q: Thanks, Jeremi. My name is Jin. I’m the assistance vice president for diversity and inclusion at Boston University. And I say that actually diversity and inclusion is the twenty-first century repackaged version of e pluribus unum. And that’s—and so as far as democracy is concerned, this isn’t just about political party. How do you address this to a whole group of diverse group where they don’t feel that they’re part of democracy? SURI: Great question, Jin. And thank you for all the work you’re doing. And I get that question from lots of students, actually, and lots of activists. It’s obviously probably the most important question. So I’m glad you put it so succinctly and so eloquently for us. Diverse—we have to begin by recognizing diversity’s hard. Diversity’s very hard, because of what Richard Hofstadter wrote about seventy years ago, one of the truly great historians of the twentieth century. That people, no matter who they are, don’t like to give up status and power, right? And the challenge with diversity is that those—there are those who have power, and there are those who are coming into our society and have gained and merit access for all kinds of reasons. And those with power don’t want to share power. Many call this—and you know this literature better than I do, I’m sure—the hording of privilege, right? And I’ll tell you, I feel this personally. I mean, as much as I pontificate about this, you know, my wife and I intentionally lived in a part of Austin where our kids would be able to go to good schools. And our daughter’s in college, our son just got admitted to college. And, you know, we’ve done all the things to get them access to go to privileged institutions, right? So we can pontificate about this all we want. We have to take a deep, hard look at ourselves. And so I think that to get people involved in this issue, to get them to see there’s a chance is, first, for them to recognize that this is a long-term struggle. That we’ve been in this struggle for a long, long time. And that should not make us despondent. It should make us to see that our time horizon has to be a broad one. Doesn’t excuse problems today, but we have to see ourselves as part of a long time horizon. And then, second, we have to be smart about finding the things we can do, the institutional levers we can push and pull that can have a disproportionately positive effect opening up access to people. That things that will help—and I’ll give you a few examples of things I think a lot from my historical work. It’s a central part of this—of my new book is voting. There are a lot of things we do that make it hard for people of color to vote. I’m Asian American myself. My father’s an immigrant from India. And I see Asian communities in Texas that have actually lower voter turnout not only than white communities, but than Black communities. And in Texas, Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing populations, but their turnout percentage is actually lower than African Americans, which is, of course, lower than white Americans. And I think this is true in many parts of the United States. And I think there are things that the state of Texas does, if you look closely, that actually make it harder for Asian immigrants, particularly immigrants from Southeast Asia and elsewhere—to feel comfortable registering to vote, to feel comfortable going to vote. And Filipino nurses, for example, in Houston, there’s been a lot written about this, they tend to work shifts that make it hard for them on one day to go vote. And the state makes it harder for them not to vote if they don’t vote on the Tuesday in Houston, right, during the day. They had twenty-four voting two years ago. The state is now not allowing twenty-four-hour voting in Houston. Who doesn’t get to vote? So we have to be conscious of those things that sometimes don’t look like barriers, in addition to the obvious barriers, and push to change those. Make the case to change those. And work piece by piece. And how I try to get my students and others to be optimistic and engaged is to show them places where we have made progress and where we can continue to make progress in that way. States that have eliminated onerous registration requirements. States that have—and places that have made it easier to vote. It was a victory for us at the University of Texas in the midterm election. We added voting booths, and we intentionally put them in the parts of campus where we had more minority students. We didn’t put them in the places where the faculty were. We put them where our students were, and things of that sort. So we can do those things. We can start at home. And we can start to build upon that. But we should be realistic. We’re not going to fix this in one year, or two years, or five years. Q: Well, thank you. I’ll just say hook ’em, ’Horns. SURI: (Laughs.) Thank you. FASKIANOS: All right. So I’m going next to a written question. Trelaine Jackson, who’s the disability services coordinator for Fort Valley State University. What are your thoughts on the ongoing debate about critical race theory (CRT)? SURI: Thank you for asking that question, Trelaine. I hope I’m pronouncing your name correctly. I get this question a lot. I do a lot of work with teachers through the Gilder Lehrman Institute. I’m sure many of you work with Glider Lehrman, and through various humanities councils, including the one in Texas. This comes up all the time. And I give that background because I think on an average year, through workshops and things of that sort, I probably work with about five thousand different teachers. And I am yet to find one who teaches or knows what critical race theory is. History teachers are not teaching critical race theory. This is—this is a total made-up issue. It’s a total—it’s like fraud in elections, right? (Laughs.) It’s a total made-up issue, right? History teachers—I can’t comment on law professors. It might be different, right? But, again, law professors are not teaching undergraduates or high school students, right? (Laughs.) Among history teachers at the high school and college level, I don’t know anyone who’s teaching critical race theory. And I really don’t know anyone who could identify and tell you what it is. This is a made-up boogeyman. You know, once there were reds under the bed and communists everywhere. Now there seem to be critical race theory proponents everywhere. What most teachers are trying to do, even at the collegiate level, is get students to sit on their butts, turn off their phones, and listen, and read. (Laughs.) That’s what they’re trying to do. And they’re not indoctrinating. They’re not indoctrinating. Of course, everyone has biases. I have biases. Everyone has biases. But that’s actually not what’s driving any of the issues that people care about, really. All it is is a boogeyman to scare people one way or another. If you want more points of view to be taught, here is what I think should be done. If you want more points of view, create more opportunities for students to hear other points of view, but don’t try to cut off the legitimate teaching. And don’t disrespect teachers, who are every day doing their best. What teachers need—and this is why I work through Gilder Lehrman and Humanities Texas, they need exposure outside the classroom to material they don’t have time to learn because they don’t have the privilege I have of being a tenured professor who gets paid to sit and read and do research. They’re so busy. They have a harder job than me. Teachers, especially in the high school, or at a college where they have a four-four load, have so much more work to do than I do. They are in the classroom all day. They’re dealing with all kinds of student problems that I don’t see at a research one institution. What I try to do is to offer them workshops where they actually get paid to show up, and they can hear from me and other scholars about new research that then can then bring into the classroom. If you care about getting a more set—a diverse set of viewpoints offered, invest in that. Invest in the teachers. Educate the teachers. Do not attack the teachers. Do not make things up. And I’ll say what I’m sure Trelaine and others know really well, which is that the challenge we face—in part because of the CRT attacks—is lots of teachers are leaving the profession. And that’s a real problem. That’s a real problem. We need more talented teachers, not fewer. And we don’t need to attack them. So the CRT stuff, it’s a boogeyman. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Karl Inderfurth of St. Johns—actually, I don’t know—he’s with—let me get this. OK, he’s at George Washington University. St. John’s College is known for its great books curriculum. What would be your short great books list for teaching American democracy? He is just finishing up Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Lincoln, and just finished a chapter entitled “America -Whither.” Still asking that question today. (Laughs.) SURI: Great question, Karl. And I am a believer in great books. I think our great books can be old and new. If we weren’t talking just in an American context, right, there’s no reason we can’t go Plato to Toni Morrison, right? We can have great books, they don’t all just have to be from people of another age. So I’ll give you my four that I think are essential. And this is in addition to reading the Constitution and reading—(laughs)—the Declaration of Independence. The first is also a primary document, The Federalist Papers. I think everyone should read The Federalist Papers and grapple. They are great for discussions because there’s so much meat in them, and they don’t agree all the time, even internally. Even the ones Hamilton wrote himself, or Madison wrote himself. So The Federalist Papers. Then I really like the classic book by Edmund Morgan, American Freedom, American Slavery. And that book makes the point, focusing on Virginia—written, I think, in the 1960s or 1970s—focusing on Virginia. Makes the point that American—the definition of freedom in the United States was connected to slavery. That Virginians thought they were free because they held slaves. And these are not contradictions. And that’s so important in thinking about how we think about race going forward. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which captures so many concepts. It’s empirical in the time, but also captures concepts about social capital, associationalism that are so important to us going forward. And then I would—I’m going to actually give you five. I already had three, I have two more I want to—(laughs)—two more I want to mention here. I think it’s absolutely crucial that students get a sense of what happened in the Civil War and the Civil War’s legacies. I wrote a book on this, but I think the best book for anyone to read is James McPherson’s Battle Cry Freedom, which captures the politics of the war, the nature of the war, and the legacy of the war, as such. And then I really love the classic book that was written years ago by William Leuchtenburg on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, which just gives you a basic—I think it’s from the 1950s—it was a classic book that gives you a basic overview of what the New Deal was about. There’s a more recent version, not quite as detailed, by Eric Rauchway, I think called What the New Deal Did [sic: Why the New Deal Matters], something along those lines. David Kennedy’s also written a book, Freedom from Fear. But one of those New Deal books I think is really, really important. And, you know, I gave you five, I’m now thinking of another eight I want I want to say, but we’ll stop there for now. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: That’s great. All right. There’s a raised hand. Stan Gacek. Q: Yes, thank you, Professor Suri. Absolutely an enlightening discussion. I am the senior advisor for global strategies of a—we argue that we are the largest union of workers in the private sector, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. My question is the following, Professor Suri. From a historian’s point of view, you have mentioned, quite insightfully, you know, what the role of supermajorities, and how supermajorities have been necessary in order to get things changed. But how would you, from a historian’s point of view, how do you assess now what are really anti-majoritarian institutions in our constitutional system, most notably the Electoral College? And from a historian’s point of view, why is it that we, as the American people, have not been able to change this system over time? SURI: Great question, Stan. And I struggle with this myself. So the Electoral College is a—is a really interesting phenomenon. First of all, almost no one understands it. I always ask my students, who have taken AP history before they come into my class, where the Electoral College meets. They think there’s, like, some college of cardinals somewhere that—I mean, people don’t understand how this thing works. People don’t understand who electors are. Most of us don’t really understand it. And it’s never been popular. It wasn’t even popular among the founding fathers. I wrote about this in an earlier book, and many of you know this, the Electoral College was a last-minute compromise. They couldn’t figure out how to elect a president. The founders believed that Virginia would always put up someone, Massachusetts would always put up someone, New York would—and how would they—how would they come to an agreement? And so they created this jerry-rigged system that they never thought would last. They actually expected that most elections would work the way the 1824 election worked, where things went to Congress. They actually thought that you were going to have multiple candidates, no one would have a majority, and Congress would have to decide. Which has only happened a few times in our history. Most famously, again, 1824, 1800 to some extent too, though that’s a more complicated example. So this is something that shouldn’t exist. The problem is, we can’t agree on what to replace it with. So this is a classic case of suboptimality, where we’re stuck with something because we can’t agree on what to do in place of it. That is something I tell another generation they’ve got to work on that. Every student I met thinks it’s silly we have an Electoral College. It’s time that we actually put work into something that would replace it, and building support for that. Now, that’s a long-term issue. That’s not going to happen overnight. But there are anti-majoritarian elements that have been misused recently that we can use history to help us un-misuse. (Laughs.) And one of them is the filibuster. And I’m sure you know this, Stan. The filibuster exists because Aaron Burr changes the rules of the Senate. But for the most part, the filibuster is rarely used and, when used, the barrier to use it is pretty high. Until the late twentieth century. It is consistently used on race issues, which is interesting. It’s consistently used to protect slavery and then to go against civil rights. But the barrier to use it is high. And it is rarely invoked. We have gone to a system in the last thirty years where on every issue if you don’t have sixty votes you can’t go forward. And so that means in the Senate that basically forty-one senators can stop anything from happening. And you can actually have forty-one Senators who represent less than 40 percent of the population. So thirty-some-odd percent of the population is holding things hostage, such as voting rights. I am a firm believer, as a historian, that the filibuster should not work that way. No one intended it to work that way. It is not good for our democracy. And that can be changed tomorrow. It can be changed in 2025 if one party has enough people who just change the rules. All you need is fifty-one, or fifty-plus-one, with the vice president’s vote. And I’m a believer that that should be changed. It’s already been changed for Supreme Court nominations, right? You got rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations. Let’s just get rid of it for everything. Let’s go to reality and say if you have fifty-one votes you have a majority, and forty-one people don’t get to stop us. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Patrick Duddy at Duke University. The immense flow of undocumented migrants over our southern border and recently over our northern border have alarmed many and aggravated certain nativist elements in African—I’m sorry—American society. The numbers are startling. More undocumented migrants have crossed our border in the last year than there are citizens in a dozen U.S. states. But we are a nation shaped by immigration. How do you approach the history of immigration in the U.S. in view of the current political discourse on the subject? SURI: Great question, Patrick. And also thank you for being fact-based, because a lot of people talk about this without being fact-based. And I think you clearly know the details, probably know them better than I do. Look, the first thing a historian would say is that immigration has always been a problematic issue in our country. We are a nation of immigrants. I proudly stand by that, as a child of immigrants myself. But we’ve always been a country that has had strong nativist impulses, as you point out, and done a lot to restrict immigration. The most infamous example being the 1924 Immigration Act, that actually, between 1924 and 1965, created a quota system that made it very difficult for people like my father to come into the country. My father came into the country from India in 1965, after Lyndon Johnson passed the reform act of 1965 that actually allowed Indians, South Asians, to come into the U.S. in any significant number for the first time. And it changed everything, right? Silicon Valley, Austin, look at the South Asian communities. So this is a long-term problem. It’s not new to today. But what I will say is what has been not necessarily new but been striking about the last thirty years is our inability to pass any legislation. So the challenge that we have, particularly on the southern border, is we don’t have effective legislation to deal with exactly what you pointed to, which is the processing of people who want to come and deciding who gets to come in and who doesn’t. As much as I, in theory, would like an open border, we can’t have one, for what you implied. But we have to let people in. We need them economically. The Austin miracle—Austin’s the fastest-growing city in the U.S., right—is because of immigrants. There was a shortage of computer programmers every day in Austin, Texas, and we’re hiring educated people from India and Mexico. There’s a brain drain from those countries to Austin. We need immigrants, as our country does. You know, our demographics also. We don’t have the replacement rate population. And if you want to look at the country that doesn’t bring in immigration, what happens, look at Japan and the economic stagnation they have faced. So we need immigrants, as well as wanting immigrants ideologically. But we don’t have a process—an effective process that helps us to have the resources and to have fair laws that are actively applied to determine who comes in and who doesn’t. I believe that we should not allow families to come in, I think we should do more for political refugees—those who can prove they’re political refugees. We should do more also for skilled workers. And we can have various other categories—DREAMers and others. Some of my best students, by the way, every semester, are DREAMers, in my classes at the University of Texas. But that’s not to say we’re letting everyone in. And we should hold people accountable to the law. But right now we have a system of laws that are outdated. The last legislation was in the Reagan administration. We have poorly funded and mis-funded institutions. We have states like Texas and Florida that are sending ill-trained forces down to the border to do things that are intentionally not matched up with the federal government. And then, it has to be said, we are creating not only hateful rhetoric but misallocating resources in building walls, or pieces of walls, that don’t keep anyone out of anywhere. It is long time that members of Congress sit down and work toward the passage of legislation. There was a majority that agreed to a legislative package during the Obama administration. And it was filibustered, back to that—back to that point. So the best way to deal with this issue is to update our laws based on our values. That won’t solve the problem, but that can do a lot better. And I am deeply frustrated that we haven’t had the historical will or the political will in the last thirty years. That has to change. FASKIANOS: I’m going to go next to Jennifer Brinkerhoff at GWU. Do you think Supreme Court reform is needed to keep our democracy strong? SURI: Yes. And I have a strong historical argument for that, Jennifer. Thank you for asking that excellent question. Here is the thing about both the Supreme Court and Congress. I think most people know this, but it’s worth resaying. From the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, we expanded Congress every ten years. So we need more members of Congress for more representation. And we brought in more states. We need to bring in Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, as states. And we changed the composition and jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. I point this out in my book, the Supreme Court numbers, the number and jurisdiction of the court, the actual operation of the court was changed by Congress three times between 1861 and 1872. To change the number of justices—for a time there were ten, then there were eight—to change their jurisdiction. And this was what everyone assumed was Congress’ role. Congress doesn’t get to decide the cases, but Congress sets the framework within which the Supreme Court operates. Since the late nineteenth century have we not only kept Congress at about the same size—so we now have 750,000-800,000 people per member of Congress in the House—but we’ve also—we’ve also kept the Supreme Court at the same size. We all know that the legal structure of the United States has multiplied in its complexity and scale since the late nineteenth century. And why we think that nine cardinals is still the appropriate number, and the jurisdictional demarcations make the same sense, it doesn’t fit with our world. We need to update that. And we could do something that would be very fair. We could follow the model of our appellate courts where, let’s say, we created nineteen, eighteen Supreme Court justices. And they rotated randomly in groups of nine to hear cases? So that way, you couldn’t also game who your Supreme Court judges were for the cases you were bringing. There’s no reason we couldn’t do that. We could give every president a guaranteed number to appoint, and then have others that are appointed when people pass away or retire. We could do this in a way that initially might give one side an advantage, but would set up a fair system, a fair rotational system, which is what we do for our appellate courts. And I think it’s long time we do that. I think something like this was recommended, Jennifer, you probably know more details, but by the committee that was brought together to advise on this. I think this was recommended. And let me say one other thing. That’s not packing the court, what I just described. What FDR was trying to do with the alleged packing of the court was actually trying to change the judges in real time so he’d get the outcome he wanted at that moment. I’m not talking about doing that. I’m talking about creating a long-term process that would make for a court that would be less political, because you couldn’t choose exactly which justice, and because every president would get to appoint. And a court that would be able to cover more issues more appropriately. FASKIANOS: Jeremi, just as a follow up, do you think that there should be term limits, both in terms of the Supreme Court and in Congress? And is there any historical evidence that that might make a difference? SURI: Well, I think the term limits on the court might make sense, because I will say, as a historian, the founders and most who have written about this through the twentieth century never assumed people would serve on the court as long as they have, right? Because life expectancies were not the same. People were actually not appointed as young, chosen by the Federalist Society or things like that. So I do think there’s an argument to be made. It think it would be a long term limit you would want. But I think you could say you’re dealing with the historical intent by assuming people don’t get to be Supreme Court justice for fifty, sixty, seventy years. That does seem like a very, very long time, in a sense. So I would—I’m not saying I’m advocating that, but I think one could make a historical argument for that. My problem with term limits at the congressional level is one that’s always been the historical objection, which is that in some ways further empowers parties and further empowers lobbyists, right, because if you’re constantly rotating, the new person who wants to run is dependent upon the party and dependent upon people who raise the money. So I’m not sure that’s the best way to deal with things, although I do think there is at some point enough time that someone has been in office. But I’d like to make it easier for people to run, and easier for people through primaries, as well as through general elections, to vote someone else in. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Damian Odunze. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Delta State University in Mississippi. How can we address the structural problems that confront the criminal justice system, for instance police use of excessive force? Do we have a problem of a few rotten apples, or do we need to address institutional inadequacies? SURI: So this is a great question, Damian. A question my students are asking all the time. And this is one I’m actually optimistic on. I think we’ve made progress since George Floyd, or in the aftermath, or around this period, despite what recently happened in Memphis and what happens in Austin quite often here. We’ve made progress, because people are much more aware of these issues. I think we start by understanding the very severe problems of the criminal justice system by talking about precisely the history we’ve been talking about today. Our criminal justice system is not entirely, but is in part, an extension—an extension of a slave system, slave enforcement system, and even more so a post-Civil War system of protecting white supremacy in our society. And that’s incontrovertible when you look at the evidence. Let me make this as clear as I can. I show this in the book, and I could have shown it even more. There’s only so much about this you can write about in one book. But most of the violence that occurs in major areas after the Civil War, which involves rioting and violence to prevent people from voting, to prevent African American and Jewish communities, and immigrant communities living places. The Memphis riot in 1866, New Orleans, Colfax, 1873. Almost all of this involves local policing not simply allowing this to happen, being responsible for much of it. Almost every one of these police forces are involved with the violence. Now, current police officers are not those people. Many of my students have become police officers. My cousin just retired from, I think, twenty-eight years on the New York City Police Department, where he survived. I’m so—he’s one of the best public servants I know. Richard Mack is his name. I have a deep respect for police officers. That’s not the problem. The problem is the structure of policing, the attitudes that are encouraged, the practice and behavior, the violence that is used and now has gone upscale with new weapons that are acquired. It’s a classic case of what you call, Damian, right, structural or institutional racism. Doesn’t make the individuals racist. But we need to understand that—I’ll give a very concrete example of this. My wife happens to be on the city council here in Austin. And she looked at the curriculum for cadets. And the curriculum for cadets was not teaching them to understand the communities they were dealing with. In fact, just the opposite. They were taught a civics course that did not mention slavery in Austin, Texas. And how can you understand that—in Austin 1924, there was forced segregation. Entire community of African Americans were forced to move from one part of town to another. Police officers are not taught that history. Now they are, because my wife got involved. That’s a classic case, I think, not of the racism of the officers, but of the institutionalized racism. And I’m optimistic, Damian, not because I don’t see resistance to changing that, but because we are all more aware. Every one of my students now has seen a video of something like what happened to George Floyd. And every one of my students recognizes it as a problem. And you can’t solve a problem till you recognize it. And we’re farther along now in recognizing it. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Question from Julie Hershenberg from Texas, Collin College in Plano, Texas. I’m always struggling to find unbiased news sources for my students to help them stay current. What are your suggestions? SURI: Great, great question on that. I don’t think there’s one. I think what we’re teaching our students to do is to go to real, serious sources that try to be unbiased, even though they are not. And that’s the big difference. Is the source fact-based, as best as it can? And is it self-reflective on its own biases? And is it trying to get beyond those biases? So I’m very predictable on this. I want my students to read the New York Times. I want them to read the Wall Street Journal. I want them to read either the Financial Times or the Economist, particularly on the U.S., how those sites view the U.S. I want them, of course, to read Foreign Affairs on foreign policy, and the Foreign Affairs website. And others as well, right? But the point is, there’s a difference—this is what I’m trying to get across to my students—there’s a difference between those sites and sites that have not the same elements of fact-checking nor the same effort to be unbiased. Whether you like Fox News or not, Fox News is not trying to be unbiased. That’s now documented. MSNBC I don’t think tries to be unbiased. I like MSNBC. I sometimes go on MSNBC as a guest. But I don’t think MSNBC tries to be unbiased either. So I think it’s a lot better than Fox News personally, but I don’t think it's—that’s as good a source as the others. And so those are the things. For basic news coverage day to day, especially students who want to follow international affairs not just U.S. affairs, I still think the gold standard is the BBC. You know, I find bbc.com to be the best. If I want to know what’s going on in Turkey, that’s what I look at. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Let’s go to—back to Todd Barry, Hudson County Community College. Is another constitutional convention possible? And would it be meaningful with new constitutional amendments? Or could it be dangerous, with too much change? SURI: Yeah. I have a colleague, a wonderful, very distinguished colleague, Sanford Levinson, who has been arguing for a new constitutional convention for, like, thirty years. And he’s arguing for it from the left. And then my governor, Greg Abbott, is arguing for a constitutional convention from the right. I think a constitutional convention would be a disaster. The last thing I want us to do is throw away two hundred years of wisdom and try to start again. But I do think we need amendments to the Constitution. And our Constitution makes it hard, but we can rewrite the Constitution. So I’m for rewriting the Constitution. I’m not for starting over, because I’m a Burkean. I’m not for revolution. I’m for building on the wisdom of the past. And we have a lot of wisdom to build on. My problem is not that we don’t have the wisdom. I mean, I’m a historian so I’m obviously going to say this. It’s not that the problem is the absence of wisdom. It’s whether we’re willing to learn it and use it. So let’s study the Constitution, and then let’s change it. Let’s not try to throw it away and start again. FASKIANOS: And, Jeremi, I’ll ask you the final question. Do you think, as you’re seeing students come into your university, do you think that there should be more systemized teaching of civics and history across the states? Because each state, as you mentioned with what the officers are studying, their civics didn’t mention slavery. So what does that look like for students, and how it’s being taught in different states—history? SURI: Yes. I think civics should be taught. I think we should be less prescriptive. I am for empowering teachers. I think we should—in the same way we invest a lot in educating science teachers, and math teachers—we don’t do enough, obviously, but we do a lot in that—we should be doing more to invest in an attractive career path for people to teach civics, to each constitutional and American history, and to teach it across the board, to be supported in doing that, to be given material and then left to their devices to teach. And that should be something supported not just by the federal government financially, it should be encouraged by our country as a whole. What I have witnessed is actually students are coming into my classrooms from all over the country, from very good high schools. It’s very hard—to get into UT now you have to be in the top 5 percent of your class, at least. It’s really hard to get in. They come from great schools with lots of AP credits. And they haven’t learned basic—they haven’t read the Constitution. They don’t understand basic things. And that shouldn’t be the case. We can do better. I don’t think we’re worse than we were, but we can do better. We can do better. And I think that should be a national mission. But I don’t want that to be civics taught just one way. I want use to actually train teachers to do it, and then let them run, let them do—let them do the teaching. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much for this hour. This was fantastic. We really appreciate your insights, and for all your work on this. Again, I commend Jeremi Suri’s book Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. If you haven’t already read it, you should. And we really appreciate your being with us. You can follow him on Twitter at @jeremisuri. SURI: And if I might, Irina, I also have a podcast called This is Democracy, where each week we talk about these issues. We bring on people to talk. We just had Jonathan Alter on this week to talk about Jimmy Carter and his legacy, positive and negative, for our democracy. We had John Sipher on last week or the week before talking about the CIA and its role in our democracy. So please listen. It’s called This is Democracy. It’s free. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. And we are going to continue this conversation on the future of democracy with our next webinar with CFR President Richard Haass on Tuesday, March 7 at 3:00 p.m. As many of you know, he’s written a book entitled The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens, and feels very strongly about how we need to be training and teaching young adults about their obligations. SURI: It’s a great book. I just want to—I want to pitch for Richard. He’s a friend, so I’m biased. But it’s a great book, and I hope you all will come and—read my book first, and then read his book. But you should— FASKIANOS: Oh, OK, but—(laughs)—I won’t tell him you listed it, but I will share your endorsement. (Laughs.) SURI: Tell Richard—tell Richard I was pushing his book. It is a great book. I highly recommend it. It’s very readable for students also. I’ve actually already given some of it to my students to read. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. So in the meantime, please do follow us at @CFR_Academic, go to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com—Jeremi already mentioned Foreign Affairs—and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. It was great to be with you all, and with you, Jeremi. Wishing you all a good rest of your day. SURI: Thank you, everyone. Thank you. (END)

Panelists discuss the role of the private sector in promoting social responsibility, development, and change at scale around the world. The CFR Young Professionals Briefing Series provides an opportunity for those early in their careers to engage with CFR. The briefings feature remarks by experts on critical global issues and lessons learned in their careers. These events are intended for individuals who have completed their undergraduate studies and have not yet reached the age of thirty to be eligible for CFR term membership.

Margaret O’Mara, Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington, leads the conversation on big tech and global order.   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 Margaret O’Mara with us to discuss big tech and global order. Dr. O’Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two. Dr. O’Mara is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer and has received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award for Innovation with Technology. Previously, she served as a fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. O’Mara served in the Clinton administration as an economic and social policy aide in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She is the author of several books and an editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press. Welcome, Margaret. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. O’MARA: Thank you so much, Maria, and thank you all for being here today. I’m setting my supercomputer on my wrist timer so I—to time my talk to you, and which is very apropos and it’s really—it’s great to be here. I have a few slides I wanted to share as I talk through, and I thought that since we had some really interesting meaty present tense readings from Foreign Affairs as background for this conversation as well as the recent review essay that I wrote last year, I thought I would set the scene a little more with a little more history and how we got to now and thinking in broad terms about how the technology industry relates to geopolitics and the global order as this very distinctive set of very powerful companies now. So I will share accordingly, and, Maria, I hope that this is showing up on your screen as it should. So I knew I—today I needed to, of course, talk—open with something in the news, this—the current—the ongoing questions around what has—what was in the sky and what is being shot down in addition to a Chinese spy balloon, which is really kind of getting to a question that’s at the center of all of my work. I write at the intersection of economic history and political history and I do that because I’m interested in questions of power. Who has power? What do they value? This is the kind of the question of the U.S.-China—the operative question of the U.S.-China rivalry and the—and concern about China, what are the values, what are the—and Chinese technology and Chinese technology companies, particularly consumer-facing ones. And this is also an operative question about the extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in a few large platform companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States—(laughs)—a couple in my town of Seattle where I am right now talking to you, and others in Silicon Valley. It’s very interesting when one does a Google image search to find a publicly available image and puts in Silicon Valley the images that come up are either the title cards of the HBO television comedy, which I was tempted to add, but the—really, the iconic shot of the valley as place is the Apple headquarters—the Spaceship, as it’s called in Cupertino—that opened a few years ago in the middle of suburbia. And this is—you know, the questions of concentrated power in the Q&A among the background readings, you know, this was noted by several of the experts consulted about what is the threat of big tech geopolitically and concentrated power, whether that’s good, bad, if that’s an advantage geopolitically or not. It was something that many of those folks brought up as did the other readings as well. And this question of power—who has power and taking power—has been an animating question of the modern technology industry and there’s an irony in this that if you think about the ideological granddaddy of Apple itself is the Whole Earth Catalog, which I—and this is—I quote from this in the opening to my review essay that was part of the background readings and I just thought I would pop this up in full for us to think about. This is Stewart Brand. This is the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. The full issue is digitized at the Internet Archive as are so many other wonderful artifacts and primary source materials about this world, and this is right here on the—you know, you turn—open the cover and here is the purpose: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory as via government, big business, formal education, and church has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” The audience of the Whole Earth Catalog was not a bunch of techies, per se. It was back to the landers, people who were going and founding communes and the catalog was—you know, which was more a piece of art than it was an actual shopping guide, had all sorts of things from books by Buckminster Fuller to camp stoves and to the occasional Hewlett Packard scientific calculator, making this kind of statement that these tools could actually be used for empowerment of the individual because, of course, the world of 1968 is one in which computers and AI are in the hands of the establishment. We see this playing out in multiple scales including Hollywood films like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, of course, follows, what, four years earlier Dr. Strangelove, which was also a satiric commentary on concentrated power of the military industrial complex, and computers were, indeed, things that were used by large government agencies, by the Pentagon, by Fortune 50 companies. And so the countercultural computer or personal computer movement is very much about individual power and taking this away from the global order, so to speak. This is the taking—using these tools as a way to connect people at the individual level, put a computer on every desk, connect everyone via computer networks to one another, and that is how the future will be changed. That is how the inequities of the world would be remedied. The notion of ultimate connectivity as a positive good was not something that originated with Facebook but, indeed, has much, much deeper origins and that’s worth thinking about as we consider where we are in 2023 and where things are going from there. It’s also worth thinking about the way in which global—the global order and particularly national security and government spending has played a role—an instrumental role—in the growth of the technology industry as it is. Take, for example, the original venture-backed startup, Fairchild Semiconductor, which is legendary as really starting the silicon semiconductor industry in the valley. It is the—it puts the silicon in the valley, and the eight co-founders known as the Traitorous Eight because they all quit en masse their previous job at Shockley Semiconductor working for William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, and they went off and did something that one does not—did not do in 1957 very often, which was start your own company. This was something that you did if you were weird and you couldn’t work for people. That’s what one old timer told me, reflecting back on this moment. But they, indeed, started their own company, found outside financing and in this group contains Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the two co-founders of Intel, as well as Gene Kleiner, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm. This is really the—you know, the original—where it all began, and yes, this is a story of free-market entrepreneurialism but it also is a story of the national security state. This is a—Fairchild is founded at a moment when most of the business in the Santa Clara Valley of California, later known as Silicon Valley, was defense related. This is where the jobs were. This is the business they were doing, by and large. There was not a significant commercial market for their products. A month after they’re incorporated—in September ’57 is when Fairchild incorporates itself. October 1957 Sputnik goes into orbit. The consequent wave of space spending is really what is the literal rocket ship that gets Silicon Valley’s chip business going. The integrated circuits made by Fairchild and other chip makers in the valley go into the Apollo guidance system. NASA is buying these chips at a time that there is not a commercial market for them and that enables these companies to scale up production to create a commodity that can be delivered to the enterprise. And so by the time you get to the 1970s you are not talking about defense contractors in any way. These are companies that are putting their chips in cars and in other—all sorts of one time mechanical equipment is becoming transistorized. And Intel is Intel, still one of the most important and consequential—globally consequential tech companies around at the center of the action in the CHIPS Act of last year, not to mention others. But this longer history and this intertwining with the military industrial complex and with broader geopolitics—because, of course, the space program and the Apollo program was a Cold War effort. It was about beating the Soviets to the moon, not just doing it because we could. But that really kind of dissipates and fades from collective memory in the Valley and beyond with the rise of these entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, young, new-time CEOs that are presenting a very, very different face of business and really being consciously apolitical, presenting themselves as something so far apart from Washington, D.C. And this notion of tech, big or little, being something separate from government and governance is perpetuated by leaders of both parties, not just Ronald Reagan but also by Democrats of a younger generation that in the early 1980s there was a brief moment in which lawmakers like Tim Wirth and Gary Hart were referred to as Atari Democrats because they were so bullish on high-tech industries as the United States’ economic future. And the way in which politicians and lawmakers from the 1980s forward talked about tech was very much in the same key as that of people like Steve Jobs, which is that this is a revolutionary—the tools have been taken from the establishment, and this is something that is apart from politics, that transcends the old global order and is a new one. And, in fact, in the speech in May 1988 in Moscow at the end of his presidency Ronald Reagan delivers a—you know, really frames the post-Cold War future as one in which the microchip is the revolutionary instrument of freedom: “Standing here before a mural of your revolution”—and a very large bust of Lenin—“I talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now. Its effects are peaceful but they will fundamentally alter our world, and it is—the tiny silicon chip is the agent of that, no bigger than a fingerprint.” This is really remarkable, if we sit back and take a deep breath and think about it, and particularly thinking about what happens after that. What happens after that are decades in which, again, leaders of both parties in the United States and world leaders elsewhere are framing the internet and understanding the internet as this tool for freedom and liberation, a tool that will advance democracy. Bill Clinton, towards the end of his presidency, famously kind of said, effectively, that I’m not worried about China because the internet is going to bring—you know, internet is going to make it very hard to have anything but democracy. And this notion of a post-Cold War and beyond the end of history and tech and big tech being central to that that, in fact, aided the rise of big tech. That was a rationale for a light regulatory hand in the United States, allowing these companies to grow and flourish and so big, indeed, they have become. But I want to end on a note just thinking about the—you know, why this history is important, why this connective tissue between past and present actually does matter. It isn’t just that, oh, this is nice to know. This is useful. Lawrence Preston Gise was the second—sorry, the first deputy administrator of DARPA in 1958, created in the wake of the Sputnik—post-Sputnik panic, originally called ARPA, now DARPA. He later ran the entire Western Division of the Atomic Energy Commission—Los Alamos, Livermore, et cetera. Longtime government public servant. In his retirement he retired to his farm in west Texas and his young grandson came and lived with him every summer. And his grandson throughout his life has talked about how—what a profound influence his grandfather was on him, showing him how to be a self-sufficient rancher, how to wrangle cattle and to build a barbed wire fence. But the grandson—you know, what the grandson didn’t mention that much because it wasn’t really relevant to his personal experience was who his grandfather was and what he had done. But when that grandson, Jeff Bezos—a few years ago when there was—when Google employees were writing their open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai saying, we are not in the defense business. We are—we don’t like the fact that you are doing work with the Pentagon, and pressuring Google successfully and other companies to get out of doing work with the Pentagon, Bezos reflected, no, I think we’re—I think this is our patriotic duty to do work—do this kind of work. And as I listened to him say that on a stage in an interview I thought, ah, that’s his grandfather talking because this little boy, of course, was Jeff Bezos, the grandfather of Lawrence Preston Gise, and those—that connective tissue—familial connective tissue as well as corporate and political connective tissue, I think, is very relevant to what we have before us today. So I’ll leave it there. Thanks. CASA: Thank you, Margaret, for that very interesting introduction. Let’s open up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) While our participants are gathering their thoughts would you start us off by providing a few examples of emerging technologies that are affecting higher education? O’MARA: Yeah. Well, we’ve had a very interesting last three years in which the debate over online learning versus in-person learning very quickly was not necessarily resolved. We did this mass real-time experiment, and I think it made—put into sharp relief the way in which different technologies are shaping the way that higher education institutions are working and this question of who’s controlling the—who controls the platforms and how we mediate what learning we do. Even though I now teach in person again almost everything that I do in terms of assignments and communication is through electronic learning management systems. The one we use at UW is Canvas. But, of course, there are these broader questions—ethical questions and substantive questions—about how our AI-enabled technologies including, notably, the star of the moment, ChatGPT, going to change the way in which—it’s mostly been around how are students going to cheat more effectively. But I think it also has these bigger questions about how you learn and where knowledge, where the human—where the human is necessary. My take on it is, aside from the kind of feeling pretty confident in my having such arcane prompts for my midterm essay questions and research projects that ChatGPT, I think, would have a very hard time doing a good job with it but although I’m looking forward to many a form letter being filled by that technology in the future, I think that there is a—you know, this has a history, too. The concern about the robot overlords is a very deep one. It extends from—you know, predates the digital age, and the anxiety about whether computers are becoming too powerful. Of course, this question of artificial intelligence or augmented intelligence kind of is the computer augmenting what a human can do rather than replacing what a human can do or pretending to have the nuance and the complexity that a human might be able to convey. I think there’s, you know, these bigger questions and I’m sure—I imagine there are going to be some other questions about AI. Really, you know, this is a—I think this is a very good learning moment, quite frankly, to think more—you know, one of the things I teach about a lot is kind of the information that is on the internet and who’s created it and how it is architected and how it is findable and how those platforms have been developed over time. And what ChatGPT and other AIs like them are doing is they’re scraping this extraordinary bounteous ocean of information and it is as good as the—it’s as good as its source, right. So whatever you’re able to do with it you have—your source materials are going to determine it. So if there is bias in the sources, if there is inaccuracy in the sources, there is—that will be replicated. It cannot be—you know, I think what it is is it’s a really good rough draft, first draft, for then someone with tacit knowledge and understanding to come into, and I like to think of digital tools as ones that reveal where things that only people can do that cannot be replicated, that this—where human knowledge cannot be, where a machine still—even though a machine is informed by things that humans do and now does it at remarkable speed and scale it still is—there is—we are able to identify where humanity makes a difference. And then my one last caution is I do—you know, the one thing you can’t do with these new—any of these new technologies is do them well really fast, and the rush to it is a little anxiety inducing. CASA: Thank you. Our first question is from Michael Leong from the—he’s a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Michael, would you like to unmute and ask your question? Q: Yeah. Hi, Dr. O’Mara. Hi, Ms. Casa. Sorry for any background noise. I just had a, like, general question about your thoughts on the role big tech plays in geopolitics. Specifically, we’ve seen with SpaceX and Starlink especially with what’s going on in Ukraine and how much support that has been provided to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and potentially holding that over—(inaudible)—forces. So, basically, do we expect to see private companies having more leverage over geopolitical events? And how can we go forward with that? O’MARA: Yeah. That’s a really—that’s a really great question. And you know, I think that there’s—it’s interesting because the way—there’s always been public-private partnerships in American state building and American geopolitics, and that’s something—it’s worth kind of just noting that. Like, from the very beginning the United States has used private entities as instruments of policy, as parastatal entities, whether it be through, you know, land grants and transcontinental railroad building in the nineteenth century all the way through to Starlink and Ukraine because, of course, the Pentagon is involved, too—you know, that SpaceX is in a very—is a significant government contractor as ones before it. I think that where there’s a really interesting departure from the norm is that what we’ve seen, particularly in the last, you know, the last forty years but in this sort of post-Cold War moment has been and particularly in the last ten to fifteen years a real push by the Pentagon to go to commercial enterprises for technology and kind of a different model of contracting and, I should say, more broadly, national security agencies. And this is something, you know, a real—including the push under—when Ash Carter was in charge of DOD to really go to Silicon Valley and say, you guys have the best technology and a lot of it is commercial, and we need to update our systems and our software and do this. But I think that the SpaceX partnership is one piece of that. But there has been a real—you know, as the government has, perhaps, not gotten smaller but done less than it used to do and there’s been more privatization, there have been—there’s been a vacuum left that private companies have stepped into and I think Ian Bremmer’s piece was really—made some really important points in this regard that there are things that these platform companies are doing that the state used to do or states used to do and that does give them an inordinate amount of power. You know, and these companies are structurally—often a lot of the control over these companies is in the hands of very, very few, including an inordinate unusual amount of founder power, and Silicon Valley, although there’s plenty of political opinionating coming out of there now, which is really a departure from the norm, this kind of partisan statements of such—you know, declarations of the—of recent years are something that really didn’t—you didn’t see very much before. These are not folks who are—you know, their expertise lies in other domains. So that’s where my concern—some concern lies where you have these parastatal actors that are becoming, effectively, states and head of states then and they are not, indeed, speaking for—you know, they’re not sovereign powers in the same way and they are speaking for themselves and speaking from their own knowledge base rather than a broader sense of—you know, they’re not speaking for the public. That’s not their job. CASA: Our next question is from Michael Raisinghani from Texas Woman’s University. Michael, if you could unmute. Q: Thank you, Ms. Casa and Dr. O’Mara. A very insightful discussion. Thank you for that. I just thought maybe if you could maybe offer some clarity around the generative AI, whether it’s ChatGPT or Wordtune or any of this in terms of the future. If you look, let’s say, five, ten years ahead, if that’s not too long, what would your thoughts be in this OpenAI playground? O’MARA: Mmm hmm. Well, with the first—with the caveat that the first rule of history is that you can’t predict the future—(laughs)—and (it’s true ?); we are historians, we like to look backwards rather than forwards—I will then wade into the waters of prediction, or at least what I think the implications are. I mean, one thing about ChatGPT as a product, for example, which has been really—I mean, what a—kudos for a sort of fabulous rollout and marketing and all of a sudden kind of jumping into our public consciousness and being able to release what they did in part because it wasn’t a research arm of a very large company where things are more being kept closer because they might be used for that company’s purposes. Google, for example, kind of, you know, has very in short order followed on with the reveal of what they have but they kind of were beaten to the punch by OpenAI because OpenAI wasn’t—you know, it was a different sort of company, a different sort of enterprise. You know, a lot of it are things that are already out there in the world. If we’ve, you know, made an airline reservation and had a back and forth with a chatbot, like, that’s—that’s an example of some of that that’s already out in the world. If you’re working on a Google doc and doing what absolutely drives me bonkers, which is that Google’s kind of completing my sentences for me, but that predictive text, those—you know, many things that we are—that consumers are already interacting with and that enterprises are using are components of this and this is just kind of bringing it together. I think that we should be very cautious about the potential of and the accuracy of and the revolutionary nature of ChatGPT or any of these whether it be Bard or Ernie or, you know, name your perspective chatbot. It is what it is. Again, it’s coming from the—it’s got the source material it has, it’s working with, which is not—you know, this is not human intelligence. This is kind of compilation and doing it very rapidly and remarkably and in a way that presents with, you know, literacy. So I’m not—you know, does very cool stuff. But where the future goes, I mean, clearly, look, these company—the big platform companies have a lot of money and they have a great deal of motivation and need to be there for the next big thing and, you know, if we dial back eighteen months ago there were many in tech who were saying crypto and Web3 was the next big thing and that did not—has not played out as some might have hoped. But there is a real desire for, you know, not being left behind. Again, this is where my worry is for the next five years. If this is driven by market pressures to kind of be the—have the best search, have the best—embed this technology in your products at scale that is going to come with a lot of hazards. It is going to replicate the algorithmic bias, the problems with—extant problems with the internet. I worry when I see Google saying publicly, we are going to move quickly on this and it may not be perfect but we’re going to move quickly when Google itself has been grappling with and called out on its kind of looking the other way with some of the real ethical dilemmas and the exclusions and biases that are inherent in some of the incredibly powerful LLMs—the models that they are creating. So that’s my concern. This is a genie that is—you know, letting this genie out of the bottle and letting it become a mass consumer product, and if—you know, OpenAI, to its credit, if you go to ChatGPT’s website it has a lot of disclaimers first about this is not the full story, effectively, and in the Microsoft rollout of their embedding the technology in Bing last week Microsoft leaders, as well as Sam Altman of OpenAI, were kind of—their talking points were very careful to say this is not everything. But it does present—it’s very alluring and I think we’re going to see it in a lot more places. Is it going to change everything? I think everyone’s waiting for, like, another internet to change everything and I don’t know if—I don’t know. The jury’s out. I don’t know. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Denis Fred Simon, clinical professor of global business and technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He asked, technology developments have brought to the surface the evolving tension between the drive for security with the desire for privacy. The U.S. represents one model while China represents another model. How do societies resolve this tension and is there some preferred equilibrium point? O’MARA: That is a—that’s the billion-dollar question and it’s—I think it’s a relevant one that goes way back. (Laughs.) I mean, there are many moments in the kind of evolution of all of these technologies where the question of who should know what and what’s allowable. If we go back to 1994 and the controversy over the Clipper chip, which was NSA wanting to build a backdoor into commercially available software, and that was something that the industry squashed because it would, among other things, have made it very difficult for a company like Microsoft to sell their products in China or other places if you had a—knew that the U.S. national security agencies were going to have a window into it. And, of course, that all comes roaring back in 2013 with Snowden’s revelations that, indeed, the NSA was using social media platforms and other commercial platforms—consumer-facing platforms—to gather data on individuals. You know, what is the perfect balance? I mean, this is—I wish I had this nice answer. (Laughs.) I would probably have a really nice second career consulting and advising. But I think there is a—what is clear is that part of what has enabled the American technology industry to do what it has done and to generate companies that have produced, whether you think the transformations on balance are good or bad, transformative products, right. So everything we’re using to facilitate this conversation that all of us are having right now is coming from that font. And democratic capitalism was really critical to that and having a free—mostly free flow of information and not having large-scale censorship. I mean, the postscript to the Clipper chip—you know, Clipper chip controversy is two years later the Telecom Act of 1996, which was, on the one hand, designed to ensure the economic growth of what were then very small industries in the internet sector and not—and prevent the telecoms from ruling it all but also were—you know, this was a kind of making a call about, OK, in terms when it comes to the speech on the internet we are going to let the companies regulate that and not be penalized for private—when private companies decide that they want to take someone down, which is really what Section 230 is. It’s not about free speech in a constitutional sense. It’s about the right of a company to censor or to moderate content. It’s often the opposite of the way that it’s kind of understood or interpreted or spun in some ways. But it is clear that the institutions of—that encourage free movement of people and capital have been—are pretty critical in fueling innovation writ large or the development and the deployment and scaling of new technologies, particularly digital technologies. But I think you can see that playing out in other things, too. So that has been, I think, a real tension and a real—there’s a market dimension to this, not just in terms of an ethical dimension or political dimension that there does need to be some kind of unfettered ability of people to build companies and to grow them in certain ways. But it’s a fine balance. I mean, this sort of, like, when does regulation—when does it—when do you need to have the state come in and in what dimension and which state. And this goes back to that core question of like, OK, the powerful entities, what are their values? What are they fighting for? Who are they fighting for? I don’t know. I’m not giving you a terribly good answer because I think it’s a really central question to which many have grappled for that answer for a very long time. CASA: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ahmuan Williams, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. Ahmuan? Q: Thank you. Hi. I’m wondering about ChatGPT, about the regulation side of that. It seems like it’s Microsoft that has kind of invested itself into ChatGPT. Microsoft had before gotten the Pentagon contract just a few years back. So it’s kind of a two-part question. So, first of all, how does that—what does that say about government’s interest in artificial intelligence and what can be done? I know the Council of Foreign Relations also reported that the Council of Europe is actually planning an AI convention to figure out how, you know, a framework of some type of AI convention in terms of treaties will work out. But what should we be worried about when it comes to government and the use of AI in political advertisements and campaigns, about, basically, them flooding opinions with, you know, one candidate’s ideas and, therefore, them being able to win because they’re manipulating our opinions? So what would you say would be kind of a regulation scheme that might come out of these type—new flourishing AI devices? O’MARA: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. That’s a good question. I think there’s sort of different layers to it. I mean, I see that, you know, the Pentagon contract—the JEDI contract—being awarded to Microsoft, much to Amazon’s distress—(laughs)—and litigious distress, is a kind of a separate stream from its decision to invest 10 billion (dollars) in OpenAI. I think that’s a commercial decision. I think that’s a recognition that Microsoft research was not producing the—you know, Microsoft didn’t have something in house that was comparable. Microsoft saw an opportunity to at last do a—you know, knock Google off of its dominant pedestal in search and make Bing the kind of long—kind of a punch line—no longer a punch line but actually something that was a product that people would actively seek out and not just use because it was preinstalled on their Microsoft devices. That is—so I see that as a market decision kind of separate from. The bigger AI question, the question of AI frameworks, yes, and this, again, has a longer history and, you know, I kind of liken AI to the Pacific Ocean. It’s an enormous category that contains multitudes. Like, it’s—you know, we can—oftentimes when we talk about AI or the AI that we see and we experience, it’s machine learning. And part of why we have such extraordinary advances in machine learning in the last decade has—because of the harvesting of individual data on these platforms that we as individuals use, whether it be Google or Meta or others, that that has just put so much out there that now these companies can create something that—you know, that the state of the art has accelerated vastly. Government often is playing catch up, not just in tech but just in business regulation, generally. The other—you know, another example of this in the United States cases with the—in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, with what were then new high-tech tech-driven industries of railroads and oil and steel that grew to enormous size and then government regulators played catch up and created the institutions that to this day are the regulators like the FTC created in 1913. Like, you know, that’s—of that vintage. So, I think that it depends on—when it comes to—the question about electoral politics, which I think is less about government entities—this is about entities, people and organizations that want to be in charge of government or governments—that is, you know, AI—new technologies of all kinds that incorporate ever more sophisticated kind of, essentially, disinformation, that—information that presents as real and it is not. The increased volume of that and the scale of that and the sophistication of that and the undetectability of it does create a real challenge to free and fair elections and also to preventing, in the American context, international and foreign intervention in and manipulation of elections but true in every context. That is, you know, getting good information before voters and allowing bad actors to exploit existing prejudices or misassumptions. That is an existing problem that probably will be accelerated by it. I think there’s—there’s a strong case to be made, at least in the U.S. context, for much stronger regulation of campaign advertising that extends to the internet in a much more stricter form. In that domain there’s—I think we have pretty good evidence that that has not been—you know, having that back end has made the existing restrictions on other types of campaign speech and other media kind of made them moot because you can just go on a social platform and do other things. So there’s—you know, this is—I think the other thing that compromises this is the rapidly changing nature of the technology and the digital—and the global reach of these digital technologies that extends any other product made—you know, any other kind of product. It just is borderless that—in a kind of overwhelming way. That doesn’t mean government should give up. But I think there’s a sort of supranational level of frameworks, and then there are all sorts of subnational kind of domain-specific frameworks that could occur to do something as a countervailing force or at least slow the role of developers and companies in moving forward in these products. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Prashant Hosur, assistant professor of humanities and social sciences at Clarkson University. He asks, how do you—or she. I’m sorry. I’m not sure. How do you think big tech is likely to affect conventional wisdom around issues of great power rivalry and power transitions? O’MARA: Hmm. I don’t—well, I think there are a—these are always—these definitions are always being redefined and who the great powers are and what gives them power is always being reshuffled and—but, of course, markets and economic resources and wealth and—are implicated in this for millennia. I think that tech companies do have this—American tech companies and the tech platforms, which I should preface this by saying, you know, none of the companies we’re talking about now are going to rule forever. Maybe that just goes without—it’s worth just note, you know, this is—we will have the rise and fall. Every firm will be a dinosaur. Detroit was the most innovative city in the world a hundred and ten years ago. There’s still a lot of innovation and great stuff coming out of Detroit, but if you—if I queried anyone here and said, what’s the capital of innovation I don’t know if you would say Detroit. But back in the heyday of the American auto industry it was, and I think it’s a good reminder. We aren’t always going to be talking about this place in northern California and north Seattle in this way. But what we have right now are these companies that their products, unlike the products of Henry Ford or General Motors, are ones that are—go across borders with—you know, the same product goes across borders seamlessly and effortlessly, unlike an automobile where a—to sell in a certain country you have to meet that country’s fuel standards and, you know, safety standards, et cetera, et cetera. You have a different model for a different market. Instead, here, you know, a Facebook goes where it goes, Google goes where it goes, YouTube goes where it goes, and that has been kind of extraordinary in terms of internationalizing politics, political trends. I think what we’ve seen globally is very—you know, the role of the internet in that has been extraordinary, both for good and for ill, in the last fifteen years. And then the kind of—the immense—the great deal of power that they have in the many different domains and, again, Ian Bremmer also observed this kind of the—all the different things they do and that is something that is different from twenty-five years ago where you now have companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States with products designed by a small group of people from a kind of narrow, homogenous band of experience who are doing things like transforming taxis and hotels and, I mean, you name it, kind of going everywhere in a way that in the day of the—you know, the first Macintosh, which was like this cool thing on your desk, that was—yes, it was a transformative product. It was a big deal and Silicon Valley was—became a household word and a phrase in the 1980s and the dot.com era, too. That was—you know, everyone’s getting online with their AOL discs they got in the mail. But what’s happened in the twenty-first century is at a scale and—a global scale and an influence across many different domains, and politics, this very deliberate kind of we are a platform for politics that has really reshaped the global order in ways that are quite profound. This is not to say that everything has to do with big tech is at the root of everything. But let’s put it in context and let’s, you know—and also recognize that these are not companies that were designed to do this stuff. They’ve been wildly successful what they set out to do and they have a high-growth tech-driven model that is designed to move fast and, yes, indeed, it breaks things and that has—you know, that has been—they are driven by quarterly earnings. They are driven by other things, as they should be. They are for-profit companies, many of them publicly traded. But the—but because, I think, in part they have been presenting themselves as, you know, we’re change the world, we’re not evil, we’re something different, we’re a kinder, gentler capitalism, there has been so much hope hung on them as the answer for a lot of things, and that is not—kind of giving states and state power something of the past to get its act together that instead states need to step up. CASA: Our next question is from Alex Grigor. He’s a PhD candidate from University of Cambridge. Alex? Q: Hello. Yes. Thank you. Can you hear me? O’MARA: Yes. CASA: Yes. Q: Yeah. Hi. Thank you, Ms. O’Mara. Very insightful and, in fact, a lot of these questions are very good as well. So they’ve touched upon a lot of what I was going to ask and so I’ll narrow it down slightly. My research is looking at cyber warfare and sort of international conflict particularly between the U.S. and China but beyond, and I was wondering—you started with the sort of military industrial complex and industry sort of breaking away from that. Do you see attempts, perhaps, because of China and the—that the technology industry and the military are so closely entwined that there’s an attempt by the U.S. and, indeed, other countries. You see increase in defense spending in Japan and Germany. But it seems to be specifically focused, according to my research, on the technologies that are coming out of that, looking to reengage that sort of relationship. They might get that a little bit by regulation. Perhaps the current downsizing of technology companies is an opportunity for governments to finally be able to recruit some good computer scientists that they haven’t been able to—(laughs)—(inaudible). Perhaps it’s ASML and semiconductor sort of things. Do you see that as part of the tension a conscious attempt at moving towards reintegrating a lot of these technologies back into government? O’MARA: Yeah. I think we’re at a really interesting moment. I mean, one thing that’s—you know, that’s important to note about the U.S. defense industry is it never went away from the tech sector. It just kind of went underground. Lockheed, the major defense contractor, now Lockheed Martin, was the biggest numerical employer in the valley through the end of the Cold War through the end of the 1980s. So well into the commercial PC era and—but very—you know, kind of most of what was going on there was top secret stuff. So no one was on the cover of Forbes magazine trumpeting what they’ve done. And there has been—but there has been a real renewed push, particularly with the kind of—to get made in Silicon Valley or, you know, made in the commercial sector software being deployed for military use and national security use and, of course, this is very—completely bound up in the questions of cyber warfare and these existing commercial networks, and commercial platforms and products are ones that are being used and deployed by state actors and nonstate actors as tools for cyber terrorism and cyber warfare. So, yes, I think it’s just going to get tighter and closer and the great—you know, the stark reality of American politics, particularly in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, is the one place that the U.S. is willing to spend lots of money in the discretionary budget is on defense and the one place where kind of it creates a rationale for this unfettered—largely, unfettered spending or spending with kind of a willingness to spend a lot of money on things that don’t have an immediately measurable or commercializable outcome is in national security writ large. That’s why the U.S. spent so much money on the space program and created this incredible opportunity for these young companies making chips that only—making this device that only—only they were making the things that the space program needed, and this willingness to fail and the willingness to waste money, quite frankly. And so now we’re entering into this sort of fresh—this interesting—you know, the geopolitical competition with China between the U.S. has this two dimensions in a way and the very—my kind of blunt way of thinking about it it’s kind of like the Soviet Union and Japan all wrapped up in one, Japan meaning the competition in the 1980s with Japan, which stimulated a great deal of energy among—led by Silicon Valley chip makers for the U.S. to do something to help them compete and one of those outcomes was SEMATECH, the consortium to develop advanced semiconductor technology, whose funding—it was important but its funding was a fraction of the wave of money that just was authorized through last year’s legislation, the CHIPS Act as well as Inflation Reduction Act and others. So I’m seeing, you know, this kind of turn to hardware and military hardware and that a lot of the commercial—the government subsidized or incentivized commercial development of green technology and advanced semiconductor, particularly in military but other semiconductor technology and bringing semiconductor manufacturing home to the United States, that is—even those dimensions that are nonmilitary, that are civilian, it’s kind of like the Apollo program. That was a civilian program but it was done for these broader geopolitical goals to advance the economic strength and, hence, the broader geopolitical strength of the United States against a competitor that was seen as quite dangerous. So that’s my way of saying you’re right, that this is where this is all going and so I think that’s why this sort of having a healthy sense of this long-term relationship is healthy. It’s healthy for the private sector to recognize the government’s always been there. So it isn’t though you had some innovative secret that the government is going to take away by being involved. And to also think about what are the broader goals that—you know, who is benefiting from them and what is the purpose and recognize often that, you know, many of the advanced technologies we have in the United States are thanks to U.S. military funding for R&D back in the day. CASA: Our next question is written. It’s from Damian Odunze, who is an assistant professor at Delta State University. Regarding cybersecurity, do you think tech companies should take greater responsibility since they develop the hardware and software packages? Can the government mandate them, for instance, to have inbuilt security systems? O’MARA: Hmm. Yeah. I think—look, with great power comes great responsibility is a useful reminder for the people at the top of these companies that for—that are so remarkably powerful at the moment and because their platforms are so ubiquitous. There are—you see, for example, Microsoft has really—is a—I think what they’ve done in terms of partnering with the White House and its occupants and being—kind of acting as a NSA first alert system of sorts and kind of being open about that I think that’s been good for them from a public relations perspective, and also—but I think it also reflects this acknowledgement of that responsibility and that it also is bad for their business if these systems are exploited. Yeah, I think that, again, regulation is something that—you know, it’s like saying Voldemort in Silicon Valley. Like, some people are, like, oh, regulation, you know. But there’s really—there can be a really generative and important role that regulation can play, and the current industry has grown up in such a lightly-regulated fashion you just kind of get used to having all that freedom, and when it comes to cybersecurity and to these issues of national security importance and sort of global importance and importance to the users of the products and the companies that make them there’s, I think, a mutual interest in having some sort of rules of the road and that—and I think any company that’s operating at a certain scale is—understands that it’s in their market interest to be—you know, not to be a renegade, that they are working with. But I think having—you know, there can be a willingness to work with but they’re—having a knowledge and an understanding and a respect for your government partners, your state partners, whether they be U.S. or non-U.S. or supranational is really critically important and sometimes tech folks are a little too, like, oh, politics, they don’t know what they’re doing, you know. We know better. And I think there needs to be a little more mutual exchange of information and some more—yes, some more technical people being able to be successfully recruited into government would probably be a help, too, so there’s—on both sides of the table you have technically savvy people who really understand the inner workings of how this stuff is made and don’t have simplistic answers of like, oh, we’ll just take all the China-made technology out of it. You’re, like, well, there’s—like, it’s kind of deep in the system. You know, so having technologists in the conversation at all points is important. CASA: Thank you. I think we have time for one more question. We’ll take that from Louis Esparza, assistant professor at California State University in Los Angeles. Q: Hi. Thank you for your very interesting talk. So I’m coming at this from the social movements literature and I’m coming into this conversation because I’m interested in the censorship and influence of big tech that you seem to be, you know, more literate in. So my question is do you think that this—the recent trends with big tech and collaboration with federal agencies is a rupture with the origin story of the 1960s that you talked about in your talk or do you think it’s a continuity of it? O’MARA: Yeah. That’s a great way to put it. The answer is, is it both? Well, it’s something of a rupture. I mean, look, this—you know, you have this—you have an industry that grows up as intensely—you know, that those that are writing and reading the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 the military industrial complex is all around them. It is paying for their education sort of effectively or paying for the facilities where they’re going to college at Berkeley or Stanford or name your research university—University of Washington. It is the available jobs to them. It is paying for the computers that they learn to code on and that they’re doing their work on. It is everywhere and it is—and when you are kind of rebelling against that establishment, when you see that establishment is waging war in Vietnam as being a power—not a power for good but a power for evil or for a malevolent—a government you don’t trust whose power, whose motivations you don’t trust, then you—you know, you want to really push back against that and that is very much what the personal computer movement that then becomes an industry is. That’s why all those people who were sitting around in the 1970s in Xerox Palo Alto Research Center—Xerox Park—just spitballing ideas, they just did not want to have anything to do with military technology. So that’s still there, and then that—and that ethos also suffused other actors in, you know, American government and culture in the 1980s forward, the sort of anti-government sentiment, and the concerns about concentrated power continue to animate all of this. And the great irony is that has enabled the growth of these private companies to the power of states. (Laughs.) So it’s kind of both of those things are happening and I think, in some ways, wanting to completely revolutionize the whole system was something that was not quite possible to do, although many—it is extraordinary how much it has done. CASA: Margaret, thank you very much for this fascinating discussion and to all of you for your questions and comments. I hope you will follow Margaret on Twitter at @margaretomara. Our next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 1, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Chris Li, director of research of the Asia Pacific Initiative and fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, will lead a conversation on U.S. strategy in East Asia. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR’s 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. We look forward to you tuning in for our webinar on March 1. Bye. (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.

Julia Gelatt, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, discuss the Biden administration’s expansion of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program and recent developments in U.S. immigration and border policies. Gustavo Solis, investigative border reporter for KPBS San Diego, discuss sources for information and data on immigration topics and framing stories at the U.S. southern border. The webinar will be moderated by Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times.   TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, publisher, and educational institution focusing on U.S. foreign policy. We are also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. This webinar is part of CFR’s Local Journalists Initiative, created to help you draw connections between the local issues you cover and the national and international dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on international issues and provides a forum for sharing best practices. So this webinar is on the record. The video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org/localjournalists. So we are pleased to have Julia Gelatt, Gustavo Solis, and host Carla Anne Robbins to have this discussion on reporting on President Biden’s border policies. Julia Gelatt is senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute where she focuses on U.S. immigration policies, demographic trends, and the implications of local, state, and federal immigration policy. Previously she worked as a research associate at the Urban Institute. Her mixed methods research focused on state policies toward immigrants, barriers to and facilitators of immigrant families, access to public benefits, and identifying youth victims of human trafficking. Gustavo Solis is an investigative border reporter for KPSB (sic; KPBS) Public Media in San Diego. In 2018, he was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning team in explanatory journalism for “The Wall: Unknown Stories, Unintended Consequences,” which was a series led by the Arizona Republic involving over thirty journalists to cover the border wall separating Mexico and the U.S. And Carla Anne Robbins, our host, is a senior fellow at CFR. She is the faculty director of the Master of International Affairs Program, and clinical professor of national security studies at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. Previously she was deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. So thank you all, and Carla, over to you. ROBBINS: Thank you, Irina, and I’m going to make a pitch—a naked pitch—which is starting tomorrow I’m going to be the co-host of the Council’s The World Next Week podcast, and it’s—I would like to say it’s not Only Murders in the Building, but I’m hoping that people will tune in. So with that, having done my self-promotion, thank you so much everybody for joining us. Thank you to the journalists on the call. We’re going to chat up here and then throw it over to you guys for questions, but if you have questions while we are talking, please, you know, throw them into the chat, raise your hand so we know that you are—you know, you can help shape that conversation as well. And we really appreciate the work you do. We know it’s an incredibly hard time to be in the business, and you’re doing the extraordinary job, and thank you so much for doing it. So Gustavo and Julia, thank you for being here. Julia, can we start with you? As a researcher, can you give us a sense of the scale of what we’re looking at here—you know, how many migrants are trying to enter the U.S., and how much has it changed since Biden came into office from the Trump years? GELATT: Sure. Yeah, last year we saw 2.4 million people being encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is, you know, a really big increase. As soon as President Biden took office, we actually saw the border numbers starting to increase, which isn’t necessarily, you know, because of him. This coincided, of course, with kind of the reopening after really low border numbers during COVID-19, and kind of a resumption of trends that we saw starting in 2019 as well. But we really are seeing big numbers coming at the border. And also we’re seeing really different trends of who is showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border, so, you know, over kind of a longer history there are a lot of Mexican immigrants, a lot of Mexican single adults coming, and then in the Trump years we were really seeing kind of more Central American families and unaccompanied minors. Last year, for the first time, there were more Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans encountered than Central Americans, so we’re seeing just kind of ongoing shifts of who is coming at the border. So, yeah, really kind of big increases and also really different groups that are coming. ROBBINS: How can you explain the different groups? It’s not like Cuba is more repressive this year than it was last year. Venezuela is more repressive this year than it—you know, Haiti, granted, is worse, but that, you know, a long story. Why is it a different mix? GELATT: I think partly it’s the economic impact of the pandemic. That was, you know, tough all around the world, but we’ve seen a lot of economic downturns in the region. That was also why there were Haitians coming to the border in prior years that had been living in South America, but with some economic challenges increasing there, they were making their way to the United States. There are also—I think in some cases, even if the conditions aren’t where I said—sort of like a frustration point. In Cuba we saw big protests, and then a big crackdown, and kind of a sense that, well, this isn’t about to change; the same thing in Venezuela. You know, there had been some kind of hope of the opposition, and it seems like the opposition is really not succeeding. And so, you know, kind of giving up on the hope of change at home can lead people to leave. Maybe also there are people who, you know, were kind of frustrated when the pandemic hit, but delayed their travel while mobility was really hard, and there were public health concerns, safety concerns, and then it became an easier time to move. So I think there are a lot of different push factors. But there is also the impact of President Trump’s—sorry—President Biden’s border policies, which is that, you know Title 42 is still in place—those are really quick expulsions back across the border to Mexico. Those had been mainly applied to Mexicans and to Central Americans, and Mexico wasn’t really wanting to accept nationalities that it also couldn’t return to their home countries. The U.S. doesn’t really have a way to deport people back to—or didn’t—back to Venezuela, to these other countries, and so Mexico also didn’t and so wasn’t wanting to take people expelled under Title 42 from these countries. Now, you know, we’re seeing changing border policies, and Mexico is agreeing to take more nationalities under Title 42, which seems to be having some impact on the numbers. But the word was getting out, you know, that certain nationalities were going to be let into the United States and, you know, that this might be a good time to travel. So the administration is now kind of working on countering that narrative with its new policies. ROBBINS: Thanks. So Gustavo, you are down close to the border. You’re talking to people there. Two things: I want to talk about the factors of the—the push factors, but talk a little bit about the pull factors to start. Certainly the critics of President Biden would say, President Trump is really tough, and that’s why people stopped coming, and this is all because people think they’re going to get a really, you know, immigrant-loving deal from Biden. How much of this is, you know, perception rather than reality? Are people coming because they think they are going to get a better deal from Biden—people you talk to, and how much of it is just, you know, the factors that Julia is talking about? SOLIS: I think most of it is the factors that Julia is talking about—at least the main ones, right? The employment factors, right, working conditions, poverty, violence, discrimination. I mean, I think what Julia said was spot on and very—a key part of this is the shift in migration from traditionally adult men coming for work to now it’s a little bit more diverse, more families, women, children; people seeking kind of humanitarian aid, and I think that shift is very, very important because our entire immigration system was built on one type of migrant—the men, employment—and we’re experiencing a different one which presents a whole slew of different challenges. But back to your question, I think when I talk to them, and I ask them why they are coming and why they decided to come, all the reasons they point to are turmoil back home, whether they are coming directly from impoverished states of Mexico like Guerrero and Oaxaca, or like you mentioned, they are Haitian nationals who have spent the last couple of years in Venezuela or Chile and are kind of finally making their way over here. They do mention some of the policies. Especially like during the election, I do remember hearing in Tijuana there was a big migrant camp, and that essentially formed because there was—during the 2020 election Biden ran on this campaign of rolling back some of Trump’s policies, restoring a more humane system to asylum, and there was this expectation that, you know, not overnight, but eventually they would be able to kind of have a safe and orderly way to get into the country. That unfortunately hasn’t happened to the majority of them. And I would say that that was kind of a factor once they got here, but I wouldn’t say that is a major push factor to when people are deciding to leave their homes. I would say one of the last things they are looking at is U.S. immigration policies. It’s all the internal issues going on there. ROBBINS: This is such a hard trip for people, and it’s just so hard in so many ways. It’s physically hard. It’s dangerous. The potential for exploitation is so enormous. Why are so many women coming now with children that didn’t do it before? You know, I worked in Central America for a long time. Conditions were bad when I worked in Central America. You know, it’s a—why suddenly would women be more willing to take these risks with their children that they weren’t willing to five, ten years ago? SOLIS: Well, based on interviews I’ve done, it’s a calculated risk. And I think in their mind they’re seeing—at least the people for—like the asylum seekers and people fleeing violence—they would see that, if they stay at home, they will most likely die. I mean, just to be frank, they’ve been threatened individually or collectively as a family, and they view the dangerous journey as being less dangerous than staying at home. That’s the only way I can kind of understand that situation. I mean, nobody comes here thinking it’s easy. Maybe there are people who think it’s easier than it actually is, and that might be some human smuggling kind of putting these ideas in their head that it’s an easy walk across the border; it’s not a multi-day-long hike through dangerous territory. But I think they expect it to be difficult. They know it’s dangerous. I mean, they have friends who have done it before, and people go missing all the time. And they are aware of all the challenges, but I think they are making a calculated risk. And more than anything, it’s speaks to the level of uncertainty and desperation back home for them. ROBBINS: Julia, can you explain just some basic terminology for us? What’s the difference between a refugee and asylum seeker—that’s the first thing. And the second thing, can you explain what, under international law, are the obligations of the United States when people come declaring, asking for asylum? GELATT: Sure. So, yeah, refugees and asylum seekers—asylees—are people who are fleeing persecution, who meet the standard of having a well-founded fear of—either have experienced persecution or have a well-founded fear of future persecution on the basis of race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, things like that. Refugees are processed outside of the United States, so refugees are someone who is outside of their country of origin, but they have—you know, they have experienced persecution, they have a fear of persecution, and they are processed through a combination of U.N. agencies—specifically UNHCR—and then the U.S. government. And if they are found to be refugees in need of protection and, you know, are chosen to come to the United States versus some other country in the world, they will come to the United States with that refugee status, with a legal status. They will come in an orderly way. They will be placed in a U.S. community, given refugee resettlement assistance. Asylum seekers are people who come onto U.S. territory, whether they flew here or come to the border and get onto U.S. soil, and then ask for protection in the United States meeting those same standards. Asylum seekers go through a really long process of being put into removal proceeding and then asking for asylum—usually—in immigration court, and then having those claims adjudicated. If they are found to, you know, be an asylee; if they are granted asylum, then they are also eligible for that same resettlement assistance, although usually by then people have been in the country for quite a while, so they are less likely to be taking advantage of that. Under international law, we have an obligation—we have agreed that we have an obligation that anyone who gets on to U.S. soil has the right to present their asylum claim and to have that claim heard, which, you know, is something that you might not know, given some of the policies of the Trump administration and even some of the things that are being discussed as future possibilities by the Biden administration, but that is our obligation. ROBBINS: And so are people—given our obligations under international law—and it really isn’t just—I mean, international law—of course there’s, like, no police to enforce international law, but there is—there’s a pretty accepted norm internationally that under international law, people have the right to claim asylum, and that has to be adjudicated, but it’s adjudicated by a particular sort of judge, right? And how—is there just a huge backlog of cases? Can we kick people out while their cases are being adjudicated? You know, have different administrations dealt with that differently? I mean, what’s the process?  GELATT: Yeah, so asylum claims are adjudicated in immigration courts, which are part of the executive branch—they are not part of the judicial branch—by an immigration judge. Right now there is a backlog of two million cases before the immigration courts, and eight hundred thousand of those are asylum cases. So there’s an enormous backlog. It’s taking an average of over four years for someone to have their asylum claim fully adjudicated in immigration court. People have the right to stay while that’s ongoing. The exception would be if there is something, you know, very severe in their background. If they have terrorist links or something like that, they could lose their right to claim asylum. But for the most part, they have the right to stay while they are waiting for that full adjudication. The Biden administration has taken a step to try to speed this up. They are sending some asylum cases that originate at the border to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which has its own backlog, although it’s a little bit smaller. So you have those cases hopefully processed more quickly rather than going—waiting in the court backlog and going through the court system. It’s also a friendlier process. That’s in its pilot stage and, you know, we’ll see how that works out and whether that can be ramped up. But that’s one idea for trying to get people their asylum answers more quickly. ROBBINS: And did the Trump administration deal with it the same way? Did they—did they—if you got in and you claimed asylum, you were dealt with in the same way? GELATT: So they tried a number of things. One was having people wait in Mexico through the Remain in Mexico policy, so they would have a U.S. court date in the immigration courts in the United States, but had to wait in Mexico while that, you know, court backlog worked and while they were waiting for their day in court. Under Title 42, the border expulsion order, we are not allowing people to claim asylum in the United States. People who are expelled under Title 42, if they assert that they are afraid of torture in Mexico or their home country, they might be able to come into the United States rather than being expelled, but otherwise, they are not able to present their asylum claims. They are just turned right back to Mexico, which is why many people try again to come into the United States. Kind of at this point it’s a game of chance. If you are expelled under Title 42, you keep trying to cross until maybe you eventually make it into the country. There also—you know, the Trump administration also put into place a ban that was blocked by the courts, and then allowed, and then blocked again that said that anyone who had passed through another country on the way to the United States and hadn’t taken advantage of their asylum system would be ineligible for asylum in the United States. And that’s—the Biden administration is talking about some kind of policy where people who come to the border between ports of entry will have some kind of higher bar to meet in seeking asylum. We’re waiting to see the details of that. Some have said that that will be like that Trump rule—if you’ve crossed through another country you won’t be able to seek asylum. The Biden administration says it’s nothing like the Trump rule but, you know, we don’t exactly know what that’s going to look like yet to really assess that. ROBBINS: So Gustavo, when you talk to people who are seeking to come into the United States and who are going to make asylum claims—and this question of a well-founded fear of persecution is an interesting one. Is it political persecution or is it gang persecution? These are all interesting questions. You know, if you have an abusive husband, you know, an abusive partner—you know, these are violence against women questions. I mean, how much do the people you speak with understand the system? And I’m not saying that they’ve been coached to say the right thing, but it matters what they say, both to make their claim to get into the country, to remain in the country, and when the day finally comes for them to go to court because they are not guaranteed a lawyer, I assume. How much do they understand, and are there NGOs or—you know, do they get some support to at least understand the complexity of the system? Because, I mean, I’ve written somewhat about this, and I’m listening to Julia, and I’ve frantically taking notes because every time I read a story I think I understand it, but it’s pretty complex. SOLIS: Oh, it’s incredibly complex, and the question actually brings up—raises a lot of issues just from even like what asylum is, right? You’d think somebody fleeing gang violence would be a pretty good cause, but that’s not always the cause, and Julia, I think, maybe you could help me out. There are—the way the asylum system is set up in our country, you need, like, certain kinds of persecution, be it religious, gender, ethnic, and I think—and you can correct me if I’m wrong, Julia, but generally speaking, violence—like gang violence and just street crime doesn’t really have—you can’t—there’s no category for that in the way we understand asylum right now legally. So it does present a lot of challenges to their case. The other big issue you touched on is access to attorneys, right? Immigration court is not part of the quote, unquote, “regular court system.” It’s not like in criminal court where you are guaranteed a lawyer. In immigration court, you are—you have the right to a lawyer if you can pay for one or find one to do it pro bono, and a lot of people don’t have that luxury. There are some nonprofits along the border trying to provide legal aid. They do workshops. Al Otro Lado is a good one that does work throughout the border. They kind of do a little bit of asylum screenings, and every once in a while they will be able to provide legal aid to an individual family or migrant, but it’s a drop in the bucket. I mean, the number of people that require legal assistance to manage an incredibly complex case is a lot more than the lawyers who are, A, trained, and B, willing to take them pro bono. I think the Remain in Mexico program really kind of shed light on this, right, at one point. With the Remain in Mexico program you could come to the border, present an asylum claim, and you would start the process, but you would be forced to live in Mexico while that case was adjudicated. The problem with that is that almost nobody got lawyers from that one, right? To get a lawyer you would have to, A, find a lawyer willing to spend the entire day crossing the border in Mexico, meeting with their client, screening their client. It’s just not feasible, especially when you are doing it pro bono. At one point under the Remain in Mexico, I think the people in that program who actually completed and got an asylum status was less than 1 percent, so it just kind of shows you how difficult it can be. ROBBINS: So this is obviously not just a border issue. This is an issue across the country, not least because—unless we’re Native Americans, all of us are, you know, one or two generations away—if not immediately, you know, immigrants. And so say I live in X state that’s hundreds of miles away from the border, and I want to understand the challenges facing people who are trying to get through this legal system. How would I start that? You know, how do I—you know, where do I go to begin to understand that and, you know, understand the system, understand how many people in my community are, you know, going through this—without scaring the you-know-what out of people? (Laughs.) SOLIS: You go to immigration court. That will be the first and best place to start. I mean, they’re all over the country. ROBBINS: Are there immigration courts everywhere? I mean, where are they? SOLIS: Most, if not all, major cities have one. I mean, there’s one here in San Diego. I don’t know exactly where all of them are, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t one in every single state—definitely one in every major city. And you can—I mean, it’s a court. You can go in and just sit down, spend a morning or an afternoon just hearing the cases. I mean, back to your question about whether migrants understand the process, like, some of it can be heartbreaking because it’s clear that they don’t. I mean, I’ve seen children as young as eight representing themselves in immigration court through a translator, so like just imagine that, right? An eight-year-old, semi-literate child in their language trying to present a claim for themselves in court in a system that they—you know, a system most Americans don’t understand. But if you want to get from a reporting perspective to that point where you are talking to the people actually involved, go to immigration court. If you sit there long enough, you will start to see recurring patterns. You will—I mean, that’s where the immigration lawyers are, so that’s where you will get a couple of good contacts, as well. And you can identify one or two cases to highlight and talk—write something about a bigger issue going on. ROBBINS: Julia, how do you answer that question? How do we—if we want to—I mean, you’re a consumer of news as well as a maker of news. How do we—if we don’t live on the border, how do we begin to understand what’s in reality happening in every city, every community? GELATT: I mean, I rely on the reporting of many of the people on this call-in, many reporters, to know what’s happening at the local level. But, you know, at MPI we tend to look at things kind of at a national level. We produce a lot of data, have a lot of data tools that you can kind of see where immigrants of different nationalities are. We use the data from TRAC, from Syracuse, that shows, you know, what’s happening in the immigration courts, how many cases are being filed, what are the nationalities, what are the outcomes. So, yeah, we use a lot of data, and then I think, you know, right, the immigration courts are the place to go. And then there are networks of legal service providers. They are completely overworked and overstretched, but they are really on the front lines, and really, I think in every community, and trying to do what they can to provide representation of people. So those may be hard people to get on an interview, but those are good places to go to talk with people and to see where people are going. And then, you know, likewise are—I think in most cities now there are really great immigrant-serving organizations, nonprofit organizations that may or may not have legal services but are trying to kind of meet the broader needs of immigrants in their communities, and in many cases, also advocating for this community and really want to be, sharing their stories and talking with reporters about what they are seeing and what they are facing. SOLIS: And if I could add, I think a resource—if you live in a city that is—if you are lucky enough to live in a city that has a consulate, I would reach out to them. Here in San Diego, the Mexican consulate is very helpful, very open with us, and they are—they have an interesting perspective and connections with, obviously, the Mexican foreign nationals, but also undocumented immigrants and different groups that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to connect to. ROBBINS: Can you—and that’s really useful. Julia, can you go back and talk about your data sources—this Syracuse database called TRAC? Can you tell us a little bit about it? And we’ll send links out to everybody, but could you just tell us what that is? GELATT: Yeah, so all credit to them, to the TRAC folks for putting out the data, so they regularly— ROBBINS: Is it T-R-A-C-C or T-R-A-C-K? GELATT: T-R-A-C. I think if you Google that and immigration, you can find kind of a—it’s somewhat of a wonky page—(laughs)—but you can find a lot of their tools. So they regularly submit Freedom of Information Act requests to the government, and they get information on, like, every single immigration court case. They also have data on, you know, how many immigrants are in alternatives to detention, which is a new way that ICE is using to track immigrants that they have encountered. At MPI we have a—what we call our data hub, which is all of our data tools. There is lots of—tons of data in there. Mostly we’re using data from the Census Bureau, so we’re kind of giving a broad picture of who are the immigrants in the United States, what countries are they from, where are they living, what are their characteristics, what are their experiences in the United States. We also have international data tools. So if you go to migrationpolicy.org and then look for our data hub, or just Google MPI data hub, you can find all of the data that we have so that you can kind of get a bigger picture of, you know, who are the immigrants in your community, in your state, in the country overall. ROBBINS: That’s hugely helpful. That’s great. So on January 5, President Biden announced a new asylum policy which denies people from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti—and they previously announced this on Venezuela—the chance to apply for asylum if they cross illegally from Mexico. But they also raised the number of people who can apply for those two-year humanitarian parole, which is basically a temporary work visa. They claim that this was—you know, this very creative way that’s working to stem the flow of undocumented migrants, and the Department of Homeland Security announced in the middle of January, that they said that—had seven-day average from December 11—had gone down to mid-January, had fallen 97 percent because of this new policy for these four groups. Is that right? I mean, is this policy actually working, persuading people that if they just wait, that they have a chance of getting work visas? That’s to Julia and then to—and then to, Gustavo, what you’re saying. GELATT: Yeah, it certainly seems to be working in the short term, if by working they mean reducing the number of people trying to cross the border without authorization—from these countries. Whether that—whether that will hold long term, I think we’ll have to see. There’s just a lot of questions—(laughs)—around this policy, so nationalities of these four countries are now being expelled to Mexico under Title 42. But there are also these parole programs where, if people have a sponsor in the United States, and they have a passport, and they apply and go through a—you know, background check and other basic screening, they can come to the United States with humanitarian parole, which is a temporary right to stay for two years and work. It’s unclear what happens at the end of those two years. That’s one big question here. Another big question is whether the people who are, you know, really desperate and fleeing their homes, and making these really dangerous journeys, are those the same people who can wait at home, find a sponsor, you know, get a passport, and be able to come through this parole program? We’ve seen already thousands of people who have been able to take advantage of the parole program, so that’s another success that the administration can point to. If people who would have otherwise made the dangerous journey can take advantage of parole, I think that’s a really big win. Although, I should note that there is now litigation by several states, and then Stephen Miller’s new organization, against this parole program, saying that it exceeds executive authority to create a program like this. So, that challenge is hanging out there. (Laughs.) And they filed that suit in a friendly, to them, you know, part of Texas, where they may be able to get an injunction to stop that parole program. So that will—that could really stop that. But it—you know, it’s a combination of carrot and stick, carrot being this new pathway to the United States, and the stick being tougher border enforcement for these groups. The combination seems to, in the short term, you know, have had this impact. But people may be kind of just waiting to see how this plays out, and watching for a little bit. And then, depending how it does play out, that will shape, you know, future decision making, and whether those border numbers start to go up again, I think. ROBBINS: So, Gustavo, what are you seeing? Is this working? I mean, I understand working is a relative term— SOLIS: (Laughs.) ROBBINS:—it’s by their definition of what working is. SOLIS: Yeah, I—TBD, I think, just echoing what Julia said, right? It is a fact that the numbers of certain nationalities that are included in this program are going down. The most interesting issues I’ve seen is just that the method of obtaining this humanitarian parole is through this mobile phone app that isn’t really working for a lot of people. So I think if that app, CBP One, continues to not really deliver, then I would anticipate the numbers will go up, just out of sheer desperation. Other problems with the app, CBP One, solely available in English and Spanish right now, so if you’re an immigrant who doesn’t speak either of those, you know, good luck. Obviously, you need a smartphone, you need a reliable internet connection. That’s not always a given in border towns. And there’s just this sort of—the way it works, I mean, it’s like—one of the sources I talk to just described it as, like, Ticketmaster, right? It’s based—like, every morning, you get up—or I think it’s nine in the East Coast, six here in California—and you sign up, and try to sign up for an appointment. And if you get it, great. If you don’t, you know, good luck. Try again tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day. It’s not really based on who has the highest need, or is in the most danger. And I don’t think it really—it sounds great in theory, it sounds great coming out of Washington, right? Like, oh, they can just download the app and sign up, and do it that way. In practice, at the border, particularly for people in dangerous circumstances, it doesn’t really work out. So, I think for now, it—we’re kind of—Julia said, wait and see. But there might come a time where people just kind of abandon the app, and then would kind of revert back out of desperation to crossing illegally. ROBBINS: So, we have a question, yay. (Gives queuing instructions.) We are now in the question time. Abigayl Martin has a question. Abigayl, do you want to ask your question? If not, I can ask it for you. Abigayl Martin asked, what does it take to be expelled under Title 42? GELATT: So, when someone, yeah, comes across the U.S-Mexico border, the Border Patrol is making decisions, kind of based on resources that they have, who they’ll process into the United States, who they’ll put into detention, who might already have a removal order, they can remove them, you know, using that old removal order. One of their options is to expel someone under Title 42. That’s the quickest, fastest, least resource-intensive option that they have, because it basically doesn’t involve any processing. They just send someone right back to Mexico. So—but Mexico, of course, controls who comes across their borders. So Mexico, you know, had agreed to take, of course, Mexicans, also people from the northern Central American countries under Title 42, and now, Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. But last month, only 20 percent of people who were encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border were expelled under Title 42. Or, only 20 percent of encounters ended in an expulsion—it’s really events, not people. But so, most people are being processed into the United States under regular rules. But some of them are being expelled under Title 42. ROBBINS: So, we have a question from Phillip Martin from—I think from WGBH. Phillip, do you want to ask your—ask the question? Q: Sure, it’s—since it’s a long one. I’m always—I continue to be amazed by the inability, it seems, of the White House, and for that matter, many activists, to explain exactly what is happening, when you see these occasional stories of—that were—that are used politically—when you see, quote, unquote, tens of thousands of individuals lined up at the border. I’m trying to understand why it is that the White House, and for that matter, activists, seem to have a difficult time explaining accurately what is happening on the border. And I tend to believe that the reason it is, is because it’s a complex issue that is difficult to explain in simplistic terms. But because it’s politicized, it has taken on a life of its own. I’m just wondering if our—if Julia and Gustavo could put that—could basically talk about that form of communication, why it seems so difficult to get that across to most Americans, it seems. ROBBINS: Gustavo, do you—do you—you must encounter a lot of prejudice, too, from people, and—as well as confusion from readers. But you know, the pictures are very compelling, as Phillip says. And then there’s all this stuff about caravans coming and invading the United States, and all of that. I mean, how do you deal with that, as a writer and a reporter? SOLIS: Well, I think Phillip’s right, in just recognizing that these are incredibly complex and nuanced issues, right? It’s very difficult to sum up even something as simple as, like, a Title 42, without—(laughs)—a couple of lines of background and explanation behind it. I think the problem, especially with information coming out of Washington, is that the rhetoric is just so divorced from the reality at this point, right? You can only start talking about this topic so long before somebody mentions a phrase, like open borders, invasion, amnesty. I mean, all those things don’t really mean anything to me. (Laughs.) I don’t really understand them, because they’re used in a variety of different contexts. I think from a reporting standpoint, you should avoid using those phrases that sound awesome, but don’t really mean anything. And there should be kind of a balance between going that route and going the super wonky, legalese route. I mean, you’re only as good as your sources, so I think in terms of sources, I would avoid whenever possible, using elected officials—(laughs)—in D.C. or state capitals. I mean, just, if anyone tuned into the House Judiciary Committee hearing, like, it’s clear that a lot of these lawmakers don’t know the basic function of customs and border protection sometimes. So, I would just rely on experts, and really framing the stories on the individual migrants, asylum seekers, kind of how it impacts them. I think that simplifies it very well. Because you kind of only have to focus on one person and what’s going on with them, instead of trying to cover the border. But I—Phillip, I kind of echo what you’re feeling, and said, with—especially with the frustration of just how complicated and convoluted some of this can be. It’s very easy to mess up. ROBBINS: And it will get— Q: Thank you. ROBBINS: —I’m sorry—it will get even more politicized, I suspect, if the Republicans in the House go ahead with their threat to call for impeaching Mayorkas from Homeland Security. And this could be—this could really become a, just sort of a made-for—made-for politicization television moment. So, we’ll hear—we’ll hear a lot more of this. We have a question from Jessica Montoya, which I’m going to read quickly, just because we have lots of questions coming in, yay. And I think this is good for Julia. So, Jessica, if you don’t mind, I will—I will read it. What Jessica writes is: I’m from San Antonio, Texas, and this topic is everyday coverage for us. With all of these policies and restrictions to come in, every day people are led in and driven to immigrant centers, and then from there, they can go wherever. So, under what laws are these individuals coming in? If some have to, you know, do the refugee asylum process or are expelled under Title 42, I think, you know, how can some people get to come in and other people get expelled? GALETT: Yeah, I think I mentioned that there—that’s a great question, and it’s confusing. (Laughs.) And there are a bunch of different pieces of immigration law in here. When people come across the border, there are a number of ways that they can be processed. They could be expelled under Title 42. If they’re not, they could be put into immigrant detention. The Biden administration isn’t detaining families with children, so this would only apply to adults who are traveling by themselves or with other adults. But they could be put into immigrant detention, and then once they’re there, they could be there for a while, or they could be there for a short period. A lot of people—with the really high border numbers coming, and kind of overwhelmed government systems, a lot of people are released into the United States. And that looks like two different things. One thing is they’re issued a notice to appear in immigration court, so that’s the beginning of deportation proceedings. That can happen right at the border. They travel on to their community, but they have this court date waiting for them, and at some point in the future—but it can take a while, because of backlogs—they’ll go into the immigration court. And then they can, you know, if they want to claim asylum, they can present their asylum claims. Usually, there are multiple hearings that people have over time in immigration court, one to kind of schedule things, and then one to actually get into their asylum case. But whether they claim asylum or not, they’re in removal proceedings. And at the end of that, they could be ordered deported; they could be given asylum. Other people that are processed into the U.S. are told, because the government is overrun, and they don’t have time to kind of process those notices to appear at immigration court, they’re released and told, here’s the local ICE office in the place that you’re going. Go check in with them, and they’ll issue your notice to appear in court. And also, we’re enrolling you in alternatives to detention, meaning that you either have an ankle bracelet, or more likely, we’re giving you this cell phone app. You have to check in, you know, daily, show your face, or we’ll be tracking your location or something, some kind of monitoring, to try to make sure that people comply with these instructions to check in with ICE. And then that again will start their immigration court proceedings. So people are being let into the United States, but it’s not like they’re just being let in. They’re being let in to wait for their removal proceedings. People under general order can’t be removed from the United States without having a formal removal order from an immigration judge. The exception is Title 42; there may be some other exceptions. (Laughs.) But so, that’s why people are put into removal proceedings. I hope that clarifies, rather than making it more complicated. ROBBINS: Jessica, do you have a follow-up for that? I think you answered her question. So, we have a question from Rebecca Santana. Rebecca, do you want to answer your—ask your question? Or shall I read it? Jessica says thank you. Yes, answered. Rebecca Santana, do you want to ask your question? Q: No, you can go ahead and read it. Can you hear me? ROBBINS: Sure. Although— Q: Go ahead and read it. (Laughs.) ROBBINS: OK. (Laughs.) Rebecca, where are you from? I’m not actually looking at the list right now because I’m trying to— Q: Oh, OK. I’m in D.C. ROBBINS: OK. OK. So Rebecca asks: Can both of you talk through the process of credible fear hearings? Where they happen, who’s usually doing the interview, and what happens at the end of the hearing? Any insight you can give into that process would be helpful. Gustavo, I assume that you go to credible fear hearings? Can you talk about that? SOLIS: I can’t talk about that too much. That actually happens before the actual, like, hearing and court case begins. That’s actually—I think, Julia, you could talk more about that—but that’s one of the first steps to kind of establish that you have a reason to stay in the country, and have a shot at asylum. That’s, like, really early on. GALETT: Yeah, I can talk about that. That’s actually an option at the border that I skipped over, because it’s not happening a lot these days. But something else that can happen at the border, besides being expelled under Title 42, put into detention, or just released, is that people can be put into something called expedited removal. This is what most people went through at the border when border numbers were lower in, like, the late Obama years, early Trump years. And what this means is that it’s a process to quickly remove people from the country. As defense against being quickly removed through expedited removal, people coming to the border can say that they are afraid of going home, and then they’re given something called a credible fear screening. So, it’s kind of an initial screening to see if they have—if they’re likely to have some valid asylum claims. It’s a pretty low bar on purpose, because people are just coming across the border; they don’t have their papers in order; they’re in a state of, you know, kind of chaos and confusion. But if people can meet this kind of low bar to find that they have credible fear, then they can be released into the United States, and go into their asylum hearings. This takes more time, and usually, people are detained while they wait for their credible fear screening. It takes more government resources, so that’s why this is happening in a smaller percentage of cases. More people are either being expelled or released into the United States right now. But this is part of the regular order of border processing. ROBBINS: So, is it German Visbal with LTV Univision in Miami? German, would you like to ask your question? Is it—I just—I have, my name is German Visbal. I—yes, German, do you want to ask your question? Or should I read it? FASKIANOS: Carla, this is Irina. I think he needs to unmute himself. ROBBINS: Can you unmute yourself? Well, I can read it: For a long time, we’ve been discussing—I used to live in Miami—for a long time—(laughs)—yes, I’m going to read it for you. We couldn’t hear you. For a long time, we’ve been discussing that the policies that we see today are more an improvisation. Do you consider it this way? Gustavo, does it feel like they’re just making it up as they go along? Or does there seem to be a—some method to this? SOLIS: No, they are just making it up—(laughs)—as they go along. And for decades now, right? And that’s because in the absence of legitimate, comprehensive immigration reform, we’re kind of reduced to this system, where most new immigration policy happens either through executive action, like DACA, or court challenges, right? That’s kind of what kept Remain in Mexico, and is keeping Title 42, like, dead or alive, dead or alive, depending on what month it is. But it is very, I don’t know, reactionary might be a good term for it. But it’s tiring. I mean, you know, President Trump came in with a bunch of different executive orders, and things do change overnight. I think that add—this kind of culture and environment adds to the uncertainty, the confusion. And the complexity of our immigration system right now, is that it’s made up of executive orders for various administrations, and there’s a constant, like, dark shadow hanging on some individual policies in the—in the way of lawsuits, right? Depending on how one court rules, it can change the entire system overnight. ROBBINS: Julia, is there—I mean, I know there’s no—almost no possibility that Congress is going to do anything, but maybe. Because there is a possibility. There are moderate Republicans who may make common cause with Democrats on some issues. Is there any possibility of any sort of immigration reform? Or is that—or have you just stopped even paying attention to it, because it’s just so impossible to imagine? GALETT: It is hard to be— ROBBINS: And Lindsey Graham was supporting immigration reform. That’s exactly how old I am. (Laughter.) GALETT: Yeah, it is really hard to be hopeful about the chances of immigration reform in Congress. I mean, Congress struggles to pass legislation in general, much less something, you know, really controversial like immigration. I think one thing that we’re really watching is the litigation over the DACA program. It looks like it’s kind of—it’s been somewhat slow-moving, but we could have a court decision in April. The judge could decide, you know, not only that the program was illegal—which is probably, likely, how he’ll rule—but also he could, you know, mean—he could allow that to mean that current DACA holders will lose their protections when their work authorization expires. That, you know, I imagine would lead to a huge outcry, and tons of pressure on Congress. Like, it could—that could not happen. This judge could also stay the impact of his ruling. You know, it could kind of continue as it is until it gets to the Supreme Court. But at some point, there might be an adverse ruling, and that would really push Congress. I think there’s such, you know, enormous support for DREAMers in the United States, and giving them a path to citizenship. You know, and I hope that someday, there will, you know, be real reform. I mean, we really could use an update to our visa policies. You know, the president can use parole to try to let people in legally, but ultimately, Congress could give people a real visa pathway to the United States. Employers are hungry for workers, migrants want to come and work, and they want the safety of the United States. If we can, you know, allow for that match between willing workers and willing employers, that could go a really, really long way, along with all kinds of other fixes that are needed in our immigration laws. But you know, hard to hope for those broader changes in the short run. ROBBINS: So, can I take this moment here—I know this isn’t a border question, but I’m going to ask it just really quickly here. The Afghan Adjustment Act did not go through at the end of the year. Seventy-thousand-plus Afghans who worked with the U.S. military in Afghanistan who are here, their visas could potentially, you know, run out this year. What’s happening with that? GALETT: Yeah, that’s another challenging one. I mean, there’s—there was such broad American support for the Afghans in allowing them to come to the United States, and you know, a big outpouring of support and help for Afghans once they arrived. And then that got caught up in politics too. I mean, in the past, whenever the U.S. has had a big parole program—like after the end of the Vietnam War, or for Cubans—we’ve had an adjustment act, where people paroled in could adjust to permanent status. So, I am—maybe not in the next year or two, but you know, maybe, hopefully after that, there could be room for an Afghan Adjustment Act. We also, of course, have seen over a hundred thousand Ukrainians paroled into the United States. You know, they also need a path to permanent residence, unless that war ends quickly, and people can go home. So, maybe there could be a combined push for those two populations, kind of as this all progresses. A lot of Afghans are applying for asylum right now, and many of them will be successful in their asylum claims. But that’s a really difficult way for them to get a path to permanent residence, when we already decided to invest the resources to evacuate these Afghans here, because we saw them as, you know, having supported the U.S. government, and being in danger. So, an Afghan Adjustment Act would just make it a lot simpler for the Afghans, and for the government. It would—it would save a lot of resources when we have this big asylum backlog. ROBBINS: So—(inaudible)—Julia, as I wait to see if there are any more questions. Are there? Ah, Sarah Betancourt. Sarah, do you want to read your question, or voice it? Ah, feel free to read this out loud. Sarah Betancourt, GBH News: Texas, Arizona, and Florida’s governors have bussed or flown immigrants from their states to cities and states with immigrant-friendly policies in the north for the past ten months. I remember one of the coldest—now, I’m going to add in here—one of the coldest nights in Washington, D.C., they also bussed them to the, funnily, vice president’s house. States like Massachusetts have seen two flights from DeSantis, but have seen overflow from New York City buses and local hospitals, ERs, airport. Wondering if the communication between immigrant advocacy groups and state governments in the border states, and state and local governments in northern states has improved at all? It seems like every time there’s a group of unhoused immigrants, everyone scrambles. It took a while to create some kind of process to get immigrants into the already strained Massachusetts shelter system. And that effort seems to be failing. I’m particularly interested in Massachusetts, and how organizations and governments on border states are communicating, with advocacy groups helping groups up here prepare, and make sure people’s needs are being met. Jump ball here. GALETT: I can start, and feel free to add, Gustavo. SOLIS: Sure. GALETT: So, yeah, the Texas governor was explicitly not communicating with the northern cities about, you know, when migrants were coming, which migrants were coming, any medical needs that they had when they arrived. But I—my understanding is that there are now relationships between the service providers in Texas, that are actually, you know, coordinating the migrants who voluntarily get on those buses, and then the service providers in D.C. and New York—which is not to say that there aren’t surprises, like changing the location of the dropoff. In Arizona, they—there is explicit coordination between the local officials and, I don’t know, service providers in Arizona and the service providers in D.C., where those migrants are being bussed. They send manifests. They send information about medical needs. And so, the local communities can prepare. I think your question also gets at, kind of more broadly, just, you know, the cities weren’t ready for this. We’re seeing a lot of—or we were seeing a lot of migrants who didn’t have U.S. ties. Traditionally, people who come to the United States, they know someone, they have somewhere to live when they first get here, and kind of have that initial safety net. But it seemed like particularly, a lot of the Venezuelans that were coming didn’t have that. And they were really depending on local governments for the very basic basics of shelter, and food, and you know, medical needs, and things like that. So, it does raise the question of whether there could be more coordination. You asked about coordination between kind of border communities and receiving communities. But I think there could really be a role for the federal government as well. There is some funding that’s available as reimbursements, but I feel like there could be more coordination of, kind of, how do you provide these services? What are the federal resources available, that are—you know, this is a problem that’s a federal problem, but hitting states and localities. And then just information-sharing, about who’s coming, what the needs are, kind of models that have worked, what’s been tried and not worked so well, and just lessons learned, you know, I think there could be more of that. SOLIS: Yeah, just to add a little bit. I know here in San Diego, the—I think—Julia, what you said about the fact that a lot of migrants coming in have established familial ties, friends, relatives, who they want to see—so, at least until a few years ago, most of the people who came, they would stay in a shelter in San Diego for two, three days, connect with their families, and then go either via bus or airplane to wherever their community was. And that, I think, is still the case. But like you said, the people who don’t have those ties present a unique problem. They are a little bit less transitory, and they do require a little bit more resources. And that’s where people are struggling a little bit. I know in the beginning, some of the people that were bussed to New York were kind of OK with it, because that’s where they wanted to end up, anyway. I mean, here in San Diego, and I would imagine most border cities, migrants don’t stay here. They go to their final destination. It’s just another part of the journey. But there is something to be said about the chaos of forcing a city who isn’t used to being part of that traditional migration route to essentially create a new one by force, by just kind of bussing people there. Doesn’t make much sense, especially if there’s no communication. ROBBINS: So, we have just a few minutes left. And I—David Lyons, from the South Florida Sun Sentinel, has made a statement, rather than a question. David, do you want to explain your statement about—oh, ah, here we go. So, David Lyons, from the Sun Sentinel noticed that they regularly receive announcements from the Coast Guard that it has repatriated migrants from different countries, multinational, who have been intercepted along the southeast Florida shoreline—you know, people on the same boat who come from different countries. Can they legally be returned to the country of their journey’s origin, without having their situation processed? GALETT: I have to confess to being a little bit ignorant about the law in this situation. But if someone’s not on U.S. soil, they wouldn’t have that right to claim asylum. So I believe that that’s the case. I believe that they can just be returned to the country that they were coming from. And that generally is what happens when Haitians or Cubans are being intercepted at sea. ROBBINS: And now that the Cubans are letting them be towed back, which they weren’t—you know, which they weren’t for a while. So, final round. As we said, we just have a few minutes left. Julia, as a consumer, as well as a maker of news, what do you think we’re not covering, and we should be covering? GALETT: That’s a tough question. I don’t have a great answer. But I just—I mean, I’m so grateful for all of the local coverage of, kind of, the impacts of things. As—I think, Gustavo, as you said, you know, we really closely follow what the administration is saying, and we read the press releases, and we read the announcements, and we kind of assess, like, what might this look like. But then we really rely on reporting to know how it plays out. What are the—what are individuals at the border, in U.S. communities, facing? What are they experiencing? You know, what are the unintended consequences of these policies? What are maybe the intended consequences? You know, how are—how are plans not kind of proceeding as they were planned, or, I don’t know, what—you know, what new trends are emerging? So, I think just, really, kind of having that real-world impact of, you know, we know what the official statement was, or we know what the initial plan was. But what does that really look like when the rubber meets the road? That’s what I really appreciate when I’m consuming the news. ROBBINS: Vertical integration. So, Gustavo, you—I don’t feel sorry for you, because you get to live in a really great place. (Laughter.) But—it’s like 30 degrees in New York right now. So, but if you weren’t in your really great place, and they said to you, go someplace else in the country, and follow this story, you know, what else would you be writing about, that would also be developing that? You know, what different experiences away from the border would you like to be reporting on? SOLIS: I think there’s so many to choose from. And every community is kind of affected differently. Like, I’m thinking of the—all of the meatpacking facilities in the Midwest. Those are mostly migrant-run. Even in San Francisco, there’s more—I think the immigration issue would be one about visas, and employment, and lack of access to those. I think it hits everyone differently. And I think the problem is, when we think and only discuss immigration and its relation to the border, we really limit the stories that we can tell over there. So I would—I mean, every—I would assume every, or most communities in the U.S. have a large immigrant population, and that’s where, like, just go there. (Laughs.) Be there. I mean, half the story is just showing up and being there, listening to the right people. But if we keep on—I think, like you said—relying on, kind of, press releases coming out of the state capitol or Washington, then we’re not going to—I think we’re just going to keep on telling the same narrative, kind of pushing that. We’re not going to create new ones, or really expand people’s understanding. ROBBINS: Well, this has been great. I just want to thank Gustavo Solis and Julia Gelatt. And of course, I want to thank Irina for bringing us all together, and thank everybody for such great questions. So, Irina, I’m going to turn it back to you, just with the reminder that we are going to share with you Gustavo’s writing and Julia’s research, and links to the things that they mentioned. So you guys will have easier time doing your research. So, back to you, Irina. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Carla, Julia, and Gustavo. We appreciate it. You can follow Julia on Twitter at @J_Gelatt, Gustavo at @Journogoose, and Carla at @RobbinsCarla. So, go there. And as always, we encourage you to follow us. Visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends, and how they are affecting the United States. And of course, do share with us your suggestions for future webinars. You can email us, [email protected]. Again, thank you all for being with us, and for today’s really terrific conversation. We appreciate it. ROBBINS: Thank you, guys. (END)

Ashley Holben, interim manager and project specialist with the National Clearinghouse on Disability and Exchange and executive specialist to the chief executive officer at Mobility International USA, leads the conversation on disability inclusion on campus and in international affairs. FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR’s Higher Education Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic if you’d like to share it with your colleagues. You can enable the closed captioning by clicking on the icon on your laptop or on your iPad in the “More” button. If you click on that you can show captions. So I encourage you to do that. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Ashley Holben with us today to discuss disability inclusion on campus and in international affairs. Ms. Holben is interim manager and project specialist with the National Clearinghouse on Disability and Exchange, and executive specialist to the CEO at Mobility International USA. In these roles, she develops initiatives and resources to increase participation and inclusion of students with disabilities in international exchange. So, Ashley, thanks very much for being with us. Let’s just get right to it. If you could discuss and share with us the importance of disability inclusion in higher education institutions and international affairs, and share what you have found to be some of the best practices to do so on college campuses. HOLBEN: Certainly. Well, thank you so much, Irina, and thanks so much to the entire CFR team for putting this topic on the agenda of this webinar series. It’s such a fantastic opportunity to discuss an often misunderstood topic but a very prominent community, which is people with disabilities in higher education. And so really appreciate all of those who are joining today to tune in, and welcome. And, you know, the CFR team shared with me the roster of folks who were planning to attend and one thing that really stood out to me is kind of the really wide breadth of expertise and departments represented and positions represented. So it’s really encouraging to see so many different types of leadership wanting to discuss this further and wanting to share practices. So I’m looking forward to doing that today and I really hope to hear from some of those who are tuning in with your expertise and observations and activities as well, and I am delighted to share some—just observations of my own in this role at the National Clearinghouse on Disability and Exchange (NCDE). As Irina said, this is a project that’s housed at Mobility International USA since 1995. But we’re sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, really, in order to promote the participation of people with disabilities in international exchange between the U.S. and other countries, and that is to say kind of to the end we provide tips and strategies for people with disabilities and international program staff on how to prepare for an inclusive international exchange. So, before I kind of dive in, I just wanted to define these terms a little bit because it’s not always clear what we mean by international exchange. But, basically, we’re talking about everything from study abroad, teach abroad, volunteering, research, professional visitor exchanges. Also, cultural like arts, sports programs. So try to picture a U.S. college student going abroad for a semester or an international student coming to the U.S., a Peace Corps volunteer, Fulbright scholars, and so on. And we’re—the genesis of this project is really because people with disabilities are taking advantage of these same opportunities as nondisabled people in order to advance their educational/career goals, their personal goals. And that kind of brings me to kind of another definition—a loose definition—that people often wonder, well, what do you mean by people with disabilities, and by that that includes people with physical or mobility disabilities, sensory disabilities, chronic health conditions, intellectual or developmental disabilities. That includes mental health disabilities, neurodiversity learning disabilities. And then keep in mind that disabilities can be apparent or nonapparent. And then also somebody’s disability might be apparent certain times and not others—for example, if they use assistive devices on some days but don’t need them on other days. So one topic that I really—is close to our hearts in our world is this theme of disability as diversity, and I saw on the roster—I was really excited to see that there were some folks who registered who are, for example, the director of diversity and inclusion, DEI specialists, and so on, and it’s so encouraging to see that higher education is really embracing this diversity, equity, and inclusion, implementing DEI strategies kind of throughout all areas of higher ed. And so, with this in mind it’s really vital to recognize that disability is part of diversity and not separate from it. Too often folks want to separate the two. Or, disability is an aspect of diversity that can get overlooked in diversity initiatives, we find, too often. So that inclusion of people with disabilities is really fundamental to be able to—and acting on that commitment to diversity at the institutional level. And then, for many, disability is an important facet of their identity, connecting someone to a larger disability community—for instance, disability pride, disability culture, history, and more. So it’s really important to keep that in mind in any discussion related to DEI. And just as important, many people with disabilities have identities in addition to their disability identity. So, for example, a person with a disability can also be a person of color, a first-generation college student, LGBTQ, an immigrant. And so one thing that we find often when we’re talking to people with disabilities about their experience is, there was so much focus on my disability that we completely forgot—(laughs)—to talk about these other aspects of myself that are important to me. So I think that’s definitely a good lesson. If anyone out there is more interested in this topic of disability intersectionality, I want to just kind of do a little plug for a publication that I’m really excited about that we put forth last year on Intersections Abroad, which I’m holding up to the screen. I think it might be blurred out, unfortunately, but—(laughs)—oh, here we go. FASKIANOS: It’s a little blurry but we’ll— HOLBEN: It’s a little blurry. FASKIANOS: (Inaudible)—anyway. HOLBEN: But it’s Intersections Abroad: “Travelers with disabilities explore identity and diversity through a lens of international exchange.” So it’s a series of travelers’ stories, interviews with people with different types of disabilities including people who are blind or have chronic health conditions or who are on the autism spectrum but who also want to describe what their study abroad experiences in different countries was like as a person of color or as someone with a religious identity or someone who brings all these unique experiences to their international exchange experience itself. For those of you who—I know we have a lot of different folks joining the call. On the higher education campus, people with disabilities not only includes students but also faculty, staff, administrators, campus leaders, visitors, and institutions often have dedicated staff or offices to support individual level disability accommodations and also to promote disability access more broadly across campus. So I noticed some folks who registered for this event come from, for example, Office of Student Accessibility, Office of Disability Services, Office of Student Support and Success. We had—I saw an access and accommodations coordinator, an ADA compliance coordinator. So these are all some examples of the types of folks who are working to help promote access at the—in higher education. You can also find counseling centers, tutoring centers. There are a growing number of campuses that are providing services tailored for students on the autism spectrum and also those that are tailored for students with intellectual disabilities, which is really interesting. And if you want to learn more about that I encourage you to check out the organization Think College. But in addition to campus accessibility and disability support services you’re going to find other entities that help promote disability community, disability history, disability rights, representation and visibility. For example, student groups led by and for students with disabilities. I saw one of the registrants—there were a couple of registrants on this event who are representing the Harvard Law School Project on Disability to, as they describe, use their learning in comparative and international law to advance understanding regarding disability law, policy, and education around the world. So it’s really exciting to see just kind of all the different ways in which higher education can support and promote disability access and inclusion in different ways in representation. Another topic that we are really passionate about at the NCDE is disability-inclusive campus internationalization, especially when it comes to the international exchange aspect of internationalization. So take education abroad, for instance. For the most part, I think a huge bulk of our resources relate to students—college students with disabilities who study abroad. That’s a big chunk of our resources, and we get a lot of questions about that from international exchange administrators and international study abroad advisors and coordinators about how can we provide some support to these students who want to study abroad who might have some specific disability-related accommodations they might need abroad, or everything from how can we attract students with disabilities to participate in our programs, and so on. So you’re going to find a lot of those types of resources in our library. But, education abroad that can also encompass faculty with disabilities leading trips abroad, and it’s really exciting to be able to connect with some faculty with disabilities who can share some of their stories with us about arranging these types of exchange programs. And the programs that they’re leading may or may not have a disability theme, depending on what their scholarly background is. However, I’ve observed that some education abroad curricula does include disability-related themes. So one example is at California State University in Northridge. One of their faculty led an exchange program called “Black Deaf Activism: Culture and Education in South Africa,” bringing together a lot of students from their campus who identify either as deaf, as Black, or both, and more. So that was really exciting to follow their journey through South Africa, again, with those different lenses. And then, of course, people with disabilities working in the international exchange field—in the international education field as advisors, administrators, and more, and that’s always something that we get really excited about at the Clearinghouse. We kind of proselytize a little bit to people with disabilities about, oh, have you thought about entering a career in international education so that we can see more disability representation and leadership within that field. A lot of students with disabilities are—and without disabilities are kind of blown away in a good way to see some of that disability representation in the kind of leadership level of that field and so that’s something that we try to encourage in some different ways that I’ll get to a little later. And then on the flip side of education abroad we also want to see disability-inclusive campus internationalization in the form of international student recruitment, so welcoming international students and scholars with disabilities to U.S. higher education, and that comprises another large segment of the resources housed at NCDE. So for those of you who advise international students and scholars on your campus or who are connected to the recruiting side to bring students with disabilities to the U.S., or bring international students to us, ESL offices and instructors. We want to work with them to make sure that they’re aware of the international students with disabilities. These are fantastic opportunities for them, too, and but they also might have some different cultural expectations related to disability. They might be used to a different type of system of accessibility and accommodations or a lack thereof. And, most recently we’ve talked to a lot of international students who are expressing an interest in connecting with other students with disabilities during their stay in the U.S., whether it’s other American students or other international students with disabilities. And so one thing that we’re excited to do in the near future is think of some ways that maybe we can help facilitate these types of connections on kind of a peer-mentor type model. Another focus of campus internationalization can be offering coursework on international disability rights. One prominent example in my mind is the University of Oregon’s “Global Perspectives on Disability” course because it’s co-taught by MIUSA’s own CEO, Susan Sygall, who is a woman with a disability, and what’s interesting is that that course is cross listed on campus with international studies, special education, and disability studies. So, you know, disability is such a cross-cutting issue. There’s really no topic or department or educational focus that doesn’t—that can’t touch upon disability, inclusion, and access. And so the “Global Perspectives on Disability” course at the U of O is one that’s been running for several years and it’s fantastic. We’re able to bring some guest presenters who are often disabled women leaders from countries around the world to share about their experiences in disability rights, disability policy, movement building, and so on. And then, one last example I’ll share, but not to say the last one, is access to foreign language learning and ESL and really ensuring that, you know, those are so vital to promoting campus internationalization and often they’re linked to these international exchange experiences, education abroad, and so on. But, sometimes we hear from people with disabilities that they were discouraged from taking a foreign language class because of assumptions about what they’re able to do. So, for example, like a person who is deaf, there might be some assumptions that they can’t participate in a foreign language class. And so, we would really promote any person with a disability to see if learning a foreign language is something that would help further their goals, personal, career wise, or otherwise. And so, I do want to hear your—all of your questions and your—not just questions but also just sharing from your experiences. But before we do that, I do want to just say a little bit about NCDE resources so that you’re aware of what we have in our library. That is to say they all touch on this crossover of disability inclusion in international exchange and include everything from tips for recruiting people with disabilities in international exchange programs, disability-specific tips for international travel. So, if your wheelchair gets broken when you’re abroad, what might you do? Or, what are some different types of accommodations that a blind student might use or someone with dyslexia might use? Best practices from various U.S. higher education institutions. And I think that’s going to really appeal to the folks who are on this webinar today. We have—just like we’ve been able to interview international exchange alumni, students who’ve come back from their experiences abroad, and others, we’ve also really relied on higher ed professionals to share their best practices with us because, really, our resource is a compendium of expertise from the field. And so I would really encourage anyone here who maybe they have a best practice to share from their own campus that they’re working on and we would love to be able to add that as a resource to be able to share with our broader community. So if that’s of interest please get in touch. We also offer sample disability accommodation forms and questionnaires, which is really handy for those out there who are wanting to start a conversation around disability access but maybe don’t know the—don’t have the vocabulary or don’t have the language. These are kind of helpful guides that can help you take those next steps. And then, finally, one thing that I am really excited to share because this is a new—relatively new initiative on our part is we’ve started hosting an access to exchange externship for—and this is a resource you can share with your students—this is for students with disabilities, recent graduates and others, who want to use their experiences to further the mission to promote disability inclusion in international exchange. So they’re tasked with coming up with some kind of either a webinar or event or a country guide, some kind of resource that can help further this mission. And so some of them have created resources for peers like prospective study abroad students with disabilities or for the folks who are working in the international education field so that they can be more cognizant of—you know, from a disabled person’s point of view what are the supports needed or what can they be doing. And then our seminar—access to exchange seminar is for people with disabilities who have not had any international exchange experiences and, you know, or maybe it’s a little intimidating to take that first step, and so our seminar is really just trying to break it down and make it feel a little bit more comfortable to ask questions and help try to just instill some confidence in future international exchange participants with disabilities. So, well, let me stop there for the time being and let me put it to all of you. What I’d like to know is, given, again, just this very—all of the different types of departments and expertise that you’re all bringing with you today what are some of your own experiences, observations, activities, around disability inclusion on your campus and in international affairs. So I’d really like to hear from you all and I wonder if anyone would like to start. FASKIANOS: Great. Great. Thank you, Ashley. This is terrific and, yes, we want to go to everybody on the call. You can click the raised hand icon on your screen to ask a question, and on an iPad or tablet click the more button to access the raised hand feature, and when I call on you, you can accept the unmute prompt. Please state your name and affiliation followed by your question. You can also write your question in the Q&A box. If you do that, please say who you are. And we do have our first written question from Pearl Robinson, who is an associate professor at Tufts University: Does the Peace Corps offer opportunities for people with disabilities? HOLBEN: Thank you for that question. Oh, I’m so glad you asked. Absolutely. The Peace Corps encourages people with disabilities to participate in—as volunteers and, indeed, we have seen so many returned Peace Corps volunteers with disabilities come back and share their experiences. I think I referred earlier to a person who was discouraged from learning a language because she’s deaf, and she often shares, she really pushed back against that, insisted she wants to learn French and one of the happy results of her advocating for herself to be able to pursue French despite being discouraged from doing so is it enabled her to be able to serve in the Peace Corps in Francophone Cameroon, which was a life-changing event for her. And, actually, I know that there is an upcoming webinar that’s going to be hosted by a Peace Corps staff on volunteers with disabilities that will feature a number of returned Peace Corps volunteers. And so if that—I think that is coming up pretty soon. So I’ll share that information with Pearl individually or unless other people are interested I can share with you, Irina. But also the Peace Corps also has opportunities for shorter-term programs for folks with unique expertise and who have a specific area of specialized focus. And so we recently interviewed someone who took part in that program—it’s called Peace Corps Response—which worked out really well for her because she has some chronic health conditions and mobility disabilities that made that format work quite well for her. But, yes, we have lots of returned Peace Corps stories on our website about people with different types of disabilities who served and it’s really fun to read their stories and just really eye-opening as well. FASKIANOS: Great. So we have another question from Deena Mansour with the Mansfield Center: We’ve appreciated using some of your resources on our State Department exchanges. Could you speak to some of the most important ways you prepared others in a cohort, a predeparture orientation to support a colleague with disabilities, given that many countries have less—far less exposure and support than we have had in the U.S.? HOLBEN: Mmm hmm. Yeah. I would say—and that’s fantastic that you’re working with—being able to implement State Department exchanges as well. We’re really excited by any time we can provide resources related to, for instance, the Global UGRAD program or the Mandela Fellowship or Fulbright, whatever it might be. And then, as for predeparture orientations, this has been a topic that we’ve explored both in terms of international students coming to the U.S., which we just kind of put—created some new resources for that. But it sounds like what you’re asking is for folks going abroad—maybe coming from the U.S. and going abroad. I think it’s just really important that people with disabilities who are preparing to go abroad are—have a chance to research a bit about the country’s disability rights—not only disability rights laws but disability culture and context. We really encourage folks to try to do outreach to a disability-led organization, if possible, and some people who’ve been able to do that it’s led to a really fruitful relationship and really enhanced their experience to be able to meet with local people with disabilities who can share kind of the real experience on the ground, what it might be like. I think a lot of people are also—maybe aren’t prepared for just the feeling of kind of being—standing out and others are unprepared for—well, just to use an example from our Intersections Abroad publication that I shared earlier, one student who studied abroad who is blind, she really thought that people would only be interested in her blindness and only have questions about her blindness, and she was really surprised that when she arrived people had wanted to know about other things about her, too. And so I think just allowing some room for all aspects of yourself there can be really beneficial. It’s something that sounds simple but people might forget. And so kind of evaluating different identities that you have, what you want to get out of the experience. But it sounds like what you’re asking about is kind of more just on-the-ground—those logistics, those environmental barriers. And you can’t foresee all of them, but I think just one thing that’s really helpful is just getting an idea of, how do people in that destination approach disability access because, if you call a hotel or something like that and you say is this going to be disability accessible, I really encourage just trying to get a little bit more specific, because they might say yes because their idea of disability access is having some burly people lift you up over some stairs, whereas that might not be at all your idea of accessibility. And so some of these things you’re not going to know until you arrive. But if you can connect with another—a person with a similar disability who has traveled abroad or someone who has gone to the place where you’re going that can really be helpful, or talking to locals with disabilities. And then our resource library, that’s one of the things that, I think—I really hope is helpful to folks planning their trips abroad is to be able to read about the experiences of other travelers and kind of the types of things unexpected that they encountered during their travels that might help other folks just get into that mindset of what might be on the horizon. FASKIANOS: There’s a question from Kwaku Obosu-Mensah at Lorain County Community College: Do students with disabilities need special insurance to travel abroad in an exchange program? HOLBEN: That’s a great—thanks for that question. Not always. Some students who have maybe chronic health conditions have been able—sometimes their study abroad program, for instance, has been able to negotiate, like, a group rate of health insurance for—for example, if it’s a group of students who are going abroad, in case there’s some additional coverage needed related to preexisting conditions or disabilities. However, we’re also seeing a best practice in the form of international exchange departments and offices budgeting for some funds to be able to provide for students with disabilities in those instances where something’s not going to be covered by. It’s kind of an extenuating circumstance, whether it’s related to getting access to health care, kind of an emergency fund, or being able to help pay for some private transportation when the local public transportation is not accessible, to use a couple of examples. So I think you’re going to have to—it’s really important to check with the insurance company and find out what their policies are around that but also to consider negotiating what they’re able to cover to be as inclusive as possible. And that’s not always going to be able to happen in that way, in which case those contingency funds are going to help supplement whatever the insurance is not able to. FASKIANOS: Great. And people can also raise their hand and ask their questions and share best practices. But I will have another question—written question—from Kimberly Pace, University of Alaska Anchorage, which goes along with Kwaku’s question, which was—you just answered about health care for students—faculty with disabilities when engaged in study abroad programs. So it’d be great if you could elaborate on that. HOLBEN: So, with health care, I guess just some additional considerations related to health includes mental health. Some folks with chronic health conditions might need to just get some—do some extra preparation—not only chronic health conditions but other types of disabilities. People with disabilities planning to go abroad will sometimes need to just take some extra steps for preparation, for example, those who are taking medications in the U.S. Certain types of ADHD medications in the U.S. are not legal in certain countries where people study abroad, and so trying to get information about what types of health care you’re able to receive abroad, what types of prescriptions you’re able to bring into the country abroad, working with your health care professionals about whether or not to adjust any medications prior to travel, and then where are you going to be able to access medical supplies in case yours get depleted or are lost or stolen or break—you know, where to go if your mobility equipment breaks. And we do have some tip sheets kind of on these different types of disability topics related to, what happens if you get into this dilemma, how can you try to, for example, keep your mobility equipment or your medications—how do you travel with those things in such a way that kind of helps mitigate some of the risks of having things break or confiscated or flagged or whatever it might be. So it’s not, like, a simple answer but it’s absolutely really important predeparture. Part of the —it’s part of the research. It’s part of the process for going abroad and, unfortunately, it typically means building in some extra time for planning to go abroad. So we always encourage students with disabilities, even if you think you might possibly go abroad at some point in your college career it’s not too early to start planning for it now and start looking into some of these questions, and some of the guides that we have on our website are helpful just for thinking through what those questions might be because, as they say, you don’t know what you don’t know. And people will often think, well, I’ve got that taken care of, no problem. But they’re only considering it from a home environment perspective and not really thinking about how, well, is the host city infrastructure going to be able to support this accessibility software that I use or whatever it might be. So not just in terms of health care but other types of accommodations as well. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Can you elaborate on the difference between access and inclusion? I think it would be helpful to give those. HOLBEN: Well, I don’t think there needs to be a broad difference. But one thing that I would want to emphasize is, there’s—on one hand, we’re talking about disability inclusion and how can we make sure that—they’re really—they go hand in hand. Inclusion is how can people with disabilities access these—all of the same programs, all of the same services—really, just kind of everything that nondisabled people can access and—but I think inclusion is not quite the full picture. It’s not really enough. And so what we would say is how can we go beyond inclusion—the inclusion piece—which is just making sure can you participate to sometimes you have to kind of take the first step to get people with disabilities to see these things as belonging to them or see these—sometimes people will self-select out of things because they’ve grown up with these messages that this isn’t for them, or they have to wait until it’s a special disability-focused program or activity for them to participate. And so one message that we tell people with disabilities is to kind of think of it as an infiltration where you’re, like, find these nondisability-focused activities and if you want to be part of it then be part of it. But on the flip side, we’re also thinking a lot about reverse infiltration, which is the folks that are managing different projects and opportunities and activities sometimes you might have to go out of your way a little bit to invite in people from the disability community, meet them where they are, really make sure that they are expected, anticipated. So it’s not really just enough to say, well, we wouldn’t turn a person with a disability away so that makes us inclusive but, really, how can you be more proactive and intentional in your strategy to make sure that disability is represented. So I think that that would be one distinction. And then, furthermore, beyond just disability inclusion—are they participating—then I think another important step to look at is disability leadership, and so that’s kind of where—why I say we get really excited when people with disabilities are entering leadership positions in higher education, whether that’s working in the study abroad office or as faculty leaders and others who are taking part in these decision-making roles and, how can we create kind of a pipeline for people with disabilities to become leaders in these different areas and be that kind of next generation of leadership. So I would keep that at the forefront as well. FASKIANOS: Great. HOLBEN: And, you know— FASKIANOS: Uh-huh. HOLBEN: Oh, go ahead. FASKIANOS: Oh, I was just going to call on Kimberly Pace. She raised her hand. HOLBEN: Oh, perfect. Yes. Looking forward to hear Kimberly. FASKIANOS: From the University of Alaska Anchorage. Q: That’s brilliant. Oh, I’m just so appreciative of this forum, and thank you both so much. As a person with a physical disability it never occurred to me as a college student to ever go—even ask the question about study abroad and I—certainly, you’re blowing my mind that there are resources to allow students to do this. I teach international relations and comparative politics, and I am just beyond giddy that there—(laughter)—are options for students because that’s something that, personally, I, you know, never got to experience and never, certainly, was encouraged to do that. So I’m very excited. I just want to say thank you very much for the information. So thank you. HOLBEN: We’re right there with you, Kimberly, as far as the giddy factor. And, you know, thank you so much for sharing that experience because, actually, that is—I think that inclusive, that welcoming, encouraging messaging is so important and we kind of go into detail about that on one of our tip sheets about inclusive recruitment. But even just something as simple as a message on an opportunity that says people with disabilities encouraged to apply, you never know who that’s going to make all the difference in the world to and one prime example is our organization, Mobility International USA, might not exist if our CEO, who is a wheelchair rider, hadn’t done her Rotary exchange program in Australia, which kind of spawned this idea of what Mobility International USA should be, and what led her to participate in that Rotary exchange program was seeing just a simple ad in the newspaper that said people with disabilities encouraged to apply. And who was responsible for putting in that little line? We’re not sure. But it kind of led to this chain of events that kind of brought us to where we are here. And, you know, there are so many folks in the field in higher education who are—they don’t have all the answers and they don’t have a lot of—they might not have personal experience with disability. But I think if they can help be a champion, an ally, and be kind of someone who says, well, let’s figure this out, or let’s see what’s possible and not shut it down, I think that that’s often what has led to all of these amazing outcomes and impact stories from the folks who have shared their experiences with us on our website and then who knows how many more are out there. So, sounds simple, but it can have an important impact. FASKIANOS: So we have a written question from Mark Scheinbaum, who’s at the Florida International University: What updates or guidance do you have for students with de jure and/or de facto comfort pets that are needed for completion of usual and customary academic tasks? HOLBEN: If you can leave the questions up a little longer. Then I can— FASKIANOS: Oh, sure. Sure. Sorry. HOLBEN: That’s OK. FASKIANOS: I’ll put it back. HOLBEN: Well, I would just, first of all, make sure that you’re familiarizing yourself with the distinction between—you kind of use two different terms here. So there are comfort animals or emotional support animals, and then there are service animals, which are trained to do a specific service. Comfort animals and emotional support animals aren’t necessarily trained to perform a specific service related to a disability-related accommodation whereas a service animal is. So maybe that service is helping to detect the onset of an epileptic seizure, or the service is being able to help the person open doors or pick up items from the floor, or, of course, sight dogs for folks who are blind or visually impaired, for mobility. And so, anyway, that’s going to be a really key distinction for whether or not it’s going to be appropriate to have a service animal or an emotional support animal in a higher education setting, and especially that becomes more complicated when you’re talking about going abroad to another country where you’re also considering factors—not just the laws but also the cultural factors whether dogs are welcome in every restaurant or if it’s an animal that’s very taboo and you don’t keep them as pets, let alone travel around with them. And so all of those questions are going to come into play. We do have some tip sheets on our website that go into more detail around some preparation for bringing animals abroad, what you should know related to quarantine, vaccinations, and things like that. So search for animals on the MIUSA website to access some of those tips. FASKIANOS: Great, and we’ll send out links to that section, Ashley, after this so people can access it easier. HOLBEN: Oh, great. Yeah. FASKIANOS: So another written question from Erin Reed, and I will leave it up so you can see it— HOLBEN: Oh, thanks. FASKIANOS:—who’s the student services and admissions advisor/DSO at California State University San Marcos: What are your suggestions for a university study abroad program that is not made aware of a student’s disability prior to the student’s arrival? HOLBEN: I think my number-one suggestion would be rather than waiting for one student to participate start thinking about it now what are some ways we can build in some inclusive practices into our programming. So one thing that some programs might do is, well, maybe people aren’t disclosing their disability because we’re not giving them the opportunity to do so. So including questions in some of those post-acceptance forums that ask how can we make this program—how can we help set you up for success in this program. Might also ask specifically, including related to disability accommodations so that folks know that—I think it’s really important for prospective students or otherwise to just know that they’re being anticipated, that someone is thinking, yes, like, we’re totally expecting that at some point some students with disabilities will participate in this program. And I think that that can be—really signal to students, OK, this—we’re coming from a place that or we’re going to be interacting with folks who are anticipating me and, even if they don’t know all the answers to my questions they’re not going to shut me down. So I think that some of those types of—whether it’s just amending some of your forms or putting information on your program website, having inclusive images such as if there are images of people with apparent disabilities participating in the program, seeing themselves reflected in those images can be just as important as an inclusive written message. Let me go back to that question. Sorry. It went away again. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: If you click on the answered question. HOLBEN: I got it. Yeah. FASKIANOS: OK. And then I have two more written questions. Everybody’s sending in their questions at the end here. (Laughs.) HOLBEN: But just also, going back to Erin Reed’s question, if the program—it sounds like, we didn’t know that there was a student with a disability planning to arrive. Now we—we have this—these things that we need to figure out in the meantime. One more thing I’ll just say about how to maybe avoid that situation is working with—oh, this is so important—collaborating with the disability services office and other similar services on the campus to be able to arrange some kind of system. So a lot of institutions—for example, their study abroad offices will share a list of all of the students who are enrolled in study abroad for that upcoming semester and they’ll share it with the disability services office so that they can kind of go through and say, oh, well, we recognize—and this is all just privately on the disability services side to protect the students’ privacy—but they will kind of flag, oh, this is a student that we work with. And so what they might then do is connect with that student directly and say, hey, we learned that you’re going abroad—do you want to talk about some of the questions you might have or is there anything that we can do to support you and can we—are you comfortable with inviting those—the international advisors into this conversation so that we can just kind of put everything out in the open and we can figure out all the best ways to support the—that student. So, I would say, that’s so important that we used to at NCDE pay people to take each other to lunch from the study abroad office and the disability services office because too often we heard, oh, yeah, they’re just right across the—you know, their office is literally right over there. I can see them from our office. But we’ve never talked to them or—and we don’t really know what they do. So I think just to have it breaking some of that ice early on and not waiting for the time when there’s a student with a disability there but just kind of building that into your process, and that can also be helpful for collecting data as well. The Institute for International Education has an annual Open Door survey that provides data and statistics around who is participating in an international exchange and they’ve started including a question—some questions related to disability so that, hopefully, over time we can kind of see is disability—are people with disabilities being represented in international exchange in greater numbers, what types of disabilities do they have, and so on. So working with the disability support office is one great way to also collect that type of information too, which is going to really help the field and, hopefully, help more people with disabilities to be able to participate in international exchange. FASKIANOS: So we have a question from Andrew Moran from London Metropolitan University: In the U.K. inclusion is not just about access or being in a classroom. It is also about inclusive assessment methods. I wonder if you have any resources—if you know of any resources that suggest assessment methods that would allow neurodiverse or physically disabled students to fully engage and not be excluded. They’ve done away with exams because you can’t rely on an elevator to work to get to an exam room, let alone the barriers in the exam might pose for neurodiverse students. And he’s leading a working group on allowing students to choose, create their own assessment method to enable greater diversity and meet students’ needs but always looking for new ideas. HOLBEN: Oh, that’s really interesting. Thanks so much for sharing that, Andrew, and for sharing the example at your own institution as well. And I would love to hear other folks respond to this, too. As far as—one, again, I would really encourage you to check out Think College as a prospective resource for—especially just because you mention neurodiverse students. So Think College operates at different campuses right now—for now, I think, only in the U.S. Perhaps their network is growing beyond that as well. But it’s kind of this network of professionals who work with—to try to get students not only with intellectual disabilities but also those who are neurodiverse, including those who are on the autism spectrum. And so they are really a fantastic source of expertise for everything from inclusive education or specialized support and accommodations and pedagogy. So I think that they would be probably the ones to connect with about this question in particular. But if other folks have other ideas in response to Andrew, I’m sure we’d all appreciate it. And maybe while we’re thinking of that, we’ll check out this next one. FASKIANOS: Right. McKennah Andrews with the Mansfield Center: We have a blind participant on an upcoming international program taking place here in the U.S., and MIUSA’s resources have been so valuable. Can we touch on the topic of personal assistants? What advice or testimonies might you have regarding engaging with personal assistants during a program? HOLBEN: Yes, absolutely. So personal assistants can look like a couple—many different things, actually. You might even—since you mentioned having a blind participant, this might not be what you meant but some—for some folks who are blind they may have had some sighted guides during their exchange programs abroad. So that’s another example where a student who—or a person who is used to one type of access accommodation or assistive devices or technology in their home environment might have to look into some different ones for their host environment. So we’ve known some people who are really—have great cane skills for orientation and mobility and strong independent mobility skills in their home environment but have felt more comfortable having the program help arrange a sighted guide for them when they’re going to, perhaps, countries where—or environments that are a little more chaotic or where, for whatever reason, their usual skills might not work out. Or, again, if that person uses a service dog in—or service animal in their home environment and that wouldn’t really be feasible in the home environment then having that kind of human guide or a personal assistant might be one method that they look into. Personal assistants might also provide everyday living services—you know, feeding or using the bathroom or just getting ready throughout the day, assisting with lifting and transferring, and that’s going to—might—again, as somebody who—we’ve seen some instances where people in the U.S. who don’t use personal assistant services might opt for that when they’re going to a place where, you know, they might need to be lifted more often because the infrastructure is not as—going to be as smooth or not as accessible. And so we’ve seen different situations where sometimes they are—the personal assistant in question is someone they’ve worked with a long time in the U.S. Sometimes it might be a peer who attends their school. Sometimes it’s a parent who travels. I’ve definitely seen all kind of different types of—oh, and also a local person that’s hired in the country to provide personal assistant care. So it’s really interesting just to kind of be aware of all of the different ways that that might look and check out—again, we have a specific tip sheet about that—actually, a series related to personal assistant services. So, yes, we can talk about personal assistant services and we have kind of a suite of resources related to that so there’s a lot that can be said. So thanks for bringing that up. FASKIANOS: Terrific. We are almost out of time, and I did see that there was a raised hand from Justice Chuckwu— HOLBEN: Fantastic. Let’s hear from Justice. FASKIANOS: —disability rights, Oregon. He lowered his hand but—oh, there we go. And if you can ask it quickly and unmute yourself that would be great. HOLBEN: I think we’ve met before, Justice. Hello. HOLBEN: Oh, hi. There’s Justice. Q: Hello. HOLBEN: Hello. Q: Yeah, I think we met a couple times. Yeah. So my name is Justice and, yeah, I’m so much appreciative of this program. And I always have a simple question and the question is how do we—how do we unify orientation for international students with disabilities, given the fact that they come from different backgrounds and most times there are just maybe one or two or three in one university or one college and may not be able to really understand the environment early enough. Maybe by the time they would get to understand the environment they might be getting to the mid-semester. So my question is, is there a way to kind of unify the orientation, especially since we now have online—things could be done online to unify the orientation to make sure that students—international students with disabilities are not left behind. HOLBEN: Mmm hmm. Yes. Thank you, Justice. And, actually, it was your bringing that to light that kind of got—we started incorporating that question into some of our resources and, in fact, you helped contribute to one of our webinars on this very topic of support for international students with disabilities coming to different campuses in which you kind of described that feeling of how do I connect with other people with disabilities, especially other international students with disabilities, who might be able to share in some of these experiences so I don’t feel so alone in this. And I really—that really sparked a lot of ideas but one of which is, might there be some kind of opportunity for a student group of international students with disabilities but bringing together students from different campuses to be able to share their experiences. And so that’s something that we at the NCDE are exploring more. But as for existing resources, in addition to the webinar that Justice contributed to we also added some others related to just sharing some best practices from our—MIUSA leads an orientation for high school exchange students with disabilities who are arriving to the U.S. for a State Department-funded scholarship program and we—as part of this orientation we incorporate information about your rights as a person with disabilities while you’re in the U.S. and how to advocate for yourself if there’s something that you need but aren’t getting, how to fully participate in all of the opportunities while you’re there. So I think that those are the—some of the same messages that could be really beneficial to folks entering U.S. higher education from different parts of the world and just learning about U.S. disability culture and those steps for taking advantage of all of the resources available to you. So, yeah, you’re absolutely right, Justice. There’s more work to be done, and I think folks like you who are voicing kind of those needs—those firsthand gaps that you’ve identified is kind of one of the first steps in helping to build out some of these resources. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Well, we are out of time. In fact, we’re a little over. HOLBEN: Oh. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: So, Ashley Holben, thank you so much for doing this. We really appreciate it, and to all of you for your questions and comments. Again, we will be sending out a link to this webinar transcript as well as to the resources that Ashley mentioned. So stay tuned for that. Our next Higher Education Webinar will be on Wednesday, February 22, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time with Jeremi Suri, who will lead a conversation on teaching the history of American democracy. And just please do follow us at @CFR_Academic and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Ashley, again, thank you very much for doing this. We appreciate it. HOLBEN: Thank you. Thank you for—to everyone who attended for your time and thanks to CFR for getting this on the agenda. I really appreciate it also. FASKIANOS: Great. We look forward to everybody continuing to participate in this Higher Education Webinar series. Have a good rest of your day. (END)

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.