Social Issues

In From Peril to Partnership, using case studies of Colombia and Mexico, Paul Angelo evaluates the efficacy of U.S. security assistance and the necessary conditions and stakeholders in partner nations that facilitate success. The book answers why Plan Colombia achieved its objectives and why the Mérida Initiative underdelivered in Mexico. It goes beyond drug war theatrics and the “one-size-fits-all” approach to U.S.-led stabilization.  The CFR Fellows’ Book Launch series highlights new books by CFR fellows. 

Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior advisor of immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, discusses prospects for reforms to U.S. immigration policy and how state and local officials can better prepare for and manage the influx of migrants arriving in their cities and states.  TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: OK. Good afternoon and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. And, as always, CFR takes new institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. So thank you all for taking the time to be with us today. We’re delighted to have over five hundred participants from forty-eight U.S. states and U.S. territories. And as a reminder, this webinar is on the record and the video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact, at CFR.org. We’re pleased to have Theresa Cardinal Brown with us. We shared her bio, but I will just give you a few highlights. Theresa Cardinal Brown is a senior advisor of immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and founder of the consulting firm Cardinal North Strategies, LLC. Prior to these roles, she was director of immigration and border policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She also served as the associate director of business immigration advocacy at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. So, Theresa, thank you very much for being with us to talk about trends in immigration in the United States. The last significant reform to the U.S. immigration system was in 1986. Can you just talk about the trends you’ve seen, how politics has hindered attempts to reform immigration policy in the United States, and the way forward? BROWN: Thank you, Irina. And thank you to the Council on Foreign Relations. And thank you to all of you who are joining us from states and localities across the country. I will quibble a little bit with your question. I think the last major reform actually was after 1986. 1986 was the last time we had something called an amnesty. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was a compromise deal passed by Democrats in Congress and signed by Republican President Ronald Reagan that legalized some three million undocumented people in the United States at that time. The other major portion of the bill was on immigration enforcement, primarily for the first time making it illegal to hire somebody in the United States who didn’t have work authorization, and created the system that we call employer sanctions today, and the requirement that everyone who hires someone has to have them show their identity and work authorization. The bill also would have increased border patrol significantly for the time. But since that time, actually we’ve seen several I’d considered relatively major immigration bills pass. There was a major change to the legal immigration system in 1990, signed by President George H.W. Bush, which increased the number of green cards available each year, created new categories for employment-based green cards for those of the highest skill levels. We had an immigration bill passed in 1980, actually before that, that’s created our current refugee and asylum system. In 1996, we had a major immigration enforcement bill signed by President Bill Clinton with a Republican Congress that changed how we enforce our immigration laws, both in the interior and at the border. And then, you know, after 9/11, we saw several bills pass that had significant impacts on our immigration system in various ways, the biggest of which probably is the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which abolished the Immigration and Naturalization Service and created three agencies within DHS to manage various aspects of the immigration system. Along with, you know, our immigration courts remained in the Department of Justice and our refugee process at the State Department. So divided the immigration functions, basically, among five different Cabinet departments now. So I think that it’s common to hear that 1986 was the last major immigration bill, but I think that’s not exactly true. And actually, if you look at that history, what you find is that Congress would regularly pass pretty major immigration bills about every ten, fifteen years or so, until about the last fifteen years. (Laughs.) You know, we saw major and minor immigration bills. And that was kind of par for the course. Congress would get together, and usually these were bipartisan bills passed on negotiations between Republicans and Democrats, that made major or minor changes to our immigration system. But we really have not seen that in the last fifteen years. As a matter of fact, it’s been become increasingly difficult for Congress to even take up the issue of immigration. And we’ve seen many attempts at immigration reform bills fail in the last twenty years. President George W. Bush tried. Well, before 9/11, in 2000 he worked with them President Vicente Fox of Mexico to try to pass comprehensive immigration legislation. But 9/11 kind of derailed that. After the Homeland Security Act in 2003, and definitely in his second term, President Bush worked hard to try to work with Democrats and Republicans in Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. There were two major bills that were led by Senators Kennedy and McCain that came up in Congress from 2006 to 2008. None of them succeeded. President Obama also tried, with a gang of eight Republicans and Democrats in the Senate in 2013. They did manage to pass a bill in the Senate, but it was never taken up in the House. So there have been lots of attempts, I think, in the last fifteen, twenty years to try to address immigration reform. And they’ve been unsuccessful. Lots of different reasons for that, but I think we’re probably further away from that now, in part because it’s been so hard for Republicans and Democrats to work together on anything. And we’ve seen it most recently with the attempt of the Senate to enact bipartisan border package alongside foreign policy—foreign aid support to Ukraine, Israel, and the South China Sea in a border—in a major supplemental spending bill. So I think that’s where we are right now, that the parties are pretty far apart. And it’s not just on immigration, but maybe it’s especially noticeable on immigration that the parties are pretty far apart these days. And that’s making it harder to see reforms enacted. FASKIANOS: Yes. And, well, certainly, this seems to be—will be one of the major issues in this election. I mean, from both the Democrats and Republicans are pointing to this. And in fact, we have both former President Trump and President Biden on the border today, as we speak. Can you talk about why we’ve seen the number of encounters on the southwest border increase? We’ve seen it going up from—and I don’t want to put the stats out there, but, you know, you’re the expert. But it seems to be increasing. And can you talk about what is contributing to that? BROWN: Sure. So this is another one where I want to put the frame a little wider than the last year or two. Certainly, we’ve seen significant increases in the last year or two. But I would say that the roots of what we’re seeing now really started back in the mid-2010s. And even before that it’s worth understanding what the border was like before then. So the Border Patrol was created in 1924. Before that, we really didn’t enforce immigration law at the U.S.-Mexico border. As a matter of fact, the border was in a different place for part of our history than it is now.  But in 1924, the Border Patrol was created. And their primary mission initially was actually to prevent Chinese nationals from coming up through Mexico because we had an absolute ban on Chinese immigration during that time. And it wasn’t really about enforcing Mexicans coming across the border. It wasn’t until the 1930s and the Great Depression that we really started looking at Mexicans coming across the border for work or for other purposes. And increasingly, and for most of the next century, the vast majority—and I mean, over 80-90 percent of everybody that the Border Patrol encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border—were Mexicans. Usually adult males who were coming in to look for work, often temporarily or seasonally, and then they returned to Mexico. And so our immigration processes, our systems, our laws, and our infrastructure—the facilities that Border Patrol had and used—were designed with the idea that we could very quickly send the Mexicans back to Mexico after we apprehended them. And most of them were not asking for asylum or any sort of protection. Most of them were not even contesting the fact that they were deportable. They would voluntarily return to Mexico, mainly because they would just turn around and try it again. And so that was the paradigm of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border for almost 100 years. That started changing significantly in 2010. And I would say it’s continued to change since then. In 2010, we first started seeing the arrival of a very large numbers of Central Americans, non-Mexicans. And these were people who were very frequently unaccompanied children, often teenagers but some younger, and families. And those families could have very small children—infants, toddlers—from Central America coming. And not just coming and trying to sneak by Border Patrol, but coming in and saying: I need protection. I want to ask for asylum. And that process has continued to today, not just with Central Americans and not just with families, but with people from all over the western hemisphere and the Caribbean, increasingly all over the world. And why this is a problem is that, as I mentioned, our systems were designed when we could very quickly return Mexicans back to Mexico. But the fundamental thing to understand about immigration in general is that no country is required to take back into its territory people who are not their citizens. And so there was no procedure for us to send non-Mexicans back to Mexico. And so we had to take them into custody. And if they were not going to claim asylum or were deportable, we could arrange to send them back to their country. But that required time and transportation, usually airplanes. But if they ask for asylum, our law explicitly says—and this is since 1980 and again in 1996—you are permitted to ask for asylum no matter how you arrive to the United States. It is in the immigration law. You’re not entitled to get it, but you’re entitled to ask for it. And so we have a process that allows you to do that. It involves sending you mainly to immigration court, but sometimes in front of an asylum officer to plead your case. What started happening, however, is that the number of arrivals exceeded the infrastructure we had, the people to adjudicate those asylum claims, the facilities to hold people in, to hear those claims, very quickly. Because asylum, again, before the mid-2010s, was a tiny, tiny fraction of everybody who arrived at the border, and almost all of those people who are going to ports of entry not to Border Patrol. So once our systems became overwhelmed, then the only thing that we really could do, because we did not have the ability to detain people at that point, was release them to a future hearing. And that started a continuation to what we see today. And as the situation in countries like Venezuela or South America became worse due to COVID, because other countries’ economies just did not recover the way ours did, more and more of those people started coming north. And, you know, even though we had managed under the Trump administration to get agreements from Mexico to take back Central Americans, for example, and other Spanish speakers, they did not agree until the Biden administration that they would take back any people from Nicaragua, or Cuba, or Venezuela, or Haiti. And so, again, those were people that came to the border in large enough numbers that they overwhelmed our processes and infrastructure. So you know, the fundamental thing to understand about why we’re seeing what we’re seeing right now—there’s a lot of pieces to it. But one thing is that we are in a paradigm shift from where things were before. And that paradigm changed without us changing anything about our policies at the border. It started because of people fleeing conditions where they, were seeking protection to the United States. It continued when that avenue of applying for asylum became clear, it was a way that people could come into the United States and remain for some period of time. It was expanded when other populations that could not be quickly returned started arriving. Smuggling networks that were informal, usually mom and pop operations, now had become terribly sophisticated, charging tens of thousands of dollars, and are integrated with criminal drug cartels now. So just a lot of things about the way we thought about the border and what we needed to do with the border have changed, but our laws have not, our resources have not, and many of our policies have not. And so I think that’s at the root of what we’re seeing at the border right now. And to be clear, every president since President Obama has tried within the law to do different things. President Obama was the first one to try to detain families until the court said he couldn’t. President Trump tried a lot of different policies, including getting Mexico to agree to take certain people back to Mexico under the remain in Mexico policy. Again, that was only Spanish-speaking Central Americans, not other nationalities. And that continued until COVID. And then Title 42 came in, where we were expelling people back to Mexico. But, again, Mexico had conditions who they would take, when they would take them, how many people they would take, from time to time. And anybody that exceeded that we couldn’t send right back to Mexico. And if we couldn’t send them right back to their home country, they ended up being able to stay in the United States for some period of time. So that’s really where we’re at. And each of those policies were contested in the courts, and have been contested in the courts. So another point that I would just want to emphasize is that if Congress is not able to pass new laws, to change the procedure, provide the resources necessary to manage the number of people we see at the border right now, I don’t think it’s possible for any administration to manage it without that. Partially because all the resources have to be allocated by Congress, but also because we need to get Mexico to agree to certain things that they may or may not be willing to agree to. And our law still says that once you’re on U.S. soil, you’re our responsibility. We have to process you somehow. And everybody who arrives and turns themselves in is already on U.S. soil. So that’s something we have to figure out how to manage. FASKIANOS: (Off mic)—unsolvable problem, given the politics of all of it, and that this is really a third rail. And you hear so much about what everybody’s doing or not doing. So. I mean, you’ve been working on this issue for a long time, right? And you were a policy adviser and the commissioner of the Office of the Commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, you were on the Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s second-stage review. And you’ve worked in the Department of Homeland Security. And you’ve also been on the Canadian border. I mean, for the next administration—be it Trump or if Biden gets reelected—I mean, what would you say? What would be your advice to them? BROWN: My advice would be, work with Congress and get something done. My advice would be that, first of all, you’re not going to be able to do it on your own. If for no other reason than the resources required to manage the number of people arriving right now is far, far greater than we have. To give you an example right now, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are looking at budgetary shortfalls, because they’ve been spending in excess of their last year’s amounts under the continuing resolution, to some $1.2 billion, just to manage the number of arrivals right now. They were given that permission to do so, but when the FY-’24 budget finally gets passed, they have to reconcile that in the remainder of this year, which probably will mean a cut to their programs. And so they’re going to have to cut back on what they’re doing. And that may mean fewer Border Patrol people on the line. It may mean fewer deportation flights. It may mean that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going to be releasing people they have in detention right now. So all of these things matter. (Background noise.) I apologize. I didn’t know I was getting a call. I apologize. Stop it. FASKIANOS: No worries. BROWN: (Laughs.) I tried to zero out all my phones, and somebody tried to call me anyway. So I think that you can’t do this without resources. But I also think we need to fundamentally recognize the change that has happened at the border and that the laws and processes that were put in place for a very different type of migration is not necessarily going to be workable right now. Another thing I think it’s worth understanding is that for most of the last two decades our primary strategy at managing the border was one of deterrence and prevention. And that is, how do we make it hard to cross the border? How do we have consequences for those that do, and send them back as quickly as possible? And then that was supposed to deter other people from coming. When I think the majority of migrants were from Mexico that mattered, because as I said early on Mexicans would be just sent back on their own and would turn around and come back. So to reduce that recidivism, as they called it, these consequences were meant to prevent them from coming back. But that is a different paradigm than I think we can really talk about dealing with the kind of migration that we’re seeing right now. Because for many of them, their level of desperation to get to the United States, for them they feel it’s life and death. It isn’t a matter of I can make some more money and buy a house on land that I have back home and go back, which is a lot of the migration that we’ve seen in decades prior. This is people who literally believe that they, or their children, or their spouse, or their family will be killed or die if they stay where they are. And, you know, if you are coming three thousand miles through the jungle, and suffering unimaginable horrors along the way, if you are twenty feet from the border or, you know, fifty feet from the border and you may not be able to get across right now, but you’re going to keep trying until you do. Because the idea that you would go back is not really in your mindset. And so I think it’s worth understanding that with that level of determination that the migrants have right now, and the smuggling organizations that will provide them all kinds of bad information to get them to make that trip—because they know that once they’re at the border, they’re not going to turn around and go home—that that strategy of deterrence and prevention is not as—it’s not likely to be as effective. And we have seen that with different policies that have been put in place since 2014. You know, we’ve had probably dozens of different policies and processes that were tried under different administrations that may have worked for a period of time. But almost always, after a couple of months, we saw the numbers go back up. Nothing really reduced the levels of migration at the border for a persistent period of time, even during COVID, which is when it dropped the most. The numbers went down from March to May, and then starting in May they started going up again. And that was even before the election of President Biden. Now they went up substantially afterwards. And some of that was just new nationalities that, again, Mexico wouldn’t take back and we didn’t have alternatives to deal with. But, you know, it’s worth noting that that no one—no one has been really successful in dealing with this level of migration since we saw it start in 2014. FASKIANOS: Before we go to the group—thank you for that—this is a group of state and local officials. Where do you—how do you see that they can better prepare and manage for the influx of migrants that we are seeing arriving to cities and states? And if there any resources you can recommend, we’ll circulate after the after this webinar as well, but any thoughts you have on that front. And then we’ll go to all of you for your questions, and to share things that are happening in in your communities. BROWN: Yeah. You know, and I think that’s one of the features that makes this migration somewhat different from previous waves of migration that we saw across the U.S.-Mexico border. Increasingly, a lot of the people coming to the border are people with no prior ties to the United States. Even when we saw a lot of the Central Americans arriving, many of them had family members or friends who had migrated previously, or maybe, you know, decades before, that had settled in the United States. So they knew where they were heading and they had somebody that would receive them and take care of them while they were processing, whatever they were doing. Increasingly, and this is particularly true of the Venezuelans and the Cubans in the Haitians, they did not have anybody in the United States. They didn’t know where they were going. They literally just—if I get across the border, I’ll figure it out later. And that meant that when they arrived in locations across the country, whether it was on their own or whether they were sent there by—(laughs)—you know, governors trying to take them away from their states, they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know where to go. And so they’re ending up relying a lot more on local government services for housing, for shelter, for food, as well as nonprofit and charitable organizations. You know, the organizations like that along the U.S.-Mexico border had been dealing with this influx for years at this point, in far greater numbers than some of these cities have seen. But most of those people were not staying in those locations. They were transiting through to other places. Now, they’re ending up in places and they—one, they may not know where they are, or what to do once they’re there. And that is creating strains. And yet, there are other places in the country who would be happy to have people who, especially if they’re in one of the statuses that allow work authorization, to come and work. Right now the federal government is not—they’re not managing the dispersion of migrants throughout the country the way, say, they usually do with refugees that are resettled from overseas, right? The government works with nonprofits in the United States and with local governments and state governments to resettle refugees. But these people are arriving on their own and they’re arriving with sometimes no advanced warning whatsoever. And that is providing strains. The government is providing essentially some reimbursements to state and local governments as well as to nonprofit organizations under their Shelter and Services Program. That is CBP money, but operated by FEMA. But that’s far less than what many places are laying out for their needs. I think that, you know, what I have been hearing from state and local government officials that I’ve spoken to over the last year is, one, there’s a big desire for the federal government to do more to reimburse them. Unfortunately, that’s tied up in whether or not the government can fund itself. And we’re seeing that, you know, play out right now with these continuing resolutions. And so it’s unclear, you know, how much money Congress is willing to allocate for that. And Congress has to allocate the money. The government can’t spend any money that Congress hasn’t given it. That’s the Constitution. So that’s one place to look. Other than that, I think, you know, what you’re starting to see is states and localities trying to learn from each other how other jurisdictions have been doing and receiving migrants. I know, for example, New York has been working—the state and city of New York—has been working with USCIS and with nonprofit or pro bono immigration attorneys and clinics in the region to do basically fairs for migrants who may have access to work authorization, but haven’t been able to file it yet, to help them file their paperwork and have it expeditedly decided by USCIS. And Chicago is trying to do that as well. So there are some of those kinds of things that people are trying to work on. Other things I think is obviously connecting with nonprofit organizations and immigrant organizations in localities where they exist, and coordinating as much as possible between them, so that nobody feels like they are doing it all by themselves. At the end of the day, I think this is a federal government problem to solve. (Laughs.) They really—you know, immigration pretty clearly is a federal government problem. And as I said, you know, you mentioned, clearly there’s presidential politics at play here. But I actually lay the issue squarely at the feet of Congress, because it’s Congress’ job to pass immigration laws. It’s Congress’ job to legislate. If they don’t like what an administration is doing, then they can pass a law to change and require the administration to do something different. And I think one of the biggest issues is that our law still clearly says, no matter how you arrive to the United States you’re allowed to ask for asylum. And that process and allowing that has resulted in, at this point, a couple million people who’ve been admitted into the country to pursue that claim, many of whom probably won’t end up getting asylum at the end of the day but will be here for years while that’s figured out. And that is not a sustainable process. And that the only people who can really address that is Congress. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to Council Member Charles Levesque in Portsmouth Town, Rhode Island. If you can accept the unmute prompt. Thank you. Charles? OK. BROWN: Not able to hear you. FASKIANOS: We are not able to hear you. Q: How we doing now? FASKIANOS: Oh! BROWN: There we go. Now we can hear you. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. Q: I should say, can you hear me now? FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: My name is Charles Levesque. I’m on the Portsmouth Town Council in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, which is a small state up in New England. Previously I was a family court magistrate. And I handled particularly petitions for people to take custody of children who had come across the border who needed that custody determination for somebody to pursue getting them a resident alien, or begin the process. My experience was that almost all the people, of course, that I saw had a family connection or a connection when they got here, although that may have been extraordinarily amorphous. In other words, I had people showing up who are taking a kid from their village, a kid that they really had no blood, if you will, relationship to, but they were willing to accept and try to help. The thing that kind of concerns me about this conversation—and I was looking at the title, Responding to the Immigration Influx, I mean, the United States has about fifty-one million foreign visitors every year. The only difference with those is that, one, we invited them and, two, they have hotel reservations. And that is to say they have money. The people who are coming across the border, my experience, and I think—and this actually goes to my question. Is there any empirical evidence being drawn that indicates whether or not in fact the crisis on the border is not—is only a humanitarian crisis because we’re not dealing with it well, as opposed to any sort of challenge to the United States of America? And by way of example, New Hampshire, they just had a primary, Republican, in which about 40 percent of the people indicated that immigration—that illegal immigration was a primary concern. New Hampshire has all of ten thousand potential illegal aliens. And most of them are probably Canadian, OK? And the whole—and my state of Rhode Island has not that many more. I think I did the math. It’s like 1 or 2 percent. And the thing is, if you want to find the undocumented aliens, I think for the most part all you have to do is drive into any city and you’ll see them walking to the hotels, because that’s where they work to clean. Or you can drive around your suburban neighborhoods and see whosever doing the work of lawn care. And in all likelihood, at least some of them are. But they’re not draining. They are, in fact, sustaining and in my experience, anyway, was some of them got to a point where they were able to send some assistance to their families. One last point before you cut me off. FASKIANOS: Oh, OK. We have lots of questions and comments. So I just want to give both Theresa a chance, and the others too, to participate. BROWN: If I can, you’re talking about a couple of different things. And I want to kind of separate them a little bit. Right now, the estimates by most of the organizations that do these estimates, including government, are that we have between 10 ½ and 11 ½ million undocumented immigrants living in the United States right now. Pew Research Center estimates that half of them have been here at least ten years, probably a larger chunk—a large chunk have been here twenty years or more. So these are long-term resettled people who have not—who are not able to legalize their status in the United States because our laws make that extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for most people. The people that are being released from the U.S.-Mexico border are not technically unauthorized, because the government has processed them. They have been encountered by the government, if not admitted under legal immigration status. They are here with the permission of the government to await a determination as to whether or not they get to stay. And that—and whether or not they ultimately will become part of the undocumented population in part will be whether or not they follow that process through to its completion and whether or not they are successful in getting relief from deportation, whether that’s asylum another form of relief, or if they’re ordered deported whether they leave. I think the challenge at the border is twofold. One is, it’s clearly humanitarian in that that the number of people arriving in very desperate situations, as you mentioned, is an issue in and of itself. They are much more reliant on assistance, on charity, whether that’s from a government or from a charitable organization, than maybe past generations of migrants who arrived and, as you mentioned, had somebody they were coming to join, and would find work quickly—whether that was off the books, under the books, or with somebody else’s ID. Or, you know, maybe they had a way to get legal and could get legal status eventually. So one of the challenges is just the nature of the people who are arriving at the border right now. They’re not trying to sneak in. They’re turning themselves in. And they are in very desperate circumstances. It is also a phenomenon that is not unique to the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says there are more displaced people in the world right now than at any time since World War II, and maybe even more than then. The vast majority of those people aren’t even in the Western Hemisphere, but a lot of them are. Seven million Venezuelans have fled Venezuela. That’s one in four Venezuelans no longer live in their country. Most of them are still in South America, in other countries in South America. But they are—you know, many of them are making their way up to the United States. I think—you know, so we have a challenge of a different type of migration happening, in larger numbers than our system is able to address right now. Whether or not we as a country have the capacity to accept that many immigrants into our—into our population, I think that is a different question. We certainly probably do. As a country, even though the United States admits more immigrants than probably any other country in the world, as a percentage of our population we’re not even in the top ten. Other countries admit a far higher percentage of their population in immigration on an annual basis than we do. And I was literally just at a briefing this morning by the Congressional Budget Office. And their latest estimates are that by 2040 deaths will exceed births in the United States. And all future population growth after that point will come from immigration. So it’s something to think about as a country. You know, how they come matters. But our capacity, I think, is probably far bigger than many people might believe. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. I’m going to go next to the Q&A box. J.J. Garza, you’ve written a question but you’ve also raised your hand. Do you want to just ask it yourself? And if you could identify yourself. Q: Sure. I can just—I can just ask it. It’s fairly simple. My name is J.J. Garza. I work for Texas State Representative Mary Gonzalez from El Paso. You’ve talked a lot about the problem at the border. But I think we have to recognize that the border is near the end of the line for the migrants that are coming up. What should we be doing on the foreign relations side with these—with the home countries of the folks that are coming to try to improve conditions so these folks don’t have to come here? BROWN: Yeah. So that was certainly something President Biden wanted to do when he first came into office. You recall that he sent Vice President Harris in charge of working on the so-called root causes of migration in Central America. And so the theory was, if we can improve the situation—because at that point the majority of non-Mexicans were coming from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, that that would reduce the incentives to migrate and we would have fewer people coming to the border. The challenge, and there’s lots of them—and we know this from a lot of our history of international foreign aid—is that that’s a long term process. These are countries that have had challenges of governance, that they have had civil wars and corruption, they have natural disasters, they have climate change. And so, you know, helping those countries sustain their own populations is a long-term challenge and commitment. And it’s worth doing. And we absolutely should. But it’s not something that’s going to affect immediate migration decisions. As a matter of fact, there’s some research from development experts that say, as a country starts to improve its poverty levels, you actually spur more immigration in the short run, because people have more wherewithal to migrate. It’s expensive to migrate. It’s not—it’s not inexpensive. You have to have some money to be able to do it. The poorest actually can’t migrate, because they don’t have the ability to pay the smugglers and the travel expenses necessary to do so. I think the foreign policy area is one that we absolutely need to invest in, because these are people that are moving up through several countries. As I mentioned, many of the Venezuelans before they come to us have been living in Ecuador or Colombia for years, until the situation there became untenable for them. And now they’re moving up. Same with the Haitians that were arriving in the last year or two. Many of them are Haitians that had been resettled in Brazil. They traveled from Haiti to Brazil to work, for example, for the Rio Olympics. And then once that work dried up, found that they weren’t wanted in Brazil anymore. And so they were looking at other places to move to. Clearly Mexico is a transit country, but it’s also increasingly a destination country. Their own asylum applicants have more than quintupled in ten years, far past their capacity to process as well. And so one of the things we need to try to do is try to speak with a lot of the other countries in the hemisphere about this migration phenomenon and where do our interests align? Are there things that we can do to help mitigate the situations of migrants where they are? Can we work with law enforcement on going after the smuggling organizations that are facilitating the migration through these countries? But right now, I would say that our interests aren’t always aligned in how we address migration. For example, Nicaragua is allowing visa-free travel to Nicaragua from pretty much anywhere in the world. And so what we’re seeing now is a lot of what we call extracontinental migrants, migrants coming from Africa or Asia, are flying into Nicaragua and making their way north from there. And Nicaragua has no problem with this. (Laughs.) So how do we—because they see it as money making for them, and a pass through to the United States. So how do we help other countries see it as their own interest to manage this entire situation much better? And so we should be using foreign policy much more as a tool, but we have to figure out where our interests align because, you know, we can—we can try to strongarm it, and threaten, and force other countries to enforce against migrants. But they will only do that so long as, one, it’s in their interest to do. And usually what we’ve seen, for example, with Turkey trying to prevent migrants from going from the Middle East into Europe, after a while Turkey said: We don’t care that you gave us EU membership and you gave us a lot of money. This is a problem for us. We’re just going to let people pass through. (Laughs.) So, you know, we do have to do more. But I don’t think we can realistically rely on other countries to be interdictors for us in the long run. FASKIANOS: Sonja Norton, if you can identify yourself. Q: Hi. I am Sonja Norton. I am from Utah. I’m a county commissioner here. And the biggest—I applaud the efforts to—I like attacking problems at the root of the problem. And I think the foreign relations is a good way to do that. But the thing I hear a lot here in our area, and I’ve heard from my friends in Texas, is it’s the burden that we’re putting on some of these states in areas that is the most troublesome. It’s putting a huge financial burden, a community burden, well-being of their communities. My husband has been in law enforcement. So I’ve dealt with law enforcement a lot. And they’re seeing a lot of offenses by these illegal immigrants. And it’s frustration. It’s really just a big frustration. And so I don’t know how do we—how do we deal with that? I know we talk about reforming the process to become a citizen. That has been talked about for years. How come that isn’t being done? And the costs—and I applaud the efforts to work with the other countries. But I think we’re having this problem here now, and we’ve also got to address those issues. BROWN: Yeah. I mean, there’s twofold, right? There’s the folks who are coming and then what do we do with the folks that have already come? And the numbers now—as I mentioned, it’s no longer just a border problem. It’s at places around the country. You know, I think that Congress, again, has been stuck on immigration for many, many years now. And I think one of the things that might help it get unstuck, because the last time it really passed major immigration legislation was when localities—states and localities started really leaning upon their members of Congress to fix it, to do something. Because the burden, as you said, is at the localities. And, you know, I think that that pressure—we’re already seeing it somewhat. You know, the border package that was part of the Senate supplemental bill, I don’t think we would have seen that package of reforms be accepted by Democrats, frankly, but for the fact that a lot of the places receiving it, are crying uncle, are Democratic cities who are insisting that something needs to be done, and done differently. So I think that, you know, that is the pressure that Congress needs to feel. And it’s not enough for them to say, well, it’s the other party’s fault that they didn’t do it, or this president didn’t do it, or whatever. If the responsibility is on Congress to enact legislation, which it is, then they have to figure out how to do that. And almost certainly it’s going to have to be bipartisan. I think we are in a period of our political reality in the United States where we’re not going to see large majorities of either party in the House or the Senate for the next decades. The country is too politically divided. And the way our elections are held, you know, I think what we have seen is very close majorities or, you know, 50/50 Senate. And, you know, that means that it’s very difficult to get things done with only your side, if you will. And that that’s going to force, I hope, them to work together and make the compromises necessary. It’s not going to be the perfect bill. There is no such thing as a perfect bill, there really isn’t. Our system is actually not designed to pass a perfect bill. It’s designed to pass the bill that the majority of people can live with. But even that, if it moves the issue forward, if it makes some changes, and maybe they don’t work out the way we think, and then Congress can try again, I have said before and I will say it again, I wish immigration was boring. I wish it was not so controversial, because then people would be willing to make those kinds of deals and come back and try again if that didn’t work. We have made it very political. And that’s made it harder to get done. And so we have to find ways to really get our leaders to work together to solve this. It’s not going to be—it’s not going to be solvable at the state or local level. But unfortunately, you are the ones that are feeling the base problems of what having this happen is causing. I think over time—and this is also true—over time, the United States is fully capable of probably incorporating all of these folks. But rapid arrivals in a short period of time in locations when they don’t have the ability to support themselves and are reliant on either unauthorized work or don’t have work, that creates all kinds of other order problems that we need to solve. OPERATOR: Can you please repeat who you’d like to call next, please? FASKIANOS: I would like to go next to Melissa Monich. Q: Great. Thank you. I’m Melissa Monich. And I’m the mayor of the city of Wyoming, Ohio, which is a suburb of Cincinnati. We have recently seen a large influx of people from Mauritania, I would guess in the last six months. Probably just in our area, eight hundred to a thousand people that were essentially not—kind of to your point—not expected. But there is a population of Mauritanians in this part of Ohio. So I think that’s why they’ve come. I also work one day a week at a food and clothing shelter that supports them. And so I’ve gotten to know a lot of these individuals. And the concern I have is some of these people are well educated. And they’re already working their way through their immigration hearings and their work visas. But we also have a big population that are coming in that have never been offered by Mauritania any formal education. So, you know, they speak their local dialect, they don’t read and write. And my concern is—and they may have an equally—Mauritania has a history of enslavement of indigenous populations, and also indentured servitude. So they may have a case for asylum, but do we have any ways in the past that we’ve taken these populations and educated, you know, these adults? BROWN: So a couple of things. I think you’re absolutely correct. When you see a group of people go and arrive into a place where previous folks from their country have been, that’s word of mouth. One of the phenomenon that we’re seeing about the migration that’s happening right now, a lot of it is driven by social media. And people have these WhatsApp channels and Facebook posts from their countrypeople, who post: I made it, and I’m here, and there’s work, and there’s people that will support you, and come and we’ll help you, right? And so that is—that is something that draws migrants both to the United States and to particular places within the United States. For what you said about education and training, you know, I think, traditionally the United States has done an exceptional job of integrating immigrants over time without any formalized immigrant integration policies. And I say this because, as Irina mentioned, I worked a lot with Canada and in Canada. And Canada has a very formalized, federal government-led, in partnership with the provinces and localities, immigrant integration model, with lots of money flowing from the federal government to states and localities to help new Canadians integrate, find jobs, get educated, learn language, that we just don’t have. Traditionally, the integration has happened at the community level, oftentimes by these mutual aid societies and civil societies that are made up of previous generations of immigrants from the same place. And, you know, that has been a remarkably successful model, even if it’s not, you know, formalized. What we have now, as I mentioned with our immigration system, is a capacity issue of new arrivals and the existing supports maybe not have capacity to address the number of new arrivals in the timeframe. And so I think, you know, what states and localities can do is work with nonprofits and other civic organizations, maybe foundations and other donor organizations, to help create programs that might help these populations increase their education level, be able to work in better jobs. You know, the resources available to that you know better than I do in your community. But that’s, I think—we don’t have a formal way of really helping with that. It’s not the federal—the federal government does not see it as its responsibility. There’s some money that can come from the U.S. Department of Education, for example, for certain types of programs. Sometimes immigrants are eligible for those. Sometimes they’re not. I’m not an expert in all of that. But those are the kind of things that you’d need to look into. But I also want to point out something else you said, which is those who are making their way through the immigration system on their papers. People who’ve been processed at the border and released are not automatically—there’s no automatic process. They’re told that they’re in deportation proceedings, but that means they have to then go to immigration court. And they can ask for asylum, but that’s not automatic. They have to actually file an asylum application, which is a big, long form, in immigration court if they want to ask for asylum and have that decided. If they want work authorization, they almost always have to apply separately to the USCIS for that work authorization. And all of that takes assistance, usually legal assistance. And that’s why I mentioned these clinics that were happening in New York and Chicago, because there’s a shortage of lawyers and other people who can help with the immigration processes. And one of the things that tends to happen whenever there’s a lot of people looking for immigration, help not enough people with the expertise to help them, is that there are unscrupulous people that will take advantage and will tell somebody that they’re filing their papers for some amount of money, and then have just absconded, or filed the wrong paperwork, which messes up their future immigration prospects. So there’s a lot of sort of follow-on issues that we can see happening from this amount of arrivals in a short period of time that there are no easy answers to right now. And no matter what we do at the border, we have this now population, some two to three million over the last, you know, eight years, that we are going to have to figure out what we do with. FASKIANOS: So we have a question from Cindy Wolf, who is a council member in San Juan City, California: I understand many Central Americans and Mexicans are fleeing the cartels. Can you please talk about how that situation interacts with drug cartels operating illegal border crossing operations? BROWN: Yeah. So for a long, long, long time when we talked about migrant smugglers at the border, these were small operations. Usually people from the towns and communities along the U.S.-Mexico border who would smuggle people across the border for, you know, a little bit of money. They were guides, is what they called themselves. Sometimes they’d be called polleros, sometimes coyotes, it depends on where they were. They were not part of organized criminal organizations. They weren’t affiliated with the drug cartels in any way. But the drug cartels control the territory along the U.S.-Mexico border on the Mexican side. And if you wanted to take migrants through a territory controlled by a cartel, you would have to pay them essentially a toll to allow you to take them through their territory. Over time, and this is, I would say, again, because of the volume and the in the recent numbers, instead of just taking a toll from the smugglers, the criminal cartels have taken over those operations. And so now they see it as another line of business. They smuggle drugs, they launder money, and they smuggle people. And, like, they are making money—trillions of dollars—into these transnational criminal organizations. You know, they—and it’s a line of business, just like any company has multiple lines of business. They see it as a moneymaker for them. And that makes it more dangerous for the smugglers. It makes it more dangerous for law enforcement to go after them. It also means that they have monetary incentives to keep the migration happening. And so they will advertise on these social media networks: Now’s the time to come because the law is going to change at the end of the year. One of the reasons we think we saw so many immigrants in December was because there was rumors flying and all of these channels, started by the smuggling organizations: You have to get to the border before the end of the year. They’re going to close the border in January. Or they’re going to stop taking appointments in CBP One app. So you have to get there before then. And so there was a lot of people that were making their way up through Panama and Darien Gap to try to get to the border before December. There was no truth to that. Nothing fundamentally changed between December and January. And it didn’t happen. But that drives people to come. And so I think that, you know, not only do we have the challenge of the things that are making migrants want to migrate in the first place, all of the challenges they have in their countries of origin, but we now have these criminal organizations that are incentivizing and enabling this migration to happen as well, and will continue to try to do that because they can make money at it. And so I think that that creates another set of challenges to managing in what’s happening right now. Irina, you’re on mute. I’m sorry. FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the last question. Sorry that I keep doing that. From Representative Steven Galloway. Q: Hi. Thank you for having us today. I guess I would just have two points that I would love it if you would touch on. One is the fentanyl epidemic that’s coming through. It’s not really just immigration. We’re having thousands of deaths even here in Montana. I serve in Great Falls, Montana. You’d think we’re away from the border, but it’s not. BROWN: Different border, but yeah. Q: The state can’t really do anything, but yet we have an example where Texas, you know, they put guardsmen and razor wire out and they went from three thousand people a day to three people a day. So I do think that the states do have some rights to protect themselves. BROWN: So talking about the fentanyl, what we know from what we have seized—what the government has seized of fentanyl—the vast majority, like 80-plus percent, of seizures of fentanyl happen at ports of entry. And they are being smuggled by U.S. citizens or permanent residents. There is a, you know, kind of understandable reason for that. There’s a lot more drugs that can be smuggled through a vehicle than on a person. That U.S. citizens are far less likely to be inspected thoroughly when coming through a port of entry. Ports of entry are busy. Your chances of being inspected at a port of entry are, you know, not that big, particularly at the busiest ports of entry. That’s not to say that drugs aren’t smuggled between ports of entry. That certainly is the case, although not as—probably not as much as it used to be. When I was at DHS the biggest issue we had between ports of entry was people smuggling large loads of marijuana. Since many states have legalized marijuana in the United States, it’s not as big a deal. There’s not as much marijuana coming in from across the border. But these other drugs that are much more dangerous are. And they’re much more dangerous in much smaller amounts. You know, the other thing I would say is that the migrants that are coming across and turning themselves in are not carrying drugs, by and large—(laughs)—because they’re turning themselves in. But the fact that we have migrants that are coming between ports of entry to seek asylum, rather than going to ports of entry—and I would make clear that that’s a choice the U.S. government has made. Previous to the 2010s when we had small numbers of people asking for asylum, they almost all came to ports of entry. Very few asked for asylum if they were caught between a port of entry, because we allowed it and because the numbers were small. But as there’s numbers started going up in the Obama administration, and continuing through to today, it was impacting the ports of entry doing the regular job of expecting the regular traffic. And so they started preventing people from coming in to ask for asylum there. And so the asylum seekers started going between ports of entry. And as I said, now the smugglers—you know, they don’t make money if they take you to a port of entry. They make money if they smuggle you in between. So some of this is the policy choices that we have made that have facilitated this between ports of entry thing. But because Border Patrol is dealing with that, they are not as many Border Patrol agents available to see what else is crossing the border. And we know that there have been an increased number of what they call got-aways. That is where we have detected people crossing, but we did not apprehend them. In that—and we don’t know what they may or may not have been carrying. The evidence that we have is that that is not a major vector for drugs coming into the United States. The majority of it probably is coming through ports of entry. But it’s not—it’s not nothing, either. And we—you know, if we were to change how we processed and how we incentivized migration at the border, to go back to ports of entry, and resourced the ports of entry to be able to handle that without distracting from the regular crossing, then Border Patrol could get back to, you know, looking for the people who are trying to get away and making sure that they’re not bringing in drugs or other threats to the country. FASKIANOS: Well, with that we are at the end of our time. Theresa Cardinal Brown, thank you so much for doing this. I apologize to all of you that we could not get to all of your raised hands and written questions and comments. This is—we’ll just have to continue to talk about this issue. We really appreciate it. We will send the link to the webinar and transcript afterwards. You can follow Theresa Cardinal brown on X at @BPC_TBrown, and the Bipartisan Policy Center has a lot of wonderful resources at BipartisanPolicy.org. And, as always, we encourage you to follow us, visit us at CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they are affecting the United States. Please do share your suggestions for future webinars. You can send an email to [email protected]. So, again, thank you all for being with us. And thank you, Theresa, for doing this.

Tarek El-Ariss, James Wright professor and chair of Middle Eastern studies at Dartmouth College, and Susannah Heschel, Eli M. Black distinguished professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, lead the conversation on navigating academic discourse on Israel and Palestine. FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR’s Higher Education Webinar. 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. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Tarek El-Ariss and Susannah Heschel with us to talk about navigating academic discourse on Israel and Palestine. Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright professor and chair of Middle Eastern studies at Dartmouth College. Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black distinguished professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College. And they teach together a class at Dartmouth called “The Arab, the Jew, and Constructions of Modernity.” So, with that, I’m going to turn the conversation over to them to talk about how they teach this class, and how they’ve worked together to address discourse on Israel and Palestine in Dartmouth, and best practices, as we all think about how to discuss these issues. So, over to both of you. Thank you for being with us. EL-ARISS: Thank you, Irina. Just to backtrack a little bit on the idea of the class, and our collaboration, I’m originally from Beirut. I’m trained in philosophy and literary studies. And I grew up during the civil war. And what we’re going through right now is extremely difficult to watch, to engage in, but this is something that we need to do. And this is something that I’ve been very interested in thinking about. And I just wrote a book on the subject, called Water on Fire: A Memoir of War, which really starts in Beirut, what was then called West Beirut, and ends in New York on 9/11, where I was actually teaching a course on the Middle East at NYU. And specifically on that day, I was teaching a course—a class on Islam. And needless to say, that these crises, these catastrophic events that happen from the region that I’m associated with, where I come, has been really fundamental to the way I think about scholarship, to the way I think about pedagogy, the way I think also about teaching and the community building that I think is really fundamental for the conversation today. So, I just wanted to kind of situate that within that context. And how do you think and deal with these questions? And how do you incorporate them? And where does the personal scholarship and the pedagogical engagement come, and so on? My work has been really dealing also with the question of the universal and the questions of the Enlightenment tradition. I mean, this is very important, and questions of modernity. Also wrote on the subject in the context of Arab modernity, in the context of what’s called the Nahda, or the nineteenth century Arab renaissance, and which is this kind of engagement with European modernity. So, this question of the universal, or the experience, of the European enlightenment tradition and how it kind of affects different parts of the world, how it allowed us to understand questions of human rights or questions of the universality is also at the core of this conversation here, and also of my intellectual training. So, this question has been really fundamental. I’ve also been interested in how a lot of these Arab intellectuals and scholars went to Europe in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and how they experienced this modernity. And that is not just simply an intellectual experience where they’re thinking about the ideas of the West and trying to translate them or reject them or accept them, but it is also an embodied experience. It’s also—I’ve been working on this question of the somatic, on the affect. And my work has also been, again, tracing this question of the universal of modernity to also think about it in the context of the digital age. And my last book is called Leaks, Hacks and Scandals. It’s on digital culture and the Arab Spring, and also digital culture that’s transforming some of our concepts of writing, political protest, community, the public sphere—all that is associated with that kind of eighteenth century that has been reverberated and had major influences across the region. So, I think I just want to kind of trace that genealogy. I think it’s important to also see where we come from and what are the things that have shaped a little bit our work, and where we have come, and then how we end up collaborating and also teaching this course that you mentioned. HESCHEL: Thank you, Irina. My name is Susannah Heschel. And, as you mentioned, I am chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. And my work together with Tarek stems in part from my academic scholarship. Also, perhaps from the experiences that I had growing up. I grew up in New York City and my father was a Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel. And he was involved in the civil rights movement, in the Second Vatican Council, and the movement against the war in Vietnam. And those were important experiences for me on many levels. For one thing, the civil rights movement and Dr. King made me fall in love with the Hebrew Bible. But, it was also an example for me of how to talk to people from another community, from a completely different environment. When I saw my father and Dr. King, and their relationship, or my father’s work with Cardinal Bayet at the Second Vatican Council and so on, I learned something about how to function in this world when you’re talking about very difficult, very painful issues. My own scholarship looks at Germany. And, in fact, I’m in Hamburg, Germany right now on a research fellowship at the Maimonides Institute. And I’m interested—my first book was a study of a Jewish historian in the nineteenth century in Germany who wrote an important book on the Koran showing parallels between Judaism and the Koran. And then later, he did work on Jewish rabbinic texts and the influence on the gospels, the New Testament, and Christian origins. So, I was interested, as you see, in how Jewish studies overlaps or interacts, and creates a synergy with other kinds of fields. And that continued with a book I wrote on Nazi theologians who supported Hitler. So, the question of how does the academy respond to political crisis, to fascism in this particular case? And now I’m working on another study, on the history of Jewish scholarship on Islam. But again, about interactions. I’m in the department of religion, as well as in Jewish studies. And the work that we do together, Tarek and I, on campus, has become very important for both of us, and also for our students. We teach the class together, the Arab, the Jew, and constructions of modernity. And we have a wonderful collection of students with different kinds of backgrounds—Palestinian, Jewish, from all parts of the world. And we try to create an atmosphere in the classroom of community and engagement with one another. We want the students to see themselves as working with us to do academic investigation, discussion, analysis. So, it was in that context then, that on October 7, when I was hearing the horrible news, I got a phone call from Tarek. And his voice sounded as horrified and devastated as I felt. And we planned two forums on campus that week of faculty—open to students, faculty, everyone. And the response was overwhelming. Far more than I expected. I think what was important—we can talk more about those forums—but I just want to say that we sought to model for the campus how we speak to each other, what kind of a tone we take, even in the midst of a crisis. Four of us from Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies, we speak with respect, of course, with dignity. But, also, in doing that, we modeled for the students. So, they asked questions that were sometimes difficult to hear. But they asked respectfully, politely. And so going on from there, we’ve established a series of dialogues. And we find that in our work together, having two professors teaching courses on difficult topics creates a much better atmosphere in the classroom. It unites students. It shows students how to talk to each other, even when they disagree, to have the dialogue taking place right there. So go ahead, Tarek. EL-ARISS: And the idea, we also have—we’ve worked—this is my seventh year at Dartmouth. So, this is really—we’ve been working a lot together also on inviting people and trying to bring different programs and departments to sponsor events, to bring authors, to bring filmmakers, so also there is—even to bring a rock band. We brought Mashrou’ Leila at some point to Dartmouth right before COVID hit. (Laughs.) And so, I’m coming to New York to see Hamed Sinno’s concert at the Met this weekend. So, this is—you also have to create a community within the classroom and outside of the classroom. And maybe Dartmouth, also the—where it is located, the size, also the resources, I mean, there are differences. Not every place has the same culture, or the same abilities, and the same—but this is our experience. And this is what we worked very, very consciously on building, is that we need to create this community that operates—that connects to culture, intellectual processes, learning, music, that brings all these bodies and different departments and programs together in an interesting way. And this is also what we teach. And we have Ezzedine Fishere, my colleague, who co-teachers, a course, with Bernie Avishai in government on the politics of Israel-Palestine. Susannah was teaching in the fall a course on 1967 with a colleague, also who works on Arabic literature, Jonathan Smolin. And the administration has been very receptive and encouraging to these kinds of models that allowed us to come up with these courses and bring different disciplinary backgrounds. Like, I come from literature and philosophy. And Susannah comes from religion, and so on. And bring these different backgrounds also that are cross disciplinary and that open up the subject matter in an interesting way. And our course, I mean, this is also where our research overlaps, is this question of the nineteenth century, which is very interesting in this part of the world—eighteenth/nineteenth century—is how Jews and Arabs deal with this question of modernity, which I think is very important. And because this is the question, also, of language, how Hebrew becomes modernized/standardized, how Arabic becomes standardized, how you rethink questions of community, questions of political institution, writing genres, but also how certain issues that deal with questions, for instance, of racism and xenophobia and antisemitism—begin to influence or affect some of these relations. And I edited an anthology on this question, where you have a lot of—called The Arab Renaissance—that we teach texts from it. And you have all these Jewish intellectuals from Beirut, from Cairo, engaging with the Dreyfus affair in 1894 to 1895. I mean, the Dreyfus affair is a huge global scandal at the end of the nineteenth century. And you have Reuters cable for the beginning—the beginning of mass communication—media. Technology that are starting. So, people in Beirut are reading what’s happening in Paris to Dreyfus as the cables are arriving. So, then you see these questions. And then you have Zola, you have this Jewish woman from Beirut, Esther Moyal, who’s writing about Zola and how Zola is defending Dreyfus in his famous article, in J’Accuse…!. So, you also have solidarity among Muslim scholars saying: Where is the French universal now? I mean, where are these human rights and equality and fraternity of the French Revolution in the face of this xenophobia, antisemitism that’s coming out of France? So, it’s also interesting to create genealogies. Like, how do we connect the genealogy from Zola, through Beirut, through Esther Moyal, to the intellectuals speaking truth to power, to Foucault, and Sartre, and Edward Said? And how do you kind of bring different narratives to the students that expand, also, our understanding of what’s happening in the Middle East, and the kind of perspective of conflict? So, I think when October 7 happened, the students were part of the community thinking about these things in multiple ways, in diverse ways, and students coming from different backgrounds. HESCHEL: Yes. I would just to add to that, that it’s important for me, as the chair of the Jewish Studies Program, that we have alliances with the different departments and programs on campus, many different ones. So, I want courses that we teach in Jewish studies, but that are cross listed in African American studies, in sociology, history, religion, and government, and so forth, women’s studies. That’s very important to me. And not only because of the alliances that we can create, and in some sense reproduce what Tarek was just talking about in the Nahda, but also because this sheds light on aspects of Jewish history, of Jewish religious thought, that we wouldn’t otherwise recognize. We see, for example, the parallels between Jews coping with European modernity and Arabs coping, in very similar ways. And also, being horrified at some of the same things. So, the construction of our identities has some parallels. There’s a way in which teaching this class also demonstrates to students that there was a very different trajectory from what one might imagine, looking back from today and all of the conflicts and terrible events and catastrophes that are going on, even at this moment. But to see that there was something else that was blossoming. It didn’t last, but it may come back. And that also is an important element here, to give our students some hope. And to show them, also, that the situations, the conflicts that we look at, are terribly complex. So, we tell the students, don’t look for a simple narrative. Try to learn to hold onto complexity, something that can’t be unraveled easily. There is no bad witch and fairy godmother, bad guy and good guy. Don’t divide the world that way. That just exacerbates the polarization that’s affecting all of us. See the complexity. And look at the future. Imagine, optimistically, what you would like to see in twenty, thirty, fifty years. How can we get there? What are the roadblocks? What do we need to do? What can you, students, do? What problems can you tackle and overcome so that we can achieve something? Too often we are so mired in the present that we don’t think about the future. And we have to offer our students that possibility and encourage them to think about a better future for themselves. EL-ARISS: And this is—pedagogically, it’s really very important, especially now. When I look at the pictures coming out of the region, I mean, I’m devastated. But how do I deal with this devastation? And how do I transform it? Do I bring it to class as is? Because I feel like I always—I also write on monsters and really kind of dark things that are happening in the world. But also my cynicism and my sometime despair—I feel like when I’m in the classroom, I also have to give hope. I can’t also just bring it as it is to the classroom. I feel like in front of them, I want to be hopeful. I want to—and I do it organically. It is not almost by design, but it is almost something—because I feel like I owe it to that generation also. And this is also kind of a question about where our personal research and what we teach, how they come together, or they might differ. And how thinking pedagogically also is very important, especially in these moments of crisis. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. I want to go to the group for questions and comments, and then we can continue the conversation. (Gives queuing instructions.) So, the first question we’re going to go to Mark Tessler. Q: This a great discussion. And I hope I can ask a question to each of the speakers to push a little bit. The end of the nineteenth century that Tarek has been talking about is really an important period. And he did a good job of describing it. But, it’s in the context of a region where there are centers and peripheries. And, I mean, I went to school in Tunisia, and I would say that’s part of the center, surprisingly. Egypt is the center, but Tunisia was not too far behind. But Palestine was the periphery. And it wasn’t totally untouched, but relatively speaking change was much less and much slower. And there’s an analysis by a number of Arab scholars, one of them was my professor a long time ago when I went to grad school, that this—I hesitate to use the word backwardness—but this relatively unchanged circumstance in Palestine, with a traditional inward-looking elite not really interested in the kinds of changes that are taking place in Egypt with the reopening of Ijtihad and so forth. And so, the argument is that that’s an important part of the story about why Palestinians fared so poorly in the context of their emerging confrontation with Zionism. And so, I cover this period a bit in my own course on Israel-Palestine. I forgot to say I’m at the University of Michigan, where I teach about the Middle East. And so, it’s interesting to think about this period and the larger implications that Dr. El-Ariss has been pointing out, very significant. But, if we kind of see what does that mean for Palestine, the story is going to be quite different. If I could ask a quick question, I’ll try to be brief, to Professor Heschel. And I read your father’s work, and glad to know a few. This is a really interesting story as well, in how the two people are struggling together to—I’ve done some writing on this myself earlier in my career—to find their way, to not lose their identity, to balance tradition, but to be of the modern world. This is not so much about Israel-Palestine, but this is an important story. But if we focus on, in particular, North Africa—and this would apply to Egypt to some extent, as well—this meant for the Jewish populations of those societies less of an alliance in the service of a joint struggle that they’re both engaging in, and more—it gets mixed up with colonialism. The Jewish elite, and to some extent, the Jewish masses becomes very European in their orientation. And so as we look to the evolution, the story isn’t quite as happy as—both of these peoples have common concerns. They’re facing them at the same time in history in response to the same stimuli from Europe. And, my goodness, the dialogue between them is enriching. And we have examples of that. But, I would say that it isn’t—and for at least the Maghreb, where there are half a million Jews—it’s not the most important part of the story. This quest for modernization in the end doesn’t build alliances with the Muslims in those countries. There are exceptions, but as a generalization. But rather, puts them if not politically—and sometimes it is political—but at least culturally on the side of the Europeans. And the divide between the indigenous Jewish population and the indigenous Muslim Arab population actually grows. So, just a few things to—food for thought. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Tarek, let’s go to you first, I think. EL-ARISS: Yeah. I mean, Mark, I think it’s a—I also need to push back against your comment. (Laughs.) But, I think it’s obviously a more complex story. I mean, a lot of the Palestinians are also studying at the Syrian Protestantn College in Beirut, a lot of Lebanese from out Lebanon are in Cairo founding Al-Ahram. So, the way you locate cultural development or Nahda, but the way you define center and periphery, I kind of—I contest this binary. And I think it’s a much more complex picture. And you have the movement across that region. I mean, you have also people who are writing in exile in France. You have people who are in Russia studying a lot of Lebanese Greek Orthodox, for instance, and Palestinians. So,  we  need to think territorially, but also in terms of that region itself as kind of engaging with these questions of modernity in interesting ways. And of course, it’s a complex relation to modernity. I mean, there is a pull. There is a rejection. There is a fascination. But if you look at it as a whole comprehensively, you see those kind of movements that we try to capture in our class. HESCHEL: So, Mark, of course I know who you are, and I know your work and admire it greatly. And far be it for me to—(laughs)—answer the questions that you yourself write about. I’d just say that of course I agree with you. And we—in our class—when we do talk about these issues, we range from everything from Jessica Marglin’s work to The Rabbi’s Cat. And I think one of the big problems we focus on is the Crémieux Decree, and that has larger resonances, in fact; the significance—the political significance of something like that, how that is to be evaluated and how something like that actually recurs throughout the course of Jewish history with often very dire consequences that you pointed out. So, thank you for the comment, and thank you for your work. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question, a written question from Alison Brysk at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s a professor of global governance. She appreciates your model but has had different disturbing experiences teaching contemporary poli-sci, and IR, and human rights classes on a very politicized campus. My whole agenda is universalism, context, international humanitarian law for all sides. But, about half of my students are simply locked into preexisting identities and convictions and will complain when I try to present a basic range of perspectives and evidence on roots of the conflict. Do you have any suggestions for the beleaguered public university when students experience humanistic history as hate speech? I don’t know who wants to start. HESCHEL: Go ahead, Tarek. EL-ARISS: This is something we also struggle with. I mean, this question of the universal; come back to it. That’s, of course, the critique of the universal as Eurocentric, as only covering or being framed along very specific political lines that exclude the other or that does not represent people who might come from, to come back to Mark’s term, the periphery in some way, whatever that periphery is. But again when you are thinking about conflict, how do you work outside of that framework? I mean, this is also the question. So how—we need it in order to think of a community of—we need to think of—do the critique of universality, but also take the good things, because we also have human rights. So, how are we going to talk about human rights? How are we going to talk about things that matter for everyone that we all need to care about and be mobilized if we only situate forms of identity or rights in the particular, and the particular that is defined in very specific ways? And I think there should be teachable moments like, OK, you don’t think—let’s ask the students or let’s organize teach-ins about, what do they mean by certain terms? I mean, I think we use terms and concepts really without knowing what they truly mean, or what their histories are. I mean, we are at the university. This is the place to actually engage and say what this kind of humanism or universality that is seen as Eurocentric and exclusive in many ways, then what is its history? How—did it not also influence the way people in that part—in Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, different parts of the world where they also think of themselves as modern subjects and as claimants to particular rights and traditions, and so forth? So, I know where we are. I mean, I understand the, kind of, current moment. But, how do we try to bring it to a level where, OK, what do you mean by this? Ask questions. Listen, but then ask questions, and open it up to a conversation. Maybe the class is about something else, but maybe because of the crisis, the class has to pivot or shift to a different moment that deals with a particular event that is unfolding in the world. HESCHEL: But let me just add that I understand a hundred percent and have experienced it, too. My sense is, first of all, students are very lonely. Identity—that kind of insistence on one’s own identity—is a very lonely position to take. Students will end up saying: You will never understand what it feels like to be me. And that needs to be challenged. It may be, I will never understand you and your identity, but I can help you understand yourself better. I can help you accept relationships with other people, and even be loved by other people. So, there have to be ways to open up and not end with the declaration of identity, and that is a problem. I also would say that a lot of students have a very strong sense of injustice, and I admire that and appreciate it. But, sometimes they get into a state of despair over it, and we need to make sure that we can lift them up and not let them sink into a hole of despair, but to talk in more concrete terms about what they can do and make it a viable engagement with injustice—overcoming injustice. So, those are just a few things. There’s so much more to say about it. But we both have experienced this, and we’re with you. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from Margaret Lewis, who’s at Seton Hall University. Q: Thanks so much. I’m both a professor and an associate dean, so I think about this from several angles. So, I wanted just to think more broadly about navigating the academic discourse. It’s one thing to do that in an intimate course setting where you know the students, they know you. But, I wonder if you have thoughts, both about how to create community conversations or spaces outside of a class when we do have a situation that emerges—for example, not just one we’re having now, but go back to Freddie Gray or anything that’s really rocked our students. And then maybe separately, but if you have thoughts about university messaging, the emails that our students expect us to put out after events and the extent to which those are helpful. And, if so, how to craft them in ways that: Is it expressing care just for the students? How do we try to bring in different stakeholders to give us language that will work across different stakeholders? Any of that would be hugely helpful as we all navigate this. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Tarek, or— HESCHEL: Yeah. I’m not sure it’s a single answer that will address every institution because there are important differences. You say you’re at Seton Hall, which is Catholic, and it’s a different culture on campus. I’m familiar with that; I actually lectured there a few months ago. In terms of the statements, I found that the outrage over many university president statements puzzling initially. And then I realized, I suppose, people were psychologically/emotionally so devastated that it was a displacement, and then a lot of argumentation arose over the precise language of statements. I’m not sure if statements are the way to address emotional devastation or catastrophe. And the statements that were quite formal in the language, or politically oriented, perhaps that wasn’t the way to do it. I’m not sure—I haven’t been an administrator—exactly how to formulate it, but I think that’s—in those kinds of moments, that’s what people are looking for, some sense of support. I also think it’s important at the convocation in the fall—Tarek and I were discussing this earlier—for the university to make its message clear, the mission: What are you supposed to be doing here, undergraduates, at this university for the next four years? This is what we want to offer you. And then, at some point later on, have the students write something. What they’re looking for because the only essay you have from them really is for the admissions. And once they arrive, it would be good to hear from them: What do you want to get out of these four years? What do you want from your classes, from your professors, and so on? And then finally, I’d just say that the atmosphere in the classroom is very important—friendly, happy, a joyous atmosphere throughout the semester—to keep the students together as a group having a good time, feeling that they’re there for each other, forming a community. We find that very important when we’re teaching a class that can, in fact, give rise to terrible conflict. We want to avoid that. So, we bring cookies. We have an open door in our office. We have conversation. So, again, the atmosphere. Tarek, go ahead. EL-ARISS: Yeah. No, and I think also we need to rethink, I mean, outreach. We also go to the students. We go to different religious groups, different houses. I went. Susannah went. We go also into their own spaces. We don’t just organize the event and say come; we go to them. And when we bring people—we’ve organized a couple of forums and we brought some people from outside, and we said—we organized breakfast with the students. We have organized places where the students also feel comfortable. And it’s very important, this question of space and you going to them. And they, then, are hosting you on their own—their own dorms or their own whatever—houses and so on. I think that’s very important. And also, the administration is not—the more I think about it, it’s not one thing. It’s not like the administration is this abstract thing, like a tower in the middle of campus that’s—I mean, I’m also the administration. Susannah is also the administration. I mean, my office is open to these students. They come. I listen to them. Some of them are not happy with the way things are going. I comfort them. I sometimes transmit their messages to higher-ups and say this—and who ask me, actually, how are the students doing? And I say, I met with so-and-so, and he said this, or she said that. And also, I have say, okay, I have this kid that said, you’re going to run the Arabic Club this term, or you’re going to help me on this research dealing with these questions, because I also have the ability to recognize some of the things they’re struggling with. So, the administration, we have to—or how the university responds—has to be rethought, and also support organic processes that are already happening. Who among the faculty are in conversation? What can the administration do to give them more support, to highlight more what they’re doing? So, I mean, we’re seeing some efforts that are coming from high up, from the top down; like, OK, we’re going to have a task force and start dialogue. But, I think it’s important that the administration responds to what faculty are doing and supports it. So, support these organic processes, these community-building processes that, I think, are much more effective and are more likely to produce results than some sort of, kind of a, let’s bring a consultant and tell us what we have to do, and then form this committee, and then make everyone go through more drills about how to be a good citizen in this university. I don’t think that is effective. I don’t think it’s effective in—also in other contexts that we’ve been experiencing on campuses. FASKIANOS: I’m going to take a written question from Mark Diamond which is—I think follows onto this, from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles: Could both of you share your thoughts about academic freedom on college campuses, especially as it relates to discourse on Israel and Palestine? When, if at all, is student or faculty discourse on campus out of bounds and poses a threat to others in the university? HESCHEL: Well, I can’t address the legal issues. I know that each university has a set of standards and so forth, and they may well vary. I know one college president of a Catholic university told the students: You may hold a prayer vigil, but you may not hold a demonstration. And that was that. So, that I don’t think happens everywhere, but that was one example. What is out of bounds? What’s out of bounds is, I would say first of all, people who don’t know very much about the topic that they’re addressing or screaming about. So, I begin with that. I was talking to some colleagues about this. Don’t teach a course if you don’t really know the subject or limit the course to what you know. I would encourage students who are deeply concerned about a political conflict to take courses on that conflict to get some background. We also encourage our students to think about what they can do in the future. Making a demonstration on a college campus is exciting, but actually, it can be more important to work for a political candidate, for example. To do canvassing and do work for an NGO, or come to Washington and be an aide at a congressional office. So, pointing that out to an 18-year-old is sometimes very helpful. Telling them that they can actually do something very concrete and powerful—not just on the college campus, but on the national level of politics. And then, I would say, yes, in terms of the kind of language and out of bounds, that’s really our point of our work. We wanted to demonstrate to the campus how to have a dialogue that’s respectful, that’s polite—even if we disagree—and that we talk to one another at a university in a way that’s different from the kind of conversation one has at a restaurant with your friends. We also emphasize that there’s a distinction between private and public. I may have some pretty strong views that I tell my family or my close friends—I’m not going to tell the whole world. That would be highly inappropriate. I think faculty need to be professional, and so do students. Once you’re in a university, you have to be a student. That’s a particular role, an academic role, and that, also, should be outlined to students when they’re admitted to the university, or at the fall convocation. Professional behavior is something we expect from everyone—from a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, an electrician. I don’t want vulgar, sexist jokes when I’m consulting a physician, for example. And I don’t want a certain kind of language from faculty colleagues. So, these are basic standards of behavior that I think have been eroding in recent years, and we need to come back to them. EL-ARISS: Yeah, but we also understand that the university itself, the education and mission and the university as an institution, is no longer correspond to the model that we also study, or the Humboldt model, or the creation and the formation of the national subject. So, there is also something about the university itself that is shifting in terms of use, I mean, people say, if you also look at statistics about what people think of higher education in the U.S. and so on. So, there is a lot of questions about the university. What is the university? I mean, a lot of kids come to the university, they already know more than we do about a lot of things. They have technology on their side. Some of them are making money from apps that they created, and they talk to their parents, and they say is it really a good investment or not? So, also, we have to acknowledge that there is something about the university that—the humanistic tradition and the liberal tradition—that perhaps is no longer functioning in the same way that we imagine it to be. And we need to take this challenge seriously. And is the green a place where you take your students when it is nice out if you are in Ithaca or Ann Arbor—(laughs)—in April or end of April to do the class outside because you are missing the sun, or is the green a place of protest now, or identity affirmation. So, there are real fundamental questions about the university, and about our mission, and about our classrooms, and it’s not an either/or, it is not either this or that. How do we kind of bring the community into a space of negotiation where I understand that this is what the students are feeling right now, and they are angry, and they want to express themselves in an embodied fashion, and really do something about the world because we also expect them, when we ask them to apply how they are going to change the world. So, we also set them up for it. And so, we need to have a conversation about that. This is a moment of crisis, but it’s a moment of self-reflection that I think is really important to have—every university needs to have it, and it could have been some other crisis unfolding. But, I think this is an opportunity to ask these questions and have these conversations among—and Susannah was just we were talking today that we should have these conversations about—with faculty, with colleagues, cross-generationally, what do people think, how are they teaching, how do they come to the subject that they come to, what are their assumptions, what is the point of the classroom? Is it the political platform? Is it the place of intellectual inquiry? How do they come together? So, these are important questions I feel like, and this is the moment to ask them and engage them. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Heidi Lane. Q: Thank you very much. The question I have relates to things that I don’t actually experience in professional military education, but I have in teaching in universities like Dartmouth. And the question is, what do you think Dartmouth, or universities in general, should be doing to help faculty like yourselves engage in this kind of open, trust-building course? That’s the first question—because that really is a pressure that I think a lot of universities and administrators are feeling and navigating that for their faculty is maybe even as difficult as the relationship between the faculty and the students. That’s the first thing. And then the second question is, how do you change your model when you are teaching in, let’s say, an open session that’s like a lecture that is not part of the course? Because it’s one thing to build that trust within your class, within maybe twenty or so students over a semester, but it’s another thing to apply that same model when you are going into an open session and maybe even people from outside the campus are coming. So, thank you. HESCHEL: Those are big questions—thank you. There’s much to say. I’ll just say briefly, so on October 9, Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. my phone rang. It was the dean of faculty at Dartmouth calling to tell me that the president of Dartmouth—who was new, Sian Beilock—had asked her to get in touch with me because the president wanted to have dialog on campus. So, too often, I am afraid administrations aren’t really aligned with their own faculty. They don’t know who is teaching what, or who has what expertise, and they don’t turn to faculty in moments like this. And I actually—I’ve seen that happen after October 7 at times when I thought why didn’t the president call the faculty? Get the faculty, who are the ones working with students, to set up the kinds of forums that we held. I think it would have been very helpful. There is sometimes not a close enough relationship at some colleges and universities between administration and faculty, and faculty can actually help a great deal since we’re spending every day with the students in the classroom. So, that’s one thing. I think another issue is, when we hire faculty, we have to make sure we are hiring people who are willing to engage in dialogue. Who are willing to sit down and talk to people, or teach with people, from other programs, people who have different backgrounds with whom they may disagree. If they are willing, and enthusiastically, willing to do that kind of teaching, then I say bravo, hire them. But, those who are unwilling—that’s a problem at a university. If we aren’t talking to each other as faculty, then the institution is going to fall apart. We need to have that engagement; that includes in the sciences, the biologists and the geologists talk to each other. So, we have to foster that and make that an imperative, actually, a criterion for faculty. Are they engaged with one another? Are they open, willing to talk? There is more to say, but Tarek, you go ahead. EL-ARISS: No, I mean, basically recognize where there are efforts and where there are conversations—productive conversations—and see how you can support them; support them financially, support them logistically, get assigned space, fund—I mean, we’re lucky, really. We’re really lucky, I mean, in many ways, to have each other, but also to have an administration that was very receptive and very supportive, and said, what do you need? How can we help you to continue to do this? And that was very important. And they understood that, and they recognized—they knew us but we were kind of, I would say, a bit under the radar, and there is a new administration and new kind of leadership. So, again, it’s like, immediately they recognized that, OK, they are doing something, and what can we do to support it? How can we make it grow? How can we—and they continue to do that. And we took the initiative. We also went on a retreat to think about courses, to think about people we want to invite. So, I mean, I think it’s important that you have an administration, who are on the ground—(laughs)—are talking to faculty, who have their hand on the pulse and see where these collaborations are, and then try to figure out ways where—again, the changes are not coming from some cookie-cutter model that’s coming from the outside and being imposed on the campus, on the faculty, but actually—I mean, I’m a literary critic, and I always tell the students read the text; like do a close reading. So, do your close reading and see what is happening, and then from there, you move to the theoretical. No, don’t impose the theory on the situation, but rather let it come out of what is happening on the ground. And I think—so, this requires this different administrative direction from what we’ve been witnessing, which is bringing people from outside and training us in all kinds of ways to be better teachers, and more humane, and so on. And that’s taking the place of a lot of the things we do like the humanity especially—(laughs)—which is supposed to be doing that. So, recognize and build these infrastructures of support by recognizing what is happening on your campus, and the particularity of your campus, and your student body, and your geographic location. HESCHEL: What Tarek is trying to emphasize is that what’s important for the college is teaching that engages students in a dialogue, that brings students from different positions together, that that’s what should be recognized as the most important innovation in teaching and the most important thing for the future of the college and for the students, and not the size of the classroom, let’s just say, yeah? FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Karen Jackson-Weaver who is associate vice president of global inclusive faculty engagement and innovation advancement at NYU, and she also comes as a former dean at both Princeton and Harvard Kennedy School. So, she thanks you both for the important framing of your collaboration in the work you’ve done at Dartmouth. My sense is that the kind of sophistication and complexity that Professor Heschel mentioned that is very much needed is missing in academic discourse and in many conversations taking place on college campuses. Do you have any suggested guides or resources that you can share, which have been useful in the Dartmouth community and elevate the discourse in a meaningful way? HESCHEL: Look, that’s a great question, and it’s going to be waking me up in the middle of the night because I’m going to think of some things to tell you. But I would just say that I come to this because I wrote book about a Jewish scholar writing about the Jewishness of the New Testament, Jesus in the context of Judaism, and so on. Abraham Geiger was his name—and how the Christians responded to his arguments—very negatively, very critical—and he responded to them, and so on. So, there was a kind of engagement that I analyzed very carefully, something primarily from the late 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, and that gave me a way of sort of understanding the subtlety of arguments, how they were perceived in the moment. So, that trained me to look for things like this, and I think that’s what I bring to this kind of situation: this way of trying to engage in—yeah? EL-ARISS: Yeah. I mean, my simple answer would be us. (Laughs.) But, we’ve actually been working on coming up with some dialogue, reflections on dialogue, or some resources that might—about this because this is also something that we’re thinking about—not about what we’re doing, but also as some sort of values that I think are important, not just for us, for our campus, and for the different constituencies on our campus who want to engage in this, who want to organize events dealing with these questions. So, I think eventually we will develop something, but this is not—I mean, really, we were just doing our normal work and—(laughs)—working on the—( HESCHEL: Yeah, but I would say that we understand that fields develop by engaging with different disciplines, with different theoretical models. That’s how we move ahead in a field. So, I would say, first of all, to any faculty member, think about how your field has developed and what has generated new ideas. What’s made it exciting is to engage with others; not to simply hide in its own corner. OK. FASKIANOS: OK, I’m going to go next to Stephen Zunes, with the raised hand. (Pause.) Yeah, we can hear you. Can you hear us? Q: OK. How about now? EL-ARISS: Yes. HESCHEL: Yes. FASKIANOS: Yes, we can. Q: OK, hi. I’m Stephen Zunes, University of San Francisco. I’ve been teaching Israel and Palestine for over thirty-five years now, and there’s been a big shift in, sort of, the assumptions that students come in with. I mean, when I first started teaching, pretty much every student was familiar with the Israeli narrative, but not really aware of the Palestinian narrative, so I had to bend over backwards to make sure they knew that, as well. Today, if anything, it’s the other way around. It’s been quite striking, the shift—generational shift. I mean, maybe because the larger percentage are people of color. These people—this is a generation where black lives matter, indigenous rights—whereas our generation where the nationalism was a progressive force, and many of us saw Zionism as a national liberation movement for Jews. Nationalism seems more of a reactionary force to today’s youth of the Eastern Europe, and everything else, and Israel is seen more as a colonial settler-state. And, I was wondering, since it appears you all have been teaching this for a while, too, I was wondering if you’ve noticed similar shifts, and how you might have adjusted your teaching in light of this. EL-ARISS: I think—I don’t know, I think a lot of our students come—they don’t know a lot about this, and maybe this is where we are, or different campuses. I mean, there are some students who know and who are engaged. But I think what we try to do is that we try to kind of give them the longer history of this, so take them back to the eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and to see where they ended up—so not to kind of focus—like, we have colleagues who teach, like, Israel—the politics of Israel-Palestine and focus on the contemporary conflict, so they are more—(laughs)—they can tell you more about what the students say about those particular narratives. But, the students who come to us really don’t know anything beyond like the contemporary conflict if they know anything. So, we try to take them to places that really are uncharted—Damascus affair, the Dreyfus affair—I mean, Max Nordau on early Zionism. I mean, so texts that are foundational—and then they take politics of Israel-Palestine, and then they engage it, and they have a different understanding. So, we try to do the kind of earlier work to open up those narratives, so we’re not just simply pro-Palestinian, or pro-Israeli, or outside of these just simple binaries. We kind of take them even to open a wider horizon. HESCHEL: I would just add that I think—I’ve also noticed what you’ve noticed. There seems to be, also, just a wide rift generationally on these political issues and on many others as well, of course. And what I found in the course that I taught together with Jonathan Smolin in the fall on the 1967 war, sometimes called the Six-Day War, students came in and they thought they knew something—on both sides, by the way—but it turns out they didn’t. So, that’s one thing—to show students what they don’t know; that what they know is only a drop in the bucket, and there is so much more. Also, to show them that whatever you think there is something new that comes in that actually contradicts that assumption because there is so much evidence coming from so many different parts of the world—because it’s not ever really about just Israel and Palestine; it’s about nearly every other country one can think of, from the United States to China. So, the complexity is something. And then another—finally I want to say, sometimes students come in and they are looking for somebody to blame. That’s something important for us to address. This is not about blaming one side or the other, and sometimes, for example, yeah, one side is bad and one side is good. Sometimes both are bad. And when both are bad, I tell them. Even someone who has committed a terrible crime, don’t you still care about that person that is still a human being, who should be treated with dignity? So, let’s keep that in mind as well. Let’s remember that even those who do terrible things, nonetheless, these are human beings. There are reasons for it. Let’s figure that out, let’s see what we can do about it. But, don’t just dismiss it and say, oh, well, they’re terrible; let’s walk away—so to keep the students engaged all the time, to show the complexity, to show that it’s more and more and more complex, involving so many different groups, and not try to reduce it to bad guys, good guys, this one is to blame, this one is the innocent. Nobody ultimately, in politics, is innocent, and nobody is a hundred percent guilty. They become interlocking as we know, and they are doing that dance. What was the line about Fred Astaire danced with—who was it? Not Jane Crawford—Ginger Rogers, but she did everything he did but backwards and wearing high heels. So, there are ways in which each side influences the other, and we have to think about it in those terms as well. They are not separate from each other. So, those are some of the ways we try to overcome the biases that they walk into the classroom with, and we ask them sometimes, how has your mind changed in the last few weeks of the course? Every few weeks ask them that. What changes here when we bring you this document, or this fact that you didn’t know about? And hopefully they will experience the class as something uplifting and exciting, and that they will know that they are coming away as a different person with so much more knowledge. So, thanks for the question. FASKIANOS: And with that, we are at the end of our hour. I’m sorry that we couldn’t get to all the questions, raised hands, but I can say that I wish I were at Dartmouth and could take your class. (Laughs.) So, maybe perhaps you should do it and have it be available online to a broader group. I don’t know. (Laughs.) It’s a thought. Thank you very much, Tarek El-Ariss and Susannah Heschel, for this wonderful hour. We do appreciate it. And to all of you for your questions and comments. And we encourage you to follow us at @CFR_academic on X and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analyses on global issues. And we look forward to your continued participation in CFR programs. So, thank you again. (END)

Jess Maurer, executive director of the Maine Council of Aging, discusses demographic trends in Maine and the work of her organization. Jennifer Sciubba, global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, discusses demographic trends and the implications of an aging population at home and abroad. A question-and-answer session follows their opening remarks.  TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. And CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. Thank you all for being with us today for this discussion. The webinar is on the record. We will circulate the video and transcript and post it on our website after the fact at CFR.org. We are pleased to have with us today Jess Maurer and Jennifer Sciubba to talk about demographic trends. We’ve shared their bios with you, but I’ll give you a few highlights. Dr. Jennifer Sciubba is a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She’s an expert on demographic trends and their implications for politics, economics, and social relationships. Previously, she worked for the Hess Center for New Frontiers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and was a tenured professor at Rhodes College. Dr. Sciubba is the author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape our World. Jess Mauer is the executive director of the Maine Council on Aging, which she co-founded in 2012. The Maine Council on Aging consists of over 135 organizations, businesses, municipalities, and community members. Its recent achievements include increased pay for direct care workers and increased eligibility for the Medicare Savings Program in Maine. And Ms. Mauer previously worked in the Maine office of the attorney general for nearly two decades. So thank you both for being with us. Jennifer, I thought we could begin with you to give an overview of the global demographic trends you’re seeing and their political, social, and societal, and economic implications. SCIUBBA: Absolutely. Glad to do so. And I have just a few slides to show and tell a little story, if we can pull those up. Perfect. Let’s go to the next one, but it might even—that one might be blank, and it might be the one after that. Perfect. Let’s start there. So pop back one to the star. So let’s think about that.  I love this, the idea of the night sky as a metaphor for understanding global population. Because I remember learning—I had to take one science class in college as an International Studies major. And that one science class was astronomy. And I was so fascinated in learning that when we look at those stars in the night sky, some of them are so far away from us that they don’t even exist anymore by the time their light reaches us here on Earth. And when I think about where we are in this moment of global population trends, I think it’s a lot like that night sky.  In parts of the globe, the human population is already or will soon be shrinking. And that’s really different from what we hear all the time. We hit eight billion globally in November. And Irina mentioned, that’s the title of my most recent book. And we know that we are continuing to see global population grow. But what I don’t think everyone grasps is that while those overall numbers are increasing, there’s a tectonic force underneath that is leading us towards shrinking. It’s kind of like looking at a star that seems to be shining brightly, but in actuality it’s already imploded. And so to understand where we are today in terms of global population, and where we’re going, I want to explain first how we got here. And what I hope you’ll take away from this few minutes that I have to speak with you is thinking about the night sky as representative of our soon-to-be shrinking population is that it is a trap in data analysis. And so I’m actually going to talk about two traps and data analysis and how they relate to demographics, that I think can help us understand how to incorporate demography into our larger planning, which is exactly what I hope you’re all doing at the state and local levels. So let’s go to the next slide, please. Alright, so how did we get here? There are just three ingredients to population change. So that’s all we have to wrap our brains around, and that’s fertility rates. We typically talk about the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime. Mortality rates. Think about us dying. And, of course, migration. And if we’re at the global level, like the whole planet, migration doesn’t much matter. We don’t have other species coming here yet. But when we zoom down, it matters a lot. And I know to a lot of you on this webinar it matters a great deal for what determines population change at your local level, whether it’s in-migration or out-migration there. So where else did we—how else do we get here, putting these components together, particularly the births and deaths? Next slide, please. A quick overview of our human history in thirty seconds here. It took from all of human history until around the year 1800 for Earth to amass its first one billion people. But as we started to get control over that second variable on that preceding slide, over death, we started to see populations boom. In particular, we were able to help infants and children live to reproductive ages. And that allowed population to boom. If you’ll click one more time you’ll see that it actually boomed from 1.6 billion at the start of the century to 6.1 billion by the century’s end.  And I want to flag this as a moment to understand that probably for everyone on this webinar—maybe a few of you who are in your early twenties not so much—but this is what you were born into, right? I know this is what I was born into. We were born into this context. And when I talked about traps—you know, a little hint about the traps in data analysis, this is one part for us to take stock. What kind of world were you born into? What kind of messages were you receiving about population? We’re going to think about how that colors our view of it. Next slide, please. We’re not just talking about size of the global population. We’re talking about a shift in the composition of the global population as well. So what you see here, they’re commonly called population pyramids because they actually used to all be shaped in this little pyramid, like 1950s, but maybe more accurately called population trees now because they’re actually turning into more of trees. And it’s typically males on the left, in the blue, females on the right in the red. And we see age groups in the ascending order there. So it’s thin at the top in the 1950s. Not a lot of folks living to be over ninety, a hundred years old. And we see that it’s fatter at the bottom. And if you think about where people of reproductive age, particularly women of reproductive age, would be located on that pyramid, and you see that it’s fatter at the bottom, you know that your fertility rate—the average number of children born per woman—was over replacement level. By the time we get to 2023, we now have a total fertility rate globally of 2.3 children per woman on average. And that’s really close to replacement level of 2.1. And where we’re headed is a more tree-like structure. Next slide, please. That mirrors what happens at the country level. And so still today there are countries in the world that do have high fertility rates. In case you thought I was off my rocker in talking about shrinking populations and forgetting about places like Nigeria, or Tanzania, Ethiopia. No, that’s certainly still the case. But there are fewer of them. There are only about eight countries left in the world, out of two hundred, where women have five or more children on average. That is a complete sea change from 1960s, when it was, you know, about 130 countries. So the shape of Turkey’s population today looks a lot like the shape of the global population. And if you’ll click one more time you’ll see that Japan’s population has that tree-like structure, with lots and lots of folks at those older ages and fewer people at the younger ages. So the next slide, we’ll see why that happened. I said there were tectonic forces at work all along. Well, here they are. Since the 1960s, the rate of global population change has been slowing. And so what we end up with, next slide, is that in 1968 lots of women—lots of countries had high fertility. Very few had two or fewer children on average. And now, we click again, and we see that very few have high fertility and that two out of every three people on the planet live somewhere with below replacement fertility. And nearly half the countries that are above replacement, are only just above it, with women having fewer than three children on average. So we’re part of a global trend. And I think this is a spot for us to pause and think about why it matters. And that, you know, we’ll get into this in Q&A because I don’t want to get into Jess’ time, but when we think about priorities, and setting priorities and policy—and I’m at the global level—then we’re thinking about how the interests of those countries that have rapidly aging and potentially shrinking populations might increasingly differ from those that still have very young and growing populations. And it’s just something that I want us to keep at the front of our minds, is how investments and policy priorities might be different in those different settings. But, of course, we all need to be thinking about demography. Next slide. Because if you are thinking about planning for education, care work, et cetera, demography matters. This is just a quick map to show you places where fertility is still higher, which are some of the poorer places on the planet, as you might expect. OK. Next slide. OK, so the first trap is getting stuck in the past in terms of our trends here. So we know that trends change but sometimes our thinking does not change. And so I want to make sure that we understand how much the global situation behind fertility has changed, like those stars. OK, next slide. And, of course, that matters at the state level as well. So state—here, I’m thinking about the United States. And we’re about to make that a very different kind of state. But we—whoops. My own little screen just did something strange. So U.S. population has been, in some ways, exceptional compared to some of its peers for a while. We had relatively higher low fertility, if that makes sense to you. So low could be anywhere from zero to two, right? And we were on that relatively higher end of low. But that’s not necessarily the case anymore, as we’ll see here. And I’m sure some of you—well, probably all of you saw the news coming out of U.S. Census in November and December of last year, that really talked about these changes at the regional and state level in the United States, and which regions are growing or not growing. Next slide, please. That, much like the slide I showed with the little baby and the death and the migration, it’s driven by births, deaths, and migration at the state level as well. So we see here in the United States, our total fertility rate is somewhere around 1.6 to 1.7 children born per woman, on average. That places us, again on that higher—still kind of on that higher end. For comparison, in Japan is probably around 1.3, maybe a little bit lower than that. So this is, you know, kind of typical of a wealthy, industrialized country. And places in the country that it has historically been lower are the Northeast. So we typically see lower fertility rates. This down here is called the general fertility rate. So it’s expressed a different way, which is basically the birth rate—births per one thousand, women fifteen to forty-four. You can see where it’s slightly higher. It’s already, I think, starting to fall again in North Dakota and South Dakota. And, but we see regional differences here. Next slide, please. And we see regional differences in terms of migration. Now, let’s—look, this is taken from the Tax Foundation. So you know that they’re trying to make the point that people are moving to states with lower taxes, but that is true, demographically speaking.  You start to peel down at the level here, and we see people are moving to Texas for jobs and cheaper housing. They’re typically a working-age population. Most of Florida’s growth came from people between the ages of fifty and seventy. So, you know, nuance is always really important with demographics there. So I would submit to you that U.S. exceptionalism is over. We have low fertility. We do have some in-migration that is propping up the size of the population, but the U.S. is facing the same set of issues and opportunities—challenges and opportunities—that other wealthy industrialized countries are. And I think it’s time we wake up to that. Next slide. And we’re almost done.  And then trap two, I just really quickly want to point out that we are all carrying biases in with demographic data. All kinds of ones. Jess has a whole other set of biases besides the ones I’m going to talk about. But it’s really important for us to recognize that. I saw it when I worked at the Pentagon. I saw the U.S.—that line about U.S. demographic exceptionalism, perfect, was talked about all the time. Yeah, you can go to that one. And I say—would often say, we’re not that different from Russia and China. Just look at the little shape of our population here. A lot of things are really similar there. And in fact, if you are a democracy and you need to pivot quickly to deal with an aging population, it is very difficult. If you’re not a democracy, it’s a lot easier.  Next slide. I also often point out that there is a sense in the United States that migration will continue forever, whether you want it to or not. That does not matter to me. It’s just this idea that this—you know, we have the world’s largest stock of migrants in the U.S. So we tend to think global migration is really high. But really, 2 to 4 percent of people live outside the country in which they were born. That’s been true over the last decades and decades. There are actually far more older people worldwide than migrants. If you look at just those ages sixty-five to seventy-four, there are about 200 million more of them than global migrants. So this is a huge segment of the global population and of the U.S. population. But I think we kind of carry some of that bias into looking at the data there as well. And so a question we might ask is, will migration continue at these levels, and for the United States, or not? And last slide for me is just to say—I got two plugs for you here. One is the personal plug. The list of you on this webinar I’m salivating over because I would like to talk to you. Sorry, Irina, but I got to give this plug. My next project, research-wise, is trying to understand how we can thrive, not just survive, economically particularly, in this era of shrinking populations. And so if anybody is talking about this at your state or local level, please shoot me an email or find me for us to chat. And then the other is I’m on the board of the Population Reference Bureau, which does a lot of data and analysis for state and local governments about population projections. And I’m sure that soon—if this is the kind of thing that you’re interested in, I’d be happy to send you their way. Thank you so much. FASKIANOS: Jennifer, thank you so much for that and your wonderful slides. And we will circulate your contact information after the fact as well, in case people did not get it on the—on the slide presentation. So, Jess, now we’re going to over to you with your experience. Talk about what you’re seeing in Maine, what policies you were looking at to prepare there. And I know you’ve been advising other governments as well as the federal government—some national governments and the federal government. So what you were saying and where you see things are working well, and any best practices you can share with the group. MAUER: Sure. And thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here. And I just learned a whole lot from Jennifer. So I’m really excited to be here. And I have questions. And I’m going to be using some of—some of this data as I talk about this stuff in the future. So if whoever is going to share my slides could do that, that would be great. And so you can go right ahead to the next slide. I just thought before we jump into the issues that we’re seeing and some of the solutions, I’d talk a little bit about Maine. So Maine is the oldest state in the country by median age. Our median age is 45.1. We’re also the most rural state, which a lot of people find interesting. And I find that when I talk about rurality, a lot of folks particularly in urban areas don’t really think the same way we do. For instance, I’ve heard people talk about a city of twenty or twenty-five thousand people as rural. So, for reference, I like to say, only nine cities in Maine have a population greater than twenty thousand. And 83 percent of Maine’s five hundred towns have a population of five thousand or less. And, in fact, 44,000—sorry—44 percent of Maine’s population lives in towns with fewer than five thousand people. We have towns, like, with five people in them. And so, you know, we have a lot of rural communities.  We also have the lowest working-age population, which creates a significant challenge. Not just for business, but also when we’re talking about the direct care workforce and a significant growing care gap that we have for populations of all kinds across all settings. So next slide.  So here’s an actual look at our demographics. We have 44 percent of our entire population—entire population—is over the age of fifty. For reference, 18 percent of our population is under eighteen. And 23 percent is over sixty-five. So, this means for the better part of the last decade we’ve had significantly more people every year turning sixty-five than we’ve had babies, and sometimes twice as many for a good three, five, or six years. We had about 24,000 people turning sixty-five and about 12,000 babies born every year. Next slide. So in 2020, we launched a three-year municipal data dashboard project to help communities in Maine understand the challenges that older people in their community might be experiencing, and to take a look at their demographic challenges generally. These were our pilot communities. Just want to say that three of them were remote rural communities. One was our—one of our largest cities. One was a midsized city, and two are sister suburban towns. Next slide, please. So these are two different data points that highlight the differences between rural and urban communities in our—in our community, in our state. One generally looks at the median age. And you can see that, particularly for urban areas, not surprisingly, our median age is lower. But in some of our most rural communities, is very high. So in Eastport, the median age is sixty-one versus forty-five, as a state average. And in that same community, you’ll see that just over 70 percent—70 percent—of the households in that community include a person over the age of sixty. Next slide. So one of the shocking, really, pieces of data that we learned when we started digging deep at a community level was that some communities do better and others do worse at supporting people later in life. So you’ll see here, one community has very few people living in their community who are eighty and older, as opposed to another community which has a much larger percentage. And the next slide is actually the data. And you’ll see that these two communities have essentially the same population of people who are over sixty-five. And so you have to ask yourself, why is one community the community that’s better for older people—which is a city setting, walkable, access to transportation, access to affordable housing—so much better for people over eighty then another, which has no transit, all single-family homes, very few affordable housing units, rural, and very few services? So these are the reasons we start, like, saying, you know, it’s really important for municipalities to look at their own data and not just rely on state and county data to sort of see how they’re doing. I will say, interestingly enough, and why it’s important, this community that I mentioned in the last slide, that has—more than 70 percent of the households have sixty and older, they have a very, very low working-age population. And they said, well, that’s because nobody can afford to live in our city anymore. And they all live outside of our city. So we did a demographic profile of all the communities around their city that they said that older people—that younger people lived in. And the reality is, they don’t live there. They just have a really, really low working-age population, and it’s something that they need to consider. So next slide. In 2022, we did a report on the economic status of older women in Maine. And the next few slides highlight some additional demographic concerns specifically related to older women. On this slide, you’ll see why it’s important to explore data by gender, race, and age. Nationally, eighty—women over eighty have a significantly higher rate of poverty due to—than men—due to gender-based wage disparities across their lifetime. But in comparison to White women, Black women or women of color over the age of eighty experience nearly twice as much poverty as White women. So these are issues we just have to look at, right? I mean, it makes a difference if you’ve just experienced gender-based bias versus gender-based and race-based bias across a lifetime. Next slide. And then to truly understand how folks are doing in your community, you also have to disaggregate data related to age. For instance, all the reports we see show poverty among older people at a rate at about 8 or 9 percent. And we can see here, however, that women over eighty in Maine experience poverty at a rate nearly twice that of men over the age of eighty. So it’s really important not just to say, how well are people over the age of sixty-five doing? But now we have to say, how well are people over the age of eighty doing in our community? And are there demographic differences again, by race, or by age? So next slide, please. So the federal poverty level is the piece that we look at when we say whether or not older people are experiencing poverty. But living alone is a clear demographic issue that has big impact for people later in life. People who live alone when they’re older don’t have a second income, right, to help cover costs, and have no informal care within the home if they need help with care. And they also have no basic help with chores. They have nobody to drive them if they can no longer drive. They have nobody to help them with home maintenance. So two times as many women over the age of sixty in Maine live alone. And women who live alone, not surprisingly, have less income than men who live alone. The next slide, please. So we look at something called the Elder Economic Security Index, which is a national index that tells us how much income an older person or older couple needs to meet their basic needs if they’re in poor condition, poor—good health, poor health, excellent health, and also if they own their own home, with or without a mortgage, or they rent. So you’ll see here, this is both the previous slide and this slide, that at least half of the older women who live alone in Maine do not have enough money to meet their basic needs, regardless of where they live, and regardless of their health status. So these are issues that also help us think about: How we target services? And what do we do, right, when we come up against this sort of issue? So next slide. I just want to say a little bit about some of the policy-level solutions. We’ve been focused on really creating new models of housing in Maine for older people to address the very issue of a community that is no longer working for people over the age of eighty. We asked, well, what can we do? How can we help older people find housing, help older people find transportation? So with our focus on housing, we’ve actually just in the last few months—few weeks, actually, signed a contract with a new organization who’s going to start doing a home-sharing pilot project here in Maine, to get that up and running.  We’ve also been doing a considerable amount of work over the last many years on zoning, specifically related to accessory dwelling units. We’ve had a big win recently on that. And so it’s no longer just town to town whether you could—you can put an accessory dwelling unit or a second home on your property, but now really municipalities have to allow for that accessory dwelling unit. Which is a really terrific thing. We’re looking to implement transportation solutions that really knit together technology that we already have, and we already use, and volunteer driver—volunteer driver programs as well as public transit systems. Trying to make sure that they’re more accessible for everybody and also better funded. We’re also focused, and have been for a decade, on growing the direct-care workforce to meet the increasing support needs of older people. And have had some real success. If you’re—if you’re a direct-care worker in Maine and you’re living alone, you can actually earn a livable wage, which is really terrific. But, you know, not if you’ve got kids or a husband. So we’re still working on cracking that nut. But our big focus has really been on older people themselves and reducing poverty. Our biggest win just came in the last legislative session last year, when we used a lot of the data that’s in this presentation to secure economic justice for older people who’ve experienced a lifetime of economic injustice and disparities, by significantly increasing eligibility for the Medicare Savings Program. It’s a program that puts about $7,500 in the pockets of older people. So this ultimately means that about—well, about thirty thousand people in Maine, older people in Maine, will have more income. And they’ll be more on par with a livable income and will be better able to meet their basic needs.  And this is something any state in the country can do. The Medicare Savings Program is a terrific program. And for those of you who’ve done Medicaid expansion, Medicare eligibility expansion is essentially the corollary. It’s the part that lifts older people in your communities out of poverty. And D.C. actually increased theirs to 300 percent of the federal poverty level. We didn’t go that far. We’re up to 250. So pretty exciting stuff. And but totally doable, to really make a huge difference in the financial security of older people. So next slide. Just a couple more pieces, and then I’ll be done. We’ve also been using this data—and I loved Jennifer’s talking about traps. And I think, you know, we talk about this idea that we’re still sort of stuck in that 1950s thinking about older people, and what they should be doing, right? They should be leaving work. They should be retiring. The reality is, they’re supposed to be dying at seventy, and they’re not. They’re living to a hundred. And, but we really haven’t gotten rid of the views that older people aren’t good workers, that they cost too much money, that they’re not good at technology. And so what we see a lot of is ageism, both at an institutional and a systemic level. And so we’ve been using this data to talk about, you know, these outdated views that older people and aging—that they’re a problem.  And really, this image is what I like to—like, when I think about, you know, for the better part of the last thirty years, we’ve been talking about this, right? A silver tsunami. It’s literally a gray wave of sedentary, medically needy, older people that’s going to crash down on your head and ruin everything. I mean, that’s what we’ve been talking about. And it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy about older people, right? I mean, they’re a problem to be solved. They’re not a solution. So next slide, please. Really, the primary work that we’ve been doing lately is flipping the script, really changing the way we look at this wave. Literally turning the wave upside down, and looking at it as an opportunity. The key here—and I love—I love this point. We’re so focused on in-migration. And we haven’t—we’ve just started to move the needle in increasing the number of people over the age of sixty-five who are working. I mean, we’ve been working on that for a decade. So we’re glad that there’s movement, finally. But the focus has been on getting people to move to Maine.  And so getting this number, this is—you know, there are 200 million more people sixty and over than there are migrants in the world. I mean, that’s a really interesting number. And I’m going to be thinking about how to use that because, you know, we’ve really been looking elsewhere for the solution, when the solution, as we’ve been saying, is sort of right under our nose, that if we are seeing that older people—that people—all people are living longer, healthier lives, and can continue to work long into their seventies, and eighties, even in their nineties, then our solution is right there. But we’ve not yet been able to do that. So we really do need to flip the script and see older people not just as our workers, but also as our volunteers, as our cultural and municipal leaders, stewards of our environment, right? Caregivers for young and old, basically integral parts of our community that we just can’t let go and we need to actually embrace. And then the final slide is a new map. It’s called the new map of life, that’s come out of the University of Stanford. We look at this and it’s basically saying, look, kids are going to—kids born today are going to live to a hundred, by and large. And we have to think differently about our systems. We need to learn differently, right? Space out the way we learn, space out the way we work, and also need to build longevity-ready communities, right? Communities that have these new models of housing, transportation solutions that work for people who can’t drive. Again, not being able to drive didn’t used to be a problem, because people died when they were seventy. Now people stop driving in their eighties and nineties, for many physical reasons. Also just don’t feel comfortable about it. But we just haven’t—we haven’t invested in the solutions that help people move around when they can no longer drive. So we have to do this through this lens of equity. Age equity is what we have been talking about. And need to be intentional about who’s in our communities, who’s being included, who’s being excluded, partner with people in their eighties, nineties, and hundreds to talk about how we design solutions that work for them. We really haven’t been doing this, but it’s really what’s next in relation to, you know, sort of, again, how do we take advantage of what we have and also build what we need to build for the future? So I’ll stop talking there and say thanks for the opportunity. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. Again, another fantastic presentation. And so we’re going to go to all of you now for your questions and to share what’s happening in your community. As a reminder, we are on the record. So I’m going to take the first written question from Justin Bielinski, who is director of communications in the office of Wisconsin Senator Chris Larson. Do you have any successes from Maine to share regarding increasing density, affordable housing in urban or suburban areas? MAURER: Sorry. We do have some successes. And we passed a really comprehensive—we actually had a committee that worked for a year on recommendations regarding these things and have passed a comprehensive bill in this regard. And I will say, it’s still early days to be talking. So I think the bill—the law itself is a success. But there have been real challenges to implementation. And I’m happy to share a link to that law in the chat. FASKIANOS: Great. And we can also share that out. Next raised hand from Councilmember Jose Trinidad Castaneda. Q: Hi. Good morning. Or, sorry, good afternoon.  So I’ve worked on some of the California ADU legislation. And I’m working on an innovative program for our city, in the city of Buena Park, California. One of the challenges that I have is how do we allocate our Medicare-managed plan funding for ADUs, specifically for categories of our population that are most vulnerable to demographic shifts—employment and economic trends that you were bringing up in both of your presentations? And since we have a silver tsunami right here at home, how do we—how do we balance that, as local policymakers, between what we need in terms of migration, a baby boom, and, like, a long-term kind of stabilization of a very—you know, a massive aging population in our city? So how do we allocate those funds? And how do we balance between those challenges? Thank you. MAURER: And, Jennifer, I don’t know if you—if you have any interest in jumping in. I’m happy to, I just want to— SCIUBBA: I’m listening to this part. Yeah. I’m learning. MAURER: I mean—I’m not going to say that we have it sorted out in Maine, by any stretch of the imagination. And I think the answer is, it’s going to take a lot of different solutions. There’s not one solution that’s going to work, A. And, again, you’re in a very different place than we are, because we’re so rural and we’re so spread out. But one of the things we’ve been talking about, A, is that we don’t ask people what they want. And the things we know that are true is that it’s better for older people to stay in their community. And because we have decided that we have to build—from an economic standpoint, we have to build affordable housing in a certain way or housing with services in a certain way—build and fund in a certain way, we just do. And so that separates people from their community if they, you know, don’t have an affordable housing option in their community. And so, you know, what we’ve been talking about are that we—you know, we really have to build what’s next. We haven’t—we haven’t designed or built that thing, although it’s starting to work. So we—you know, we’ve got a couple of—like, a pocket community in Dover, New Hampshire of, you know, forty small homes, tiny homes. They’re workforce housing, but I think that’s exactly the kind of thing that older people want. And the question is, how do we incentivize the development of the things that people want? I’m not sure I’m answering your question directly, but it’s going to take a mix of doing affordable housing differently. We need some changes within the federal government around Medicare and pairing of—well Medicare, and Medicaid, and also paying for services within housing. And we need to have affordable housing investing in accessory dwelling units and figuring out how to build affordability into them. So I think there’s a lot of solutions. There are a lot of problems that we haven’t found solutions to, but we’re working on them. SCIUBBA: I want to add in a little on that too, because I think what is great about a demographic lens is it lets you see the future in the ways that no other trend does. I mean, there is no other trend where we can be so certain about what the world will look like in twenty years. You know, the people of—the retirees of tomorrow are already born, or they’re sitting in kindergarten desks today. And so we can do this long-term planning. And I’ve even—there’s an architect who looks at age-friendly architecture out of New York City, who’s German, Matthias Hollwich. And he and his firm build modular homes. Imagine being in New York City or in a densely populated area, and when a building is being turned into housing units it’s done so modularly so that it can adjust for: Do you work from home? Do you have two small children? Did your children move out? Do you now have an aging parent move in? And some of this is done in the context of being environmentally sustainable as well.  So, you know, if we build for that, as Jess said, that can look all kinds of different ways depending on the community. In New York, it looks one way. You’re not going to do that kind of thing, you know, in my suburb of Memphis, Tennessee. But there are many options. And I think also, when we start to do an international comparative context, we can learn a lot there as well. Like, we can learn from other states but, like I said, the U.S. has seen itself as demographically exceptional for so long that in many ways we’re way behind. You know, I remember doing some fieldwork in Singapore in 2009. And they were working on complete streets there for older people to get on the buses, and how did they make that age-friendly? And that was, you know, fifteen years ago. So I think there are some places that have aged faster or have been aware of their aging faster that might serve us as models. Yeah. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Texas Senator Donna Campbell has raised her hand. Q: Hello. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Yes. My name is Jim Morales. I work policy for Senator Donna Campbell here in Texas.  Thank you, Jennifer, for that presentation earlier. It was very enlightening. And also Jess, as far as the state of Maine. We are taking some good notes here. As you presented earlier, the growing population here in Texas from basically all over the country and other parts of the world. And we are currently working on legislation for the next session that addresses the workforce, especially, like it was mentioned earlier from Jess, as far as the age population—working population. The infrastructure, medical facilities and centers, nursing homes as well for that—in preparation of that longevity. My question is, if you can share, if you have that information, does Maine have any—have data or best practices on nursing homes, preparation for public health emergencies, and natural disasters? Of course, our natural disasters are going to be different from state—from state to state, but there’s some commonalities there, especially when addressing and sustaining our aging population. Thank you. MAURER: Yeah, and I wish—I wish I knew. You know, I don’t do direct advocacy, nor support—I mean, we’re partners with all of the aging services in Maine. But I can certainly find out for you. I know of a lot of our policies, but I don’t know of a specific—or a specific report that would answer that question. But I will find out and be happy to share it with you if I—if I find it. FASKIANOS: Great. One question, how does women’s access to reproductive care influence the population trends that you’ve cited, both globally and domestically? I think, Jennifer, maybe you can start. SCIUBBA: Yeah, sure. I’d be glad to take that. It makes a difference if you have a desired number of children, and you’re able to act on those desires. Certainly, that is why we have seen global fertility fall from, you know, seven children per woman on average to lower. But by the time you get to a wealthy country and how far it is along the demographic transition to lower fertility and mortality, we’re really talking about a lower number of pregnancies generally. So that would be women’s ability to control whether or not they get pregnant. And women have been getting pregnant less, particularly teen women. So in the United States, what a lot of people don’t realize is that that drop to below replacement fertility has really been in large part at the teen level. And so we see fewer teen pregnancies. That is not just from contraception and reproductive health. It’s also from the fact that they are less sexually active than previous generations were. So, you know, it’s always good to look behind those numbers and really see things like, you know, we see increasing pregnancies in my age group, in the forty-plus age group, is actually up. And so it does differ for those different age groups, yes. But having the ability to control who gets pregnant, when, and where does make a difference, of course, as to how many children are born. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to Patricia Farrar-Rivas. How are you addressing the high costs of care for individuals with dementia and Alzheimer’s? I think, Jess, you marked that you could answer that. MAURER: Well—I’m not sure that we’re addressing the high cost, but we are trying very specifically to, A, support informal family caregivers. We’ve increased the respite care benefit and have created a respite care program specifically for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Are doing a better job of trying to do care coordination. So that is one of the bigger cost drivers in the federal government, or CMS, or—you know, sort of uncoordinated care for people with dementia. We also have just completed the revision of our state plan on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, and have a BOLD—the second iteration of the BOLD grant, and are working collaboratively—starting implementation of many of the recommendations of that. And, again, a lot of that talks about coordination of care early, early diagnosis, early connection to services, and then additional training for all kinds of providers. Which I think is really critically important from EMS and Fire and Rescue to local municipal officials needing to understand, you know, sort of how do we—how do we intervene with people who are in our communities, particularly, as I mentioned, right, I mean, women are more likely to live alone than men. And this is a trend not just in Maine, but nationally. And so—and also, we didn’t talk about this, but I think, Jennifer, you bear this out, the generation before—Boomers had 10 percent fewer babies than the generation before it. And so you have a lot of older people who don’t have kids. And so you’ve got a lot of older people with dementia, with moderate dementia, living in the community, and really no supports. And so we’re really talking about, you know, looking at dementia-friendly communities, and how do we integrate some of the good work that’s been done nationally at a local municipal level to put supports in place, both for people living with dementia and with family caregivers. So happy to provide some more support. I’m not sure that we’re—I’m not sure we can say we’re addressing—we’re addressing the cost drivers at a very local level. I’m not sure we can say we’re being successful at the CMS level. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Tom Flight, board member in East Hampton Village in New York, with a raised hand. Q: Hi. Good afternoon. And thank you both very much. A fairly straightforward question, which is: What have you found to be the most effective means of educating the public on the changing profile of the population and the services required? SCIUBBA: I’ll add some global part of this. I think that we have a long way to go to get people to understand that this shift towards fewer babies is permanent, and not a problem to be solved. So that is, there’s just a long way to go in getting that. But it is a necessary first step then if we are going to implement these policies and programs that Jess talked about in detail, and all of you are concerned about in detail. It seems to me that without getting that first hurdle—getting over that first hurdle, we don’t plan for the long run.  So that’s why I do always start by putting it in global context. This is not some fluke. This is not an exception. This is a permanent shift, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. But we worked so hard to get there. We worked so hard to get infants and children to live to reproductive ages. We’ve worked so hard to create economic opportunities outside the home, and to educate people and, you know, to thrive. The result of that was having fewer children on average. And so I think we’ve got to—that is a first hurdle, and then understanding how to be resilient and adapt to this is the next step, which I’ll hand over to Jess.  MAURER: Sure. And, you know, I mean, I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I’m going to say the answer is really just conversation. And we’re hosting those conversations at multiple levels. So we actually have created a thing called the Leadership Exchange on Ageism, which is a fourteen-hour, very intensive peer learning, leadership learning experience. We’ve had 180 leaders graduate through that. And we’re really digging deep on these issues. And what we found, which I don’t—you know, it’s sort of been stunning, actually—is that people—the program itself leads people to take rapid action within their own institutions, systems, and spheres of influence to create some change. It is an aha moment. And so we’ve now taken that. We’re having community conversations. And, again, we are finding them very impactful. People haven’t had a chance to have these conversations. And when you kind of bring cold, hard facts—as Jennifer presented them, and, you know, we talk about them, that people get it and they want to know then, what do we do next? And so, anyway, I will just say, we’re just hosting a series of conversations with employers. Again, helping employers understand why—what are the benefits of a multigenerational—first of all, what’s the business case? And then, what are the benefits of a multigenerational workforce? And if you approach it in that way, and then you give them examples of multigenerational workforces in Maine that are thriving, that are actually attracting workers because of—because they’re multigenerational.  And the ways—that’s the other piece. Is there’s a lens that we talked about, right? When you—when you do things to address challenges—real or perceived, by the way—for older people, older workers, it works for everybody. I’ve heard, you know, it takes longer to train an older worker. And then I say, well, even if that’s true, don’t you think that would benefit younger workers too?  Let’s start there. It’s not true. But even if it were true, wouldn’t it be better for younger workers to have a four-week onboarding process instead of a two-week? And don’t you think they’d probably do better, and feel actually better connected to the organization if you did that? So conversation is the key to this. And I’m going to say it works. I swear it does. So that’s my answer, and I’m sticking to it. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to Emily Walker, legislative director in the Office of Pennsylvania Senator Katie Murth. Q: Hi. Thank you guys so much. I’ve learned so much from both of you. I am a Pennsylvania native myself, but I lived in York, Maine, for a long time, and I have family in Dover, Delaware—I’m sorry; Dover, New Hampshire, not Delaware. But, so familiar with the area and the issues that they face. And so it’s very helpful to see the work that you’re doing there. I have a question about kind of tying in sort of the needs of our younger generations into the needs of older generation. You mentioned, you know, more accessibility to affordable housing, more accessible public transportation, and just generally, like, more working—more workplace accommodations as well. Do you think there’s more opportunity that we could be bringing in young—so for being—I’m at the end of the Millennial Generation, and right at the beginning of the Gen Z generation. So I feel like, is there opportunity to kind of build on things that we do need for our aging population, and then the things that our younger generation are also asking for, that they want in their communities? And how can you sort of bridge that together a little better? MAURER: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s work we really have to do. And, yeah, all right, well, I’ll just say it out loud because I feel like, you know, it’s my—it’s my duty to say, you know, I’m not sure generational—like looking at generations are really helpful. Because I think it skews things. What I think is to say, you know, we have older people who need X, Y, and Z. And if you solve that solution—by the way, we have younger people who need X, Y, and Z. As a matter of fact, you know, older people—they’re lonely and isolated. That’s, like, I hear it all the time, like, with pity in your voice. Poor older, lonely people. Well, all of the data suggests that the people who are struggling most with isolation and loneliness are in their twenties and thirties, particularly young people who are going to college right now, because of the pandemic, are really struggling, right? And so, you know, it’s sort of, like, we need to stop talking about age and start talking about what we all want. And what you find, right, is if you look at workers today, right, older workers—oh, they need flexibility, or want flexibility. They want—they don’t want to work forty hours a week. They want to—well, OK, that’s also true for younger workers. I mean, all the trends say it. And so, you know, like, moving to a value-based sort of view, or what do we—what do we—where, where is there common ground, right?  I’ve heard over and over again that people who are described as millennials don’t like to drive, right? They would prefer to be driven. They would prefer to use public transportation. Well, public transportation is what we need. That that wouldn’t be what older people say, but they need—but they need public transportation. That’s what they would say. So for different reasons. So I think it’s like finding commonalities where things work for everybody, regardless of how you come at the problem. We come at the problem through aging, but we always try to solve that problem for everybody. FASKIANOS: There’s a written question from Stuart Murray in the Village of Corrales in New Mexico: It seems this presentation is aimed at higher-density communities. I was raised in a small Oklahoma town where services do not exist. When I talk small, 1,500 people or less. People do lean on other people, churches, et cetera. However, creating these services may not be financially possible. Is this where higher levels of governments need to step in to help these rural communities? MAURER: So I’m sorry if I gave that impression, because, like, all of Maine is rural. We don’t—we have, like—we have, like, nine communities that are not rural. And what we have are—one-hundred-plus communities have started volunteer initiatives called lifelong community initiatives, age-friendly communities, villages, NORCs, whatever you want to call it. We don’t—there’s lots of ones that have no models at all. But these are volunteers within communities that are doing volunteer driver programs, food, lunch programs, home repair initiatives. The key, though—particularly what we found in rural settings—is that you do need some community backbone, some community-based organization backbones. So, for instance, Habitats. And we don’t have Habitats in every community. Well, we also have public housing authorities, but not in every community. So we have some churches—that wanted to—so we look at—from a policy perspective, right, we say we need home repair, right? So the very first—so older people are living in homes that don’t work for them anymore, but we haven’t built the next iteration and we’re not going to build enough affordable housing. So we have to keep people safely in homes. So home modification, and weatherization, and home repair is the—is the first line, right, of keeping people safely at home. So how are you going to get those services affordably? Well, you have to figure out who you have that serves any community. And then we have successfully had Maine Housing then fund those home repair initiatives. Some of them use volunteers. Some of them use public housing authority staff. But it’s about, you know, sort of—we can do this. But it does have to be knitted together through the municipality, through volunteers, and through a community-based organization. We have found, over and over again, different models that work to solve different challenges that people who are living rurally are experiencing. FASKIANOS: Great. I think we have time for one last question. And I’m going to take it from raised hand, Monica Rossman, Glenn County supervisor. Q: Good afternoon. Thank you for letting me ask a question. We live in a very rural county here in California. Population twenty-eight and change. The problem that we’re having right now is getting our seniors to actually take advantage of the services that we are providing, even though it is limited. I keep saying over and over again, in fact I said it during my campaign, you know, a hungry bird only gets fed when it opens its mouth. And if these don’t want to do it, they’re just not going to. And, you know, I’m starting to see all of these programs, which I’m sure, you know, Jess, you could probably agree with me, there are a ton of programs out there. It’s just when they’re not used, they’re forgotten. And, you know, we have a grant for tablets to senior citizens that have been open for two years.  They’re just now, ever since I started—I started peeling an onion, is what I did. When I first got into office, I started taking care of, you know, my senior citizen parents who have Alzheimer’s, dementia, the shared cost, you know, taking care of two households, you know, trying to get two households to run. So my question is, how do we get the—what is the incentive to bring them in? You know, what can we do? That’s the problem that I’m having. And I’m working on it. I feel like I’m going uphill. And I could definitely use some help. So thank you for letting me ask the question. MAURER: Yeah. So, you know, I mean, if I were in a room full of however many people who are here today, I would say how many people like asking for help? And the answer is zero. I mean, like, every once in a while some doctors will raise their hand. I don’t know what that’s all about. But most people really don’t like asking for help. And it’s really true. I mean, like, I mean, I love, you know, it’s a trap, right? Independence is a trap. And what we hear all the time when we ask, when are you old—what’s old and when will you be old, it’s always about what I can’t do for myself. And so there’s a real tension inside of us that says, if I need help, you know, I’m on the—I’m on the downslide here. And so there’s—so one of the things we found that’s really helpful is to ask older people, why is it hard to ask for help and what would help you ask for help? And, specifically, what’s the trusted source? What we heard in my own community when we asked that question is: We don’t want to rely on the same volunteer over and over again. We don’t want to burden our children. We don’t want to, you know, burden our next-door neighbors. But if there was—if we could call the town, or we could call a church, then—and say, I need a ride to the grocery store, that would feel less burdensome for us. So I think it’s about asking the people themselves. And then, I will also say, getting a whole bunch of volunteers, right, together who know about the services to be the bystanders who are there to say: Hey, I know about this great program, when they hear that people are in need of things. And we have found that’s a great way. The final piece, I’ll just say, in my own community, again, we’ve had this—every community has this problem that there are benefits that people don’t want to use. Telling stories in your local paper about people who did use them successfully and how it changed their life is really good. It’s money. It does—it does bring people in. SCIUBBA: Yeah, the two last ones that Jess mentioned, I was thinking come—we have so much research in the public health literature about how to change people’s behavior. And the most effective way being a peer who’s used a service coming into your home and talking about that service. And if we’re talking about family planning, or if we’re talking about old-age services, or, you know, any kind of help in the home, that model just—that community-based model seems to work really, really well. FASKIANOS: Thank you both for this wonderful hour. We really appreciate it, for you taking the time to share your expertise, and for all the great questions and comments. We appreciate you as well. We will send out a link to the webinar recording and transcript, contact information, links to resources. You can follow Jess Mauer at the Maine Council on Aging on X at @mcoaging, and Jennifer Sciubba at @profsciubba. As always, we encourage you to 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 please don’t hesitate to share suggestions for future webinars. You can email us at [email protected]. Again, thanks to Jess, and Jennifer, and to all of you. And we hope you have a good rest of the day. END  

Panelists discuss potential and ongoing crises that may erupt or escalate in 2024, as well as their global political implications. This event will explore the results of CFR’s 2024 Preventive Priorities Survey. 

Panelists discuss potential and ongoing crises that may erupt or escalate in 2024, as well as their global political implications. This event will explore the results of the 2024 Preventive Priorities Survey, which will be available on CFR’s website on Thursday, January 4, 2024.