Welcome everyone to the first lecture of our spring series. My name is Betsy Gardner and I am the president of this fabulous organization. I have several announcements and the first is the most important. Please, please, please turn off your cell phones. The other thing I want to remind people of and tell people about if you're new is following the lecture there is a question and answer period. And I know that this is an intelligent audience and you have lots of interesting questions. We all want to hear them. So save them for the Q&A and wait for a microphone. There will be someone on this side, someone on that side who will carry a portable microphone so we can all listen. The other thing I want to remind you of is our website. We do have a website and it's a good idea to check it now and then for information about forthcoming lectures but also in case for some reason there is a change in the schedule or something is canceled. Last semester we unfortunately had to cancel one lecture and we hate to do that. This is our spring semester but this is February 1st. So always check and then in the brochure there is my number which is listed. You can always call my number or on the website you can call. They'll give you some information so you'll have a person to call. And purposely if you remember I told you last semester we did not put emails and phone numbers down for everyone because of being scammed. Our publicity chairman is Dorothy Lovering and she asked me to request you to help her out. We're looking for volunteers who are familiar with Front Page Forum. If you are and you're willing to post information about the week's lecture and you post on Monday or early Tuesday it would be a very big help to us and we will even give you a script and all the information. She is not here today, that's why. And so if anyone is interested in helping us out that way see me after the lecture and I will get your name and information and pass it on to Dorothy. I do it for my section and it's pretty easy. The other thing I would like you to think about is taking extra brochures with you. We sent out brochures to 21 libraries and if you're in a local library look around and see if they have our brochures out and if they might be out of them. If they're out of them please let us know because publicity is what keeps us growing and it keeps you guys coming. So thank you very much. And now I'm very happy to have Beth Woods come and introduce our speaker and wonderful to have her back. Well welcome to our second semester, our new semester and on behalf of the program committee we hope you'll enjoy our programs again this semester. It's with great pleasure that I welcome back Pablo Bows as our kickoff speaker and Pablo was born in India raised in Canada. He is a graduate, received his PhD at York University in Toronto. He joined the faculty at the University of Vermont in 2006 and he is currently an associate professor of geography and director of the Global and Regional Studies program at UBM. He also chairs the university's diversity curriculum committee. One of his main areas of research is migration and refugee resettlement and that's what he's here to share with us today. So with great pleasure please welcome back Pablo Bows. Thank you so much. So thank you so much. I think this is my third lecture here. I've enjoyed it. A great deal coming in speaking to you. I think the first lecture I gave was on refugee resettlement last fall on India and I thought I would choose a really non-controversial subject that no one is talking about today. So immigration is, as Beth mentioned, one of the main focus points of my own work. I'm a migration scholar. I study cities. I study cities and change, primarily affected by migration. I look at refugee resettlement all across the world. I've been looking at it here in the U.S. for the last 10, 12 years. I've also been looking at it in Canada. I'll talk a little bit about that here and I've expanded this work over the last couple of years now to look at migration issues in different parts of Europe, primarily in Scandinavia and in Germany and primarily in the same way that here in the U.S. I've been looking at kind of non-traditional sites that migrants and refugees, primarily refugees have been going to. I'm sort of looking at similar kinds of things in Europe as well. I also talk about this from the perspective of having been an immigrant in two different countries, so having been born in India as you heard and then immigrating to Canada when I was young with my parents and then moving here to the U.S. as an adult. And so I've seen all sorts of different kind of aspects of this, both through my own research but also through my lived experience. This is, I would say, one of the primary areas of interest for many of our students up on campus these days, looking at different ways in which they can get involved or simply understand what is going on. And so I cannot pretend to understand all of the things that are going on in the world of immigration but I want to share today some of the things that I have been looking at. I'm realizing this screen is not super large, so I'll probably read some of these things. So there's three main things that I wanted to talk about today. The first is about migration across the globe. So some of what we're seeing as trends and patterns and in particular the backlash against immigration and migration and that's something that we see in parts of the U.S. and something that we also see across the world more generally. I've sort of said that in terms of just backlash but I also want to reiterate and my whole sort of last example we'll talk about not just backlash but welcome. One of my thesis students right now is writing a really interesting senior thesis about her experiences being in Germany during her study abroad and she's writing about this kind of clash between what's called welcome culture and the sort of rising xenophobia. I'm not going to talk as much about, well, you'll see both sides of that in this presentation. I'll talk a little bit about kind of what's going on in the U.S. today just a little bit about that and then I'm going to end with a case study looking at the response to the Syrian refugee crisis both in the U.S. and in Canada. So just to begin with when we're talking about migration there's a lot of different terms a lot of different ways in which people talk about migrants and I'm going to unpack a little bit of that. Right now when we talk about migration we're talking about people living outside of their country of origin or citizenship that can be a little bit tricky which definition you use. However, some people will talk about the current ages being the age of migration. We've had other periods of mass movements of people of goods, of capital, of ideas, of labor but in many ways today it's talked about as the age of migration. In 2000 there were 173 million people who had fallen to this category of living outside of their country of origin across the globe. By 2018 that's at 258 million people so the scale of this has really really ramped up over the past two decades. In 2050 the projections back in the early 2000s based on those numbers was that there would be 230 million people by 2050 living outside their country of origin. As you can see we've already surpassed that number and the revised projection last year was that there will be 400 million people living outside of their country of origin. Now these are all large numbers and again the scale is growing a great deal. At the same time I want to emphasize that migrants as a percentage of the global population is about 3%. It's still a fairly small percentage of the overall world's population who are either immigrants or migrants of different kinds. One of the challenges I think is that today we try to think about this process of migration which is an age old human phenomenon. People move for all kinds of different reasons but we now put modern constructions like borders or passports or sort of national boundaries down many of which cut across these routes that people have taken for a long, long time. Some of the categories through which we see migration one of the big ones is economic migration. So that's people moving for work so labor migration is a big one but again there you have a huge disparity in different kinds of labor migration. We have low skilled seasonal or irregular migration. We have semi-skilled migration and then there's professional class migration. If you were to look at the Gulf countries for example and you look at the main flow of people that are coming into the Gulf for work you have lots of domestic labor, you have manual labor that's coming from places like Bangladesh and Malaysia but then you also have lots of highly skilled engineers, doctors and other professionals coming from parts of India, Pakistan, etc. You also have guest workers so people either coming on a temporary or a more permanent basis. You have migrants who are going because of educational reasons either on a shorter or longer term reason and something that until recently didn't seem to be, actually no I won't say it's only recently become a dirty word but the idea of family reunification which has been the backbone of immigration and migration patterns and policies is really the largest flow of migrants in the world. So some of the different categories again most of what I just showed before was reasonably optional migration so people who actually wanted to people who have the option in some way of migrating. So for a big category the one that we tend to see a lot more on television is really forced migration so people who don't really have the option. Refugees are the category that is most recognized by international law by most nation states, people who are kind of authorized to be in another country because they can't stay in their own. There are others who are similarly displaced but they might not be displaced outside of their country so they're displaced within. So if you look at the population of Syria there are well over half that country's population has been displaced but roughly half of that number is outside of Syria, the other half is inside. Asylum seekers, we obviously have heard a lot about asylum seekers at the southern border from Central America that's a little bit different if you're an official refugee you've already been vetted and approved. Asylum seekers show up and they asked for sanctuary so it's a little bit of a different process and finally stateless persons so that would be like the Rohingya or some of the Kurdish populations people who don't really have access to citizenship and are said to be not from the country that they're actually in anymore. The reasons for leaving are really varied, it might be a natural disaster environmental degradation resource extraction development projects have displaced lots of people so things like dams, railroads, things like that and of course conflict and persecution is one of the main ways in which we think of this. So there's lots of people on the move going to many different places in some cases new places, in some case old but the reception that they're receiving is really has always been kind of tempered there's been all kinds of ways in which immigrants have been welcomed into certain societies but there are all kinds of ways in which they have not and I'll kind of call back to some of that historical trends before but we're in a moment right now where since the end of the Cold War and the sort of end of history as some people would put it you know, since the sort of the ascendancy of global capitalism and this new age of globalization where apparently there's no more borders and people and goods and trade will just flow across borders there's been this kind of rising sense that well, immigration is probably good it is a general kind of good this isn't widely accepted everywhere but what we've really seen of the last three to five years is a generally kind of populist notion that actually immigration is not good this is not to say that this came about in the last five years but it's been given much more popular expression and we see it especially in a lot of the countries of the global north of the west of the north in North America and Europe places that have been for certainly a few decades one of the big sort of pillars of kind of global migration flows lots of people have been going to wealthier countries more jobs or more opportunity in different ways and yet what we've started to see is a lot more of this so in France in Italy we've seen the rise of especially right wing populist parties that have at their core one thing that sort of holds them in common and that is an anti-immigrant kind of platform in many ways they are distinguished by all sorts of other things that they don't have in common with one another but the one thing that sort of holds them together is this notion that there has been too much immigration in their country take brexit for example there are lots of different things that have that underpin the support for brexit amongst those who voted to leave you could look at underdevelopment of Britain outside of some of the major cities you could look at in kind of Euro skepticism about you know the power of Brussels and this and that but there's been a lot of really interesting studies that have talked about the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain that is really tied to the enlargement of the EU in 2004 the anti-immigrant sentiment that's kind of surrounded brexit is really directed at Polish and Romanian immigrants many of whom come over after that 2004 enlargement of the EU and other eastern European central Europeans and they fill a lot of these service sector jobs in particular in the UK where they're really needed especially outside of the metropolitan core and so again I'm not going to get into the insanity that is brexit and what they think they are going to be able to get out of the EU I have an easy answer nothing there is no leverage anyway I'm going to leave that but in France we have seen anti-immigrant protests that have gotten swept up and then again there's lots of other things that are going on there's a long standing social inequality and tensions especially around Muslim minority in France which is one of the largest growing minority populations the spate of terrorist attacks a lot of different kind of cultural anxieties what it means to be French especially in a society as you'll see within a lot of these European examples and then I would argue also in the US it's really about a lot of anxiety about demographic change and what does it mean to be a person living in one of these countries in Germany again wide and large scale protests protest marches again we see these in much greater numbers in the eastern part of Germany where the former east Germany where again we can ask questions about underdevelopment or uneven development Poland Denmark Sweden and Finland and here we have three of the countries that have three of the Nordic countries that have been certainly in terms of refugees one of the largest per capita resettlers of refugees Sweden and Denmark effectively shut down the refugee programs in the last few years and yet again as I said there's a lot of complexity that underlies a lot of these populist parties the true Finns for example you'll hear a lot about the rise of the far right and this is a trend in many different places but you know the true Finns and some of the other anti-immigrant parties the coalition in Italy for example you actually have some fairly progressive kind of policies articulated by these parties about family leave or medical health access many other things but the idea there is we want to have these kinds of social programs only for the people who are legitimate citizens of the country so it's really a nativist kind of argument and it doesn't always align with other things we get these kinds of messages really in ways that I think shock a lot of people all of a sudden in places that I've had more of a reputation for being more welcoming we start to see messages like this this is in Slovakia here is another one where is this I guess it's in Canada so this is in the warm and fuzzy home of multiculturalism and all the rest and here you see also ways in which some of these different movements speak to each other and echo one another so this is in Edmonton and it's a protest that draws on the yellow vest protests in France and again this has also been at the heart of Canada's largest province Ontario elected a premier who ran on in large part an anti-migrant policy saying there's too many refugees coming to Toronto it's not just in countries of the global north sorry you probably can't see this all that well but here we have on the bottom this is in South Africa stop illegal immigrants fake refugees go home that's in South Korea this is an anti-immigrant protest in Brazil pro-Basenaro protest and in the bottom corner there are Singapore historians and you can look at country after country across the world and really what's noticeable is this kind of this rise of this nativist sentiment so once again there is some group out there that is doing something to you they are stealing jobs they are whatever it is there is a grievance that is sort of deeply deeply held against them so what so I'll get kind of into why I think this is happening but one of the other things that we are seeing right now articulated very clearly is this idea that we have to do something so what is the something that we can do to stop immigration migration and again I'll get to the problem in a moment and the one big one of course we have heard a lot about is the idea of the wall so walls again make a lot of sense for people who don't understand geography security mostly anything I mean like if you want to stop migration this is not an effective way to do it this has never been an effective way to do it I'll put aside the question of whether or not you want to stop migration but let's say you really do want to do it it doesn't actually that's not what happens and it's also kind of a fiction that well there are many fictions but the fiction that it's an incredibly porous border and you know you can get across it of course that's true because a line on a map doesn't look the same as a border on the ground it never has you know I mean post 9-11 there have been attempts to actually draw mostly the northern border we have large large stretches of the northern border where you couldn't build a wall unless you moved the border right unless you know you cut through lakes you actually have money in Homeland Security budgets every year to deforest parts of the border to actually demarcate this is where the border is and the reality is that over time what we've done in the US is and not just the US but other places as well if we look at all the crossings of the Mediterranean to try to reach asylum we don't stop people from actually making those journeys we just make them much less and so that's what we've actually done is we've pushed people into more and more and more dangerous crossings and the initial intent of that would be we're going to make it dangerous enough we're going to make it terrible enough we're going to steal people's kids we're going to put them make them cross a desert cross an ocean in a terrible dingy and that's going to stop them but unfortunately it doesn't stop them because and you know I went to a bread and puppet show I remember a couple of years ago and they performed they had a whole thing about the Mediterranean crossings and they read from this poem by the poet Harshan Ali Sheer and and there's a line in it where it said how dangerous must the land be for you to put your child onto that boat and that's what I always think about is that when people make these kinds of journeys there's often this sense of well it's just people are just being economic migrants and that is not that's not enough of a reason that's and there's always been an arbitrary nature of this kind of categorization my own family when my family fled across the border to what is now India from what was what is now Bangladesh they were fleeing horrific violence there's no question about it 40 members of my family killed and all of the rest of this but they were recognized as refugees for those two years my family had wealth and capital and the ability to make that journey anybody who came so it was as long as you were crossing between 1946 and 1948 anybody who came after 1948 was classified as an economic migrant even though most likely the reasons that people couldn't cross was they didn't have the means to so a lot of times these sorts of attempts we make to categorize and to kind of close people off they make very little very little sense on the ground and yet again it's not just the US that builds walls so we see walls in Israel-Palestine the great anxiety in India is always in India's northeast and the great anxiety is always Bangladesh and so there's these miles and miles and miles of new fencing that have gone up all across the border as some politicians have pointed out walls are a medieval contraption and as we know from the great wall of China and Hadrian's wall they don't work if you're trying to keep the Mongols out it did not work it certainly didn't keep the Picts and the Scots and the others out it is however a really good investment if you're thinking like the long game and you're thinking in a couple hundred years if we need a really good tourist attraction this is something so again maybe it's just like just really high level thinking and I'm missing it but there are other ways in which we have seen an increasing number of restrictions on immigration so we've seen an increasing number of travel bands visa restrictions lots of things that have slowed down the journey of people from point A to point B again this is in the context of the US so the travel bands that we saw that were temporarily blocked and then allowed to proceed but even before that we have all kinds of visa restrictions that come come about and again most countries will use this in different ways we've seen incarceration and deportation here in the US even before the Trump administration under the Trump administration the kinds of targeting of wide groups of immigrants has really grown but under the Obama administration especially the second administration there was a real spike in deportation and incarceration and especially the use of privatized prisons for immigration enforcement however we also see similar kinds of things in other places I mentioned the Gulf before the Gulf countries are sort of notorious every time there are different kinds of ups and downs in the global economy there is the cancellation of visa programs especially from poorer sort of immigrant labor countries in South Asia so there's lots of different ways in which migration is attempted to be slowed down and stopped so a lot of why this is going on and some of this is you know it takes different kinds of manifestations in different places but there's a bunch of different things that we kind of hear about when we think about immigration and migration all over the world one very common sort of discourse is about a great flood you hear about this all the time there are so many migrants we're in an emergency which apparently is really slow moving it's a national emergency of slow moving I actually want to say that I do think it's important to think smartly about if you believe in the idea of a nation state you should think about what a border looks like and what border security looks like but there are ways in which you diagnose problems that actually exist and then there are ways of throwing enormous amounts of money and resources towards fantasies that will not actually help you deal with real public policy problems so the first one is that there is not really a great flood of migrants there's some really interesting polling data that shows across the world in most kind of immigrant destination countries you know wealthier countries in Europe and North America if you poll the residents in most of these countries almost everybody thinks everyone else in every other country wants to come there whether you are surveying people in Portugal Poland, the US or whatever everybody thinks everybody wants to come to their country and that is true in some cases but it is not true in most most people they have an attachment to where it is that they live now certainly the opportunity to better your life is a really really big one but the actual trade-offs are really big I remember when I first returned to India as an adult or as a young adult with my father and I saw my extended family and all of these networks and all of these things they had and I said how could you leave this I really didn't understand why they would have left this they said to me they mainly left because of my sister and that they really felt that my sister would not have the same kind of opportunity growing up in India that she would have had in Canada and my father also said all these relatives at some time they get a little annoying so that was my father though but there are other reasons other things that we hear about around immigration in sending countries the big concern is a very different one than the thing that we hear in the countries that receive immigrants which is about a brain drain which is about the idea that what happens if all the best and brightest of your country perhaps people that you have educated at public expense then go elsewhere I mean we talk about that in a kind of a micro way here in a place like Vermont where if you have youth out migration what does that mean for that place as a whole but overall you know the real challenge is about demographic change in a lot of these places that immigrants are going to now what you're really seeing is a shift in location for the majority of the modern age of migration immigrants have gone to cities they've gone to big gateway cities but that for at least 20, 30 years that pattern has changed now people have been going to in the US for example it used to be that immigrants went to six states Texas, California, Florida New York this is a question on my no it's New Jersey and Illinois sorry right this is a question on my final for my students so I really should know that and within those states they go to the large cities large metropolitan cities the New York's the Chicago's and later on LA and places like that San Francisco but for the last 20, 30 years that pattern has been changing you have newer places in the south in the Midwest you have places that used to be immigrant hubs that are reappearing somebody said Minneapolis or Minnesota that used to be in the 19th century immigrant destination and then it really wasn't for a long time and it is again now so what you're experiencing in a lot of these places is significant demographic change especially if you look at rural areas and again this is very similar in Scandinavia and Germany and here you're having a out migration of younger populations and you're having an in migration of mostly immigrant populations Bowling Green Kentucky a city I went to a couple of years ago to do some research and the city manager started off by saying to me I may have said this in a previous talk he started off by saying I'm a good old boy from an old white southern town and I thought wow this is going off the rails really fast and he said the best thing that ever happened to our city was getting immigrants and in their case it's Latino labor migrants and refugees but it was really interesting that there is a town that went from in 1990 had a foreign born population of 0.5% by 2000 it was 5% by 2010 it was 10% and by 2015 it was 15% that is a huge shift in a very short time and it raises what a lot of scholars will say I mean in the US it's really been about a shift in Latino labor migrants coming into lots of places they weren't before in different parts of like amenity places ski resorts and resort towns and into agriculture into lots of different places that you just haven't seen the volume of people before and so the anxieties you hear about the effects on culture people being so invested in like why is somebody speaking this language why are they wearing this kind of religious garb etc and so you see other kinds of pushback so you see in Quebec a ban on wearing religious head scarves or in France or in Germany lots of places the effect on jobs again you know it's a quick sort of response to say well this is going to mean that our young people aren't going to get jobs except we are in a very very healthy economy right now well at least on paper a pretty full employment economy so the other questions that come up security especially with all of the sort of issues around terrorism have been a pretty significant and legitimate question at the same time there is very little evidence take refugees for example 3 million refugees resettled in the US since 1980 roughly I think 3 5 convictions for terrorism so that's a pretty good evidence that the vetting actually works effectively and crime you hear about this all the time while immigrants are bringing crime and yet there's no evidence in fact what we see is that immigrants in the US commit crimes at far lower rates than the native born population as I said before this is not new I just wanted to read a couple of quotes I realize this is way too small so I'll read it this is Benjamin Franklin talking about Germans unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language and even our government will become precarious this is John Jay speaking of Catholics we should build a wall of brass around the country this is John Dispasso speaking of about Jewish populations the people of this country are too tolerant there's no other country in the world where they'd allow it after all we built up this country and then we allow a lot of foreigners the scum of Europe the offscourings of Polish ghettos to come and run it for us so again there is a long tradition I always say like yes the US has a long tradition of being an immigrant country also has a long tradition of not particularly liking immigrants not everyone but that that strain remains and again we see this in Australia Australia had a explicit policy in the 1920s called white Australia Canada in the 19 in the late 19th century early 20th century the Department of Interior had what they called the great chain of race where they had at the bottom all the Asiatic races Africans and at the top they had any guesses who do they put at the very top what Brits sort of a Scottish peasant with a sturdy wife is that right at the top of the list so you know another thing here to think about when we think about what's going on these debates in the US around immigration just to give some context again in 1965 there were 10 million immigrants in the US 1965 is when we revamped the immigration system in the US between the 1920s and 1965 there had been restrictions significant restrictions basically to stop less sort of Asian immigrants than European and Jewish immigrants that's really what that was aimed at in the 1920s there were 10 million immigrants in 1965 in the US there are 45 million today including their descendants meaning second and third generation that's generally what's counted as descendants in these figures 72 million by 2065 are projected 103 million immigrants or immigrant descendant populations and it's 88% of population growth so the bulk of the growth of the US population over this period is projected to be immigrants out of a projected 441 million but the other thing I wanted to emphasize so this is from a Pew Research Center extensive survey in July 2015 immigrant effect on society 45% of respondents had positive 37% negative immigrants as a burden as a strength not burden 51% positive 41% negative and when we look at specific immigrant perceptions some of them are very low especially of Middle Eastern African immigrants but even Asian and European there are only 44% positive perceptions of European immigrants does it make the crime or economy worse 50% said it made it worse moral and social values and schools are worse 34% and 41% the system needs to be changed 54% immigration needs to be decreased 49% so a lot of times when people look at the current moment and say like Trump is worse than the conversation or all these kinds of things that may all well be true but it's also very true that where there are all kinds of things that I don't think Trump taps into or different things that different people might want judges or this or that I actually think that he tapped into a fairly widespread anxiety about immigration and this holds through when you look at voting patterns across the country there's some again New York Times really interesting kind of visualizations that show where high sort of Trump voting districts have been and how touched they are or not by immigration it's pretty interesting one of the big questions that's often raises about immigration costs and certainly that's I think a valid question to raise so when we look 51% of immigrant headed households in 2016 use at least one federal welfare program compared to 47% of the native born population so not a huge disparity but it is there however when we look at this again taking the longer view most immigration scholars would say you have to look at the second and third generation because we see a movement out of that kind of dependency fairly quickly in immigrant households so the 2011 to 2013 net cost to state and local budget $1,600 for each first generation immigrant second and third generation immigrants create a net positive of 1,700 to 1,300 each total annual cost $57 billion for first generation but by the second generation 30.5% $5 billion positive $220 billion positive by the third generation but again it comes down to the way in which you look at this I was asked to contribute to this study that DH at Homeland Security did in 2016 to measure the effect of the refugee resettlement programs and so yes how much those same people produce? that's the second and third generation that actually shows that the second and third generation actually produces a net positive so that's not actually costing so that's actually going into the positive so yeah so I presented or contributed to this report and it showed that over a 10 year period the refugee resettlement program had a net benefit of about $75 billion that was a 83 page report that was supposed to be used to determine how many refugees we would bring in the next year and it was replaced with a 3 page memo from the White House which simply looked at the cost so it looked at the first one of these categories it said how much does it cost to deliver services versus the native born population I would not accept that in any kind of accounting of a program it makes very little sense but that's where ideology trumps trumps yes okay I'm going to move a little bit more quickly through this so the just again when we're thinking about immigrant benefits the undocumented population approximately 11 million in 2016 this is a serious issue whatever side you fall on you know security or all these other things to have this many non-citizens within a country is deeply problematic it's deeply problematic in terms of what their access to civic life is resources all of these sorts of issues and it's especially traveling when you think about the impact on different economies 5% of the domestic labor force 30% in service industries you know 13% of professional management business finance I also thought this is interesting they pay approximately 12 billion in taxes at an effective tax rate of 8% the top 1% pays an effective tax rate of 5.4 it's interesting to think about and again on relatively low incomes so when we think about immigration today in the U.S. I like this quote by Portez and Rombau who have written a series of books called immigration in America underneath it's a parent uniformity contemporary immigration features a bewildering variety of origins return patterns modes of adaptation to American society never before has the U.S. received immigrants from so many countries from such different social and economic backgrounds and for so many reasons so immigration in the U.S. today does look different there's different people coming in and they're going to different places I think that the way in which we sort of manage immigration absolutely has to change in large part because it leads to such a fragmented set of outcomes I want to end just not on this everything is terrible and how horrible so instead I want to talk briefly about this the case study of Syrian refugees so Syrian refugees as we know from this terrible civil war and all of the other things that have come out of it and it's spread people all across Europe and to a much much smaller extent even here to North America the vast bulk of Syrian refugees are in Turkey and in Lebanon a significant population in Germany and Sweden as well in the U.S. so the U.S. has always been one of the bigger refugee resettlement countries not by per capita but in absolute numbers and that was pretty stable it kind of went up and down depending on refugee flows across the world Vietnam, Bosnia, things like that it has more recently fallen off a cliff as we have had massive sort of cuts to refugee inflows and you'll see there the black line is how many refugees we were supposed to take the yellow line is how many refugees we actually took last year so by the Obama administration last year it was supposed to be about 75,000 a year second last year of the Obama administration there was an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees and then in 2017 there was supposed to be an additional 40,000 or so Trump administration came in travel bans et cetera just got slashed it ended up being about 55,000 refugees overall very very few Syrians and we simply haven't had an uptake of Syrians since then in contrast and what I'll talk about in a moment the black line is the U.S. the yellow line is Canada and Canada has been again one of the like the U.S. one of the main players in refugee resettlement but the real difference we see here is in Syrian refugees the other graphic I won't get into so the U.S. and Syrian refugees what we really see is an initial moment of embrace so especially after all of the outpouring of kind of affect about Alan and what was happening to people across the Mediterranean there were a whole lot of programs like the Rutland one that were supposed to be started to welcome in refugees from Syria and I saw these all across the country lots of little programs that got started but much like the program in Rutland they got caught up in local politics they got caught up in national politics and then with the Trump administration's cutting and cutting of numbers two years ago it was supposed to be 45,000 refugees that were going to be allowed into the U.S. it's the lowest number since 1980 in actuality less than sorry just over 20,000 actually came this year it's supposed to be 30,000 and there's no way we're going to hit that the government shutdown and other things have all gummed up the works as well in contrast in Canada what you actually had was this huge outpouring and this kind of desire to resettle Syrian refugees so Canada country tenth the size of the U.S. ends up resettling so the U.S. ends up resettling 10,000 maybe about 20,000 Syrians overall in a two year period Canada on the other hand ends up resettling 54,560 refugees in about a one and a half year period with a bulk in this like four month period what's really interesting here is what they did was they had two different tiers so there's a whole group that come in as government assisted refugees and that's the group that was mainly they were going to come through the regular refugee resettlement program but there was such an outcry of well how do we help what should we do that they created an entirely new it's really the bottom two columns there private sponsorship program and that's where you and four friends church groups university groups, businesses you have to put up $40,000 collectively as a group and you can sponsor a refugee I actually think it's a really really effective strategy it builds on what used to be here the U.S. had a private sponsorship model kind of chaotic and that was then replaced by what we have now but this with a lot of government assistance still in the managing and coordination of it privately sponsored refugees when I've gone and done a bunch of interviews with people that's where I think some of the thickest sort of social connections that you see made where people really adopt families in a much more long term kind of way so I think it's a really interesting model so you see again here Syrian refugees this was and it was kind of a one time thing it wasn't like they kept doing this model they did it this one big time and there's a lot of questions about what the impacts are and might be there's a lot of questions about does this leave the government off the hook for actually doing refugee resettlement should the government be doing that in the province of British Columbia this is where I did most of my work with immigrant and social settlement services it's not just that there are a lot of refugees coming in through this program there are a lot of young refugees coming in through this program so there are also a lot of questions about the specific kind of supports that were needed and you can't see on this map at all but in Canada like the US migrants have traditionally gone to big metropolitan cities it used to be called MTV because everybody went to Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver but now you see here with these refugee groups this map doesn't show you very well but southern Ontario lots and lots of smaller communities in Alberta in Saskatchewan I mean you may raise questions about sending refugees to Saskatchewan in the middle of winter but I'll end with just showing one of the places that is kind of a hub for bringing in these mostly Syrian refugees so this is again one of the places I went to in Vancouver this is a new 40 million dollar facility that had been built with public and private resources it's a 278 bed welcome center so people who come in there they come in they don't stay for more than two weeks and then they are they head out to one of their resettlement sites but it's a fantastic integrated center it includes a day care language classes there's all kinds of there's a credit union there's like economic literacy classes they have a cooking class the apartments are clean they're quite spacious there's all sorts of youth focused programming there and it's all in this integrated space and it's really interesting again as I started off today talking about the backlash and the fears that immigrants or refugees might engender in other people and I thought some of the strategies that they used in this center were really interesting so they're built by major road and the metro line but they wanted very much to be accepted and integrated into this neighborhood and so they worked quite a bit with the local neighborhood they had all sorts of interesting planning things all the stairwells are glassed both for a sense of safety stairwells can often provoke fears but they also allowed the community beyond to see in at least the public part of the buildings partnered with three churches that were nearby and they would do community dinners on Fridays at one of these three churches to integrate a lot of the people and again there's both a long term resident community there and then a short term sort of transit community and so they balance those things again Canada is not immune to any of these sorts of right wing populism has grown in Canada as well Islamophobia and Islamophobia this sign there is in reference to the killing of a number of men at a mosque in Quebec a couple of years ago but one of the questions I asked a lot of the people involved with resettlement I said why do you think Canada embraced the Syrian refugees where the US didn't seem to as much but I actually don't think that question is right because I actually think there were large parts of the American population that did and it was an interesting answer most people said two things one was they were a little frustrated with how much everybody wanted a Syrian refugee but they didn't necessarily want other refugees but the other thing they said was Canada at the time had just gone through a very divisive election and Stephen and a long period of conservative government that had been very conservative and some of the people that I talked to said they thought that this was a way for the Canadian population to express their difference their difference and the rejection of both that and their difference to the US because if there's one thing that actually there's not a lot that holds Canada together but not being the US holds Canada together and so I think that was one I see that the celebration right now this is Alfonso Davies Alfonso Davies born in a refugee camp in East Africa and now starring for Byron Munich and so there's like all sorts of stuff about see what a refugee she can be but anyway it is a very different discourse about refugees that you still see in at least parts of Canada so I wanted to end with that thank you I was hoping you would speak a little bit about people who are immigrating for ecological reasons because of climate change I have read about some people going for example from India to New Zealand you didn't see I don't know if that's too small a group for you to talk about but I am very interested in that thank you yeah great question right now environmental refugees are not officially recognized so you couldn't actually make that journey I mean that might be the reason that you're actually leaving and certainly there's been a lot of evidence that if you were to unpeel what's going on with a lot of the conflicts in the Lake Victoria region in Africa or if you were to look at part of what was behind the Arab spring that then leads to the Syrians of a war you have massive droughts you have all these other environmental issues going on but there's been a big debate within the UNHCR the UN High Commissioner for Refugees about whether or not environmental refugee is a legitimate concept there are entire nations so the Maldives for example the Prime Minister of the Maldives tried at one point mostly as a stunt to buy a big chunk of Australian land and say I'm going to move my whole country there you know and so for islands in the South Pacific this isn't an existential problem it's not like oh well maybe this happens at some point but right now we can barely deal with conflict induced refugees and so I think there isn't a lot of appetite to do that most countries will not recognize that as a legitimate I mean even in the US the very small amount that we see is only for large scale disasters and what we've seen under the Trump Administration is progressively each of those have been removed so the temporary protected status has been removed so if anything it's been going in the other direction that it's harder to claim that kind of status yeah thanks for the information about Canada very interesting I've heard it said I don't know if it's true but many people who are immigrating who enter Canada ultimately have the goal of moving to the United States historically has that been true that Canada has been a stepping stone to settling in this country and was that ever true is it true now and any thoughts on that yeah I mean I thought you were going to ask about asylum I mean that's the bigger thing that people have been talking about the crossing the border it's a stepping stone to some degree but people immigrate for different kinds of reasons you know in the 80s the Central American you still had Central American migration but because everybody knew that you were not going to get sanctuary in the US the pathway was actually up to Canada so Salvadorans, Dicaraguans would all go up to Canada it's been more that I mean Canada and the US signed a treaty a number of years ago the safe third country treaty and that treaty says that wherever you claim asylum has to be the first safe country so you can't go through the US to Canada or vice versa you have to claim it in the first country and that's really, I mean there's not a lot of people who go through Canada to get to the US it's actually the other way around so that hasn't happened so much especially with a lot of the worry about the loss of the temporary protected status programs what you saw was I'm sure you saw the news reports of all the people going up to Roxbury Road and other places and crossing the border and going up to Quebec the irony there is so there are people who are leaving here because the temporary protected status would get cancelled here it was already cancelled in Canada so the vast majority of people who went up there are not going to get to stay there so, yeah yes I'm just wondering oh, yeah I thought it was using my fifth grade teacher voice I'm just curious about the humanitarian corridor and some folks might not be familiar with what it is but how effective is that as a strategy for trying to keep people out of the Mediterranean right, I mean part of the problem is that if you talk to the countries in southern Europe for the most part there is a sense that they have been used Greece, Italy in particular and now increasingly Spain they have been used to create a border so that the Scandinavian countries or Germany or you know Europe doesn't actually have to address the issue of migrants coming and if anything there's been an attempt by the European nations to push the border further and further south into Libya into other places into Morocco into places of emigration there's actually been multiple humanitarian corridors that have been established there's been multiple depending on the path of departure there's also been different rules for the ships the rescue ships that go up the problem is every time a new populist government so when the Italian government falls and a new populist government comes in and they say we're not going to accept anyone or as just happened today with the rescue ship they detain the rescue ship on environmental and I think safety grounds and then let it go out again so it becomes, I mean I think the big question becomes how reliable are these corridors and how reliable do migrants themselves feel they are unfortunately if anything the more robust corridors are the ones that are operated by smugglers and they're the ones who then sort of prey on people saying like well are you sure you can trust that humanitarian corridor what if the humanitarian corridor is simply for them to be able to see you and then turn you back around far too often in the official crossings that's what actually really happens so I don't know if that answered oh yeah sorry I've just finished studying colonial revival and this is just like the 1870s when the Irish came here because they were starving and the people of Vermont did everything but hang them then the Italians came to work in the quarries and the same thing happened so this is nothing new yeah unfortunately there are you know that there's lots of evidence that you have not just in times of economic anxiety where the really easy answer is it's them somebody is doing this to you what is interesting in this particular moment is that it's not really connected generally speaking I mean I've often wondered so what happens when the next actual economic downturn happens I mean this is happening in good times when people just have these kinds of fears and those fears are irrational in lots of ways they're not connected to something actually on the ground and we spend our time and money on the wrong thing when we really should be addressing other kinds of issues I mean I think that say what you will about the Obama kind of the increase in immigration detention at least that was focused on violent crime which again seems to make sense it's kind of a perverse logic when you say well we're now going to take what is a civil offense of overstaying visas we're going to make it a criminal matter and now all these people are criminals and that's a very strange way of approaching it so yeah thank you very much