So good morning everyone, thank you for being here and welcome to everyone who's in person and those of us who are joining on the G-SAP YouTube channel. My name is Hiba Barkar and I'm an associate professor in the urban planning program here and at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. I'm also the director of the Post Complex Cities Lab that have been putting some of these events together. First I'm grateful for everyone who accepted our invitation on a relatively short notice to share their experiences and knowledge and to be with us here today. Today's conference serves as a rapid response basically to the migrant crisis, crisis invitation that is unfolding in New York City. It brings together a diverse array of academics, experts, activists, urban stakeholders and individuals with personal experiences and knowledge to help us better understand the obstacles as well as the resources and the communities that are available for migrants arriving in New York City. The conference will particularly focus because you know this is a big topic but we're going to particularly focus on the issues of the built environment and the experiences and rights of immigrants to shelter and housing and claiming space in the city, the right to the city. Coming together as scholars, activists, community organizers is also important giving how the right to shelter that is New York is famous for the mandate is actually also under attack. The right to shelter in the context of New York City refers to the legal obligation of the city and I think some of our guests will speak to this today in the context of New York City refers to the legal obligation of the city to provide temporary shelter for individuals and families who are experiencing homelessness. This concept is based on the understanding that access to shelter is a fundamental human right, especially in locations with harsh weather conditions like New York. Around 118,000 new immigrants have arrived in New York City. It's estimated since April 2022 which according to the city has trained its resources and caused crowding in homeless shelters that are already at capacity and many people eventually have been sleeping in the streets. For example, you can see close to, in Harlem, close to campus on 116 and Frederick Douglass, the people who have to live in the streets. Mayor Adam said the city has already spent around $1 billion to handle the migrant crisis and that the city does not have additional resources to handle the income influx of people that are forced to compete with the unhoused population for beds in homeless shelters. It is a crisis in quotation and parenthesis for many reasons. One of them is the lack of support from the federal government that says it doesn't have enough resources to help the unhoused in general, whether homeless populations or immigrants fleeing hardships from their countries. However, and I have to say that the federal government has allocated $858 billion to spend on the military and defense for 2023 alone to fund wars in the Middle East, Latin America and the African continent and elsewhere in the world. Of course we cannot talk about this without the background that there's something that's happening in the world. So as we watch thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers sleeping on the streets of New York City looking for shelter, we are also watching on our screens 5,000 miles away from us. 2.5 million people in Gaza, 70% of them are refugees on their own land and have been under attack by Israel funded by our federal tax money, which managed to allocate $14.3 billion in emergency funds, plus the $3.8-annual million of dollars that goes to the Israeli defense, which have helped create millions of refugees at the other end of the world in what many scholars are describing as a genocide, as a response to the October 7th cruel attacks. So 1.5 million who are ready refugees are on the move again looking for safe space from shelters and moms and we have thousands and thousands here also looking for safe space and shelter away from violence. So while we're talking about New York City, these conversations are important global conversations as the United States United Nations estimates that there are about 118 million people forcibly displaced in the world right now. Our day will be divided into three panels. We will start with a panel on the urban history of immigration crisis in New York City. We're followed by lunch. Panel 2 will focus on the formal and informal systems of support and care that immigrants depend on to make life in the city. On the last panel, we will focus on the housing question and the right to shelter. Our panels will be moderated by the very capable masters and doctor students from the urban planning program and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights here at Columbia. At noon around afternoon, I guess, a bit afternoon, we will break for lunch. During the lunch break here, the post-conflict city lab is co-hosting a second teaching on what is settler colonialism, where speakers trace the entanglements between indigenous dispossession regimes of US surveillance technologies and Israeli designs and use of drones connecting to the globalized warfare. It's happening in the same building on the fifth floor when our lunch break is happening here. I want to thank the many sponsors that have made this event on the migrant crisis possible today. I want to thank the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, the Society of Fellows and Haman Center for the Humanities, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Institute of Latin American Studies, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Post-Conflict Cities Lab. I also want to thank my colleague Hugo Ceremento for helping co-organize this event and thanks to Kendra Sykes, Stefan Bodicard from GSTAP Events and Chris Day from AV who are helping with this setup and for everyone who is involved in some way. This event would not have been possible without the dream team of students, amazing team. I've been with the pleasure and privilege to work with for the past month. I would like to thank you in alphabetical order to Maria Amaya Morphin, Edalia Gonzalez, Joe Honeykens, Claire, Kenan Kurgan, Naya Deng, Maya Komal, Elizabeth Milagores Alvarez, Daniela Pelschres, Algo Ogas, Mauricio Rada Orelana, Pedro Ramos, Saumil, Sangavi, Samantha, Sauna Sarabia, Mandy Taylor and Kee Sanghi. I want to thank my amazing research assistant, Maryam Mahmood and thank you, Maryam, for juggling with me all these events that we're putting together. I hope you enjoy your day with us. Please grab a coffee if you need more outside and we'll start with our first panel that's moderated by Kee Sang and Elizabeth. Thank you so much. Without further ado, I'd love to ask each of our panelists in panel one on the urban history of immigrant crises in New York City to introduce themselves. I'll start. Hi, I'm Nara Milanesh. I'm a historian at Barnard just across the street. I focus on Latin American history. I'm actually not a historian of migration. I always feel like I have to say that. I became interested in these topics. I mean, I have a long standing interest, but in 2016 I had the opportunity to spend a week in the largest ice detention facility in the country in south Texas. And I subsequently went back many times, including with students. And out of that experience grew an oral history project with Central American migrants. I've also been involved in some of the local organizing activities in New York City regarding the recent migrant newcomers. And, but my focus is really on Latin America. So I'm deferring here to my colleagues in US history. And I guess I don't have to pass the microphone. Hi, Ron. I'm a case on the wall stress. I'm the director of Latina and Latino studies at Penn State University, but also Columbia College class of 1992. So thank you for coming and having me back here. I'm a historian of Latinos in the United States of immigration and the author of a book that I'll be saying more about the subtitle which tells the whole story, but I'll leave that for the talk and turn it over to Dr. Flores. Hi, everyone. I'm Lori Flores. I've just gotten over laryngitis, so I'm a little bit quiet. But I'm an associate professor of history at SUNY Stony Brook. I teach modern America, labor history, immigration and food history. Hi, everyone. My name is Nermin Arestu. I am an associate professor at the CUNY School of Law where I co-direct the Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic. There, together with my students, we represent immigrants in all postures of the system, affirmatively applying for asylum, trying to come through our southern border, those detained, those in deportation proceedings, as some examples. We represent people from all over the world. Our express focus in our clinic is really to focus on the most marginalized of the most marginalized. So most recently we focused on the experience of black migrants who are coming through the southern border, youth in Long Island who are subject to pretextual gang allegations, Muslim immigrants and those who are perceived to be Muslim who are subject to post-911 civil liberties issues, and we are just wrapping up a long project looking at the experiences of disabled immigrants and their due process rights. And I've been there about 10 years and I'm really excited to be on this very cross-disciplinary panel. Hi, good morning. My name is Cynthia Santos. I am from Mexico. I am an active faculty at CUNY Journalist School, but I work in the intersection of migration, arts and community organizing. Thank you. Just a quick note, as some of our speakers have already alluded to, we will be using different vocabularies and we understand and recognize that there are several different populations and different experiences being represented today. For the two of us, Elizabeth and I will mostly be using the term migrant as an umbrella term to refer to all these different types of newcomers into the city. But we do want to recognize that there are different experiences, different reasons for coming to the city, that there are people for whom this is not the first time they are moving or being displaced. So we just want to put that out there and without further ado. Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here. Thanks to the organizers. I'll skip all of that stuff so that we cannot spend too much time. This is a conference on migrant newcomers to New York City, but I actually want to start talking about the U.S.-Mexico border. Because the border is 2,000 miles away from where we are sitting in this room, but it runs through the downtown heart of Manhattan where many thousands of people, of course, are living. And of course, it runs through Queens and Bronx and Brooklyn, et cetera. We have migrant newcomers dispersed all over the city. So I want to start with the border because we have the best statistics and best information about the border. And as far as I know, and I would be interested to know if other people in the conference know otherwise, as far as I can tell there are very bad statistics for what is happening in New York City right now, who is here, who is coming, how many people, et cetera. So I think the best we can do is at least to start at the southern border. So in recent years, we have heard this story of migrants crossing the border, which seems to recur periodically in the papers, right? It takes over the headlines, crisis, surge. In fact, this conference is directed at interrogating that whole framing, right? And then all of a sudden it disappears again. Then we don't hear about it for months. And then one day it reappears, right? It is frankly extraordinarily difficult even for people who are really interested in these topics and know a lot about them. It's really difficult to follow what's going on month to month, even week to week, right? And so I think it's really helpful to view patterns of who is crossing the border in a longer term historical perspective. History gives us a framework really to contextualize the present. And I think that's especially useful for an issue like this that seems to be in constant flux. So I want to start with a graph that does just that. And I'm so not a social scientist, but it's kind of fun to every once in a while show a graph. Here is a graph that shows us U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions, which is to say people who are having encounters with Border Patrol from 1947 to almost the present. So we get in a longer term perspective these blue bars that show us how many people are essentially crossing the border, right? So if we look, we have been hearing about a border crisis since about, let's say in the most recent cycles, since about 2014, right? Here we can see this last decade in relation to this much longer history, right? It's this little tail end. Well, if we look at that last decade, we can see that in fact the volume of people crossing the border is smaller by, and I am again not a social scientist, but I would say orders of magnitude from an earlier period in say the 80s, 90s, even early 2000s, right? So this is the graph I want to start with, and I like to often start with this graph to contextualize the last 10 years. And with this graph in mind, I want to argue that the story of migration in the past 10 years is not a story of how many. It is a story about who. Who is arriving and who has changed in ways that lends itself, I think, to this whole framing of crisis. Now you will notice, I should also say that there is clearly an uptick in the last year, and if we had a bar for 2022, it would likewise be high. And I am happy to talk about, I'll mention it very briefly, and I'm happy to talk about it in the Q&A, sort of the post pandemic story. And I will, and I will talk about it very briefly at the end. But I want to talk about instead of how many, which is always the framing of this issue, I want to talk about the who. So what do we mean by who? Well, we might assume this is the US-Mexico border, so isn't it primarily Mexicans, Mexican nationals that are crossing. And historically, that would be a correct assumption. But this has changed relatively recently. In the last decade or so, the numbers of people crossing who are Mexican citizens has decreased. In fact, in 2019, the numbers of Mexicans leaving the United States exceeded those seeking to enter. At the same time, over the last decade, we have witnessed an increase in the proportion of Central Americans who are arriving, and specifically Central Americans from three countries, the so-called Northern Triangle, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. So we get a shift from Mexico to Central America. And second, we have a shift in terms of the demographic profile of who is coming. Historically, it was adult men who primarily young labor migrants who were crossing the border seeking work. In recent years, we've seen an increase in the numbers of families and children, right? Many of whom are seeking asylum. That phrase asylum seekers that we're constantly hearing now, like where did that come from? That's where it's coming from, right? So we have this different profile of people who are coming under a distinct legal guise, right? We're trying to. There's also a gender element to this shift. Women and girls account for a larger share of crossers today than they did historically. So to summarize the story of the past 10 years is not a story of some unprecedented surge in numbers. It's a story about this shift from young adult Mexican men, labor migrants to Central American families and children who are asylum seekers. Here's a graph. This is only the second one I'm going to show that shows us the uptick in unaccompanied children and children with families. So this doesn't, I could show you graphs of how many families, which would be slightly different. But it would show essentially this similar pattern, which is that it starts slow and then starts to. We have a surge in 2014, which is when we started hearing about children at the border. And there have been various spikes since then. So these are the families that we have heard so much about in the news. I'm not going to talk about why they're coming. Let's see. I want to suggest that, and I'm going to skip ahead here. I want to suggest that that this explains the crisis framing that we have certain ideas about who is supposed to be migrating and who migrants are. And it's not supposed to be children. We have ideas that it should that is adult men, presumably with the kind of paradigmatic migrant, and that that is feeding into a lot of the framing of crisis. Children create and families create a crisis quote unquote. Because they create legal complications for those who would like to detain and deport them. Children for various reasons that I won't go into are harder to detain and deport than adults, Central American children, or even harder to detain and deport. So they create a crisis in that regard. They also, I think, create a political crisis in that children are weaponized in essence in some ways by both sides of this debate. Because there is nothing more powerful than a suffering child, right? If you can mobilize a suffering child to your ideological position, you have a very powerful discursive tool at your disposal. So I think part of the crisis, the framing of crisis is this. It is the framing of, or it is the fact of who is coming and the fact that these are children, and that lends itself to this framing. So I will talk more about that in Q&A. Thank you. Alright, so we're here to offer some historical perspective on migration to New York City. And since I've written this book on this subject with this subtitle, I clearly have some thoughts on the issue. Barrio América is a national study, but one that starts on a quiet street in a Dallas neighborhood called Oak Cliff in a modest yellow wood frame house. That is the headquarters of the Federación de Clube Zacatecaros del Norte de Texas, the North Texas Federation of Zacatecan Clubs. Now the first thing you'd notice entering would be this display between the flags of Mexico and the United States. There's the official steel of the Mexican state of Zacatecas, based on the original coat of arms bestowed by Philip II of Spain in 1588. The display is the creation of the Federation's founder and president, Manuel Rodel Rodriguez. And I began with this clubhouse and this migrante, I'll be using the Spanish term, because they exemplify and help create a series of durable connections between the United States and Latin America, and they constitute a transnational urban system, is what I've called it, one that transforms cities and towns on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. And more broadly, Rodela is just one of dozens of Latin American migrantes that my team and I interviewed between 2010 and 2016. Most importantly for our purposes, the broad historical context, he is one of about 25 million migrantes who moved to or were born in the United States in the past 50 years, and they arrived just when they were needed most, at a time when American cities were in deep distress because they were losing people, shedding jobs, facing fiscal crises and rising crime, and really facing the sense that perhaps the era of the big American city had simply come and gone. I argued that if migrantes like Mr. Rodela had not come, then a lot more American cities would look like the parts of Detroit, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, or Youngstown, Ohio that have become the tragic poster children of urban decay, right, whose abandoned homes, shuttered factories, ghostly office buildings, and empty schools have become, you know, the sort of symbols of urban decay, in books of ruins photography, their entire books published just of images like this. I want to take a moment to emphasize that the work of urban revitalization involved immigrants from around the world. I focused on Latinas because I speak Spanish. I do not know Cantonese or Arabic or Hindi or Korean or Yoruba. I wish I did, but again, this is simply a statement of the migrantes that I have studied who are about half of all immigrants. The other half come from, again, the entire rest of the world. This is an international effort. So let's begin by remembering what the urban crisis was because in this era in particular it's kind of easy to lose sight of it. The urban crisis was a period of about 30 years when cities were in deep trouble. From the 1960s to the 1990s, early 1990s, the signs of distress were all around. People would go to work in the morning and see panoramic views of abandoned neighborhoods, then they'd come home, turn on the TV and see news reports with one story after another about violent crimes in their city. And indeed crime was the most high profile symptom of the urban crisis. Various metrics, homicides, doubled property crimes, tripled, assaults more than quadrupled. I'll just give you one example from this city and I remember it well because I lived here at the time. In 1991 at the peak of the crime wave, there were 2,245 homicides in New York. If you do the math, that's about six every single day. Other cities had similarly horrible statistics. Meanwhile, cities were losing residents, Detroit loses 35% of its residents, Cleveland 37%. Lots of industrial cities say goodbye to about unbalance a third of the people living there. The industrialization and suburbanization meant that jobs were being taken out. So for example, Chicago lost about half of the manufacturing jobs that it had in 1948 by about 1980. So it was a really difficult time. Besides the near statistical analysis of what was going on, there were also a lot of cultural concomitants. And these are movies that I saw when I was a kid, so they mean a lot to me, but they're also very illustrative. There was a sense of a grim present and a bleak future for urban America. If you think of classic New York City movies like The Warriors, which depicted a city dominated by street gangs, 100,000 members strong, the poster said, who formed the armies of the night. The 1981 film Fort Apache the Bronx, where I was born, but it had no real resemblance to the Bronx I knew. It described the borough as, quote, a place where even the cops fear to tread, unquote, if only. But it was the 1981 movie Escape from New York that I think offered the most creative prognosis for the urban crisis. Now the movie took place in the future, right, 1997. The island of Manhattan has been evacuated of its civilian population and converted into a maximum security prison. Inside there are no prison guards, no law or order, only gang warfare and struggle to survive. And every inmate had a life sentence. And before they were sent in, they were offered the last minute choice. They could either move to Manhattan or voluntarily commit suicide. So underlying all of these movies and many others from the era, right, Robocop, after the fall of New York, there are lots of these, Dirty Harry, all five of those. It was the widespread sense that, again, big cities might be doomed. But essentially that is quite simply not what happened. Instead crime rates plunged in this city by about 85 to 90%. Last year there were 433 homicides in New York before the pandemic. It was 318. In a city that grew from seven and a third to almost 9 million people. Again, massive drop in crime. A nationwide one criminologist estimated that today there are about a hundred and something thousand people walking around who would have been murdered had the crime rate stayed where it was in about 1991 or 1992. So, broadly speaking, let me just give you the statistical part of this. Apologies, but just to give you a sense that, again, I based this on Chicago and Dallas, but it works pretty much nationwide. These are two tables from my book that basically show that Latinos and other immigrant stock populations like Asian Americans have repopulated cities hollowed out mainly by white flight. As you can see at the very bottom, the number of white Anglos through 2010 is smaller than it was in 1970. All that slack is taken up by migrants and their kids. It was not primarily the creative class or yuppies who were behind the revitalization for America. So, I just had these for two cities, but thankfully when the book came out, The New York Times wrote up the subject and their incredible data guy, Kwok Trangwe, did 10 more of them. So, you can get a sense. Here, the legend is here. So, Latinos are the orange other. I would have used a rather different phrasing. I think they're supposed to be Asian, African, and other migrants are really sort of taking up, again, that slack leftover. In the Sun Belt, the biggest cities, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix would be shrinking or stagnant if not for immigrant stock populations. Similar dynamics in older industrial cities. If you look at Milwaukee in Philadelphia, there are people who really are cities that really need more immigrants to stabilize their populations. New York, Boston, Oakland would also be shrinking if not for immigrant heavy demographics.  The problem is really the concatenation of laws that have concentrated particular immigrant flows into this one place, and this one place is the most expensive city in the entire western hemisphere. But really what we need is more housing and nationwide. And of course, Miigrante should be our answer to how to get it. According to the Department of Labor, we have a tremendous labor shortage. We are short about 2.2 million construction workers. Let's just say we know exactly where to get them. They're ready to be here. So if there's a crisis of migration, it's that we need more of them. Thank you so much. I'm just going to stay here and I'll just take five minutes. So, again, I'm a Latinx historian, labor historian, and a social historian who works on food, labor in particular. My first book was about farm workers, citizen farm workers, guest workers, legally contracted guest workers and undocumented farm workers in the U.S. The book I'm working on now is a book about the history of Latinx food workers from World War II to COVID, specifically focusing on the northeast. So New York, obviously a really big center of that region. So I'm just going to say a couple of things about the book and then why it makes sense that worlds of food should be talked about when we talk about the migrant prices right now. So my book is basically about this contradiction we have in the nation. We are a nation that enthusiastically embraces Latin American and Latinx food ways and food cultures, but we have a much more fraught relationship with actual Latin American and Latinx people. And questions and debates and violence that erupts over questions of belonging, I don't think, coincidentally, happens in worlds of food. And so this is a nation that loves to enjoy cuisines and the diversity of food cultures that comes with migration, but it certainly can coexist and we see this all the time in xenophobia. The very same eaters who can enjoy this diversity of cuisine that's brought by immigrants can still hold this form of cognitive dissonance that they want these immigrants to be gone, or they want them to come the quote right way when the structures in place don't allow that right way to happen quickly, in a timely manner, if at all. So my book is, you know, what is it exactly about food realms that allows people to feel like they can consume, that they can extract, that they can digest Latinx food ways, but not give anything to Latinx people in terms of citizenship, privileges, rights, however, that spectrum of rights that people are being deprived of now, and accusing them of being criminal elements, polluters or diluters of American culture. And so my book is about food scapes and the ways in which food labor, because this is often where we see people who are in precarious socioeconomic positions entering the United States economy as often in worlds of food. But these food scapes are often meant to be less visible to us, even if we're trying to be the most ethical and mindful eater. Food scapes and worlds of food are obscured from us in many different ways, either made much less visible or completely invisible to us. So this is everything from farms and barns to processing factories, to the backs of kitchens, to warehouses for all this prepackaged food service boxes that we get delivered to our doorsteps, to food delivery, the deliveries as themselves, are operating in a space and in a realm that's often shielded from us, and that's by design, that's very intentional. So my book argues that historically the pattern that we have gotten into started in the 1940s. It's around that World War II period that the nation developed this tandem appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor, and they become mutually constituted of one another this obsession that the United States developed over time. The reason why we get so used to both is that we are participating in guest worker programs that are importing labor from Latin America and the Caribbean, on a constant basis, constantly renewed by Congress. These guest worker programs, the Bracero program, the Migration Division program with Perfum Drico, the H2 visa program, which is basically the Bracero program reincarnated for the present day. And along with those guest worker programs, because they are so limited and because they are costly, the parallel stream of undocumented migration that also forms with guest worker programs. So World of Food have included undocumented labor, asylum seekers, people of precarious migration status or citizenship status for decades in U.S. history. And so this is a phenomenon still happening today. So while consumers might demand and fetishize certain items, certain food waste, certain trendy food experiences, this is happening at the same time that these people are being unseen in various places. So the hyper-visibility of the U.S. and the world, but then there's so much indisputability that is taking place in terms of these people being able to be given living wages, working rights, basic nourishment. Because ironically, food workers, not just migrants, but also citizens, experience high levels of food insecurity as they work to nourish us. They go so profoundly on nourish themselves. But in the book I don't want to paint food workers as just passive victims. There are so many moments in which food workers, from citizen to guest worker, to undocumented, to asylum seeking. Migrants make political moves to make themselves heard and seem and treated better in this country. There are the things we might think of right away, which are union strikes and protests and rallies. But there's also moments of gastro-political demonstration. There are moments in which Latinx and Latin American people ask for better food for themselves while they are working. They withhold food from others in order to make a political statement. They become food entrepreneurs themselves when other workscapes do not serve them in the ways that they hopefully will. So while describing these political moves, what I'm trying to show is that of course these people should not just be seen as labor and laborers for the United States. They are fuller human beings. They have desires for themselves. They are making efforts to nourish themselves in one another. And so I think both are important both to explore the deprivation and then also the nourishment that is taking place in these communities. But the crisis, quote unquote, that we are seeing right now, a lot of these people are actually, we see them blending into worlds of food already. In the subway cars, the selling ends, candy, gum, little things. We see them trying to get work in food delivery, so creating fake accounts in delivery apps that are getting sold to them by other people in order to start delivering food to us. Some seamless Uber Eats, Caviar, all of these apps. And so this is kind of a sphere in which we historically have profited over or off of undocumented labor and all sorts of precarious. And right now in this moment, there is a continuity here that we are still taking advantage of the people in the worlds of food. But they themselves are knowing that they have to blend in in that way in order to both be able to work until they're waiting for their work permits. So thank you so much again for inviting me to this panel. I want to share with you some photographs that I have been taking through different projects about migration. The first one that we are looking is a photo that I took so far from here is this family in 2017 that was living in Sanctuary in Episcopal Church in Washington Heights. And for me, it's really important to create ways to explain migration through art, to photography. Right now I am doing more embroidery. So during the Trump administration, as you know, a lot of families went into Sanctuary across the New York City, but also across the country. So I have the opportunity not just to document their lives, their daily lives in some of these churches, but also to go to the border and to dig in the archives, to dig into the history. Because for me, it's not just what is happening right now. It's like we have to go back to the history and see what was happening in 1980 when Reagan was president in this country. What was happening in Central America? Why these people is coming here? It's not because we want to. It's not because this country is beautiful or give us the opportunity to work. It's because in 1980 it was a war in Central America, mostly Nicaragua, Guatemala, in El Salvador. So we saw during that time, I was kind of born during this time, but our parents saw a huge wave of migration. A lot of indigenous communities. One of the questions of this panel was about raising or speaking about indigenous communities. And we are looking through legal feelings. I see it's more notorious. A lot of native people and Afro-indigenous people from Central America is coming to this country. But that happens in the program, but now it's more visible. So I put this photo of this propaganda to remind us. We have to go back to history because history kind of explains what is happening nowadays. And during this time, during the Stone administration, I started also working through my sanctuary project about collecting stories. A lot of my work is participatory, so I do photography in a participatory way, but also I collect drawing and writing testimonies from the people that I am working with. So this is Daria, who drew her own experience being on the Tension Center and crossing the border. And she was, I remember that I went with my partner that is a Lutheran minister to the above house here, not so far in the Bronx. And these children were without her mother from three months, and we helped them to reunite with them. So we were really close. I was really close with them, not just because I was documenting their lives. It's because also I was trying to help them in many ways to settle and to go to Seattle to reunite with their Salvadoran families, but also they are indigenous. They are Nawaz Pipiles from El Salvador. So I put this collage to show you. They asked me to take them to the Statue de la Libertad. So something that I feel that is important to speak about migration is the tension and new waves and new ideas that the eyes of all these complex has been created creatively to take prisoners outside of prisons, but they still make money of them. And this is a photo that I took also, Ignis Ahuti. He was in Sanctuary in Meridan, Connecticut from 2017 to 2019. He's Muslim and he was part of this Muslim community in September 11, 9-11, who go into the list of Muslims. So if you see the uncle monitor has proven and even though was broken, he was all the time afraid. And one of the things that I want to share with you about people living in Sanctuary, Muslim living in Sanctuary were more afraid that Latinx community because they are Muslims and all the stereotypes of categorization that this country has been creating of them. And this time also I went to the border to see how was the migration coming to this country. And I found not just women's because it's all the time speaking about women's who cross the border with their children. Also a lot of men's crossing with their child and waiting to settle in this country and sending money to their wives to come in a more safer way. So this is Holy Cross Retreat Center close by to El Paso, but it's in New Mexico in Las Cruces. And they have this retreat center and they are Franciscans and they have a huge shelter. They offer their doors and open the doors daily to rescue basically migrants who come out to the Tension Center in south Texas. They pick them in buses and they bring them into this center and they provide them not just food and shelter, but also they help them to go or to reunite with their own families. So this is photos from that time. And this is a collage that I made with a child that crossed the border by themselves. And if you see is a kitchen language testimony for me. This is a program that I have about that is called the Code de la Migración, the migration codex. And I am taking the idea of codex from the pre-Spanic times in Mexico to recreate the stories about indigenous migration. So if you can see the collage, the collage says everything, you know, you can see the mascara, the Maya mass and also the cactus but also the border patrol. This is another collage that I may take in or the inspiration for the stories that I have been collecting in the Tension Centers. Not so far from here, you are crossing the Hudson. You know that is like four jails that serves as a detention center. Three of them are state federal prisons and one is a detention center. And this is part of the testimony that I have been collecting of the experience of these people. I love this one. Because also put how he came, like from Guatemala, Lucas, he dragged to la frontera and he went to Bergen County jail for four months and then he went to Fadar Plaza. And this is like, I have a lot of drawings that I extract for archival testimonies in Arizona states and you can see this is in 1980. So the similitudes nowadays and you put the children now, I have been working through in a program, educational program that we call Sanctuary School, in a church that provides legal clinic every Thursday and I am part of this school program. And we have been working with children and we haven't seen, now they are, most of them are not Salvadorians. Are Venezuelan, Afro-Colombians, a lot of Peruvians, a lot of Equatorians, Quiche, but a lot of Afro communities. So it's like, I think I know that I have to finish, but this also is like from 1919 and a lot of indigenous from Guatemala were coming to the border and this is like a message that one of the activists from that time, Lori, give me to scan and to use for my Sanctuary project and you can read, somebody is giving to her the thanks for all the work that she was doing in South Valley, Texas, but also in Arizona. And also I feel that it's really important to look out the media, how the media language has been changing.  We are no aliens, a lot. And this is part of the archival material that I have that I feel that is so beautiful. He, Guadalupe came with a family that during this time was really famous because their own story in Nicaragua. And this is part of the work that I have been doing recently documenting the cultural expression of indigenous communities, mostly Mexican in New York City. This is again an indigenous woman. She crossed the border when she was 14 and she grew up in her own language, also Kiche. It's a huge Kiche community, mostly based in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. And I want to show you also like during the pandemic, I was part of the Mutual Aid program. And a lot of the people who were helping were migrants, helping migrants, not just like privileged people who have works, you know, like in their homes. So this is Josefina, she's from Guerrero. You know that a lot of the deliveries are from Guerrero, Mexico, Mixtecos, Nawaz. So I took a photo of her. She wrote also her own testimony and why she was helping or joining this program, Mutual Aid program. And I want to finish with this work that I am doing now that is called Sanctuary School and that I am part of it. And we provide artists, tools and education for children that accompany every Thursday to the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church and their parents to fill their asylum applications. I don't know if this one, this is a video. So yesterday we did this, but I don't know if we can put the video. I feel that, I think there is no going to be play. But we discovered that these children, the Garifonas, the Hondurans, they play the tambores. They start playing with us and it was amazing. So thank you so much. I'm so happy to be able to go last actually and tie together some of the points, excellent points that have been made already today. So yes, this lecture is about the so-called crisis of immigration in New York City, but it's important to start by noting that the systems and sites that we're all speaking about, taken from stolen lands, unceded territories or products of settler colonialism, that have displaced and continue to displace through systematic displacement, extermination, assimilation, deportation, criminalization, cultural appropriations, relegating folks to the margins of society as we saw in some of these drawings and collages, over incarceration, all systems of state erasure and rebranding, right? Systems that we're seeing live streamed again from across the world. So it's not surprising then that this rebranding and this erasure is then enforced on immigrant bodies. We enforced it on the indigenous bodies. We're enforcing it on immigrant bodies. It's been a common refrain, right? In U.S. history, new immigrants arrive at our shores, often trafficked here, or as a result of our own interventions abroad, as just discussed, they're first vilified, then maybe invisibilized, maybe hesitatingly tolerated, and perhaps generations later, depending on their proximity to perceived whiteness, later maybe they're venerated or appropriated for their contributions as examples of the All-American success story. So I really want to start by making those throughlines. How did we treat indigenous populations? How do we treat immigrants? And then how is this relevant today to bodies deemed foreign and who may or may not be immigrants still, even thinking about what's happening on this campus? Right? How are the tools that controlled native populations, then controlled immigrant populations, tools that come from the militarization of our border, like surveillance tools, how are they then used to control bodies deemed foreign, even on this campus? So think about that. All right. So I'm going to go through some of these enduring myths, scarcity, disease, crime, and terror. And quickly, because I know we don't have that much time. All right. So let's start with the myth of scarcity. Right? Immigrants have long been blamed from the earliest days of their arrival right here on Ellis Island as a drain on public benefits. They are taking jobs from U.S. workers. They are draining higher education spaces, exacerbating housing. None of this is new. This has all been there forever. Examples. All right. We have Tyler County, Texas, the superintendent there, who wanted to charge $1,000 where children didn't have a status so they could go and get a public education. Went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1975. We have this major case, which gives children the right to public education despite of their immigration status. But this case shows this common theme of people concerned about the drain that immigrant children bring when they come to the United States, and then enacting state legislation policies, federal policies as well, to limit the rights of those populations. All right. And then this is from the Atlantic in June 1896. This was when there were largely European immigrants coming. But that same concept. How do we protect wages? The American standard of living. The quality of American citizenship from degradation through tumultuous access of vast throngs. Look at the language here. Waves of immigrants, right? Thongs of immigrants from the ignorant and brutalized peasantry from eastern and southern Europe. So this is in the Atlantic from June 1896. Again, these themes are not new. This could be from 2022 from our mayor, literally the same type of language. If you look at it, you have hundreds of articles using the same kind of language. All right. So what I would argue, and I think what all the panelists are saying, are these are really manufactured roadblocks, right? Why is there this perceived idea of scarcity? Well, there are federal policies that deny work authorization to certain and most new immigrants, right? So I'm also coming from a trip to the southern border in May, where I met many immigrants who had just come through Ciudad Juarez into El Paso. The first thing they asked me in that red cross shelter, how can we get work authorization? We want to work. We want to support ourselves. We don't want to be on welfare. We don't want to be in public housing. We want to support ourselves and our family. We're here to work. But there are policies, federal policies, policy decisions that prevent immigrants from getting work authorization. Then they're forced into doing unauthorized work. There's a system there, right? Then a workplace exploitation. There's public charge and admissibility laws. There's requirements for financial sponsorship. Informal systems of fear and isolation that drive undocumented immigrants into underground systems. All federal policy decisions we are making that then we use against these same populations in the name of scarcity. And then, I mean, this is very similar to what my previous panelists talked about, is a little snapshot on this point into New York, right? Refugees in upstate New York. The federal government determines where refugee resettlement occurs. About 6% of refugees admitted to the U.S. since 2000 were resettled in New York State. About 90% of them were resettled in upstate New York. We're right behind California and Arizona. Cinex said the same thing they'd always said, right? On those previous slides. Oh, this is, how are these small towns going to absorb these numbers? Right? What are they going to do? There's not going to be enough jobs. Right? All of this cynicism lingered, right? And what are we going to do? And these are communities of Bengalis, Bhutanese, Bosnians, Burmese, Guyanese, Afghans, Jamaicans, Vietnamese, Syrians, Iraqis, Somalians, Asians. Like a whole huge range, South and Central Americans. And what happened there was similar to what my previous panelists talked about is, well, they contributed to the GDP. Housing values went up. In Utica, New York, for every 1,000 immigrants who moved into the city, housing prices went up by $116 per square foot. They filled both low-skilled and higher-skilled jobs, creating over and saving manufacturing jobs in these cities. So again, fully a myth and there are plenty of jobs in the United States. Right? Okay. So then there's the myth of disease. Right? We don't have to go too far back into the COVID pandemic to see how this myth played out and led to anti-Asian violence in our city. Right? So this idea, and especially in New York, thinking about tenement houses and, again, urban planning, the kinds of housing conditions immigrants were relegated into. The fact that we had quarantine and immigrant detention centers, this is the Marine Hospital in Staten Island and, of course, we have the Ellis Island, the nation's first immigrant detention center and quarantine center. This idea that immigrant bodies are inherently carriers of disease. You see that right again. Migrants bust from the border. It's not just a humanitarian crisis. It's a public health crisis. Okay. So this is just repeating itself as it always has been. All right. But what the reality is, again, it's a theme, are federal policies create these conditions of disease. So, in fact, ICE detention centers, like the ones we just saw in the collage, Bergen County, the ones in New York and New Jersey, they have long been sites of disease. There is report after report about TB. Like, my clients get TB all the time in these detention facilities. We saw during COVID, the pandemic, again, how much these were sites of COVID spread, lack of attention to existing physical and mental health issues. So the ICE detention framework itself as a creator of disease. Our own border policies and restrictions, again, creating disease. So you were talking about Remain in Mexico and these ideas of these tent cities that because of our federal policies, individuals were forced to remain on the Mexico side of the U.S. border for six months, one year, two years, awaiting their immigration hearings in the United States. That was the Remain in Mexico policy. These became some of the largest tent cities, refugee shelters in the world right at our southern border, which of course became sites of disease. And then, of course, I want to flag the disabling experience of migration itself. Again, a federal policy. When you think of the barbed wires that our states are putting up, how are we creating conditions, disabling conditions, how are we leading to PTSD by forcing people through these conditions to come here? And then, I'm going to wrap up with the myths of, and let's put them together, criminality and terror. Right? Whether it was the Irish drunker, the Italian mafia man, the Chinese worker who violated ordinances, the Arab terrorists, this has been as an age old tale in the United States as well. And I just want to flag a few things here and a few really important points and I know my time is up, so I'm going to end here. Regulation has always been driven in part by an image of immigration, immigrant criminality, an image itself that's driven by racism, which I think a lot of these myths are, driven by racism. But thinking about some of these tools that are used to criminalize immigrants, especially surveillance in New York City, for example, thinking about the school-to-ice pipeline in Long Island where school resource officers are then connecting undocumented children to ICE for deportation, and then thinking a lot about border policing, I want you to just really take away this point that these tools that are used to police immigrants are then used on our populations as well. So specifically, DNA surveillance, facial recognition softwares, social media surveillance, and that throughline that I'll leave us with is like thinking about the funding that Governor Hockill just got, billions of dollars really to put into surveillance on campuses. So thinking about where that technology has come from and where it's being used before, and now again how it's being brought to native populations that may or may not be immigrants anymore. I just want to take a second to acknowledge the amazingly brilliant work that you are all doing. Round of applause for our speakers, right? I want to start by asking you guys, I guess contextualize for us from your many perspective disciplines, why are people currently migrating to the city? And why is it being framed as a crisis or an unprecedented thing that the city just doesn't understand? People have always migrated to the city, so nothing of that is new. I think there is definitely, I can just go back to the border. There were a huge period of time where our border was essentially closed, so again my theme is our federal policies have led to where we are. So under during the COVID period and even before that, in the Trump administration first there were these policies that forced people to remain in Mexico. Then COVID happens and then using antiquated public health laws, title 42, there's basically a stop at the border. There is no asylum at our southern border, even right now under the Biden administration. So what's happening is there's periods where some of these policies are maybe lifted for a minute or there's some kind of stay and there's incredible amounts of complex litigation on all of these policies where suddenly people are seeing an entry point and coming. So you're going to see large people come at once where before there was like a constant trickle of people which is perceived to overwhelm systems. Again, these are all perceptions and we are creating systems that cause for this. Yeah, I'm going to add more if other panelists want to. Hello, yes, does it work? Yes, okay, I can't hear it at all. So many things to say. One thing that I just want to maybe point out that I didn't have time to talk about is that precisely this question of what happens after the pandemic and who is coming and how it changes. I talked a lot about and many of us talked about Mexicans and Central Americans, but in the last 18 months, which I suspect is the thing of greatest interest perhaps to the subsequent panels, what we've really seen is a remarkable diversification of the nationalities of people who are arriving, so that where once upon a time we had primarily Mexicans and Central Americans coming over the border, we have this explosion of diverse nationalities, Venezuelans, Cubans, Ukrainians, et cetera, Haitians, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that part of the story of New York, it might be that, and this is purely speculative, but for folks who are coming, for example, Venezuelans that don't have a long history, large Venezuelan communities, a deep history of migration in the U.S., many of the folks that are coming don't have social networks, right? Whereas we saw the long history of Central American migration, for example, when I worked in a detention center, almost every single person who came through that detention center had a cousin or a friend or an aunt or a parent that they were going to be reunited with. And that is not in my experience with the Venezuelans that I have interacted with over the past 18 months. That is not the case for them. So I think part of this is about historically migrant communities receive one another and rely on networks of support and solidarity. And a lot of the folks coming now lack that because they lack the deep history. I mean, history gives us knowledge, and it also gives people support, right? And so I think that explains part of the challenge of this moment, in addition to, of course, the policies, the noxious policies that deny people the ability to work, et cetera. It's also that people are not intending for New York to be their first destination. They've been undocumented in other places in Latin America and they're moved up, but they're just being moved over here by other people, treated like pawns basically. So they're undocumented to like the third, fourth power because they've tried to go through something already in another country in South America or then in Central America or then in Mexico and then in Southwest and then moved up here to the Northeast. And just to answer the crisis question, it's obviously politically beneficial to some people to imagine that there's a crisis. It is purely a hype job. They may be trying to get more money out of the federal government, which is a reasonable thing to ask. They might be trying to persuade people to vote for their party. Might be trying to persuade people to feel fear of others. But as an immigration historian, the continuities are what is really most notable, right? So right about now, there are 13% foreign-born people in the United States. In 1910, there were 14% foreign-born people in the United States. Now, that was a previous peak of the foreign born, but we have been here before and not just once. By the same token, since we're talking about New York City, 36% of all New Yorkers were born elsewhere. In 1910, that number was 41%.  If you look at them, they're amazingly consistent, whether it's what percentage growth in the U.S. population has been the same for about 70 years, roughly 1% a year. And so just the entire concept of, oh, it's a crisis is fundamentally, truly and unmistakably just wrong, except in so far as, as you pointed out, we have policies that are self-defeating that create problems where there shouldn't be any. Something that I think is important to add is, like, the people is coming in a forced migration. They just, they don't just migrate because they want to and we know it. And it's because also this extracted neoliberal system, if you see the condition of Venezuelans right now or the Haiti people, but also African, a lot of people from Middle East, from Uzbekistan, and also still from Central America and from the Garifuna community, it's because the condition that this country has been creating outside are terrible. Sending guns to Mexico, for example, and creating the drug worm in a lot of territories is really impossible today for people. So they escape, basically. I will say that they just don't migrate. They escape. They don't have another option. So they cross different countries, as you were saying. Some Venezuelans, they first go to, went to Ecuador or Argentina or Peru or Colombia and they see the opportunity to migrate in community, like in Caravans. Now it's a new phenomenon that they saw that migrating by themselves is really dangerous because they have to cross different continents and some of them, they have to be careful with the guns and in Mexico with the narco traffic. So as you were saying, a lot of people have benefit profits in this crisis. That is not just a migration crisis in the city. It's a health crisis. It's a housing crisis. It's a violent crisis. And when the people ask me about this, it's like, what are you expected with this country if this city doesn't do anything for their own citizens? You know, how many people is in the streets right now dealing with mental health, dealing with a lot of things? So I am no surprise that the city doesn't have this infrastructure economically and in different kind of levels. So often conversations about the question of migration dwell on US policy and US law. And it is the case that we have a pretty much unlimited power in this country to inflict harm on newcomers. But we actually have relatively little ability to control who comes and sort of global migratory flows. So I want to really put out there that people don't show up at a border. People don't show up in Penn Station. People don't show up on the subway from Venezuela or Cameroon, you know, magically. They come because, you know, for reasons, right? And those reasons are complex and why they come from Cameroon is different than why they come from Venezuela or Nicaragua. But that is so infrequently part of our conversation and it absolutely must be part of the conversation. We need to deep provincialize the conversation about migration in the US both by recognizing why people come and also by recognizing that New York City is, as several panelists have said, merely the endpoint of a long history of, you know, experience of displacement. Many folks arriving now have been refugees in multiple countries before they ever got here. And so we like to think of, you know, the US is somehow exceptional. We're the ones dealing with a border and a crisis and that.  So this is, and to speak about the hemisphere and we could speak of this as a global issue of forced migration. So I think deep provincializing the conversation in the US and recognizing the hemispheric and global networks and ramifications and resonances is really critical. Just as a plug for the rest of the day, we've talked a lot about kind of informal networks of mutual care and aid. That's our second panel. The right to shelter is something that is getting a lot of attention in the media and it's part of why New York is often framed as like where migrants should want to go by other political actors. Right to shelter is the third panel. So I hope if you're able to stick around to hear our fantastic panelists on that. I guess the second question that we would like to ask is if there is anything about the history of immigration to New York City that people often misunderstand. I know we talked a lot about kind of the short-sightedness of the current discourse about the kind of invisibilization of our complicity in creating these conditions that are so unstable, so unsafe for people to want to escape, want to move and then being forcibly literally shipped here to New York City, not as their first destination but as their second, third, fourth destination. And if there is any misunderstanding, how that misunderstanding, whether by the public or whether by decision makers, how that impacts this current wave of migration. I can start with that. Just as Andrew was saying earlier, this story is a lot more about continuity than it is about disruption or a different pattern. So Columbia actually played a part in a moment of crisis in the 1940s and 1950s when air travel became easier between the island of Puerto Rico and the mainland. And the Puerto Rico Commissioner of Labor actually hired some researchers from Columbia to prove because it was being said in newspapers and in public discourse that Puerto Ricans were a problem in the city because they were coming in such numbers, even though they were citizens, they were foreignized and racialized in this way that they were seen as outsiders. And these researchers at Columbia produced a report saying that these people really are not a threat, they're not criminal, they are actually contributing to the economy, they have an education, they're coming and sort of disrupting what people's ideas of what this crisis was. I think New York has also been at the center in other northeastern cities, regions all over the U.S. during the Cold War when we absorbed asylum seekers from Cuba, from Vietnam, like people were distributed, received, absorbed. So these waves that happened over time that are framed as crises, the absorptions happen. They just take time. And the way that, like Cynthia was saying before, the way that the media talks about migrants, too, affects so much. So when Trump says they are poisoning the blood of the nation when they are cannibalizing the United States, when he wants to go back to Eisenhower-era operation, went back to start these mass deportations, it's so much about language which then feeds into people's ideas of what's a crisis and what is simply continuity. I mean, like an example of that very recently is just how the tone towards Ukrainian asylum seekers are migrants as opposed to others, right? So the New York City was able to integrate thousands of Ukrainian refugees. There was a very different tone in a matter of weeks because, and a lot of that goes back to a policy choice that the federal government made to streamline these processes that we talked about, get people work authorization, resettle them, support them in different ways. So I mean, like, why are we creating those policies for one group of people and then for other groups of people spending an incredible, inordinate amount of our federal budget on detention, surveillance, border militarization instead of repurposing that money towards some of the needs that we talked about today towards our infrastructure. Yeah, I wanted to go sort of two levels deep with a couple of really basic sort of mythologies of immigration. The one that I'm sure you all know about is the whole, well, my ancestors came here legally and the people now are illegal. Response number one, which I'm pretty sure you also know is that there were lots of laws prohibiting immigration starting in about 1882 if you were Chinese, 1917, 21 and 24 if you were from Southern Europe and the entire time if you were from Africa. So number one, illegalizing certain kinds of migration is what changes that. The second level of that, and this I'm drawing on the work of a historian at Berkeley named Hidetaka Hirota, he went back and found that actually of a lot of the immigrants who were legal because immigration for Europeans was more or less unregulated until the 20th century, lots of them did fall afoul of local rules on being a public charge and they were not deported, right? So I think answer number one should be, well, there was no regulation. Number two is actually a lot of your ancestors, the Irish especially, right? The Italians, people from the Paleo settlement, a lot of those people were technically illegal but United States municipalities and states just by and large did not deport them by choice. So that dichotomy A doesn't work and B also doesn't work. The other, and this sort of comes from a very sometimes different part of the political spectrum is that we do have that all-American success story about the old immigration and it is largely true, right? There's enormous amount of exploitation, enormous amount of mistreatment but by and large social mobility among old European immigrants was remarkable. What is even more remarkable is that and here I'm sort of standing for a book called Streets of Gold by Lea Bustan and Ram Abramitsky that came out a couple of years ago. They're both economists but they actually are good at it which I don't say lightly and they used like some really clever computer modeling and you know when this book first came out I was like, oh, I'm sure they got that wrong and two paragraphs later, oh, they got that right. Ah, but did they think of this?  We have the goods to show that the levels of mobility of present-day immigrants are virtually the same as of immigrants in the 19th century and the early 20th century. So even our legitimate concerns about exploitation about people being pushed into the sort of black market of labor, those are real and if we were smart we would immediately regularize the status of 10 million people. I've got a piece in the Washington Post and I don't believe that. But even given the level of exploitation the economic progress of modern-day immigrants is amazingly good by comparison. I was thinking like as an artist I always have questions and how I am going to create projects more creatively to come from all of these categories or ideas and I was thinking in how colonialism has been creating a little vocabulary against us, against brown bodies, queer bodies, immigrant bodies, indigenous bodies. So a lot of the words that we use like illegal, alien, mojado are really like descriptive or oppressed language. So I think that we should retake or remain in these kind of words in order to change the misunderstanding about migration. And also art can help you. I feel like art can help you to confront these ideas because media as I was saying has a huge impact on creating this and also the images that we are looking about migrants. We always see them in a vulnerable position. We always see them like poor people, people who can put us in danger, people who have diseases. So we have to start changing this vocabulary but also representation in media. Getting at one more point it was just also like narratives and like the good immigrant, bad immigrant narrative because I think one thing that we're trying to all be mindful of is like yes, we as advocates like obviously we're talking about the myths and the criminalization but statistics touting immigrant contributions are helpful and valid and real but how do we keep our mind, how are we mindful of entrenched systems of ableism that prevent disabled immigrants, for example, from contributing other societal barriers that many immigrants face. So how are we undercounting actually the contributions or potential contributions of immigrants when we look at our statistics about immigrant contributions? Similarly, our statistics touting the lack of criminality statistics. I put forth two, immigrant communities have less crime, for example, we say that, right? But how do we also say and acknowledge both in court in front of an adjudicator and in our advocacy that, you know, obviously the criminal system is intertwined with racism that a lot of the stops are race-based. So if my client even has a misdemeanor arrest, are they now a bad immigrant? No, they lived in a neighborhood that was overpoliced. So how do we kind of reconcile all of this and be mindful of not creating that this is the good immigrant, this is the bad immigrant, even in our advocacy? Thank you guys. The next question has to do with the management of how the city restrains the mobility of these recent arrivals and particularly in regards to public housing and public space. So I was wondering if you guys could comment a little bit about that. I think it's really like how the city has governed this issue like as a municipality as opposed to at perhaps higher levels of governance. I definitely would be interested to hear what the other panels are going to say about these issues, but I would just say, you know, sort of rounding back to one of the themes of my presentation about families, I think that is a critical piece of this whole conversation. I think politically, I mean I wouldn't put anything past the Adams administration, but I think politically it's probably easier to have young African men sleeping on the street, right, the optics of that versus families and children sleeping on the street. So there are ways in which children and families create a political problem in scare quotes for those who would like to, you know, not have to support them. As it happens, something like 50% of folks crossing the border now are coming in families and in New York I just read the statistic is 72%. So I think that, and I leave it to the housing folks to tell us what that means, but I think that's just a really critical piece of the whole conversation. Both logistically, obviously children and families have particular needs that you know, young people on their own maybe don't have, but it also creates I think political challenges for Adams again, because how will New Yorkers respond to the optics of children sleeping on the street versus adults and I think that that's part of, I think that really plays into the whole framing of crisis that we're hearing from his administration and elsewhere. The city has also, by leaving people out in the open so to speak have created the very informal economies that they then criminalize. So street vending, informal vending of food and selling of food that then they profit off of simply because there's no work permits for those people coming in a timely manner, but historically the city has never given enough permits for people, citizen, migrant, everything in between to be able to defend and to sell and to create food legally in this city. When you leave people out in the open you also leave them vulnerable to hate crimes violence, robbery labor trafficking all sorts of things can result from this lack of true shelter that the right to shelter law on paper looks like this is the place to be, but the city historically and currently is not providing that true protection shelter seems to imply as a word. Okay, thank you. At this point we'll open up the floor to Q&A. We should have someone passing around a mic this mic perhaps so if you have a question please just let it be known. Thank you all for your presentations. My question is also related to municipal governance and specifically what ways in which New York City or any other global city can better align their policies and practices with world institutional level attempts, like the global compact on migration to better address these issues and the influxes of migrants that may or may not actually be causing crises. I can speak to that a little bit. I should say that the very odd stuff that comes out of the mouth of the mayor of New York City should not be taken as representative of municipalities dealing with this issue. Generally speaking the places in the United States at least and I will limit my comment to this country because I don't want to go over broad the places where most immigrants are are the places that are politically most favorable to migration right so the resistance to newcomers is mostly coming from counties where there are none of them or only very few of them so those who sort of know migrantist from anywhere in the world tend to very much like them so if we think back to sanctuary movements in the 1980s if we think about sort of sanctuary policies presently the act of saying we're not going to not just encourage we're not going to permit local law enforcement to do immigration enforcement is really important because it sort of at least potentially removes one level of fear that like well you're going to go out to work and then you're going to be gone the next day and your family is not going to be able to see you any policy which allows through local ordinance workers to have safe places to find people who want to hire them often you know ideally without inquiring as to their immigration status is really important because as you know other panelists have said these are people who unmistakably very much want to work and who have extremely high levels of labor force participation but making it easy for them to have physical spaces again to find people who want to hire them you know they're a number of and then finally obviously representatives from cities we have members of the house and the senate is statewide but to really just militate for a general amnesty because frankly one of the best examples we have is in 1986 the immigration reform and control act had a couple of very foolish provisions and one terrific one which is that it allowed almost three million people to regularize their status and when they did their wages went up 15% over five years and more like 20 over 10 years they began to buy documents because if you're an undocumented person you're not necessarily buy a washing machine because if you have to leave you can't take it with you once people had that security at the economic level right they began to invest in businesses they began to invest in real estate but at the sort of more human level they could go and talk to their kids teachers at school without worrying that that was going to be a site where they go and get grabbed they could go and like you know community colleges and get the kind of training that they needed to do more remunerative kinds of work because they weren't afraid that a local institution was going to check on their status and therefore turn them over so just to refuse to participate in federal level enforcement is really really important yeah I just wanted to underscore that importance of like disconnecting those like local law enforcement federal law enforcement partnerships and just kind of like highlight what's happening in Texas now with the passage of new legislation that just passed the senate yesterday I believe and it's about to go to the governor's desk where essentially local Texas law enforcement even like campus police and school resource officers can enforce a new state law which criminalizes the crossing of a border in undocumented in illegal crossing of a border into Texas so now that's a state crime that state actors can enforce so what does that mean for this environment that you're asking about right and like we're trying to go in that exact opposite direction with disconnecting that kind of enforcement of federal laws and here they're making it a state law and then to the economic policies which also of course that create enabling environments that can provide stability and predictability I just wanted to flag like licensing and professional degrees like it's a hot issue right here in our state like undocumented law students can they practice law how there was a lot of advocacy done at the state level to allow for them to be barred to practice law for example in New York and some of my clients are social workers in their home country the states they live in don't allow them to practice social work with a license because licensure professional degrees are coupled with this idea of status so looking like low into local and those are usually controlled by state entities so thinking about that kind of thing and encouraging those people who do have these professional degrees from their home country to be able to match and do that work here which is much needed work as well especially in healthcare professions and caretaking professions in the United States right now so I know some of you so thank you for all the work I know you've been doing a lot of work on the ground and beyond you know there is this naivete that kind of justifies the terror that is sown by the state but and I often hear that with people who are organizing under you know around immigrant rights but they keep saying that the system is broken the system is broken and I keep you know kind of confronting that and saying no the system is not working there is intentionality or the system to work this way and as long as we keep justifying that the system is broken and that that happened accidentally you know we are not being responsible and I think really deserving the people that we are supposed to be advocating for and working for so this increasing idea that the state can wash its hands from any responsibility it's insidious and it's increasingly evil in many ways so I just want to say that it takes us to the phenomenon of crime migration which is used in many of our circles when we organize which is the intersection and the coupling of immigration with criminalization the mobility of human bodies increasingly being criminalized and that's why I think some of you have spoken about I think all of you have spoken about that but this new phenomenon also that we have you know we haven't had an amnesty or any kind of immigration reform for the last almost 40 years and people like in my church you know I am from Cush Shepard Lutheran church we do a bunch of stuff with asylum seekers but now I am having trouble with the people that have been here and they say what about us nothing has happened we keep being pushed away into the shadows what's happening to us the government has neglected us not only neglected us but used and exploit so how do we deal with that phenomenon in our hands it's amazing now when DACA youth are now parents and grandparents right now it's really shocking I think a lot of it is like people like you said are very intentionally creating chaos in the immigration enforcement and detention regime it's not a bug it's a feature it's built in to the way that people are held because so many corporations are profiting off of people in limba and that is happening in all different ways so the people who get contracts to be these shelters for migrants the people who make the cots the people who serve the food the people who make all the materials that go into keeping people on hold is really just insidious and so taking that apart is just such a big thing and when people say the system is broken they're not even thinking about that whole other realm of it happening I just want to add to this point every one of these things is a federal policy choice it's not a broken system it is the system every one of those myths, criminality, disease everything we talked about scarcity those are choices to create that environment and especially with immigration I'm a law professor I want to say immigration reform I think about this now how do I teach this to students where is our supreme court immigration reform is that really realistic if anything we're going in the opposite direction where there's an explosion of criminalizing immigration status now on the state level like I just talked about in Texas and of course on the federal level so then lawyers have said okay what about access to council there's no access to council in immigration court it's one of the most technical difficult areas of law likened with tax law but when an immigrant goes through the system where the end result could be death by deportation and people you have no right to council you are on your own you are prosa unless you can find in New York there's nonprofit network of organizations to represent you or you hire council given the financial realities that a lot of us discuss that are built for you and that you're forced into maybe you don't even have work authorization yet and you're supposed to hire an asylum attorney for 10,000 dollars to get yourself through that system so is access to council really I don't know is really thinking about the strength of organizing. How do you think about abolition? How do you make these really important points about how this is all framed and foundational, like it's capitalism? Who benefits from an ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey? Looking at the stories of abolition coming out of New York and New Jersey right now are pretty incredible. The closure of multiple federal New Jersey detention centers, those efforts in New York, and then the realities that many of these detention centers shut down and what happened to those individuals they were transferred to shelters and even states further away, further from their systems of care, further from any counsel they might have found. So how do we make these connections nationwide? So I mean, for me, as the law professor, I'm thinking more about organizing, more than legal reform, sadly. There's a really good point, I think, Gloria, you had made about this cognitive dissonance. And for me, there's a question about policy versus politics, because I think we're talking a lot about policy change. But on my social media, I simultaneously get, through whatever algorithm, videos of people going to Queens and really enjoying all the, quote, ethnic food, and how that's an asset to New York. But at the same time, I'm getting videos of how expensive New York City is for tourists because we don't have hotel rooms and of residents griping that we're paying $300 per family to have a hotel room. I mean, some of that's because of Airbnb pushing certain narratives as well. But that there is kind of this long-term image of migrants, new residents of the city are providing this kind of really great benefit. That is part of the DNA of the city. Yet somehow, we can never get through to those, I think, the facts, that long-term they actually provide economic opportunity, benefit, culture, life to the city. How do we think about this role of politics and messaging? Because clearly, facts don't matter to the average person. How much of this is, and apologies for being a little crass about this, we're navel-gazing in a way, talking about politics when this is being fought in the court of public opinion. They're seeing certain images. And our facts aren't getting through. How should we maybe think about it, particularly through a historic lens? We've gone through this. Every generation has had this conversation. And somehow, not that the arc has always bent towards justice, but for some, we've found some type of stasis where they are now living and thriving. How do we think about that through this longer civilizational question, generational question, the urban history question? To me, and this is exactly a pertinent to the facts don't matter observation, it's even stranger than that. Because facts that should comfort people, they don't want to hear those. So when somebody is terrified about the great replacement or white genocide or whatever, and you're like, hey, we've had these fears before. They're unfounded.  The crime numbers head in the right direction when immigrants show up. If it were the case, as you said, that facts mattered, they'd be like, even the most rabid anti-immigrant person I think, oh, well, what is your relief?  Normally, you'd be like, great, I'm so happy. These are the kind of people that are told that their fears are unfounded, but they really love to fear the other. I'm not a psychiatrist, so I don't know how to deal with that, but somewhere in the disciplines of anthropological approaches to folklore and group threat theory, the answer has to be there. I think the other thing that I wanna emphasize is we wanna be sure that we don't aggregate public opinion in a way that conceals, again, where people are in favor of generally liberalized immigration policy and where they're not. So people might gripe in New York City, but this is not the problem. All of our members of Congress are out there would favor a much more liberalized immigration regime. Last thing, to try to address your question, remember also that part of the reason we have not had immigration reform is not that people are in a majority necessarily against it, it is straight up manipulation of the system. In 2013, a very, by today's standards, generous immigration law passed the Senate with more than 70 votes. It would have passed the House, but John Boehner deliberately kept it off the floor because he knew that it would pass, right? That should have happened. So I think we wanna be sure we don't walk around imagining that like a majority of the people are against immigration reform. I do not think that's the case from existing polling that often it is specifically the abuse of parliamentary procedure to prevent us from even having a vote on that. Hi, first of all, thank you all for your contributions to this panel and the work that you do more broadly. I'm wondering like a obvious consistent theme of this conversation is about how like there are very intentional structural policies in place to make this issue more difficult to address. And I'm like, especially within like the sort of more formal political space. And in terms of like for people in this room who are here because they're interested and want to engage with this issue, like in terms of like the conversation about how we organize and how like how the system is so broken looking for places or not the system is so broken, but like the system intentionally creates, what we're all talking about. How can we like in your experience have you engaged with like organizations or like social impact programs like here in New York that you think do really exemplary work or like things that we could also get involved in that you could care to highlight maybe to us because sometimes hearing about how difficult it is to navigate the system is like, okay. So where do we look to mobilize? Who can we sort of look to as like leaders in this space? I think that's a great question.  Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to join in and I'll let you do one Carlos's introduction as the person who we should definitely connect to. But from my end, I just think, so I think thinking about like, first of all, get your direction from the most impacted people is where I would start. So it's like where, who are the community based organizations in like who are authentically representing impacted communities and what are they asking for? So for some of these communities, maybe it's not been some of the things we've talked about in this panel, but it's really, I need an ID. So can you do advocacy so I can get an ID so I can get on Amtrak or go to the library? You know, those kinds of things. There is like, and then you can also think about it as issue area. So for immigration, it's intertwined in almost like every aspect of life in New York City. So there's like a worker's rights angle. There's a housing angle. There's a healthcare access angle. There's a due process angle. There's a mental health.  So I would also think about like your own expertise and interests and like whatever you're trying to go into, how does that then connect with immigrant communities? And then you find that organization doing that work and kind of using that as an in as well. So there's like a, you know, but really, I feel like if you take your direction from the most impacted of people, that'll like always be a guide in terms of where to do this work in a helpful way. And how? I feel like joining a organization, a community center, but also for so many years, I was volunteer in a legal clinic. Helping people fill their asylum application. And in that process, I met a lot of unaccompanied childrens. So one of the things that I have been doing since that time is being a sponsor, legal guardian. And that thing, I feel impact a lot of adult children that have come to the United States. And nowadays I have many sons or daughters that I say that have their residents, their green car and they are going to become citizens soon. So this is like a thing that a lot of citizens we can do using our privilege as a citizen and has a huge impact in other people. Actually, can I flag one more thing on that question too? It's just like also thinking about, so there's like direct services, you don't think about like do I wanna help an individual, right? And there's that kind of intervention. And then there's of course the policy level changes too. So that's another way to kind of think about and direct your attention. I just wanna thank our panelists again, so much for such a wonderful conversation. For this panel, we're going to be talking about formal and informal systems of support and care. And we wanted the panelists to kind of introduce themselves and give us a brief intro into what they do as well. Hello everyone, my name is Ryan Devlin. I'm an assistant professor of city planning and community development at Temple University. And most of my work is around urban informality here in the global north, focusing specifically on the issue of informal street vending here in New York City, mostly trying to expand the research to Philly as well. Hi, my name is Deb Berkman. I am the supervising attorney of the Shelter Advocacy Initiative and the Public Assistance and SNAP, which is food stamps program at New York Legal Assistance Group, which is a free legal services provider. I'm also an adjunct law professor at Brooklyn Law School and I teach different classes and topics, mostly relating to poverty law, civil rights, that type of thing. Hey, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Marad Oouda. I'm the director of the New York Immigration Coalition. This mic is interesting. And we are the oldest and largest immigrant rights work in the U.S. with over 200 members across the state of New York. And excited to be in this space with you all. Hello, everyone. My name is Sophie Bakriete. I'm the membership and services manager at African Communities Together. African Communities Together, it's an African organization and I can say proudly that's we African who work for Africans. And so we have three chapters. New York is the first one. We have one in D.C., D.C. Maryland, Virginia, and another one in Philadelphia. And we hoping open, of course, more chapter, but we also have a network, you know, organization who we can connect, you know, leaders and other organization. Yeah, we call that LF. So I'm happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today for this panel and on formal and informal systems of support and care. We're going to be following a similar structure to the panel than the first panel. After these brief introductions, we are asking you to tell us more about your work, about your experience. For that, we will have around seven minutes for each one of you. And after that, we will go with some questions that we have prepared to engage with the discussion. So please. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you, Hiba and Hugo, for organizing this and all of the students who've done, I'm sure a lot of work coordinating everything into our student discussions. Look forward to your questions. So I'm, it's interesting. I think I'm the only full-time academic on this particular panel. And as such, I feel I'm probably the least useful to tell you what's going on, on the ground and the work that's being done, though I'm really looking forward to hearing from my co-panelists about their work. And so what I think, the way I felt I would be most useful on this panel is to talk a little bit more broadly about the current moment. I think trying to put it in some theoretical context related to the field of planning and discuss some conceptual approaches to migration, informality and planning that I've found helpful in my own work with street vendors in New York City and that I think have relevance to the current moment of migration here in New York. And listening to the first panel, I wanted to also lay out that much of what I'm gonna be talking about, the framework to be thinking about this is this notion of in the meantime, right? While we wait for a potential maybe better future, a future where our government responds ethically, humanely and openly to migrants, a future where borders aren't what they are today, we, there is work still to be done, right? And so what my work and the way that I wanna be thinking about this is how do we work in this moment in this situation of limbo uncertainty with the idea, stated idea that it is not accepting this as acceptable, right? Knowing that this is still something that needs to change. And I wanna start by proposing that we think critically and intentionally about the generous face nature of the condition of uncertainty, this condition of limbo and how it's both a source of anxiety and stress but can also open possibilities for the formation of informal structures of livelihood. And that this condition of limbo and uncertainty is of course produced by a number of factors, not least of which is the political and legal bureaucratic mess that characterizes the formal space of the US immigration issue. And the formal systems of immigration in this country intentionally or not, sorry, sometimes I start to get loud when I talk, intentionally or not are broken or perhaps working as they were meant to be, but working in a way that has created a lot of problems and a lot of stress for migrants. So in Washington, there's little to no hope of new legislation coming from Congress. We have a president who's unwilling to make any bold moves regarding the situation when he has the power to do things and won't. We have a federal bureaucracy and court system that is unprepared under resource to respond to this issue. And we have a local government that just wants this to go away and administration. I shouldn't say all the people in the local government but an administration that wants this problem to go away in my mind. So my work argues that whenever we see problems of governance that are too complex to sort of solve or resolve, the space of informality opens up to help state actors and other actors manage the issue. And this informal space is one where a number of people, state actors, nonprofits, activists, urban residents work to find ad hoc solutions, workarounds good enough for now fixes. And the condition of informality has a double-sided nature to it because while uncertainty has rightly been identified as by a number of scholars as condition that enables marginalization, a condition that creates client-dependent subjects, govern through anxiety and without the guarantees of the rights granted by the liberal state, it can also be a space of creativity and opportunity. And I'd like to focus on that aspect here in what I'm talking about today. And I think it's evident in what we see around the city as migrants themselves approved resourceful, innovative, resilient, the state of limbo that they've been placed in by the form of bureaucracy has not been a state of stasis or paralysis. Migrants have found ways to create informal infrastructures of livelihood and support. This despite constant low-level harassment by enforcement agencies, particularly the NYPD, who do everything from hounding candy sellers in the subway to confiscating e-bikes and scooters.  And so also I wanna go on, before I go on, I wanna also state something extremely clearly that it is important not to romanticize these practices or to see them as simple ready-made solutions that absolve the state and the broader society from any responsibility of support and care. The state, the federal government, the state government, local government, they are the locus of material resources and funding that have a clear role to play and we still need to hold them to account to provide those funds. But at the same time, recognizing these informal practices as valid problem-solving methods in and of themselves, recognizing them as dare I say planning from the bottom up, is a critical component of any sort of empathetic, inclusive response to the current migration moment. And here I'd like to draw on the work of a number of people from outside the United States and as I've been living in this city, and living in a neighborhood health kitchen where we have a high concentration of hotels where migrants are staying and living and trying to work, particularly delivery workers. I've thought about and I've been reading a lot of, particularly scholars like Mona Fawaz, someone who writes about and studies and works with and in refugee and migrant spaces in Beirut and a number of scholars who have worked in these spaces, I think including Mona and Hiba, I have a number of lessons for us and I wanna just quickly go hit on two. First, and this is actually something we've been talking about, that it's just not a crisis, right? It's a crisis, the word crisis used to describe migration is a misnomer in the sense that a crisis is seen as a bounded event, right? And this is obviously reflected in the fact that we have quotes around the word crisis even in our program here, right? The current wave of migrants are entering the city, it's a crisis in the sense that it's not new, right? That it's in more of an amplification or pre-existing challenges and problems. So the current wave of migrants enter a city in which newcomers have long struggled to find safe, affordable housing, decent work and have had to fight for the access to public space and resources. Even before this current wave began in 2020, roughly half a million undocumented immigrants called New York home and had struggled in these informal spaces of undocumented living and that's a conservative estimate. So that's a city of undocumented people bigger than the entire population of Atlanta or Oakland or Minneapolis. So there's a continuation and amplification of the challenge, but it's not a new one. And the good news here is that New York City is a city with existing informal infrastructure built by past immigrants, infrastructure that is being used and expanded by current migrants, not without tensions, but a city full of informal ad hoc strategies to manage uncertainty and maintain an infrastructure of hope. All right, and the second lesson basically being that we have much to learn from these informal infrastructures and that planners need to strengthen informal infrastructure that already exists while working to mitigate the negative externalities. So I'll close by just saying this and this is my last page, so I don't have to wrap up. That this requires a new kind of planning or a different kind of planning rationality, right? For those working in the global north particularly, planning and public administration are still technocratic fields that deal in long horizons, positive the possibility of a rational progression to a fully articulated goal or end state. But how do we plan when long-term resolutions and ideal end state seems so far out of reach? For these answers, I propose we turn to the rationalities of migration itself. While migration undertaken in pursuit of an ideal ends day-to-day, it's day-to-day, it's about keeping avenues open. Martina Tasioli in her writing about Europe, migration in Europe speaks of a governance approach that she calls choking without killing. And it's approach where state officials lean into the informal bureaucratic practices that produce cramping and disruption that slowly dismantle migrant infrastructures of survival. The goal is to extinguish the flickering flame of hope that drives so many migrants to cross jungles and deserts, travel along railroads and roadways, cross borders, climb fences, scale, both physical and metaphorical walls. And this quiet, unsaid policy of choking without killing is unfortunately an increasingly apt description of our current mayor's administration's approach in New York. We want them to go away to give up. But it doesn't have to be, and we don't have to sit by quietly. I'd argue that the role as planners and advocates and individuals within bureaucracy is to help maintain that flame of hope to work with migrants and support the ad hoc informal, the good enough for now methods that even if they don't solve the problem in a conclusive way, keep the possibility of a better tomorrow open and keep the flame burning. Thank you. That was amazing. And I am so honored to be here and be on this panel among all of these experts. So again, I'm Deb Berkman. I'll tell you a little bit about my experience and how I got to work with this group of new immigrants, but I wanna start by talking about framing in the language we use because everyone calls this group of new immigrants migrants, but I had always understood migrants to be people who were coming and then going. And from all of the clients that I've worked with, that's not the case. All of the clients that I've worked with have an immigration sort of experience that is identical to every other immigration experience. They left somewhere where they could not live to come here for a better life and to stay here permanently. So I really think when we're using the word migrants, it's really just sort of we're taking on the government's verbiage.  Like these are not different immigrants. These are the same immigrants that have always been coming and immigrants are what makes our city great. So this is not a new situation and I don't think it should be framed as such. So I work at the New York Legal Assistance Group and part of what I do in my job is that I work with people experiencing homelessness and particularly people experiencing street homelessness. And I run a project called the Shelter Advocacy Initiative and so I sit at different feeding sites that people go to and around April of 2022 last year, I almost overnight started getting all of these new clients coming to my legal table and they were asking me about public assistance for which they were eligible. They are eligible for benefits. So again, when we hear that our clients are undocumented, this is at least in my experience, very often not true. So they were eligible for public benefits. They were trying to enter the shelter system and they had come to New York, not on buses from Texas. Some had come on buses, but most of them had come on planes in the very beginning. And they were put on planes by social service organizations, like nonprofits in Texas because they wanted to be here. And almost overnight, and as soon as they got here, they started, as probably many, many people do when they get to the city in this country, they had great hurdles that they had to face. But almost overnight, more and more people started coming to my table and asking me, how can I apply for public benefits and how can I get out of shelter? And soon I heard Mayor Adams telling about the fact that Texas and the Texas government had sent buses of people to New York, but that was actually not my experience at the time. That did end up happening eventually. But it's hard to know when or how that happened, but that did end up happening. But in the beginning, in this city, we have a right to shelter in New York City, which means that everyone who needs shelter is supposed to get shelter. And so in the beginning, the families, and I was working with a lot of families in the very beginning, they came and they would apply for shelter, like anyone else who was experiencing homelessness would apply for shelter. So they would go to the office and they would fill out applications about where they had lived, and then they would be placed in sort of the current, like dominating New York City shelter system. But from the get go, they were facing opposition because they weren't being spoken to in the languages that they spoke, they didn't understand what was going on. Many people were having to wait in the shelter intake office for days. So there was a lot going on there, but in the beginning, New York was really trying to integrate this sort of newest wave of immigrants into our existing system. And that happened for a while and they weren't treated exactly equally, but in the very beginning, New York, it appeared more like New York was trying to integrate people. But more and more people kept coming. Now, it wouldn't really matter in New York if more people who came who were experiencing homelessness, if people who were in the shelter system already were able to transition out of the shelter system. Shelter's supposed to be a way stop on the way to a more permanent housing situation. But that wasn't happening and that hasn't been happening in the New York shelter system for a long time. A lot of people stayed in the shelter system for way too long instead of being able to transition to permanent housing. So the system got fuller and fuller. And so what happened is the mayor devised that instead of absorb, oh, I have two minutes left, instead of absorbing people into our current shelter system, he was gonna create this other shelter system that was only for new immigrants that had less services than our sort of general shelter system. And that was time limited, basically. And so we have the current situation of this other shelter system where adults are allowed to stay in their placement for 30 days and then they have to leave and potentially get another placement. And families are currently being told that they can stay there for 60 days and then they'll have to either leave or get another placement. Now, and a lot's going on with that and I can talk about it later, but what I really wanna highlight is the differences in treatment that this group of new immigrants is getting as opposed to immigrants who got here in January of 2020. It's really this new group of immigrants that's been sort of set apart. Wait a minute, I'll take it. Hello, everyone, my name is Mariah DeWoud again. I'm with the New York Immigration Coalition. I kind of wanna take a couple of steps back, right? I think it's, when we're looking at a prom, we tend to just look at what the issue is at the moment. How do we fix it as opposed to thinking about what the root cause is?  That continues to be the root of all evils and everything that we're dealing with. And it shows up in every institution, every level of government. It happens on this campus often and we have to each challenge ourselves of how we're responding to that. And when we see a community of folks and folks being targeted for whatever their beliefs are, how are you responding, right? So it's easy sometimes to disassociate ourselves from the impact it has on us or what our impact can be and challenging some of the notions that we are witnessing, right? So this is your call to action. And when you see, I curse a lot and I don't know if I'm allowed to here. So I'll pause every time I'm about to. When you see crazy things happening and it just doesn't make very much sense, I think that we need to be really critical in the way in which we're absorbing information. So I ask you all to be critical. I ask you all to challenge your administration here. I ask you to challenge the people in power to make sure that justice isn't just for some of us but for all of us. So with that being said, I think that when we're talking about the recent increase in folks coming to the city, it's not really an increase. People have historically come to New York, right? New York has welcomed immigrants, refugees, migrants, asylum seekers for centuries. That is what has built the city. Regardless of what people wanna say, that is the truth. You can research it and figure it out yourself. Every single impact of the city has had an imprint by the immigrant, new wave of immigrant communities from our roads, our bridges, our skyscrapers to everything here. From the social and economic fabric of who we are as a city and the state has been impacted by immigrants. Unless you are indigenous to these lands, you are also an immigrant. I know that sometimes people have like a hard time comprehending that. But this nation was not a white nation and that also goes back to the first thing I said. So for us, we also have to look at the differences in what is leading people to leave. No one leaves their home because they feel safe. Would you leave your home if you felt safe? Looking around, I don't see anyone saying yes. So I think we have to really think about why are these conditions being created and then when you dig a little bit deeper, you end up seeing that the United States has a huge hand in that. So we are creating the conditions that are forcing people to leave and then we are conditionalizing humanity and who we see as someone who is deserving of being seen as a nation. So one thing that the U.S. quickly did which is the right thing to do after the conflict in Ukraine happened was they created the Ukrainian Response Initiative which we also created one for New York and supporting folks who want to come to the United States. We urged the federal government to create TPS, temporary protected status for those who are here, allow people to come into this country on humanitarian parole, they did that and they gave folks one to two years of humanitarian parole upon entry and it's because there was a conflict back home, right? So people fled for their lives. We quickly also urged the administration to do the same for the newcomers who were coming to New York and we sort of met with silence in the beginning. It was very odd in the way in which this administration responds to issues when they are impacting black and brown people but it seems like they just turn a blind eye to it. So months later, the administration launched a couple of different programs trying to get people to avoid going to the southern borders. One of those programs is the parole for Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians but you have to actually have someone who is going to sponsor you to come in. It's not complicated but it is complicated because we're putting a financial check mark if you are not going, you need someone who's gonna sponsor you to come in kind of thing. And then they also created the CBP One app which is not very well known but that's how they're making people check in at the southern border now and that ports of entry is through that app. So if you don't have an appointment, in rare cases will they see you without an appointment but once, if you do get in with that you also get one to two years of parole. Why is parole important? Because it also gives people the opportunity to work upon, not upon immediately, they have to apply for it but it allows them to immediately apply for an EAD. So now we're going to, I got three minutes but if we look at like, let's just look at Venezuela, right?  Like what happened that about 7 million Venezuelans left Venezuela? The vast majority have stayed in surrounding countries but some have migrated up north. And it's the Rubio sanctions that devastated the country. And this is why when we talk about sanctions, I think sometimes people are like, well we need to hurt countries that are doing bad things in our definition what we randomly think is bad. And I'm not defending any dictatorship or anyone but I'm saying what ended up happening in Venezuela was that the people who were impacted the most by the sanctions were the actual people of Venezuela. So there was no other option for many of these people but to leave. And if you look at other populations, right? A big population, I know my sister's gonna talk about it most definitely and deliver it with better justice than I can is our African and black migrants and immigrants who've been coming here, right? And we see how every level of government treats black immigrants in this country from the federal government down to the state, down to the city where it was okay for the city to be like, leave them in the street for three or four days. We're gonna like deal with it when we deal with it. And these are folks who literally have fled for their lives. Literal slavery is what they are escaping.  And these are the people that we are turning away. So we don't have a migrant crisis. We have a crisis of leadership. And it's a crisis of leadership at every single level of government in this country. And it continues to perpetuate itself unless it is a white immigrant. And that's where we have seen the US step up in amazing ways to do what we ask very quickly to ensure that they are delivering for this vulnerable population. I think I was supposed to talk about the work we do but I probably don't have enough time. We're an advocacy and policy organization that does coordinated services. We work with NILAG a lot in African communities together. They're both our members and they're amazing. But we bring together our membership of over 200 organizations across the state of New York to actually convene and talk about what are our top issues? What are we gonna fight for together? And immigration and legal services has been the top issue for, I've been here for a decade and not in this role but at the organization for a decade it's always been the number one issue. And we went from having almost no funding for immigration and legal services to having 100 million at the city level which has not been because this administration it's from previous administrations. And then we nearly quadrupled immigration and legal services this past budget in the state which was been incredibly helpful but it's still not enough. So when we're talking about the issues that we're also facing on the ground in addition to the shelter in addition to people having access to care and healthcare and everything you would need if you're setting up a new life in a new place those are incredibly important but another important piece is the immigration legal services piece which we have been trying to coordinate across the state and really working with all of our members to deliver in the best way we can as ethically and not as ethically ethically but also ensuring as creatively as possible because we know that we don't have enough immigration attorneys in the state or in this country we also don't have the infrastructure that we've been fighting for because it's not been funded and we're gonna continue to fight for it to be funded and this has been I think people see this moment as like it's been crazy for us right now it's been crazy for us for eight years and it was crazier even before the eight years but the eight years that I'm referring back to is when Trump ran for office right and him spewing the hate that he did against our communities him winning was a crisis of democracy to be honest with you him being in an office and the attacks our communities face that was another crisis and then COVID was a crisis and this moment again is not a migrant crisis it is a crisis of leadership so I'll stop there Thank you, thank you Moran It's an honor for me to be sitting close to Moran especially because like he said we are a member of his organization and we do our best to partner and also legal aid society and I call them all the time and it's really really they say it all so what I'm gonna say again so my name is Sophie Baku Yate and my work at African communities together it's working with African migrants I will say it socially but we have hospitality so we open our door to everybody no matter where you're from so yes we helping more our people because nobody is here in the city helping them they don't see us and I have to say us because I'm part of them and so I'm myself immigrants I'm from Guinea Conakry and the problem that we have here as African immigrants is when we talk about immigrants or migrants or who's coming to the US from the border they think about Latinos who came through the southern border they're surprised to see that yes African people come through the southern border and it's true that few years ago we were coming we were more or traveling by plane because Africa is very far from here I don't know if you see the it's pretty far so it's more easy to come from Latin countries than to come to Africa but you have a lot of people who do that now right but I will say that's what we try to do at African communities together and I think is we doing not too bad is to see our brother, sister, uncle whatever you want to say as a human because the thing is people forget that we're talking about human being they're talking about numbers they're more at numbers way more better than me when my supervisor, my director has me for my data I'm like okay so I put everything on my computer of course I'm a good student but I can't tell you how many people I see I cannot tell you I know that I can give you approximately a number of 50, 60 people per day which is a lot but I'm looking at my people as human being so when they talk about us I'm like can you stop being like oh we need the numbers we need this and we need that I say can you think about our feeling can you think about our mental health can you think about what we want can we listen to them when they're coming to us they're coming to a family they're coming to just of course to find resources you know we don't have a it's a lack of resources in the city so when they knock at our door sometimes we don't have even the resources that they need but what we have it's we have a here to listen and we have a harms to open and we have a heart when they leave the office they say oh my gosh that's a family we try to create a community inside a community and I think that people forget about that I was myself undocumented not too long ago for 15 years so what I tell them all the time is just looking at me I can give you hope you know and because here where I am today but what we want you to do is to fight for yourself too because you know in Africa we that's how we were raised it's don't say you know too much you know like we have to be very humble we cannot talk too much you know like you need to be respectful I say that to my dad all the time I say oh my gosh you know the way you raise me is tiring me because I have you know you can talk too much you can say this too much you can you have to be respectful and yes of course but at a point you have to say what you have to say you know because if you don't talk for you who's going to do it nobody so our organization are here for also educate our people because when you come into a foreign country you don't know how it works you don't know the system so we're here to explain the system but what we want to is New Yorkers to know us that's what we want too and that's why you know in my organization we talk a lot with press it's not because we like it I hate it first of all my accent you know my English I'm like oh my god but I have to do it because I'm the voice of you know Africa now here in New York so I have to do it and I have to go further and I have to don't think about me but think about my people you know and and again what I said all the time is hey we here yes we come from the southern border too but we are like you human being and we're here to work we're not here to we don't need no assistance that's true yesterday we did a protest for housing because we need to start somewhere right when you fed for another country and Murat said very clearly you don't live it's not because we don't like our countries we love our countries you know but it's because something happened like some of us were in danger and we have to come to the US and we want to go back home we want that I have three kids and I push them to go back home to make the difference because these things start over there you know and Murat say it it start there like why are we coming here so the new generation the new African can fight you know for these calls but for us who are here for decades two two decades for me and I'm I'm like I need to change something for my people why are we coming to they call that a crisis it's not a crisis but can you just understand us can you just listen to us why is it taking decision without having us on the table why you you know you choose something for us you decide something for us and you don't listen to us you know I think really what we need to do here is to come together because the solution is not one person who's going to find the solution and we we know that since long time ago since we work on policy and and you know all my time is up I'm sorry and I said I was a good student I'm sorry my time is up so just I'm just going to say that the solution is all of us it's just it's not one person is just one organization and why I see in you that you know we need to be like all together to do something but it's also you you know look at you know like right and left and talk to each other and you know learn about each other and that's what New York is made right immigrants so okay this is better I'm Natalie Rubio Torre I'm so sorry that I was late I guess I didn't estimate the traffic I'm I'm from bosses Latinas we are in Jackson Heights Queens often known as the epicenter for immigrant Latino settlement I myself came when I was three years old to Elmhurst Queens and but I am a I am a product of my father coming and experiencing very similar things that we are seeing now with our recent migrants and it's kind of full circle because I ended up working and building my career and building this agency in Jackson Heights I'm also a graduate of the Columbia School of Social Work and that's how I even started the agency through an internship at the school the social intervention group by the way but I just want to say I mean I don't I'm going to just hop in I'm you know we started as an HIV prevention and violence prevention agency because we saw and as a woman Latinas for Latinas agency because we saw that immigrant Latinas living with HIV were connected to care but they were living in their secret they were living alone with the secret and they weren't connected to cultural services and so although people offered the services in Spanish they still didn't get feel connected and that's all we did we just provided a space and that's it's unbelievable how when you provide a safe space and I agree I share a lot of what you just said it opens people up it opens so many other possibilities bosses is on the ground we are familiar with all the agencies here and we probably have some connection I just took this your training 40-hour training and uh and and so and we would and we refer a lot of people to your legal services African services so we are very much we've been doing this for 20 years so everything that was said that this is not new we've been doing this work for 20 years our people are coming every day to Corona Jackson Heights Elmers you could see in their faces who just arrived who needs to eat who's hungry and a little different from our agency is like boots on the ground we're trying to just get people where they're at and even if it's a gift card even if it's a meal even if it's a warm coat but just try to offer something to keep them make them a little bit more comfortable that day our people are walking around with a lot of trauma I don't know if we talked about mental health here yet but trauma is soaring and if you hear the stories and that's something that we don't hear about on the news we hear about the shelter we hear about housing in the mayor and all but we don't hear the realities of the day-to-day that our people are encountering on our living and these are the things that we're hearing so how many times a week do we run to target and buy a stroller just a stroller because women are carrying babies on the subway just trying to navigate the city how many times do we just feed people kids are coming in coughing up a storm tv is on the right tv has been identified as with our recent migrants so we're trying to connect to health care because they don't know that there's free health care here so we're just we're trying to keep up with the pace of what the people are coming in with those needs those immediate needs I could talk about all the legal and we are now offering legal services we're trying to get that program started but there's you know when somebody's in front of you and they're hungry or they're tired or they look sick you how you know we can't start thinking about the data and like the checking off and putting people into our our funding boxes we have to feed them and we have to clothe them and we have to say you know little kid could sleep here if he wants you know I have to call my contacts on the phone my pediatrician can you talk to this mom just to see what something's going on this is the way we're working now it's not like business as usual it's like now it's not making appointments at clinics and okay you can come in like a month from now no it's coming now and it requires walking hours too because people don't have our schedules people are in hotels and shelters they don't have a regular schedule so this is something that we're doing and as a as a as a COVID really changed the way we work because after COVID it's just been back-to-back situations and I know we weren't saying crisis but there are crises in our community and it affects the undocumented because the undocumented are not able to or they're more fearful to try to stay out of the radar and they don't apply and they don't know their rights and people take advantage of them and then the last thing I'll say is that our avenue is now the red light district have you heard this our avenue on Roosevelt Avenue is now considered the red light district because what's what Manhattan is that was cleaned up is now coming over to our right under my window we have migrants doing sex work we have migrants getting exploited we have migrants we've always been working with the women in the bars that do dancing and do waitressing and do sex favors just for to make more money but now it's at another level where it's in our faces I don't know who's been on Roosevelt Avenue lately you see it you don't even have to look for you see it massage parlors corners latinas asian women every one they're all migrants or immigrants and so why why are we letting this happen and our city council I'm not even going to get into that but check out your just do a little research on what our city council wants to do unbelievable what we have to accept and it's all survival survival but we could help and we could we could influence a little bit we could try to help and have them our people survive in other ways and then the last thing I want to say because I don't know how much but if you leave if anything you leave here is cultural humility because if you don't practice with cultural humility in which I think our city is failing is we're we're not getting anywhere if you're I don't know we're doing workshops and all and cultural look up cultural humility look up what that means being culturally humble at this time is vital because if you are encountering somebody that is needing so many services and they're