The State of Migration in 2025: Balancing Values and Interests at the International and Local Levels

CHRIS KAOUTZANIS: Hi, everybody. Welcome to Carnegie Council. My name is Chris Kaoutzanis. I am a trustee of the Council, and I am here to welcome everybody and to introduce our panel.

We have a fascinating topic, “The State of Migration in 2025,” and we have an even better panel. To the far left is Gregory Maniatis. He is the director of refugees & migration program at the Open Society Foundations. Closer to me is Professor Michael Doyle. I am very biased because Professor Doyle is a former trustee of the Council, but he is also my Ph.D. dissertation advisor and a very close mentor. Please accept my welcome remarks for Professor Doyle understanding my bias.

Migration is definitely one of the hardest topics that we face globally and one of the hardest topics to apply ethics to, which is why we at the Council are so very focused from the top down on this topic. It is incredible to have somebody who I think is one of the foremost thinkers in political science tackle this topic and to do so in such a thoughtful, sustained, and detail-oriented way.

Professor Doyle has had positions in five of the most renowned and leading academic institutions in the world. I think the best position he had was at Columbia, where I met him. He is a University Professor there, which is the highest position at the university. Over his career he has grappled both theoretically and empirically with three topics that I believe are the hardest challenges we have had, democracy and its role in peace, peace-building—I think many of you in the audience will remember when peace-building was considered the next “silver bullet”—and global constitutionalism, which is how we actually met. He has practiced at the United Nations, he has been at Carnegie, he has held many different positions that combine theory and practice of international affairs and international politics, and he has won the highest awards of the American Political Science Association that academics give to people like Michael.

For the purposes of today’s presentation, he has been the leading voice and driver behind the Model International Mobility Convention (MIMC) in his position at the Council but also at Columbia University. He is a frequent author on this topic, and what I love about Professor Doyle is that he attacks the right and the left with equal vigor; he does not spare anyone. I think a lot of us read the recent article where he challenged the right on certain immigration positions and the left on their conception of state boundaries.

With that introduction, thank you both for being here. Professor Doyle, I will turn it over to you.

Fireside Chat

MICHAEL DOYLE: Thank you very much, Chris, for that wonderful introduction. Let me recommend to anybody here in the audience, you should always have one of your most brilliant students do an introduction for you. It is a real treat. Thank you so much.

I am also delighted to be here at Carnegie Council. I am a former trustee from many years ago. Seeing what Joel Rosenthal has done for this institution is inspiring. This institution would not be what it is today without him.

I want to thank Kevin Maloney, Susie Han, and Alex Woodson for all the organization that led into this meeting, and I thank my fellow panelist and dear old friend Gregory Maniatis and the panelists to come for a very interesting afternoon.

What I would like to do is talk about MIMC, the Model International Mobility Convention. I want to identify some things that are special about it, where it comes from, and why we focus on the global level. I am going to be talking about the global in the first ten or fifteen minutes. Gregory is going to talk about U.S. national policy, and then we have a wonderful panel that will engage on all of these issues, including drawing upon very serious practical experience dealing with actual refugees, asylum seekers, and people crossing borders. I am looking forward to all of that.

MIMC is distinctive because it is both comprehensive and cumulative. Those are the two foundations behind it. It is comprehensive in that it covers the movement of people across borders all the way from visitors, tourists, students, migrant workers, residents, investors, family reunification, and then to refugees and forced migrants. It is really “soup to nuts” on the movement across borders. That was part of the design.

The second part of the design is that it is cumulative; that is, it starts with the intuition that visitors need to be able to protect some basic rights whenever they visit a foreign country. If you get hit by a bus, you don’t want them just to leave you in the road; you want to be taken to a hospital. If you hit somebody with your car, you want to have access to the court system. Not much more than that is needed for a visitor other than getting the visa to go in.

Tourists need to make sure that their tourist contracts are honored. Students need access to the university that they are studying in, they need a transcript, and they need to know that they will get fair treatment. Migrant workers and others need fair recompense for their work. They need access to union protections. They need all the protections that would be available to domestic workers within a country.

Residents need to have their property contracts honored. Investors need to have an assurance of return on their investment to be able to repatriate funds. Refugees and forced migrants need all of the rights that they have been denied in the country that chased them out in the new country.

But you can’t basically claim across categories without specific authorization. If you show up as a tourist in the United Kingdom next week, you are not going to be able to vote in the next election. Therefore, there are rights and limitations, comprehensive but cumulative; the rights increase as you move across these categories.

The thematic thread is not very good prose but it gets to the idea: “Everyone should have all of their rights met somewhere; while no one should be able to exercise all of their rights everywhere.” That is the thematic thread underneath MIMC. It both is globalist in a certain way, but it is also sovereigntist; it respects national borders in a very significant fashion.

Our methodology is that it is based upon people. We started meeting in 2015 and brought together some of the most eminent academics in the field of migration and refugees. They included people like Susan Martin, Guy Goodwin-Gill, and Diego Acosta; we included eminent leaders of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) across the board; we included statesmen like Mats Karlsson, Khalid Koser, François Fouinat, and others, all of whom were engaged with migration and refugees, so it was a combination of academic experience, practical experience leading campaigns and NGOs, and also experience out in the field with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the United Nations and elsewhere.

It came from around the world. This is where Commission members came from or where we did launch events. We made an effort to go global, but frankly it is still a little too Northern. If you look, North America and Europe are still its predominant home. We made a real effort to go global and did not fully succeed. We are still working on that.

The course of action you see here. We began in 2015 and would not have been able to begin without the gentleman seated immediately to my left. He made available facilities in the Open Society Foundations that allowed us to meet regularly and connect to people around the world. It was extremely appreciated.

We produced a draft in 2016. We did some launch events in 2017. As academics we did a special issue of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law on MIMC, and ever since we have been trying to promote it. You will notice that “20??” has two question marks after it. It has not gotten easier since 2016 to promote the idea of global cooperation for migration, and it certainly has not gotten easier in the past few months, as you can well imagine. That is why those two question marks are out there.

Where does it come from? We are motivated both by the real world of the movement of people and also by jurisprudential limitations out there. With regard to the real movement—and many of you know this as well if not better than I do—there has been a significant increase in the number of “migrants” by the UN definition, that is, “somebody outside their home of citizenship or their place of usual residence for more than a year.” In 2015 it was 248 million, in 2020 281 million. It is important to remember that a full third of those migrations take place in the Global South. Everybody is not headed to Germany, the United States, or elsewhere.

An important statistic motivating this effort, including our focus on visitors and tourists, is that while there were 281 million migrants living for at least a year there were 1.53 billion visitors—five times the number of people—moving for a short stay, and as you will hear there is no regime for them.

There are 123 million experiencing humanitarian distress, internally displaced 68 million, and across a border 38 million refugees and asylum seekers. Those numbers don’t quite add up because there are also stateless persons and other special categories out there, so there are a number of real lives at stake in this issue about the framework of rights and duties across borders. Equally importantly, the developing countries, which can least financially afford it, host 71 percent of the world’s refugees, so the poorer countries are opening their doors, their homes, their employment, and social facilities to refugees in ways that are totally striking given the cost to them.

The second source is jurisprudential. We are filling some gaps in two fundamental treaties, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the 1990 Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.

In the Refugee Convention classically there is a narrow definition of the grounds for protection: You need to show that you have been persecuted, that is, that there have been some intentional acts directed against you because of race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion. What about people who are fleeing generalized violence? What about people who are fleeing other forms of discrimination? What about people whose islands are going under water or whose fields are being desertified by droughts?

MIMC opens up the door to a broader group, not anybody in distress, but anybody who is experiencing an external threat to life or arbitrary incarceration, so we have opened up the doors to people who are making equivalent kinds of claims as those that were made under the 1951 Convention. We can do this because we also have measures that share responsibility. It is not just that the responsibility should fall on the country closest to the emergency. That is not the right burden holder; it should fall upon all who have a stake in protecting these basic human rights, and we have measures of shared responsibility within the Treaty.

For labor and voluntary migrants of course there is the 1990 Migrant Workers Convention, and it has many virtues attached to it. It established rights of unionization, equal pay to nationals, legal processes, etc., and that is good, but there are very few ratifications by countries of net destination; there are a couple of exceptions to that generalization but only a couple, so it has not been seen as meeting the interests of the countries that are actually committed to providing the rights basis for those who are migrating to those countries. It is very ineffective from that point of view.

For example, temporary migrants, a very important category, are in the Migrant Workers Convention, but they have “too many” rights and “too few” rights in the Migrant Workers Convention, too many because they extend rights equal to nationals, that is, equal to citizens with regard to access to education including tertiary education, universities, housing, health care, etc. Citizens of countries that are paying those taxes do not want to share those rights that quickly with people who have just shown up to do temporary work, so too many rights.

At the same time there are also too few rights. There needs to be a special regime for temporary workers that provides multiple visa entries so temporary workers can maintain their ties to their home countries easily. Doug Massey has been recommending this for many years. They need portable pensions, so pension rights that they earn in the country in which they are working need to be available to them if they go back home. I was very pleased to see that that showed up in the Los Angeles Declaration of 2022, which was a Declaration signed by countries in the Americas. We also need a time cutoff to make sure that temporary workers don’t become permanently temporary; that is, that they can increase their status toward a green card and maybe even citizenship at some point or another.

All of this requires facilitation so that there will be labor pools made available so that foreigners seeking to migrate legally through well-established pathways can apply for work and if they meet the credentials and there is an employer and a job that is not being filled by nationals—working at a Trump golf course, for example, to be very particular—those jobs will suddenly be available to those who want to immigrate in a lawful, legal way. That is very important. The other thing that is very important is that they need sponsors, and we are going to hear more about this I think from my colleague in a little bit.

Why do we have this treaty the way it is? One reason it is comprehensive is that there are some ways in which they are mutually supportive. In the labor pool arrangement that we set up so you can apply for a job we give priority to people who are seeking asylum if they have the skills that are relevant for the job. They go to the front of the list. There are some synergies that we cultivate as a reason for a comprehensive treaty.

The other reason that we have a global focus here, even though most of the action with regard to migration of refugees is bilateral, regional, or purely national is that a global treaty can serve as a floor. It can inspire countries, even those that are not signatories or ratifiers, to live up to some of its provisions.

We have many criticisms of Turkey for the way it has operated with regard to some migrants, particularly the ones going into Europe, but they are hosting 3.6 million refugees—they don’t call them “refugees,” but “persons” in their country—and they are treating them according to the good standards by and large in the Refugee Convention if not better, giving them access to housing, healthcare, schools, et cetera. Many of them of course are Syrians from right across the border, but they come more broadly. A global treaty can serve as a floor even for the non-ratifiers, and even the 1951 Convention has that role.

The challenge of a global treaty and the reason why you want to get a good one or a better one is that it also serves as a ceiling. In 2017 there was a sad case of a Guatemalan woman who had been subject to domestic abuse back home seeking temporary protected status here in the United States, called the case of A-B-, 2017, and she was turned down. Attorney General Jeff Sessions explained why and said: “Our asylum laws are meant to protect those who, because of characteristics like race, religion, nationality, or political opinions,”—think the 1951 Convention, which is what he is referring to here—“cannot find protection in their home countries. That’s what it’s for. They were never intended to provide asylum to all those who fear generalized violence, crime, personal vendettas, or lack job prospects. Yet vague, insubstantial, and subjective claims have swamped our system.” That is why he joined that case against A-B- in her attempt to get asylum here in the country.

A global treaty that is too limited can serve as too low a ceiling. MIMC raises the ceiling in terms of protections, but it also has some duties attached to it.

Let me just wrap up. We like MIMC, that is, those of us who have contributed to it, you obviously here, but it has limitations. It does not have anything about pandemic-induced mobility. We don’t have clear standards for when you can legitimately close a border, when you should impose quarantine, and when you should have an open border. We say nothing about that.

We need much more on climate refugees. We have been writing on climate refugees, but we have not reassembled to think about what are the standards that are broadly acceptable. We need more on “digital nomads.” During the course of COVID-19 there were all sorts of digital nomads. I was one. I was living in Philadelphia and teaching at Columbia, but the ones across borders raise all sorts of much more problematic issues—which labor law applies, who is getting tax revenue, et cetera? We need to sort that out, and we have not done that yet.

We also need better governance frameworks. For example, our friend Alex Aleinikoff, one of the lead scholars who helped prepare this, has given a lot of thought to operational platforms. My good friend, another former student, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the former high commissioner for human rights (HCHR), has also contributed some good ideas on all of this.

Let me stop right here and happily hand it over to Gregory.

GREGORY MANIATIS: Great. Thank you. Maybe I should start with a thank-you to the Council for having me but also a thank-you to Michael.

I think Michael didn’t put his work into enough perspective, so I am going to start with his work and the Treaty. I met Michael in 2002, and back then he was working, amongst his many other responsibilities, to try to define the role of migration in the international system.

He was tasked by Kofi Annan to create what was internally called the “Doyle report.” It was not released publicly, but it was meant to try to say that the United Nations should deal with immigration and migration because it did not at the time, and how could a multilateral system possibly exist that did not deal with migration, so Michael was the pioneer in trying to open up that space, which is a space that I subsequently entered. He was then probably the greatest advocate in the UN system and then at Columbia University when I had to move there with my then-boss Peter Sutherland, who was the UN special representative of the secretary-general for international migration.

MICHAEL DOYLE: A great person; let me footnote that statement.

GREGORY MANIATIS: A great human being who passed away in 2018. That says one thing I want to say about Michael, which is that you have to persist. It was 25 years ago that he started working on it. You have to persist.

The other thing that always stood out Michael was that he was a professor by day but also by day he was trying to change the world, and that I think is something that he brought to Columbia. That is also important for anyone who is a professor in the room—I can’t see who is—you should take on that responsibility. It is incredibly important. You cannot just be in the ivory tower, now more than ever. We are seeing that now particularly as universities are the center of developments here in the United States.

I just wanted to start with that, and I should address the question mark. I don’t know if it was 20?? or 2020?, but adoption of the Convention is going to happen at some point because we are way stale in terms of the institutions that we have right now and the treaties. The 1951 Convention is hanging on by a thread. It is effectively dead in many ways, and something is going to have come into its place.

I have been saying that I think now for 15 years. I have been criticized always for saying that because you don’t want to talk about the Convention because if you talk about it somehow it is going to disappear, but as you will hear in a moment despite Chris’s description of me as being on the far left—I think he meant that facetiously—I am certainly not on the far left when it comes to migration.

I am going to address three points: One, migration right now is being used, as we all see, as the tip of the spear to take on, undermine, and destroy democracy. For those who are in the field that has been obvious for quite a long time. We are now seeing migrants targeted by the state, and in the targeting several things are happening which will apply to many more people than migrants.

Thing one is surveillance. There is now a powerful effort by the Department of Government Efficiency to go into government and hoover up all the data there is on migrants, and for those of you who know government this is not supposed to happen. There is supposed to be very careful gatekeeping of data. That is being destroyed. I will not go into it, but they are taking Social Security data, data from the Internal Revenue Service, and they are taking data from all different parts of the system, including the courts, putting it into a single database, and they will then use that to target migrants.

Second, as we are seeing, they are taking away the right to stay in this country. I think that is the most dangerous part of what they are doing because if you can start to take people who you consider your enemies and deport them, then you are going to silence your opposition.

The third thing obviously is the courts. They are using high-profile migration-related cases to defy the courts and undermine the rule of law.

I won’t go further into the state of what is happening today—you see that—but you cannot underestimate how important it is and that it has been in the works for quite a long time in terms of being able to use this apparatus of surveillance, the apparatus of detention and deportation, and the attempt to undermine the courts. Those are hugely dangerous developments for this country but also for other countries.

You might think that my saying that would lead me to conclude that the problem is the current administration, but I am not going to say that. I think you have to understand the failures of progressives who have been in charge for 12 of the last 16 years in the United States. We can do what we can right now—and I will get into that a little bit—to take on these actions of the current administration that are as I said undermining not just immigrant rights but also democratic institutions, but real responsibility I think rests on those who have been in charge of the system for most of the past 20 years. Trying to understand why it is that 12 years of Democratic government did not get us to an immigration system that works it is important over the course of the coming years that when there is another chance to build the system we are able to do it.

Let me try to summarize a few things about this moment and why we have reached it in this way. When Democrats were in charge they did not address a system that has been chaotic especially over the past ten years but over the past 20 or so years. There was chaos at the border. You had a kind of paradox in President Obama, who was known as the “deporter-in-chief,” but that did not solve the border problem either.

This is something you have seen unfold as well in Europe with the 2015 crisis that included a set of institutions in Europe which were not able to address chaos at the border, and I think chaos is the defining story of failure amongst progressives. Why is that so hard to address?

First, one of the questions is the interpretation of the Convention on the right to asylum, but there was also a refusal amongst progressives to acknowledge the public desire for order. There was a disconnect between the elite policy discussions and what was happening at the community level. I think Governor Abbott sending migrants up in buses to blue cities and states caused that contradiction to be juxtaposed in such a way that really seized the attention of the elites.

There was a prevalence of moral arguments over pragmatic problem-solving. You could make the case in progressive circles that you had to allow people in who were seeking asylum, but you didn’t have to solve the resultant problems that came with that. If you champion the right to asylum, you should try to figure out what happens to asylum seekers. You should try to have a case-management system at the border that is functional. Kate will tell us a little bit more about that. You should have a court system that can process cases in less than 5, 7, 8, or 12 years.

Above all, and I think this is a significant shortcoming, you should accept the fact that not everyone has the right to stay. I think about the past 10 or 15 years as a kind of conspiracy of silence amongst those who benefited from having essentially an asylum system that was broken. Employers got a lot of workers without much leverage in terms of their rights, and progressives had the opportunities to allow people who they understandably felt should have a right to live in this country come across the border and disappear, and because the court systems didn’t work they were able to stay and establish themselves here.

That all led to a lot of chaos in communities and a sense of fear that conservatives have exploited. When there is chaos you create the conditions for a strong man to come, and that is exactly what Trump has done twice.

Let me stop there with the analysis. There is a lot I could say about the adverse role of government in all this and the adverse role of foundations. I think foundations have played a negative role in a lot of this. We have relied way too much on litigation to try to establish the rights of immigrants when in fact this is a project of political persuasion, but we have quietly gone into courts to try to expand rights without actually winning in the court of public opinion, which I think is eminently possible.

Let’s switch to what we are doing and what we have been doing and talk about an idea that has seized my imagination for the better part of 20 years and that I have had the privilege of working on within the context of philanthropy for more than decade, which is the notion of sponsorship. The Canadian government in the late 1970s created a program around private sponsorship that allowed individuals in Canadian communities to sponsor refugees, and it became the backbone of the Canadian system. In the United States at the same time, 1980, we passed our core refugee-related legislation and created a top-down, government-run system of refugee resettlement that has dominated the U.S. space in the 45 years since.

It is a fundamentally different approach to immigration. One says that communities can decide who comes in, and the other one says that the United High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the State Department can tell communities who should come into their cities and towns.

Over the past four years, during the Biden administration, we had the chance to see sponsorship in the United States bloom. It initially took the form of Americans being allowed to sponsor Afghans who came in in the summer of 2021. There was a small new program called Sponsor Circles that was created because there were so many Afghans on the bases, and a few months later that idea of allowing American citizens to take somebody and bring them into their community was expanded to Ukrainians in a program called Uniting for Ukraine, and when that program started in April of 2022 no one knew how many Americans would raise their hands. Incredibly there have been 250,000 Ukrainians sponsored in the United States by Americans.

I won’t get into the details of this, but it was worth noting for me that there was a lot of criticism of that program as being racist. It was criticized because people felt that it was only made applicable to white, Christian, and largely women and children from Ukraine and that the United States would never do something like that for other populations and if they did they would not get sponsored.

Six months later the Biden administration started a similar program for Venezuelans and expanded it in January of 2023 to Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans, and in two years something on the order of 3 million migrants from those countries were sponsored by Americans. About half a million were able to come in from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV).

I should just add that another piece of that is that there was an official U.S. refugee program part of this effort called the Welcome Corps, and that was for not just migrants who were named from specific countries, like from the five countries I mentioned, but Americans through the U.S. refugee admissions program were able to sponsor formal refugees. That program launched more or less in the last year of the Biden administration, and there were 35,000 sponsorship groups that were created around the country. The minimum was that five people had to be in each of these sponsorship groups formally. The average was 15, and amongst them they raised something on the order of $0.5 billion to sponsor refugees, and all of this has been shut down.

I give that as an example of what went wrong. You had a system in the United States that in its best years, when it was completely government-run, was able to bring in 80,000 refugees, and it was done in a painstaking top-down way that was alienating to communities. Then, when you created a system that was bottom-up and allowed Americans to step forward and do the work of resettlement you had a large multiple saying they wanted to do that.

What went wrong? It is worth thinking about because it was a captured institution. The idea of refugee resettlement, the most progressive possible idea, was frankly captured by a refugee establishment that resisted in every possible way the idea that the American people should be resettling refugees.

Our work right now—in addition to trying to defend against the attacks of the administration along with this heroic group of NGOs that are underfunded and under attack by the administration—is litigating a series of cases that include the refugee program and the sponsorship programs that I just mentioned.

We are working closely with cities and states to try to help shore them up as they are on the frontlines of defending against the administration’s actions, and most importantly in my own view we are focused on what happens going forward now: As with sponsorship, how do we build an entire immigration system that is bottom-up and community-driven. I often use the term “demand-driven.”

Immigration needs to be grounded in communities, and employers need to be able to bring in migrants; humanitarian groups, faith groups, and others need to bring in refugees. It has to be a system that is responsive to the needs of cities, states, and towns around the country.

I am happy to go into detail, but I know I am at my limit in terms of time. Thank you.

MICHAEL DOYLE: What you described sounds to me to be morally obvious: Find a way to provide assistance to people in desperate need that others want to provide to them because they are proud to do so and because they think it builds their communities at the same time. The great mystery then is why is it that our elected officials in Washington cannot understand that they have this wonderful opportunity in their hands to not only make themselves look good but actually do good. It becomes a political mystery. I am wondering if you have any sense of where the disconnect is that does not connect our elected leaders to that kind of an outcome?

We had a session on MIMC with commentators from former Vice President Joe Biden and former political candidate Jeb Bush. They didn’t agree with everything in MIMC, you can be sure, but they did agree on the view that work migrants and refugees should have a home in this country and that we will be better for it provided it is done within the framework of legal pathways.

Here are two ex-politicians of different parties who could get together. We put them into office down in Washington, and we get nothing. You have thinking about this for a long time, and I am wondering what your sense is. Where is the disconnect?

GREGORY MANIATIS: When it comes to refugees there was legislation. It set out who the players are on the playing field and it funded them well enough, and that refugee establishment just took hold and it was very difficult, especially since a lot of the arguments around refugees are wrapped in dogma and are sometimes hard to penetrate from the outside. It was networked. There were nine resettlement agencies, the government decided how many people would come in, and the UNHCR chose who was the most worthy in the world. We tried to challenge it for ten years, and there was incredible resistance from the establishment that had a piece of the action and did not want to see it change, even though you could make a strong case that it would benefit them over time.

We have just seen the whole system wiped out. The only thing that is working right now is sponsorship. There are still people coming in on Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) organized around sponsorship groups. You could make the case that they were not willing basically to cede that ground. The fear of something working differently that might exclude them I think is what drove that logic.

In terms of the bigger immigration system, in order to be able to have a system that is responsive to communities, to cities and states, you have to build the infrastructure that allows for that, so you have to have a way for a state to express a desire to bring in people. In the current system there are cities and towns in Vermont that work hard to try to bring in migrants.

It is not easy. The system is not built to have demand expressed from the bottom up nor to try to match migrants who might want to come here with specific destinations. We are now in an age of incredible technological advancement that would allow for people to try to find their place in the world for a town or a union, let’s say in Milwaukee, that needs construction workers to be able to go out into the pool of global labor and identify 10,000 or 15,000 workers who could come to Milwaukee and help reconstruct whatever they are working on. I think the systems are not there, and the systems that are there are captured.

MICHAEL DOYLE: Any questions from the floor or from the internet?

ALEX WOODSON: Thank you. I am Alex Woodson from Carnegie Council. There are a lot of virtual questions. I will ask one right now, a kind of philosophical question: “Is it possible to reframe migration not as a problem to be managed but as a shared creative force? If so, what kind of political language, narrative, or institutional forum currently missing would that require?”

MICHAEL DOYLE: I’ll start on it, but what Gregory has been describing is a lot of that through sponsorship. In the context of MIMC, our view is that if somebody’s life is in danger we should find a way to provide rescue. That is the basic understanding in MIMC. I think that has firm ethical foundations to it in ways that are hard to contest.

However, there are many cases when it is not a life that is at stake in the immediate sense; it is well-being. Of course we all want to be better off. All the Americans who were the sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters of immigrants came here to make a better life for themselves. It is not surprising that other people are still trying to do this.

We also have commitments to our fellow citizens that are produced by the mere fact that the only way you can govern the world is with nation-states or states so far—we don’t have a global governance that works—and moreover we have sacrificed for each other. If we have not done so very directly, our fathers or our grandfathers fought in wars to preserve the security and independence of the United States and other countries have done the same thing. They have a stake in a collective well-being.

It is not illegitimate for American citizens to say, “You have to come in legally to this country; you can’t just walk across the border,” and you do so in ways that advantage the United States because there are jobs that need to be filled or you have relatives who want to have you here and in other ways that you are directly contributing. So either you should come in because your life is at stake or you should come in because in the views of American citizens, including sponsors, employers, and others, you are going to make a direct contribution.

I think our legal pathways need to be formatted in a way that allows those, let’s call them “ethical foundations,” to be realized practically. That would be my response to that very good question.

GREGORY MANIATIS: I would just add, first, save lives. It is incredibly important to have whatever approach you’re taking be anchored by that idea for sure.

Then I think where the narrative has fallen apart is that it has been compassion versus control, and the Democratic left, the progressive left, has been identified with compassion—let them in, let them stay—and the far right has been identified with control and in the current context extreme control measures. It is not either/or; it is both, and the center has not held in this respect. There have not been enough politicians who have been able to go out there and say we need both compassion and control and legal pathways, as you said.

QUESTION: My name is Autry Johnson. I am from the University of Toronto, the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. I just finished my fellowship as a Dejusticia Global North Fellow down in Bogotá, Colombia for human rights. I did a lot of research because I grew up on my father’s reservation. My dad is Potawatomi from Northern Wisconsin. I am here for the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and we were just talking about implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People entirely for the domestic countries in comparison, and I saw a lot of similarities to UNHCR.

How can common law legal mechanisms or policy be utilized to help with migration in any shape or form specifically? When you compare it to Native American sovereignty common law is actually the most applicable way of having forms of justice mechanisms or ways of reform to be brought in without having to rely on federal institutions in many ways.

MICHAEL DOYLE: I am struggling a little bit even though I teach in a law school to get the practical potential connections that you bring to our attention, but there are a lot of common law principles like hearing both sides, providing habeas corpus kinds of defenses for seizure, and principles with regard to things like theft and compensation that are relevant very broadly. That does not mean that they apply universally despite some of the common law claims that they are universal, and one needs to adjust to every jurisdiction, and there are some cultures—it might be an Indigenous culture or a foreign culture—that have different standards, and of course there are different frameworks of law, such as civic law traditions that are different from the common law.

Having any set of legal principles claiming universal validity is I think a step too far. You have to take into account exactly the kinds of standards that apply within a given jurisdiction and make them real and determining unless one sees that those standards are so egregiously harmful to very basic principles, including the ones under common law like equality of parties within a court, et cetera, that kind of framework, that you would want to resist them.

It is an abstract question. I don’t know exactly where you wanted to take it differently from that, but that is my best attempt at an answer. It’s a real issue, and in global constitutionalism discourse those kinds of questions do arise. Two of my students this past semester wrote long papers on the civic law tradition and incompatibilities with the common law tradition, so I have seen some of that literature, and it is important, but it also has very practical conflicts that arise, and that is where I think it needs to be resolved.

QUESTION: My name is Angelo Cabrera. We are reaching a stage in America where the majority of our community is getting older, so we need a new input of income into the sources of Medicare and Medicaid, and this is a new workforce that is there right now. What are your thoughts on that, looking from the perspective of the economic aspect of immigration in the United States.

MICHAEL DOYLE: I was going to turn this over to my colleague because he knows more about this than I do, but my preliminary response is that it is interesting. When you talk about the last attempt to have a comprehensive immigration bill, the Republican on the other side of that was Marco Rubio, of all people, and many people think that the superiority of the American economy over the past 10 to 15 years compared to our good friends in Europe is a product of the fact that we have had immigration coming into this country in ways that allow us to grow in ways that the Europeans were not able to do, but I want to turn it over to Gregory, who knows a lot more about this than I do.

GREGORY MANIATIS: It is a nativist moment right now that is as harsh as it has been in decades, and that nativist moment will create a backlash, and the pendulum will swing again. Right now, if you want to summarize that, you have a narrative of deportations ‒ “self-deportations” to use that word (“I am so sorry you have to go through such a hard time, had to leave, and were not able to come back for a while”)—but we will realize that as communities live in fear and workers are ripped away from jobs.

I was reading yesterday about a dairy farm in Vermont where there was a raid on Tuesday and the crews were detained and a farmer who has a dairy farm that cannot function without workers immediately, the next morning, is going to be in big trouble. Yes, we can do what DeSantis is trying to do in Florida and lower the working age to 14 so that we can fill the labor market gaps that are created by deportations, but I think the narrative will change when people do realize not only the brutality of the deportation process and the impact on communities—tens of millions of people who won’t show up for doctor’s appointments, don’t show up for work, and who are fearful of sending their kids to school. I think that will be the narrative change, but it will take time.

MICHAEL DOYLE: Thank you for your questions and comments.

Panel Discussion

SUSIE HAN: Good afternoon, everyone. Before I introduce the panel, let me introduce myself. My name is Susie Han, and I have the privilege of supporting Michael, who just spoke during the introductions, on the Model International Mobility Convention as a Research Fellow here at the Council. I thought I would set the frame before we go into the introduction of our incredible panelists and moderator that we have here today.

Prior to arriving in New York in the fall of 2023 I spent three years at the U.S.-Mexico border in Brownsville, Texas, a small and dynamic city often in the headlines known for being “ground zero” of the country’s ever-shifting migration policies. I moved there in July 2020 and began working with asylum seekers living in an informal encampment in Matamoros, Mexico, many who had been forced to wait under the Trump administration’s first iteration of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, otherwise known as “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP). That is actually where I met one of our panelists today, Estuardo, who you will hear from shortly. At the time, our collective advocacy efforts were focused on ending the deeply harmful combination of a public health order known as Title 42 and dismantling MPP, which had already left thousands stranded in precarious and dangerous conditions.

The policy landscape, as we all know, too often kept shifting, the pace of change has only quickened, and the gap between policy and practice became more and more opaque. The goalposts kept moving as more nuanced and insidious deterrence like chain refoulement and secret digital metering was quietly merged, making it harder and harder for people to access their rights.

While the policies changed what remained constant were the frontline responses. Local legal service providers, grassroots organizations, emergency responders, and city officials stepped up to fill the gaps, ensuring that people had the basic resources and information that they needed to navigate the complex path ahead.

What struck me then and what continues to shape my work now is that despite the headlines and noise in Washington frontline communities are already modeling what dignified, rights-respecting migration governance could look like. It takes a village, but that village is rarely involved in the rooms where structural reform is actually being decided.

That disconnect became even more apparent when newly arrived migrants were being bused from Texas to cities like New York and Chicago in 2022. Suddenly border issues became national issues, but for those of us working on the ground that moment simply exposed what had always been true, that migration governance is not just about borders; it is about how we define sanctuary, how we define protection, and our shared responsibility. Yet those who are closer to the realities of that displacement, those offering shelter, legal guidance, and community support, are often the furthest from the policymaking space. Our hope with this panel here today is to help bridge that gap.

Today’s conversation is grounded in the belief that we must move beyond defending the status quo and toward reimagining how migration systems can work, both for people on the move and the communities that receive them. That is the vision behind MIMC as we just discussed, the legal framework that aims to align the rights, responsibilities, and realities both locally and globally.

To help us explore that vision I am very honored to welcome a remarkable group of speakers. Our moderator for today’s panel is an award-winning journalist and author, Molly O’Toole. Molly has written for a number of news organizations including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The New Republic among others. In 2020 Molly was awarded the first-ever Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting for an episode of This American Life, uncovering the frontlines of the Trump administration’s MPP policy.

To her left we have joining the panel Estuardo Cifuentes, the program manager with Project Corazón, a program under the auspices of Lawyers for Good Government, which aims to safeguard the rights of migrants in the face of inhumane U.S. immigration policy. As an asylum seeker who spent over 18 months in Mexico under MPP and founded a program to support LBGTQ+ asylum seekers, Estuardo continues to leverage his lived experiences and his expertise to assist vulnerable individuals and educate attorneys, community members, and other stakeholders on asylum-related issues in Mexico and the United States.

To the very left, we have Kate Clark. Kate is the chief executive officer of Welcoming Initiative for Newcomers (WIN). WIN advances innovative lawful pathways to welcome newcomers to the United States, rooted in the belief that doing so creates what they call a “win-win-win” or “win cubed/(win3)” scenario for newcomers, their sponsors, and the broader community. Before leading WIN Kate was senior director of immigration services at Jewish Family Service of San Diego, overseeing 200 staff across legal and shelter programs.

Finally, we have Emily Shechtman, co-founder and director of South Brooklyn Sanctuary here in New York, where she leads efforts to empower New Yorkers to represent themselves in Immigration Court through Know-Your-Rights programming, legal paperwork support, and pro bono referrals. Previously she was the chief of staff at Envision Freedom Fund, which pays bonds to free immigrants from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention in the New York City area.

Without further ado, please join me in warmly welcoming the speakers onstage.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: We have tough acts to follow here, but I have faith in us. Thank you, everyone, for coming this afternoon. Thanks always to Carnegie Council for having us. I think it is so important to have an institution and a community of thought leaders, academics, practitioners, and people with lived experience, all be part of this community that Carnegie has created with ethics at its core, ethics being central to a discussion of international affairs and policy today, especially as we discuss the state of migration.

Thank you again, everyone, for coming. As Sue mentioned, my name is Molly, I am a journalist, and a practitioner of sorts, but I have spent the last few years working on a book about international migration and following people from all around the world, so not just within the Western Hemisphere but beyond it, as they make their way on the longest human migrations and to the United States and then what happens to them after, so I am eager to hear from our practitioners today about what they have been seeing from their various vantage points.

I am going to start in the darkness and hopefully end in the light a little bit. Obviously things are pretty grim in the state of migration, particularly the politics around migration. I was inspired by many things of course in our first panel, but one of the things that struck me is that I think we have to acknowledge that there has been a political potency in this nativist and restrictivist response to record global displacement today. We have talked about how that has been a politically potent message around the world, but it also has proved to be politically potent in the United States.

To start with that dark question, why do you think that nativist, anti-immigrant message has been able to find political success, and what is your best counter to that? An easy one to start.

KATE CLARK: I actually think that it stems from a lack of curiosity from communities across the country, folks who do not want to better understand the issue but instead are captivated by headlines and grabbing onto headlines that they are taking on their own rather than looking at what I believe are American values that are innate in all of us that actually resonate with welcoming.

It is this lack of curiosity and seeing these images. I live in San Diego, California. I think that I live in a beautiful binational border community that is thriving, yet if I were to turn on XYZ news station or listen to a certain podcast or hear from family members who live in other parts of the country, what they describe to me is something very different than where I live. I think it is the media but it is also combined with this lack of curiosity to understand what is a complex issue.

I am an immigration attorney and have been practicing for more than 15 years, and there are areas of immigration law that I don’t even know or understand completely. I think that is a very volatile combination that has pushed us to where we are currently.

We are all one human interaction from better understanding an issue, and I think issues like sponsorship are opportunities for folks to welcome folks into their community and better understand what it looks like: Who is fleeing from around the world? Why are they fleeing? Where are they fleeing from? What are the challenges that they are facing along their journey? From those lived experiences we are able to hopefully effect change.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: Maybe we want to go to Emily. That is such a nice transition.

EMILY SHECHTMAN: I don’t know if I have the answer to this. I am a fierce optimist and a New York chauvinist, so I like to think I live in this extremely diverse and intimate city where there is a lot of difference and people can’t help but know each other and stand up for each other, and that has proven to be my experience through South Brooklyn Sanctuary, which trains volunteers to support recently arrived immigrants, but I also know that even in New York City and beyond there is a huge amount of fear, nativism, and anti-immigrant sentiment.

It is no surprise to anyone that we have a growing wealth gap in this country. Many people are living with a lot more precarity when it comes to access to resources, and I think that is dangerous. I think it makes everyone afraid of difference and less curious than they might otherwise be.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: You both emphasized interacting, “one human experience away” from changing your mind or understanding an issue, and I love that. We all have the wonderful opportunity today to speak with someone who is not only a practitioner but has that lived experience, specifically being subjected to one of these policies that has been promoted as one of the answers, “Well, if we could only bring back Remain in Mexico,” which forced people to wait in some of the most dangerous cities in the world while their asylum cases were pending in the United States, “if we could only bring back Title 42,” which essentially ended access to asylum altogether, which has been the state of things at the border since 2019 and has continued under Republican and Democratic administrations.

As someone who was forced to live out one of those policies that was supposed to be the answer, can you speak to us a little bit about that and where you see the gaps in understanding?

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: I agree with my co-panelists. I think something that is important is the lack of these spaces for us. People like me have real histories and we have knowledge and experience of all this because many people are doing good work in making investigations, making surveys, and talking with people, but we do not have the spaces to speak about them. Taking advantage of that, I want to say thank you to MIMC and Carnegie for having me. Speaking for me and I think for a lot of people it is difficult to come looking to save our lives and my first interaction with authorities here was a Taser shot. When I arrived in the United States I was received with a Taser shot. This was the start of all of this process.

I think we need to change the things that all are speaking about right now. We know the disinformation the government put out during the campaign, so we need to change this mindset.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: Change this narrative, right. One of the things that was talked about in the previous panel and that I think is important is that it is true that the asylum system and the refugee system on an international level and as directly incorporated into U.S. law and the United States being a signatory to those conventions was written in the wake of World War II, 70 years ago. We live in a very different world, and in fact some of the very communities that you work with in particular, we talked about gaps in services especially for the LGBTQ community, for example. These are not necessarily communities and populations that were conceived of in the initial definition of a refugee.

I am going to ask you another easy one: Given that we have broadly accepted that some of those legal frameworks are outdated, what do you believe should be the definition of a refugee today? What should qualify you for asylum today? What would you add to the Refugee Convention or how would you reform it?

KATE CLARK: I have an example of a client I represented. At the end of the day my answer would be climate as number one, but I remember going through his case and I knew that it was climate, but I knew that I couldn’t articulate to the judge that it was climate for all of the reasons we know to be true.

We had to go a layer deeper, which was that the gangs had overridden his small town, taken over all of the farmland, and displaced his family. He had multiple family members that were murdered, and it was all because there were no fields left for the farmers to continue to do their work and for the communities to continue to have their substance.

That was very clear to me as an attorney who was representing them and going through this case in the hours and weeks that I did. Would that have allowed him to stay in the United States under the current framework? The answer is absolutely not, yet he had faced this incredible and challenging journey.

Climate is just one example of where you look a layer deeper and there certainly are a number of issues and I think opportunities. It is also a hard question to answer in this moment. As was alluded to in the previous panel, the current framework is hanging by a string, so it is hard as an advocate to want to grapple—I want to hold onto that string for what we have in this moment and expand. The “and” of course is what we are going to strive to achieve, but it is very clear to me that we are leaps and bounds away from achieving it.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: I appreciated Gregory’s comment about how sometimes you get a lot of pushback let’s say when you even suggest that it is outdated and needs to be reformed because the suggestion is that somehow you might be working against that or undermining the very values that are at the heart even while acknowledging that we live in a very different world and that reform is needed.

This is a safe space in which we will still hold onto that thread but also talk about the ways in which the framework is not meeting the demands of the world today. How do you see this from where you sit in Brooklyn?

EMILY SHECHTMAN: We would love to reimagine this definition of asylum. A lot of our work is legal education, and that is both for recently arrived immigrants who do not have attorneys—our mission is supporting recently arrived immigrants who don’t have access to attorneys—and then legal education for volunteers who are often laypeople or sometimes attorneys who are supporting recently arrived immigrants to represent themselves.

It may not be the case for this room but for many of the folks we talk to there is this idea that asylum is protection from harm. There is a box on the asylum application which asks, “Are you afraid to return to your home country and why?” That is an easy answer for most people to explain, but it doesn’t mean that that heartfelt, legitimate fear fits into the narrow definition of asylum by law. Instead you have to demonstrate that you are being persecuted on an identity basis in ways that the government in your home country will not protect you but U.S. law will protect you.

More often than not we are working with people who are at risk of serious harm, death, or torture if they return home, and we try hard to identify legitimate legal pathways through asylum law, and it is not always obvious. From our perspective that is a sad exercise. That should not be how we are welcoming people into our country who are seeking safety. We should be able to completely expand those pathways and provide an opportunity for people to stay and be safe and thrive regardless.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: This is playing out here in New York, but it is also playing out all over the country. I think the very concept of sanctuary and refuge is being challenged in this political rhetoric that we have examined, but within the context of the United States, here in New York but also in San Diego and other places across the country, this idea of sanctuary and sanctuary policies is under attack.

Another way hopefully to turn this a little more positive is, what are some of the ways that you have found that can be productive or constructive in terms of on an individual level, an organizational level, and maybe a local or city level, pushing back as some of these sanctuary policies are being targeted?

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: I think the groups need to work more collaboratively. We try to work with cities, and we have a good approach with cities like New York, Washington DC, and Washington state, but we also have a good approach with cities in Texas and I think in red states. I think NGOs need to take the risk to approach these more difficult people because we usually are looking for colleagues or people on our side and we need to expand that.

I remember two years ago I published something on Fox News, and it was very explosive. I received death threats for it, but we went to them and explained all of these realities. I think we need to approach people who are not in this space and explain all of these things and not try to change their minds but explain what is the reality.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: That is a way to broaden the potential allies around some of these sanctuary policies. Even if you step away from the politics to the reality, then you can reach people.

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: Yes, and we have more of these people who do not know anything about immigration coming with us. I think this is something we can do in this space.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: I didn’t know that was where you were going to go with that. I love being surprised by answers.

New York itself has played an interesting role in the migration debate over the last several years, let’s say. Obviously this is in part because of Greg Abbott’s busing program, but there was also a busing program out of Arizona before that. Interestingly I have had a lot of conversations and met people along the way who have traveled thousands of miles who were excited for the free bus ride and wanted to go to New York anyway. They were like: “Great! Free ride to New York, and what a nice bus this is! You should see the buses I was riding on before.”

These attempts to use human beings as political footballs are from different sides of the political spectrum as you alluded to, while at the same time this was meant to be a political stunt that would put more progressive Democrats on the spot by sending migrants to New York—we have a New York mayor who in some ways was echoing some of the rhetoric you might hear from the other side—and it confused and muddled the political picture and the political lines.

In terms of defending sanctuary policies or the concept of sanctuary itself, how do you do that in a climate that is so confused even within a city like New York that one might assume would have a certain response when thousands of people show up on your doorstep?

EMILY SHECHTMAN: It would be wonderful if our elected officials were stepping up to this challenge, defending sanctuary policies, and expanding sanctuary policies. That is not happening. They are absolutely at threat. Our mayor has made clear that we cannot count on our existing policies and they could change at any moment, and it is making community education challenging.

We go into the shelters and provide legal education and Know-Your-Rights information. It is very unclear; what are the rights in the shelter? The shelter staff refuse to talk to you about their policies or any directives that they have gotten, so it is opaque. It is challenging to talk to people about what their rights are. Whether their rights will be protected is unclear.

I would say that we have seen beautiful mutual-aid grassroots organizing happening. I think that is one of the through lines in all of our work, working with volunteers and community members who are stepping up and are educating themselves in the law and making their time and care available to new neighbors.

We have done a lot of Know-Your-Rights work with teachers, for example, who are horrified by the idea that ICE might come into their schools and that they cannot guarantee that they won’t or that ICE could track the perimeters of their school during pickup and drop-off and it might not feel like a safe space. They are organizing internally, sometimes with the support of their own administration and sometimes not, and making sure that they have safety protocols in place. That piece I think has been heartening.

I wish the sanctuary laws that we have that are fragile extended to Long Island. I wish they extended upstate. We have seen even in the past few months an increase of coordination between upstate counties and ICE/federal government. It is a little scary, but you definitely do see a lot of emergency response and information sharing on the ground.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: What have you seen that has been effective both in your previous work and obviously in the new organization you have in terms of defending the concept of sanctuary itself or the policies, especially in Southern California?

KATE CLARK: First, I am a proud Californian. I think we have a decade plus of laws that have been in place that are preventing the commingling and information sharing with law enforcement and ICE, which is great, but taking it a step further is public-private partnerships and how NGOs can come alongside government. I think actually moments like now when we are challenged are ripe for innovation. The odds are obviously set up against us and likely to fail, but what if failure is the worst thing that is going to happen?

On the other side of that is for us to be able to succeed and succeed with breeding a new idea of how we can welcome and how we can center humans while we are creating policies that are hopefully going to create this bright path forward. I have seen organizations that are fearless in stepping forward and thinking differently and wanting to be part of the solution to work alongside government to fill gaps and to do it in a way that again is centering the people who are continuing to be part of this political football and subject to so many cruel policies in this moment.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: Speaking of the cruelty—and this is the last time I will stay in the darkness and will move more toward the light—if my own assessment is fair that the cruelty is the point, I think Republicans and Democrats have held onto this cult of prevention through deterrence: “If we make it as difficult as possible, then people won’t come; if we make it as dangerous as possible, then people won’t come; if we subject them to these increasingly draconian policies in order to prevent them from reaching the point in which they might access asylum much less that happens after, then they won’t come.”

I think the last several years have proven that that is not an effective policy if you just look at the numbers alone. I crossed the Darién Gap in September of 2022, and if you saw what I saw in the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, entire generations of a family from Afghanistan crossing the jungle, some of the most difficult terrain on Earth, I think that is a pretty good example of how prevention through deterrence doesn’t work.

Given that that has mostly been U.S. policy for the last 40 years and that there has not been this comprehensive immigration reform, now things are being taken to their extreme under the current administration. You have a weaponization of the Department of Justice, an inclination if not an outright willingness to ignore the courts, basic constitutional rights being called into question—due process, freedom of speech, et cetera. Legal service organizations themselves are being directly targeted, critical access to legal counsel at all is being denied.

I guess my very difficult question to the three of you would be: How do we defend ourselves, our rights, our institutions and our communities given this outright assault on all of that?

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: This is difficult. After a really hard fight with the system for almost five years, last year I won asylum. I was ready on April 11 to submit my permanent residence application. I didn’t because I wrote a lot of op-eds, I have been in public talking about the administration, and right now our organization is coordinating Law Day on May 1, so we have been targeted by the administration. We are trying to take care.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: But what can you do if there is this climate of genuine fear that has been created and if it risks making you a target while also still trying to do the work?

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: I was persecuted in my country for the same reason, for speaking, for talking about the government. Something different is that maybe my life is not at risk here, maybe, but if we don’t do these things, who will do them? For me it is very different to respond to this.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: I almost thought we should just end the whole thing right there. Do you guys have anything to add to that?

KATE CLARK: I think it is day-by-day, one person by one person. It feels insurmountable at times when you describe everything you did and learning about the day’s blow of policy changes, but it is the human life you have before you and the opportunity to effect change that I think motivates me to keep fighting.

EMILY SHECHTMAN: So much of what we do is supporting people to turn the wheels of the immigration legal system, and sometimes it feels arbitrary. I am educating someone to laws or I am helping you pull the levers or move forward in this process, and certain things are legal and certain things are criminalized. It is not necessarily common sense and it is not necessarily right, but I am going to help you navigate what feels like a very arbitrary set of rules designed to criminalize some and not others.

I think we have always known that, and now the lens of criminalization is being very shamelessly wielded toward groups that had previously felt protected. The nonprofit providers had previously felt protected, that there was nothing wrong with educating anyone to their rights: “I have a salary and a professional position,” but no one feels that way now. Everyone is very concerned that they are going to be targeted, defunded, and possibly more for engaging in this work. What comes up for me is how these tools that have for a long time been oppressive and harmful to minority groups are now being wielded more broadly and fewer people feel safe.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: I do think even speaking beyond—I think Gregory and others alluded to this—we have unfortunately seen that many of these tools that you are referring to that have been used against immigrating communities sometimes are test cases for using them more broadly, and I think there are dangerous moral, ethical, legal, and otherwise implications that we are seeing right now as well.

I want to end on a bright note; I promised it. I know we touched on some of this already, and you guys have done a wonderful job of highlighting some bright spots, but I do want to end with asking: What have you seen are some of the most innovative or unexpected responses to what has been a fundamental shift in migration to the United States and also the policy response? What are some overlooked potential hacks that we can highlight?

KATE CLARK: One of the unexpected was getting a call I think the day after inauguration from what we thought were three families from Afghanistan stranded across Europe and working to get them traveled into the United States. They had Special Immigrant Visa status, which is a lawful pathway into the United States.

What started as just these three families has actually turned out to be an incredible bright spot of SIVs and immigrant visa holders from Afghanistan able to continue to come. The organization I lead alongside our partners at the Community Sponsorship Hub and so many other organizations that are on the frontlines working with Afghans across the entire world have now assisted more than 380 Afghan newcomers after inauguration.

What we have done is patched together this privately supported end-to-end welcoming infrastructure that mimics what the government should be doing and what Gregory talked about with private sponsorship, with everyday Americans essentially raising their hands and saying, in the face of all of the things we have just talked about, “I want to step forward and continue to welcome.”

This has been in places like Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. We are up to more than 30 different states with more than 200 private sponsors that have stepped forward and have made a difference in the lives of these Afghans, but I think this has shown us that in the absence of a decimated system and infrastructure we can still do this welcoming work, and we have a model to point to to continue to iterate.

By no means will I say it is perfect. It is a challenge every single day, but it is an incredible gift that has been a wonderful bright spot in the face of the administration.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: Just a very quick note on that. I last year was able to visit a young Somali man that I met in one of the camps in Panama who ended up in South Sioux City, on the border of South Dakota and Nebraska, and in this very small community one side of the street is all the Latino supermarkets and the other side of the street is Somali, Eritrean, and Ethiopian, and then there is a growing Afghan community all in this town where you maybe might not expect it. For me that was a bright spot.

EMILY SHECHTMAN: I didn’t have as close a connection to the faith community in New York City until many different faith institutions—mosques, synagogues, churches; we grew out of a sanctuary church. We don’t have a connection with them anymore, but we are not alone in that. Many of the pro se legal clinics designed to support people who can’t get a foot in the door at traditional legal providers or don’t have access to private attorneys all started out of faith institutions and mutual-aid groups. My co-founder is the head of the South Brooklyn Mutual Aid, a big mutual aid organization in the city.

I do feel like I did not have a choice in creating this small nonprofit because the work was already happening and it was happening in an ambitious and vital way. It just needed a little bit of infrastructure to sustain it and let it carry on responsibly.

The last thing I would say is that in this happy chaos of the sanctuary church where this all began is a diverse group of people. You had congregants, you had Bay Ridge neighbors, and there was a leadership role also for recently arrived migrants themselves who could train to become volunteers. There was vital and organic information sharing and showing up for each other that happened, and I got carried away.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: It definitely seems that faith-based organizations are stepping in where governments are increasingly stepping out, and this is happening all over the world. The sanctuary movement in the United States itself is emerging out of not just some consequences of U.S. foreign policy in certain parts of the world that produced refugees that then tried to come to the United States but emerging from a faith-based movement.

EMILY SHECHTMAN: And all the big nonprofits and the progressives area. It has been a wonderful network of people to connect and work with.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: Take us home here. Any unexpected or surprising innovations that you have seen, bright spots?

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: Something unexpected for me is that a lot of groups like us are continuing doing this work without money.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: That is surprising.

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: A lot of groups lost their federal grants. We lose federal grants, but we have grants for meals for migrants and we have maybe 13 cents for each meal. It was hard to work with these grants, but now it is more difficult and a lot of groups continue doing this work. A lot of private groups are covering this space now. This is something unexpected for me right now.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: Great. So we are ending on a much more positive note than where we began. There are still bright spots in what is a very complicated and difficult space in terms of the state of migration.

We would love to take some questions. I am going to reserve the moderator right to go to the virtual audience first.

ALEX WOODSON: Hopefully staying on a positive note here. A great question from the chat: “Do you think migration helps people grow emotionally and mentally? Why or why not?”

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: I don’t know if migration really helps right now. I talk with a lot of people. I receive maybe 800 messages daily. All of these people are afraid of the situation right now. Many of them think that now their country is better than here. I don’t know if right now immigration can change mental and physical health in a positive way.

KATE CLARK: I would say it depends. In my previous experience as a shelter operator and now most recently with sponsorship I think it depends on how the person is welcomed and what their experience looks like integrating into society, being supported. I think it depends.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: I obviously don’t have the personal experience of migrating, but it has been incredible to be able to follow—it is a rare experience as a journalist to be able to follow people for a longer period of time, and now I have followed some of these people for several years and from all over the world, and this journey that they made is one of the defining experiences of their lives, but it has been difficult to see them hold on so strongly to this idea of America. Nothing will dissuade them from this idea that they have of America and if they just make it there then everything will be better for them or at least for their children, for the next generation if not them because America is a place of safety, opportunity, prosperity, and the like.

Our soft power export of this idea of the United States has been very successful, and to watch that idea change and be challenged when they finally reach what they believe is their destination and then realize how difficult it is, whatever comes next has been difficult to watch. I think there is a lot of resilience there with the experience of migration, incredible ingenuity, but it is also obviously emotionally difficult. There is real trauma that people also have to engage with all along the way.

Questions from the audience?

QUESTION: My name is Dave, and I am a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient and a current graduate student at Oxford but recent graduate from Hunter College right down the street. My question is specifically around this idea of decision making. I would love to hear about all of your experiences, especially working with clients in particular in this moment.

This panel and the last panel focused on how deterrence policies have never worked and the approach to deterrence as an immigration policy only started after 9/11 as many of us know, so it has never worked, and people always come regardless of whether you put buoys with razor blades or have U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents with whips, no matter what happens people migrate regardless. In that context I am curious what you are seeing in terms of information dissemination.

How aware are migrants of their rights as they are arriving to the different services you are providing? Are they aware? Are things circulating a lot quicker than they used to? There is the CBP-1 app and different digital borders that are making it more difficult to migrate now, but information has been spreading a lot quicker, or so some people say. I am curious if you can speak about what you feel in terms of knowledge. What does the base knowledge look like right now and how are people making decisions to either migrate or not migrate in response to that?

MOLLY O’TOOLE: The information-sharing networks and especially the role that social media plays in my experience has been absolutely incredible. We probably should also speak briefly about what a big business migration is as well, and sometimes smugglers and other criminal organizations might take advantage of those information networks to plant certain messages that are advantageous to them about what policies might be going on. I have definitely seen that in my experience.

KATE CLARK: From the context of the border there is a very strong cross-border binational information-sharing mechanism for guests that I welcomed in my previous experience at a shelter. Sometimes it would be like a WhatsApp showing, “Next you are going to provide me this packet that is 30 pages long,” so it outlined our entire process that was developed by newcomers sharing for those who were following in their footsteps.

I would say on the advocate side it has been incredible to see the organization of NGOs across the southern border. There are these welcoming committees because welcoming looks different everywhere, in the interior and at the border. It has been nice to have an organized space again in the context of the border that is binational, so we are able to share information to partners, shelters on the south side of the border, organizations that are along the migration routes, and we are able to adapt to changes that are happening. Is there enforcement happening in Southern Mexico or otherwise, so folks can make an informed decision.

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: We saw a lot last year. We had almost 40,000 Facebook likes weekly. We tried to explain to people the legal pathways. Most of them chose the legal pathways that were put in place in the Biden administration. I think the information and using social media is important.

Now a lot of immigration lawyers don’t want to speak publicly. It is difficult in this—

MOLLY O’TOOLE: The people who are best positioned to share the most accurate information that could enable people to make informed decisions may not want to speak because of this fear.

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: Yes.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: That is a difficult climate, and then to counter misinformation you need the people who are closest to the knowledge, the people on the ground, practitioners like yourselves, but if you increasingly become a target I can see how that is difficult.

QUESTION: My name is John Gage. I am a former trustee here at the Carnegie Council. My question gets to the involvement of sponsorship groups I guess in some cases replacing agencies like Legacy, a social agency I am familiar with up in Connecticut and New York. I am wondering if that is a model that could scale up and actually create a real basis for better, more integrated, and coordinated legal immigration or not?

One of the ways I can imagine that happening, at least theoretically, is that you are in the communities and you are working with business people. You might be working with farmers in California, where I lived for a long time; you might be working around people who are running small businesses or industries, and they would be able to voice the need for those workers in situations as well as providing part of the safe haven that sponsorship provides, or am I making all of this up?

KATE CLARK: I think you are making the case, and I think Gregory is the best to speak on this. The organization Community Sponsorship Hub has led the charge on doing this nationally, and what I have found and learned over the last couple of years as being incredible is that they are actually mobilizing sponsorship organizations that are also across the country, so it is community-driven.

You can have, again let’s just use North Dakota because it is my latest favorite example of a place that, I will own my bias, would not be expected to be so welcoming, but instead is proving me wrong and is this incredible place of welcome, so there are not only the organizations on the ground that want to do this work, but there are the private citizens who are saying, “Hey, I want to sponsor these Afghan families,” the only newcomer population that is able to lawfully come in at this moment.

What we are also seeing is that these groups are making connections with their community. They have connections with employers, they are stepping forward to help folks enroll in school, and they are tending to medical needs. They are truly living alongside these sponsorship groups that have raised their hands. That is juxtaposed against the resettlement system where you have of course the incredible work of case managers and resettlement directors, but that is their job and it ends at 5:00 p.m., then they come back again, whereas the sponsorship group is vested alongside to see this family succeed and be properly welcomed to the United States.

To answer the question, I think it is actually more scaleable than the traditional refugee resettlement model where I think it has been described as a meeting where numbers get doled out to different resettlement sites every single week and there is no community buy-in, if you will, for how and where the welcome happens.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: If I can sound a brief pessimistic note, it seems there is a lot of potential in these welcoming programs. I think 3 million was the number that was cited between Afghans, CHNV, as well as the Ukrainians. I believe essentially the administration has said that anyone who came in on the CHNV program is invalid and it is being challenged in court. They recently said they were going to take away protections for Ukrainians and Afghans who had special programs. You talked about the Afghans being the only ones who can legally enter at this point. We have seen all of this potential and this is a bright spot with sponsorship and maybe could be more effective in some ways than the refugee resettlement programs which also deal with the refugee population and not necessarily the populations we are talking about.

What now, given that those populations are no longer able to enter the country? The people who were welcomed are essentially being told, “You are no longer welcome and you need to remove yourself.” Yes, bright spot, scaleable, but what now given the changes that we are seeing?

KATE CLARK: Yes, I think we need more newcomer populations. Number one, we need more lawful pathways into the United States, and I think we are seeing the challenges in court. That was alluded to. There are several cases on a great trajectory for success, so I think the opportunity to welcome additional newcomer populations is in the future. It is going to be this light switch on and often there is going to have to be infrastructure because otherwise it is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. If there is no sustaining infrastructure to welcome any newcomer population, then you have a newcomer population that will arrive, for example, we are in New York, in an infrastructure that is not going to be prepared to receive them.

That is something we are thinking about, but we are also thinking about how can sponsorship, for example, pivot to support newcomers who were recent arrivals but are now subject to the Stop Work Orders and funding freezes and their local affiliate is forced to close the door. How can private everyday Americans and private sponsorship adapt to that change, and again with that throughline of welcoming, what are we defining as newcomer? That is going to depend on every individual subjectively to decide, “Oh, I’m going to define newcomer as this last year,” or “I’m going to say it is an Afghan from the last month,” but that ability to choose is there, so I think it is an opportunity we will continue to learn from.

QUESTION: I am wondering what you would say the most helpful support would be for grassroots organizations working in this field coming from larger nongovernmental organizations that are in the human rights framework? Given that there are limited resources, what do you think they should prioritize to support your work? Should it be litigation? Should it be documenting atrocities that are happening? Should it be direct service support? Should it be policy development support, research and policy? I am wondering what is the big hole that would be most supportive for your work to be more fruitful?

EMILY SHECHTMAN: That is a really nice question to think about. We don’t get that a lot.

I am thinking out loud, but one of the things that has made a big difference—we are a really scrappy grassroots group—is that any kind of partnership, whether it is a partnership on direct services—we can lend you staff, we can lend you office space, we can lend you resources—makes a big difference even if it is, “We can promote your work” or “We can give voice to an issue.” I think that makes a big difference.

Whenever there is any ability to partner around programming and redirect a little bit of resources, they go a long way through those partnerships, even if it is just staff support or space, it makes a big difference. Shout-out to our nonprofit partners who let us use their printers. I know you are thinking more creatively and ambitiously than that.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: Sometimes it is about the printer.

EMILY SHECHTMAN: I am going to think about that a little more, but I am wondering what you two are thinking.

ESTUARDO CIFUENTES: I don’t want to say money, but I think direct services are important right now because a lot of people have questions about what is happening now, and having direct services is the way that we really save lives, so trying to go with groups is really important.

MOLLY O’TOOLE: In New York I think I read a story yesterday that again we have a group of toddlers in Immigration Court representing themselves. This is a perfect example of these intense needs around legal services and direct services.

Thank you so much, everyone, for being here. Thank you for your time. Thank you to our panel.