Global Affairs Expert Webinar: International Cooperation on Migration

Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, deputy director of the International Program at the Migration Policy Institute, leads a conversation on international cooperation on migration. 

Speaker
Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan
Deputy Director, International Program
Migration Policy Institute

Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations

FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to today’s session of the Fall 2024 Global Affairs Expert Webinar series, formerly known as the Academic Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. I hope your fall is off to a good start.

Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org if you would like to share these resources with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We’re delighted to have Natalia Banulescu-Bogan with us to discuss international cooperation on migration. Ms. Banulescu-Bogdan is the deputy director of the International Program at the Migration Policy Institute, known as MPI, where she oversees work on social cohesion, migration, and development, global governance, and climate. She’s also a nonresident fellow with MPI Europe. She has authored numerous publications on social integration and identity, public opinion and narratives, and international cooperation and migration, with a particular focus on Europe and Latin America. And she regularly advises governments and international organizations on the design and implementation of migration policies and programs, including on topics such as combating xenophobia, targeting development investments, and designing effective communication strategies around migration.

Natalia, thanks very much for being with us today. It would be terrific if you could talk about the trends that you’re seeing in migration and your recommendations for international cooperation to deal with the growing trend of migration.

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: Thank you so much, Irina. And thank you for the warm introduction. And I think—yeah, I’ll start by maybe just laying out some of the building blocks for international cooperation on migration that we’ve seen in the past fifteen years. And just to kick off a discussion of, first, why we need it, but also why it’s really been so difficult to achieve. And then, you know, really welcome questions from the audience.

So in terms of what problems we’re seeking to solve, obviously, you know, you look around any corner of the world right now, you see large-scale displacement at an all-time high, historic pressures at land and sea borders. People are locked out of legal pathways and resorting to increasingly desperate maneuvers to gain access to protection, to opportunity, with a blurring of the lines between the two. And basically, the speed of these new trends and the scale of these new trends has outpaced the ability of our laws and institutions and processes to react and manage them.

And so now we’re in a situation where, as I think, you know, everyone knows, polling shows that Americans say immigration is the biggest problem facing the United States. You have similar sentiments in many parts of the world. You have elections really hinging on immigration, and it dominating campaign cycles—I think as we’ve all seen recently in this country. (Laughs.) And so out of this, you know, we’re trying to—we’re trying to understand what possible solutions we have to this very, very tricky issue. And the effective management of migration is just not something that can be done in isolation.

So movements across borders are, by definition, beyond the ability of an individual state to solve on its own. And so we really need a set of collaborative practices to basically reduce the likelihood of the most negative consequences of people being harmed, of communities experiencing chaos, a sense of disorder, and to bring about desirable outcomes. But the problem is, even when states know that they can’t reach their goals by acting alone, basically there’s a fear of the compromises that international cooperation requires of us. It’s actually not such a simple thing to set common goals on migration, let alone come up with a plan for how to achieve them—especially at a time when migration is so politically charged.

And coming back to this idea of control and order, right now this is what countries want. This is what publics want. We want to be able to control our borders. We want to be able to control who comes in, and on what terms. And international cooperation involves ceding control. It involves giving up some things that you want, to get partners on board. So this is what, I would say, is its central paradox, and what makes it so difficult to achieve.

And this is not to say that we haven’t made some progress. So just to kind of quickly recap where we are right now, and, you know, for those who might not have been in this field as long as I have—(laughs)—you know, only fifteen years ago it was considered very controversial to have migration even on the agenda of international dialogs. There was no—until very recently—there was no one central coordinating agency within the UN system that had a bird’s eye view of migration.

And so, fast forward to the past five, six years, we have now the adoption of two global compacts on migration—one on migration, one on refugees. We have the creation of the UN Migration Network. We have the International Organization for Migration (IOM) becoming part of the UN family. Formerly, it was outside. We have new regional processes. We’ve come out of a global pandemic that has put migration on the agenda in new ways. So things like migrants’ right to health care, things that never would have been on the global agenda and were seen as solely within the paradigm of national sovereignty, suddenly, people recognize that in our very interconnected world it actually matters if some groups are left out of national vaccination programs.

And so things have been transforming rapidly. But the challenges have been outpacing our institutions, even so. And so the same issues that are the most complex for national governments to figure out, which is, you know, spontaneous mix flows of migrants and refugees arriving at borders, climate migration, figuring out who bears responsibility for the most vulnerable groups—these are the exact same things that kind of fall through the cracks of all of the different regional and global processes that I just listed. And so we have—we need international cooperation, but we—but we fear it. So we place natural limitations on its reach.

And in practical terms, it’s actually really difficult to negotiate with other countries, whether you’re doing it bilaterally, regionally, at the global level, on how to set common priorities and goals when you have, frankly, stark power asymmetries between countries, often divergent priorities. And so I just want to, you know, kind of briefly lay out what some of the options we have in terms of how we move forward in this environment, and what forms international cooperation could take in the future now that we’ve—we kind of—we understand the case for it, and why it’s so critical.

So the first thing to understand is that multilateral processes on migration have multiple goals and purposes. And different formats lend themselves to different objectives. And they’re—the very first thing is just the—to distinguish between the goal of coordination and the much more ambitious goal of cooperation. So coordination is more sort of setting common standards, establishing a common understanding of challenges. Cooperation is actually where you put together some concrete action toward a shared goal, which is much more ambitious and difficult. And, of all of the forums that we have now that attempt to broker some cooperation on migration, they do very different things.

And so I just want to briefly kind of run through some of these different goals to kind of understand, you know, what we can achieve in some settings and where we really need different tools, and maybe a more innovative or creative approach. So one is just agenda setting, so shaping how migration is framed and discussed. So I mentioned that even just putting migration on the agenda was a bit revolutionary back when one of the first multilateral forums was created, the Global Forum on Migration and Development, back in, gosh, 2006, 2007? At that time, there was actually no place where sending and receiving countries could come together and talk about migration openly. It actually had to be kind of eased in under the larger umbrella of development, just to kind of give folks the sense of how far we have come.

So even just putting something on the agenda is a goal of some of these processes. The second is norm setting. So building a foundation of norms and principles, kind of setting a common starting point for countries that are coming to the table with very divergent goals and interests. And so sometimes you see forums that try to socialize ideas that have previously not been broadly accepted. So I think that the ten principles in the Global Compact on Migration are a good example of this. Because when you read it, you know, critics say the text was sort of a victim of compromise. It’s pretty general. It sounds, like, how could this possibly have—you know, how could any of this have been controversial?

But the idea is that these objectives set the norms around which later action is built. And it established us a common language that can guide policy. So, you know, we were quite interested in how policymakers felt about this tool. I mean, it was really the first global framework on migration. So, you know, it’s a huge milestone, but was it really useful in the day-to-day lives of policymakers? And people said, actually, that having this language on paper, these negotiated principles on paper, sort of gave them the leverage to argue, to make the case for specific initiatives within their own governments, but also when negotiating with partners.

The third goal that I just want to briefly mention is building alliances. So these forums for cooperation allow countries to figure out who are the allies who share common goals and common interests. And so you often also see what emerges from some of these forums is designated champions that are called on to take specific ideas forward, to start pledging campaigns. And I think one—you know, to go back to the Global Forum on Migration Development, I think one of its achievements is that states that used to see themselves on opposite sides—so the sort of sending and receiving country divide, for example, like the United States and Mexico—began to realize that, actually, we do have certain things in common. We do have certain things that we can work together on. And on the margins of some of these forums, you would start to see some practical cooperation emerge.

And then the last area is, of course, taking action, right? So developing mechanisms, establishing funding streams to actually push concrete ideas forward. But before we can get to this point, you know, we have to sort of consider the more subtle forms of coordination and cooperation that can seed these small actions and build habits of cooperation, where partners find their allies, they find common purpose, they build trust, and then they can take these ideas forward.

And so just to kind of wrap up, the sort of lay of the landscape of international cooperation, you know, what are some of the challenges moving forward? So, again, you know, we’re in this world of poly crisis where we’re facing so many different kinds of migration challenges. And it is impossible to conceive of countries working on these things in isolation without partners. Everything that you’re trying to do, whether it’s labor migration, whether it’s humanitarian protection, whether it’s enforcement, requires negotiation and partnership with countries all along the route—all along the migration route.

And so part—you know, one of the central challenges is that most of these processes are really just set up to support information exchange. You really, again, have to have some real leadership, some bold leadership from specific champions to make anything concrete out of this. It’s not—there’s nothing in this sort of inherent logic of these multilateral processes that is going to organically lead to action without people championing. And the issue, though, is that they’re not very nimble. The sort of arrangements we make to broker cooperation are so labor intensive to negotiate and implement, they’re not very nimble when the crisis actually hits.

And so we find that migration crises are falling through the cracks of the systems we built. And so we fall back on bilateral cooperation—thinking of Mexico and the United States, thinking of Italy and Tunisia. But, again, bilateral cooperation is still sort of at the mercy of politics. It still—it doesn’t solve the problem of this asymmetry between high- and low-income states, between sending and receiving countries. And so, again, you know, we need—we need more than this to really set up a framework for the common management of migration challenges.

And then the second challenge moving forward is a lot of these agreements create kind of a voluntary menu, rather than a roadmap that countries have to follow. Again, it’s very difficult to convince states to come to the table and give up anything, to cede control. And so the nature of the game is that you have to treat it as a set of voluntary principles. It’s much harder to get binding agreements on anything in terms of international cooperation. And so, I think one of the critiques of even, you know, the historic framework we now have in the form of the global compacts, is that it offers more of a pick and choose menu. Where states can focus on things that they’re already doing and sort of avoid the more difficult reforms.

And then finally, I just want to mention that a lot of international cooperation is built around states, of course. It’s built around countries coming together in these different forums. But national governments aren’t the only important actors. You know, you can’t talk about reducing greenhouse gas emissions without the private sector at the table. You can’t talk about return without municipal governments. It’s sort of pointless to think that you’re driving action through structures that don’t include these nonstate actors, or only include them at the margins or in a tokenistic way, when they actually can control so much of the global landscape of mobility.

So just to wrap up, we have now a much better understanding than we did fifteen years ago of the common challenges and needs on migration that are not served well by unilateralism, and which require some degree of international cooperation. But I think the big challenge here is that even as we’re codifying some of these principles and norms and a common understanding of the issues in these regional and global agreements and processes, you know, the hard part is actually taking the steps toward real action and persuading governments, again, that it is in their best interest to invest in things that have a longer time horizon even when they feel like crisis is at their doorstep.

So I will pause there, and happy to take questions on any aspect of this.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Now we’re going to go to all of you for your questions.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

So we already have written questions and we have raised hands. I’m going to go first to Miroslava Colan.

Q: Hello. This was an amazing talk and observation, first of all. Thank you for sharing all this. I’ve been researching migration and immigration since five years ago.

FASKIANOS: Miroslava, where are you?

Q: I am in North Carolina. I go to North Carolina State University. But I’m from Venezuela.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

Q: Yeah, and I also lived in Colombia. I’m a Fulbright Scholar. So I also lived in Colombia during the—during 2021 and 2022. So an interesting space during—and an interesting season for immigration there, specifically for Venezuelan immigration. So I’ve been working towards that. And my specialty is in immigrants’ political rights. So thank you so much for this.

I would like to ask three questions, if I may. (Laughs.)

FASKIANOS: Maybe if you can do one and a half, because we’ve lots of raised hands now.

Q: I will try. I will try. I would like to know if migration and integration policy, based on what you have established, needs to be more bilateral, more multilateral, or only unilateral? And what I mean by this is just national policies that advocate for immigration and integration in their host communities, and taking into consideration that menu approach that you just established. So, yeah, I would like to hear your thoughts.

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: Great question. I think that I would say that you have to do—you have to operate at all levels at once. It is incredibly important to work on integration at the local level. You know, using the example of Venezuelans in Colombia, for instance, you know, where you have millions of people who arrived in a short period of time and an incredible infrastructure was set up very quickly, with the national government issuing ten-year permits. Was a very generous response by sort of any measure when you look at, you know, other responses to large-scale migration around the world. And there’s been a real effort to invest in integration, giving people the right to work, giving people access to health care, kids access to schools.

But this can all be undermined by what happens at the regional level and what happens in neighboring countries. So there are, you know, four countries that took the lion’s share of Venezuelans. And they all have extremely different policies and different legal frameworks for governing the stay of people temporarily or putting them on a path to permanence. And so when you have these disparities in a region it creates this incentive, right, for people to sort of pick and choose, for people to have onward movements. At the same time, at the regional level countries were very focused on their relationship with the United States. The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration is thinking about the entire Western Hemisphere and how to set—how to deal with common challenges faced in the entire hemisphere.

And so there are a lot of efforts to basically dissuade people from ending up at the United States’ southern border, to dissuade people from trying to make the journey through the Darién Gap. And initiatives like the Safe Mobility Offices that were set up in a couple different countries in the region can sometimes compete with the goals of local integration that we see in individual countries. And so this is, I think, just a great example that you brought up of how, if you were just looking within one country—you know, migration isn’t static. People move. People get information about what is happening in neighboring countries, what’s—you know, what’s going on in the rest of the region.

Major destination countries have their own priorities. Transit countries have their own priorities. And so if there isn’t a sort of common understanding of what the goals are you have some perverse consequences. So, for instance, there was some controversy about people being able to apply for humanitarian protection in the United States in countries that were trying to invest in integration of the local population. So just one example of how these different policy goals can sometimes really come into conflict if you’re not thinking of things holistically, and if you don’t have all of the countries around the same table for these discussions.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to go next—take a written question from Diane Lebson, who is on the faculty of University of Maine School of Policy and International Affairs: Has the political rhetoric of the U.S. presidential elections impacted the ability of the U.S. to enter into meaningful alliances regarding migration?

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: Sure. I mean, I think any time migration is heavily politicized and also very prominent on the agenda, it complicates the behind the scenes negotiations that are often done at the working level where people are trying to think very practically about how they can partner and how they can come to common understandings. And I think, you know, in particular with the—with the U.S. election, which has been very dominated by the issue of migration and by the sort of specter of chaos at the border, by historic numbers of people arriving at the border, you know, we’re in a situation where we cannot begin to solve any of these issues without the cooperation of Mexico, for example.

And so I do think that the rhetoric that, you know, gets splashed on the headlines and sort of used as, you know, as candidates are sparring really complicates the very delicate things that have to be negotiated between countries. For example, to make sure that people have opportunities in their home countries and all along the route, so that they are less likely to take these dangerous journeys. But also very delicate things around return. You know, what happens when people arrive at a border and are not authorized for entry? You actually have to have the permission of the country to which you’re trying to return people.

We have people arriving at the border now from dozens of different places. It’s a huge change from where we were, you know, ten years ago. And if Mexico weren’t agreeing to—you know, to take some people back, then you would have to individually negotiate with every single country that these people are coming from. So just as a small illustration of how—just how you need international cooperation and partnerships and negotiations for absolutely everything that you’re trying to do on migration. And, yes, I do think having the issue be so politicized, so top of the agenda and in the headlines, definitely complicates the behind the scenes negotiations.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to go next to a raised hand from Danielle Greminger. And if you can tell us your affiliation, that’d be great.

Q: Hello, can you hear me?

FASKIANOS: Yes. Yes.

Q: Hi. Sorry, I wasn’t sure. My name is Danielle Greminger. I am a first year master’s student at Jackson State University. And I’m originally from Switzerland, so I’m kind of familiar with the immigration system here in the United States.

And my question is based on, I think, the general perception of the issues regarding immigration here in the United States and globally. Security issues are always brought up, especially with illegal immigrants and taking jobs away from people, and things like that. So my question is, how do we bridge that gap of understanding how important immigration can be and that immigrants actually can be helpful to the country’s economy, to the country’s innovation? And how do we bridge that gap? Because there’s a lot of problems and not as many solutions out there at the moment.

So I’m more interested in what are specific solutions of how we can get immigrants legally into this country, prepared for this country language wise, you know, job qualifications, education wise. How do we get qualified people into this country prior of their arrival at the border? Because I think that is a big issue right now. Australia does it. Canada does it. Switzerland does it, where you have to speak the language at a certain level to be able to be accepted as an immigrant, where you have to bring something valuable to this country, which I’m sure many people do, to be able to be accepted. Why does the United States not implement a system like that? Because I feel like Australia, Canada, Switzerland, we don’t have as many immigration problems as certain other countries who do not implement those issues or those qualifications.

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: Sure. So I think you’re asking two questions in one, maybe. So one is about public perceptions of migration. And the other is a more technical, mechanical question of how immigration systems function and how we can make sure that they function better.

So on the public perception side, I would say that you’re right. Most kind of threat narratives around migration coalesce around three issues. So it’s—you know, it’s jobs, crime, and it’s culture, right? Where people feel that migration is bringing harms in one of those three categories. And they fluctuate. So sometimes the sort of narrative that, you know, immigrants are taking jobs or reducing wages is very high of mind. Other times, it’s about that they increase crime. Other times it’s, you know, they don’t assimilate, they don’t learn the language. They don’t—you know, they’re bringing these new cultural practices that make us feel a bit unstable in the world.

And so those are—and we see this in every place where there is migration. So it’s just a question of level, basically, of how these narratives sort of pop up, how popular they become, whether they get weaponized by politicians who, you know, are trying—are deliberately stoking them for some kind of political gain. And it’s very difficult to change course once these narratives sort of enter the mainstream and people start to believe them. One problem is that using facts is not very effective in sort of combating people’s fears about migration. They sort of—they exist in this realm of emotions that, in some ways, is a little bit immune from kind of dry data and facts.

And so I’ve studied this issue a lot. And the conclusion that I’ve come to is you have to be able to relate to people on a human level, and just sort of say: I understand people have concerns. You know, it might not—they might be exaggerating them. You know, they might not be understanding the issues. But change is hard. Large-scale migration brings change to communities that sometimes communities are not prepared for and are not managing well. And we have to understand that this is hard for people. It asks sacrifices of people. And I do think we have to kind of meet people more halfway rather than saying, don’t be upset, you know, immigration has all these benefits. It absolutely has many, many benefits. But just like the cost, the benefits accrue unevenly. And so we kind of have to understand that.

In terms of the process side and how to make migration work better, you know, I can’t answer this in a—in a sort of soundbite. But just as a note to say that countries have a mix of selecting a certain portion of migrants, through labor streams, through family reunification streams, and then we have humanitarian streams, and then there are also people who show up spontaneously at a border and request asylum. And we don’t control that. So Canada and Australia, you could argue, are, through an accident in geography, more isolated from that than a country like the United States with a, you know, 3,000-mile-long border. So, you know, you have to kind of look at how all of these pieces of the system work in concert.

So when there aren’t enough legal opportunities to come to a country for work, even when there’s work available, that, arguably, creates an incentive for people to try to find a way in without permission, without authorization. And so I think, a lot of people would argue, you know, if you want less irregular migration, and people are coming because they know they can find jobs, then, you know, maybe it’s a time to sort of play around with the—how we’re calibrating our labor migration system, how we’re thinking about letting students in, how we’re thinking about seasonal migration programs. So we do have these tools at our disposal to select some of the people who apply and who come in. But then on the other side, we also have to deal with people who spontaneously arrive. And the two are connected.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question from Gil Sander Joseph. If you could tell us your college or university, that’d be great.

Q: Hello. Thank you for this presentation. My name is Gil. I am from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. And I’m a senior at Princeton University.

My question is about sort of the implications of international cooperation in migration, especially since you rightly pointed out that a lot of the dynamic between sending and receiving countries is changing. How do we make sure that international cooperation at this level does not become an excuse for more, you know, neocolonial structures to be reinforced, where “developing countries,” in quotes, are forcing—or, developed countries, more economically advanced countries, are forcing developing countries to adopt policies and take measures that, one, do not align with their national priorities, but also violate human rights. And we’ve seen this already with the EU partnerships with countries like Libya, Tunisia. We’ve seen—we are seeing this also with the U.S., and Panama, Guatemala, Mexico. There’s a lot of bullying/bribing that’s happening. So how do we—in international cooperation, we make sure that there is, like, an equal ground for countries to actually cooperate, rather than one bullying the other?

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: I think you are raising an extremely important issue, and something that really lies at the heart of all of this and is very difficult to solve. And I agree with you. I think that in the history of international cooperation countries have used many more sticks than carrots. And, you know, I mentioned earlier the power asymmetry, where you have, you know, donor countries or higher-income countries who basically want to prevent migration to their shores, to their borders, trying to convince—sometimes through slightly coercive rather than cooperative means—countries along the routes to put certain measures in place to stem those flows. And often it’s, you know, basically giving a financial contribution in exchange for these countries basically preventing people from traveling onward.

And, you know, in the EU these were, for a time period, known as mobility partnerships. But there was very little mobility being offered. There was very little in terms of the carrot, right? And so I think that has been one of the critiques. It’s just sort of been these partnerships are, well, we’ll pay these countries off to basically act as the guardians of Europe. But it’s much harder to convince our publics to, let’s say, open up a new visa category, or give, you know, a portion of—you know, some number of people an opportunity to work, or study, or stay in the other country. And, you know, I do think there’s been some progress in sort of recognizing that these partnerships that are based on more coercive tactics and not much on trust don’t have as much of a chance for success.

And I think one of the arguments for having these regional and global frameworks on migration is that it creates this common standard that is supposed to level the playing field, at least a little bit, so that it sort of reduces the sort of chasm in terms of the asymmetry between—the power asymmetry between these countries. But, again, you know, I think that this is—this is really at the crux of what we’re talking about. I think that, you know, you have to—you have to sort of play the long game. Which is that if you’re just threatening countries with sanctions or threatening to withhold funds if they don’t cooperate, that doesn’t set the foundations for a long and meaningful partnership down the line.

And also, countries, if you’re kind of putting them between a rock and a hard place, you also put them in a difficult position with their own publics. And that makes it very, very difficult to ensure, again, long-term cooperation. And people get voted out or, you know, if publics become very upset with this. And so I do think there is an increasing recognition that the—you know, the ways that we’ve been doing it for a long time are not the most effective.

FASKIANOS: Stockton University has a class of about twelve to fifteen students and they’re asking a lot of questions. So I’m going to pick one: What countries or regions tend to be less cooperative on migration at the international level?

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: Well, I don’t think I would rank countries in terms of being more or less cooperative. But I would say that there have been some surprising instances where countries have all sorts of reasons for not wanting to join an international agreement or not feel—not feeling like it really serves their best interests. It’s all a game of countries trying to figure out what serves their own national interest best. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s just reality. Again, you know, that’s the only reason to come to the table, where you feel like you’re actually better off by making an alliance or forging a partnership than you would be on your own.

But it’s always a compromise. You have to look at the potential gains from this partnership versus the costs. And some countries have decided, in all sorts of different processes and forums and agreements, that the cost is just too high. And I think a surprising one, actually, is the number of European countries that dropped out of the Global Compact on Migration negotiations. And it—you know, and these are high-income countries who, for the most part, you know, were already doing and implementing most of the things that were in—that were in the compact.

But this issue of ceding sovereignty became just a lightning rod, in a way, I think, that surprised a lot of people. And in the end, I mean, you had—these became very difficult negotiations, where you saw a lot of defections. So, again, just one example of an area where you might—you know, you might not have thought that this would be an issue. But there are all sorts of times where countries perceive that the—that the potential cost is—or, the perceived cost is not worth the potential gain.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question from Kyilah Terry, who wrote her question but also has raised—a raised hand. So why don’t you go ahead and ask your question. A former intern at MPI, too.

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: Ah! (Laughs.)

FASKIANOS: Yeah. Oh, she put down her hand. Oh, no, OK, I’m going to have to read her question then. Where did it go, now that I’ve said that? Let me find it. She is now a PhD student in political science at the University of Pennsylvania: Can you please speak on how you see countries respond to the rising use of migrants as political pawns? At an international level I’m thinking about Belarus sending hundreds of migrants to Poland and Turkey, is another one. And to the proliferation of bilateral arrangements, especially after 2015, as you mentioned earlier, make this strategy more likely? So what does cooperation look like long term in response to this strategy?

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: Well, you know, we trained her, because that was a very difficult and provocative question. (Laughter.) No, it’s a great question. And I think, again, speaks to the difficulty of stitching together a collective position on migration where countries have very different vulnerabilities and very different priorities. And so just looking at the EU, obviously, you know, we’ve seen a very long period of the past decade, where it’s been—it’s been very difficult to find common ground between the sort of frontline countries, who feel that they receive a disproportionate burden in terms of spontaneous arrivals that they have to manage and process and don’t get enough support for, and then, you know, more northern countries who don’t have the pressure on the borders but have become a magnet for migrants seeking to work and live in those places.

And the inability of the EU to find a common platform that makes all of these countries feel that the common solution serves their own best interests has resulted in some perverse consequences. And it is, you know, countries all of a sudden setting up borders within the free movement area and saying, we can’t—we can’t trust—we can’t trust our neighbors to basically manage this issue in a way that, you know, we feel is fair, and so we’re going to take some steps to go it alone. And you’ve kind of seen the sort of breakdown, and then attempts to sort of make the burden of solidarity a little bit easier on people.

OK, it’s hard to convince countries to take migrants if they didn’t show up at their border. Maybe we can ask them to pay some money instead, and sort of, you know, still participate in this collective responsibility that we all have. But we’ve also seen, to your point about weaponization and using migrants as pawns, how quickly this all falls apart when countries feel that they’re particularly vulnerable and, again, you know, that they have to react quickly, that they have to act in a decisive way. These regional agreements that, you know, are sort of, like, held together by toothpicks and glue can fall apart under these kinds of pressures, because countries feel like, you know what? We just have to act alone because we have to do it now. We have to do it quickly. And we can’t be confident that the common solution is really going to serve our interests well in the face of this emergency. So it’s—you know, that’s, I think, one of the central issues we’re facing.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to take the next question from Niyaz Najm Salih—Salih, who’s at Wayne State University. You can unmute.

Q: Yes. Good afternoon, everyone. It’s Niyaz Najm Salih. (Laughs.) But thank you so much for the opportunity and the informative session. Yes, I’m a Fulbright Scholar at Wayne State University grad student.

You almost tackled everything. Thank you so much for the participants as well. They tackled important points. I was—meant to ask about the international cooperation efforts regarding raising awareness about immigration, the causes of it. For example, there are so many people that they are living in the war zone, and they are migrating to survive. It’s about staying alive. It’s not about coming here and stealing someone else’s opportunity. We also have got the other causes, as you mentioned yourself. We have got the cause of environment and climate change, which is a serious rising issue and it needs international collaboration. And some people might come pursuing opportunities that you cannot find it back home.

So the question is, how much international cooperation is putting effort in shedding light on this effort? For example, sharing couple of documentaries on the livelihood of those people living back home, and what does it mean to stay there? I would think it would be very helpful to help clarifying the image that—the greater picture for the public, whether it’s in the United States or in the other countries. This way, when the perception of the public change, it has got a reflection in national policies and foreign policies of every state, including U.S. national policies and foreign policy.

And the last point is that how the fear of being different, or having someone different as your neighbor, different in terms of skin, having different culture, language, nationality, ethnicity, or religion, or even ideological differences, is contributing to the division of this nation, this great nation. And politicizing the issue by the political candidates for the election, definitely, as we saw last night, and the claims about eating pets and terrifying the public, how these affect the overall of the national policy of the United States and foreign policy. Thank you so much.

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: OK, there’s a lot packed in there, but I’ll do my best. So, starting with the drivers of migration, I think the first thing to understand—and I’m glad you raised this so we can—we can, you know, make sure to make this point—is that the reasons people are moving no longer map onto the frameworks that govern those movements and the legal categories that we’ve established to manage those movements. And that is one of the biggest issues that we’re facing.

And so you’re talking about people displaced by conflict, by war, by climate. We have a humanitarian system that is very narrowly defined. And so the only mechanisms that we have to provide protection for those people are either the resettlement system, where a number of countries have agreed to take certain quotas of refugees each year based on a set of standards developed in partnership with UNHCR and others. And that is a—you know, a very well established and complex system. Or, you have people claiming territorial asylum when they get to a border. That’s it. That’s what we have.

And so in terms of resettlement, the number of places available worldwide is less than 1 percent of the need. So less than 1 percent of the people displaced annually. So it’s an absolute drop in the ocean. And this is partly what is creating the pressures that we see at borders, because the asylum systems have become one of the only viable options for people seeking to move, for a variety of reasons. Also the refugee system, as I hinted at, it’s very narrow. So it’s based on a system—to qualify as an international refugee under the 1951 convention, you basically have to prove that you have been personally persecuted. So all of those things—the, you know, generalized violence, conflict, climate—they just—they don’t fit into this definition. And so these—it’s very difficult, basically, for people to make a case based on these narrow grounds.

And so we’re in this world where we’re trying to think of what—you know, what are the—what are the solutions available to us? On one hand, we’ve seen a proliferation of temporary statuses and temporary protection regimes. You have the parole programs in the United States. You have a very large number of people, for instance, who have come in through the CHNV program. That was the parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans that gives them basically a two-year permit and work authorization.

This is—these are—these are sort of stopgap measures that acknowledge the fact that we don’t have a system where people can basically apply for permission to enter a country without making dangerous journeys and, you know, have a real shot at living long term in a particular country. And with, you know, increasing conflict, increasing opportunity differentials between countries, we see—you know, we see more and more pressure to move and fewer and fewer legal options.

The other set of tools we have is supporting people where they are. And this is where development interventions come in. So if we don’t have enough legal pathways, and the ones that we do have are too narrowly defined to fit all of the reasons that people are moving, there have been a lot of efforts to invest in places that, you know, have—that are giving rise to a lot of out-migration, and create opportunities closer to home. But these are things that take generations to achieve. And they’re very complex. You know, you have to have the institutional framework in place. You have to solve corruption. You have to convince people that what you’re putting on the table is actually worth giving a chance to, and worth staying around for. So none of these are easy solutions.

And the last thing that I would mention—and so you were, you know, hinting at the polarization and the sort of use of incendiary rhetoric at the end. And I think in this world where people are moving in sort of chaotic ways, we have kind of ad hoc frameworks to govern these movements, there’s a lot of confusion about why people are coming and what is driving it, and why we don’t—why people are coming irregularly. And there’s a question of who should be responsible. And I think this is, again, sort of at the heart of everything we’ve been talking about today. Who bears responsibility for supporting people who are in desperate circumstances, and searching for better opportunities, and better livelihoods for themselves and their families?

And I think even people who are very sympathetic to that idea, you still face the question of, well, what makes sense? You know, what communities should be asked to basically make space for people? And how do you do that in a way that, as somebody said earlier, really emphasizes the opportunity within migration, the potential for migration to expand opportunities for the societies in which migrants settle, and without inflaming some of the threat narratives that we talked about earlier—which cluster around economics, crime, and culture. And it’s very difficult to make that positive case in a way that also doesn’t feel like you’re patronizing people. Because, as I said before, immigration is hard. It can be disruptive. You know, it’s something that has to be managed well to be able to realize the many benefits that it can offer. And when it’s not managed well, people feel insecure. People panic.

On top of that, you have people who are trying to stoke this panic and trying to inflame the threat narratives, and make them feel very powerful and more resident than the potential benefit narratives. And so that’s where you get into all these questions of who should bear responsibility, who is being asked to make a sacrifice, does it feel fair to people? And I think, you know, at the local community level, I think that’s one of the big issues. You can have sympathy on a kind of theoretical level, for the terrible—frankly, terrible circumstances that are prompting so many people to seek opportunities across borders. But, at the same time, feel that the communities in which migrants settle have been disadvantaged some way. And so I think if we are really going to open up more opportunities for safe and orderly migration, we also have to bring publics along, and do a lot more to combat the kind of fearmongering that we’re seeing in a lot of our societies.

FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Unfortunately, we are out of time. We have so many raised hands and written questions. I am sorry that we could not get to you all. We will just have to have you back, Natalia, to share more of your analysis on this really important topic, which clearly is of interest and many are thinking about, as evidenced by the numbers on this call. So, again, thanks to Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan—I want to make sure I pronounce it correctly—for being with us today. We really appreciate it.

I hope you will join us for our next webinar, which is actually next week, Wednesday, September 18, at 1:00 p.m. (EDT). Rana Mitter, who is the S.T. Lee professor of U.S.-Asia relations at Harvard, will lead a conversation on U.S. China strategy. And I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. Follow us at @CFR_Education on X. And visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. We will circulate the video and transcript to this webinar and any resources that Natalia thinks that she would like to share as well.

So, again, thank you, Natalia. We appreciate it.

BANULESCU-BOGDAN: Thank you so much.

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