Migration Expert Slams ‘Barbarity’ of Trump Policies
Harvard Professor Calls US Treatment of Kids ‘Weak and Deficient’
Global migration is a huge problem. In order for nations to deal with it effectively and humanely, its root causes and historical lineage must be understood.
“We don’t have an immigration crisis,” contends Harvard professor Jacqueline Bhabha: We have a “hospitality crisis.”
Under President Donald Trump, the United States’ limit for refugee admissions has reached a record low. Last week, the administration proposed to again sharply reduce the limit for refugee admissions — from an already anemic 45,000 in 2018 to 30,000 in 2019. Under this year’s cap, the US is on track to admit only 22,000 refugees, less than half of the projected maximum.
Bhabha joins Peter B. Collins for this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast. Bhabha is professor of health and human rights at the School of Public Health, research director at the FXB Center, and lectures at Harvard Law and the Kennedy School. She is an expert on the global refugee crisis.
Natural and man-made disasters, such as wars, ethnic cleansing, and famines have displaced millions of people throughout the world, but Bhabha maintains that the international community has the resources to handle the “challenges” that these migrations cause. She points out that migration is “200,000 years old,” a fact of life as long as humans have populated the Earth.
The problem, she adds, is not that there are too few resources and too little space to handle migrants; it’s that world leaders, including the president of the United States, perceive immigrants as “evils” to be driven back, rather than a new, young potential workforce to be assimilated.
The administration’s stated goal is to reduce immigration — both illegal and legal — in order to keep out undesirables whom it sees as a threat to national security. The president frequently has cited the violent acts of the infamous MS-13 gang, and isolated incidents of illegal Mexican immigrants committing violent crimes, as grounds for building a wall on the US-Mexico border.
At the same time, the president has faced push-back for his “Muslim ban,” an executive order which restricts travel from several Muslim majority countries. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court recently delivered his administration a victory by upholding the ban’s constitutionality.
The irony is that the migration crisis facing both the US and Europe — exemplified most recently by the Syrian and Libyan refugees — has its origins in policy decisions made by these same Western countries.
As the author of Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age, Bhabha deplores the “barbarity” of family separation under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. She notes that the US has never signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and that its bad record regarding treatment of migrant children precedes the current administration. While also critical of some of President Barack Obama’s immigration policies, she says that Trump has further polarized discourse on immigration while criminalizing it in many ways.
But the migration crisis is not confined to the Western world, nor is it always just about crossing international borders.
Bhabha describes the brutal displacement of Rohingya Muslims by the Buddhist majority in Myanmar. The UN report released on September 18 strongly rebukes Myanmar and its military leaders for acts amounting to ethnic cleansing.
Bhabha notes that the UN will be addressing the “final draft[s]” of two global compacts on migration and refugees at the upcoming General Assembly. Both documents attempt to spell out the “universal human rights and fundamental freedoms” that should be accorded to migrants of all kinds.
Bhabha’s latest book is Can We Solve the Migration Crisis? (Global Futures, May 3, 2018).
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| Peter B. Collins: | Welcome to this Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. In San Francisco, I’m Peter B. Collins. Today, we’re going to discuss the worldwide migration crisis, and America’s self-induced and political immigration crisis. |
| Professor Jacqueline Bhabha joins me from the Harvard School. She teaches in several different entities at Harvard, and has quite an impressive background. She served at the University of Chicago as Director of their Human Rights program, and then moved over to Harvard where she lectures in law. She is the Director of Research at the FXB Center, and Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the School of Public Health. She got her degrees at Oxford University, including a law degree, and spent time practicing human rights law in London and in Europe. | |
| Professor, thanks for being with us today. | |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | Thank you for having me. |
| Peter B. Collins: | I also want to note you’ve published quite a bit. In 2014, you wrote Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age, a set of issues that have come into new focus in 2018. Your most recent book, which I have in my hand here, is Can We Solve the Migration Crisis? |
| Let’s begin with the title of the new book. You describe it as a “migration crisis.” Here in the United States, we typically look at it as an immigration crisis from the American perspective. | |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | Yes. I think that what I was trying to draw attention to with the title of my book was really the word “crisis.” There is this perception, whether in the UK or in Germany, but also in the US, in Australia, that there’s a sense of emergency nearly, a crisis, because so many people are trying to come into our countries and trying to take advantage of our welfare system or our system of governance. |
| Whether you think of them as immigrants, i.e. permanent settlers, or whether you think of them as refugees, i.e. people who are fleeing persecution, or whether you think of them as migrants who might be coming for a shorter period to work, in any case, there’s this kind of negative stance, which is fueled by fear and by a sense of a threat to one’s collective security. So, my book is really addressing that perception and trying to set it in context, and explain why I think we don’t have an immigration or a migration crisis. | |
| Peter B. Collins: | Last year, the Chinese activist, artist, and human rights advocate, Ai Weiwei, released a powerful documentary called Human Flow. He traveled to some 25 or 26 refugee zones around the world, and captured, in a dramatic way, the scenes of these people who had been displaced. Some two-thirds are internally displaced, but that means that there are 15 to 20 million people who have been forced to leave their native countries, and this has created issues and pressures that are clearly being felt. |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | That’s absolutely right. There are very large numbers of people who are what I call in the book “distressed migrants,” so people who are forced to leave their home. As you rightly point out, Peter, a majority of those people don’t actually cross an international border, so they are internally displaced. But, about a third of them are forced to migrate abroad, and this certainly does create challenges. |
| The challenges that I think are the most acute are the challenges of failure to share the responsibility that comes with this sort of humanitarian situation. The numbers are of course significant, but if you think of them in relation to a world population of several billion, the numbers are actually perfectly manageable. In fact, we have millions of people who are traveling legally all the time, crossing borders, and traveling for work, traveling for tourism, traveling to study, traveling to do business. This regular lawful migration actually doesn’t create problems. | |
| So, the fact of crossing a border, the fact of migrating per se, is not a problem. What is a problem is the way we receive certain types of migrants, the resources we make available to them, the political concepts that we have as we receive them. I guess one of the important points I’m trying to make with my book is that we have more of a hospitality or a reception crisis than we do actually have an immigration crisis. Related to that, I think I try to make the point in the book that large scale mobility, human mobility, is a fact of our species. It’s been with us since the very early days, 200,000 years ago, when human beings first came into being, as it were, on the planet. So, there’s really nothing unusual about that. | |
| Peter B. Collins: | And- |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | That having been said, Ai Weiwei is of course drawing attention to something very important, which is that we are failing in many cases to answer the acute humanitarian and human needs that migrant populations have, that this is creating distress, it’s creating untold suffering, and it’s also creating acute difficulties for host populations, or local populations, who are unable to cope with the responsibilities thrust upon them. So, that certainly is an important issue. |
| Peter B. Collins: | Professor, in the book, you offer some historical context, even relatively recent. You say, overall, the period from 1850 to 1930 was the most intensive era of migration in human history. 50 million people traveled across Europe and the Middle East to the Americas, as did sizable numbers from India and China. Roughly similar numbers traveled from South Asia and South China to Southeast Asia, Australia, and the Indian and Pacific Islands. Nearly 50 million people moved from Northern China, Russia, Korea, and Japan to Central and Northern Asia, and as far afield as Siberia. |
| So, why is it that we are more sensitive about the migration patterns today, and after the kind of sweep of globalism, where borders were said to be disappearing, we see the European Union dissolving, or at least Britain dissolving its relationship with the EU, and the United States kind of pulling up the drawbridge of Fortress America? | |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | Yes. I think you make some very good points, Peter. So, why? Why are we seeing this now? I suppose there’s several answers to that question. |
| Firstly, we always pay more attention to large migration flows in some parts of the world than other parts of the world. It’s a product of the way our media is skewed, it’s the way our resources are skewed, it’s the way global political attention is skewed. So, the fact that 2015 saw the arrival of well over a million distressed migrants or refugees in Europe in a short space of time really sent shock waves around not only Europe, but other destination countries, something which the very large scale forced movement of South Sudanese to Uganda or other migration flows had really not prompted. | |
| So, I think the first point here is that there are some situations which generate much more political heat, political consequence, than others. The second point is that we don’t manage these distressed migration flows well. We need to do much better. Even though there has been large scale migration for centuries … And the part of my book you read out points out that it isn’t just migration flows across the Atlantic, which is what gets most of the attention, but it’s migration flows from Southeast Asia upwards, and from Central China and that area of Manchuria, right up to what is now the Stanz, so-called Stanz and part of the previous USSR, right up to Siberia. | |
| So, there have been these three large corridors of movement for hundreds of years. But, now, we are really doing a poor job of distributing the responsibility for dealing with this, and so people are concentrated in small areas, and the local population in that small area quickly moves from being receptive or hospitable, which many people are at the outset, to being hostile and threatened. So, this creates a knock-on effect. It has a political consequence. We’ve seen this, of course, with Brexit. We’ve seen this with recent elections in the US, and also other elections in Italy, in Hungary and so on. We see an upswing in xenophobia, because populations that were once tolerant are now hostile, and we see a degradation of certain parts of the receiving country because the facilities that are needed are not getting there, and large numbers of people are stuck in a particular place. | |
| If you think about images that we’ve seen from the small Greek islands, or some of the refugee camps surrounding Syria, you get the idea. So, it’s not that there isn’t space. It’s not that there isn’t an acute need for ambitious, young, healthy people to come and join the workforce, people who want to work, people who want to succeed. It’s not that there isn’t the possibility of mutual inclusion and learning. It is that we concentrate people in small under-resourced areas, where they rapidly become a burden and a problem, and where the political and social situation deteriorates. | |
| Peter B. Collins: | If I can translate that from your polite language, Professor, we stash migrants in ghettos, and then … And I say “we”, I’m talking broadly about the receiving nations. We also do have problems seeing a lack of assimilation, and this is played out in the suburbs of Paris where migrant communities have been created that I think can be called ghettos, and that this has led to a separation of the migrants from the indigenous populations. |
| Certainly there are cultural issues and others, religious issues, that are at play. But, the management that you’re talking about is that it’s done in a kind of passive way instead of proactively saying, “This is what it takes to integrate these new migrants into local communities.” | |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | Exactly. We know from a long history of migration that there is a period of transition when new arrivals do require additional support, particularly if people don’t speak the language, particularly if they come from very different cultural, social, or economic backgrounds. We also know though, that within the space of about 5 to 10 years, which I would say in the grand scheme of things is a short period of time, within that space of time, migrants actually contribute more than they take out from the host society. They have a higher rate of productivity. They have a lower rate of criminal offending. They tend not to claim as many benefits as the local population, either because they return home when they get old, or because their children live abroad and so they don’t claim the child benefits that might be available. |
| So, there is, I think, really unchallenged evidence produced by various organizations, like the UN Development Program and the International Organization of Migration, so research entities, which show that over a period of time, after an adjustment period, this is actually a net gain for host countries rather than a net cost. We also know, of course, that there are situations of, as you said, ghettoization or marginalization, where things can go very wrong. | |
| It’s interesting, I think, that you mention France. France is unique in the sense that it does not agree to include in its census any question about race or about ethnicity. The thinking here is that, once you’re in France, you’re French. It doesn’t matter what your race is, or your religion. We have this kind of post-French revolution notion that everyone is French, and therefore it’s irrelevant to count race, count religion, or class, or other such demographic variables in the census. | |
| Now, that is a very shortsighted policy, and it’s a policy that’s led to the situation where, about 15 years ago, suddenly, the French government woke up to the reality that they had these banlieue, in French, you know, the suburbs, where, as you quite rightly point out, many, many immigrant communities were really ghettoized into slums and into basically separate communities where people didn’t really learn French, they didn’t really participate in French institutions, they didn’t have access to the resources of the host society. | |
| Of course, things actually deteriorated. You had alienation, you had the growth of radical hostility to Western culture, you had a rise in criminality, very high rates of unemployment, growing offending. So, that whole policy has led to a situation, really, where the earlier legacy of inclusion and a more kind of, yes, inclusive and homogeneous mixing of different people into a common polity, where that’s been really challenged. | |
| So, I think the lesson we can draw from that is that where you ignore social realities, where you ignore short-term needs and pretend that everybody’s the same, and where you disproportionately allocate people in certain contexts, usually poor communities, poor local communities with few resources, you are really cooking up a recipe for disaster. | |
| Peter B. Collins: | Professor, would you agree that the approximate cause of the recent migration patterns from the Middle East that have excessively impacted Europe are the United States’ military adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya? |
| Now, the Syria and Libya conflicts are more internationalized, but it really is the long arc of American foreign policy in recent years that has destabilized the region and led to the migratory problems. | |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | I think that American and European, and to some extent Russian and Soviet policy, are all implicated in this. I wouldn’t want to say it is only American policy. I mean, the sad tragic history of Afghanistan goes back to the Soviet occupation. The reality in Afghanistan now, after decades, I think three generations subjected to a country at war, the reality is that over a third of the Afghan population have been displaced. So, it’s really a dangerous and really fractured society, which conflict, outside conflict, has really created or perpetuated. |
| So, I think it’s absolutely fair to say that these problems are not caused by the Afghan people, they’re not caused by local factors. They’re caused by large geopolitical factors. I think the situation in Iraq as well … Iraq, I think, maybe is the clearest example. Different people will disagree. Iraq, clearly the decision to bomb Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein had terrible spin over effects, which we’re still experiencing. Of course, the decision to conduct a war in Syria in the way it was conducted, and to bomb Libya and topple Gaddafi, also in the absence of real support and collaboration with indigenous opposition movements and political forces, was bound to be catastrophic. | |
| So, I think we’ve learned some very serious lessons, and there’s no doubt that life in many of these places now is extremely harsh. Any of us, with the opportunity to move elsewhere, would probably take that opportunity. So, I think, yes, I think we bear certainly an enormous burden of responsibility for this very large scale exodus. That said, I also think that because many of these countries, Iraq and Syria in particular, have very sophisticated systems of education and local culture, you know, prior to the recent conflicts. Many of the refugees are actually highly skilled and very competent people, who have enormous capacity to contribute, and so this idea that we are doing charity to people who are destined to be victims forever is really mistaken. | |
| Peter B. Collins: | That’s a very good point, Professor. Now, I’d like to turn to US immigration policy since the Trump Administration has taken power. From my perspective, we’ve seen an attempt to take a series of hostages in an effort to force Congress to fund the wall that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for. We saw the early attempts at the Muslim ban through executive orders, and I was stunned that the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the third and refined version of the travel ban issued by the President. |
| But, we also saw the effort to hold the DACA, the dreamers, hostage by unilaterally canceling the protections that had been imposed by executive order under President Obama. When that didn’t really seem to gain traction, and the courts once again undermined the President’s efforts, we saw the zero tolerance policy that went on for more than six weeks before the courts were able to at least force a revision to the program. But, this led to the separation of thousands of children from parents. | |
| Because I referenced your earlier book Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age, I’d like you to offer us a little context here about these efforts by the Trump administration, and if there’s any historical comparison. | |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | Yes. So, I’ve been working in the field of migration, and have had a focus on child migration for many years. Obviously, as a human rights lawyer, I’ve been engaged in many policies which I consider harsh, unethical, and violative of peoples’ human rights. But, I think this recent policy of separating families at the border, separating toddlers and very young children from their parents, was unprecedented in its barbarity. I will use that word. I think it was an extremely cruel and unnecessary way of trying to get a deterrent message out to a vulnerable population in need of protection. |
| I think that the context is sadly of quite long standing. The US has had a weak and deficient approach to the protection of children’s rights, including immigrant children’s rights and refugee children’s rights, for a long time. One of the things I note in my Child Migration book is that, because the US is not covered by the main international law on the rights of the child, the so-called UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, it’s the only country in the world that is not covered by that convention, then it is not forced to take as seriously the rights and interests of children as other countries are. | |
| So, I think there’s often, in the public at large, and amongst many of us, a sort of skepticism about international law and about human rights, that they’re all talk, but actually, when push comes to shove, they don’t really deliver, otherwise why would we have had so many genocides, why would we have so many human rights violations. I think that criticism is a fair criticism. That said though, countries which are covered by the Convention on the Rights of the Child are forced to be overlooked by an external body, The Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC). They know that they can be criticized and they can be interrogated, and because that is not the situation in the US, because the US is ultimately self-governing and the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of US law and US policy, then there’s more freedom, I think, for an administration to advance policies like the ones this administration has advanced. At least to start with, even though they may eventually get knocked down. | |
| So, there is a long history of the US being an outlier in the way it treats migrant children. I can give you some examples. When I used to live and work in Chicago, and spent quite a lot of time with my colleagues going to some of the detention facilities for children there, I was shocked to see that unaccompanied small children arriving in the US didn’t have automatic access to legal counsel. I was shocked to see that they were held in a detention center. I was shocked to see that nobody was appointed to be their guardian. | |
| Now, I was shocked not because in the UK, where I was coming from, everything is perfect, by a long shot. There are many immigration problems which I spent years working on. It’s not that in Europe everything is by any means perfect. There are many countries which still commit severe violations against child migrants. But, I think the harshness of US policy is unusual, and this is something that goes back for decades. | |
| The other point I’ll make is that the context of this very troubling family separation policy is a progressive tightening and criminalization of the US-Mexico border, which has been happening for some time. It certainly is a continuation of policies that were enforced under the Obama Administration. What’s changed is that the exercise of discretion and the pursuance of criminalization has multiplied geometrically with this administration. | |
| So, many of the laws, it’s true to say, are not brand new. But, what is new is the institutional ideology driving them, and as we all know, in a big bureaucracy like the immigration bureaucracy, discretion is really what drives work on the ground. There are big differences between what some offices do and some other offices do, and when the whole institution is geared towards a particular bias, if you like, that affects the way individual offices do their work. So, I think that is partly responsible for the way in which this policy rolled out. | |
| The last thing I’ll say about the policy is that it was remarkable … Two things to my mind were remarkable. One, that it lasted as long as it did, and it was as egregious as it was, that you really saw examples of little toddlers being looked after by unrelated six-year-olds giving them bottles. You saw images of parents catatonic because they didn’t know where their tiny children had been taken. So, that level of barbarity, I think, for any administration’s pretty unusual. | |
| The other thing, though, I would say is that bipartisan revolution against the policy was also illuminating. It was interesting to see how the administration had to completely do a u-turn and really contradict statements it had made really pretty recently about why this policy was or wasn’t acceptable. So, that was, I think, encouraging. It was encouraging to see Republicans and to see people who might be sympathetic to other parts of the administration just say, “No. This is a step too far.” | |
| Peter B. Collins: | Professor, I offer no defense of these policies by President Trump and Attorney General Sessions in particular, but to be fair, there is a matter of optics here, and that is Trump has been very aggressive and engaged in racist undertones and overtones in explaining his immigration policy. Under the Obama Administration, more than two and a half million people were deported, and there was public advocacy, including from Secretary Clinton, to return child arrivals at the Southern border, regardless of the reason for their effort to enter the country, in a way to try to send a message to others not to attempt the same journey. |
| So, some of the policies, as you point out, have been in place for a long time in this country. It appears to me that optics and the unpopularity of Trump have made this aggravated in some respects. | |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | Yes. I think that’s absolutely right. I think that what this Trump administration has succeeded in doing is turning immigration into a sort of test of loyalty, about making America great again, and somehow has managed to elide the fact that a lot of America’s greatness has always depended and has been acknowledged to depend on its multicultural and immigrant roots. |
| So, if you set aside the genocide of the Native Americans and you set aside the massive, massive abomination of slavery, the fact that there is this country with open borders and a flourishing economy, and a country that’s made itself the richest country in the world, is to do with the openness to talented people from all parts of the world. It’s a kind of stunning feat of, I don’t know, of political conjuring, that that somehow has got eclipsed by this notion that making America great is, as you said, fortifying the country and demonizing outsiders. | |
| The other point I think that is also interesting is that by shifting the focus from administrative challenge of managing numbers, of accommodating people, to a security criminal challenge of protecting ourselves from rapists and protecting ourselves from terrorists, the whole discourse on immigration has really been much more polarized. This, I think, is new. I mean, it’s true, as you say, that Obama made the political calculation of dividing immigration, stopping the raids on undocumented migrants, but going after so-called criminal aliens, people who’d committed criminal offenses. He made a kind of devil’s bargain. But, this administration is really criminalizing immigration in many ways. Everyone is suspect until they’re accepted, which is what the executive orders were about. So, it’s a sea change. | |
| Peter B. Collins: | It is indeed. Professor, one more topic before we wrap up. I’ve been deeply concerned about the expulsion of the Rohingya Muslims from the nation of Myanmar. It really does rise to the level of ethnic cleansing, if not genocide … It is this generation’s Rwanda, if you will. |
| We are starting to see some action from the UN, and the leader of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, has finally made some public comments that edge up to recognizing the gravity of the situation and the extent of the atrocities that have occurred. But, still, the world seems to be willing to ignore this crisis for the most part. | |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | Yeah. It’s one of the real tragedies of our time. I agree with you, that even while we decry what the Myanmar government has done, and even though we see these images of destitute Rohingya, up to three-quarters of a million or more, camping out in mud and squalor along the camps of Cox’s Bazar, that long coastline in Southern Bangladesh, even as we see that, we have no substantial engagement of the rich part of the world, if you like. |
| I mean, it would take nothing to have instituted robust resettlement. It would have taken nothing to have really vigorous and generous investment in building better infrastructure. After all, Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world. It’s the country most at risk of climate change, of massive flooding. It’s the country that already has hundreds of thousands of previous refugees. So, the fact that we … In fact, what we’ve done with Myanmar, to my mind, incredibly, is we’ve sort of accepted it as a completely changed country now that the military dictatorship is over, now that there is a democratically elected government. We’ve accepted Myanmar as a friendly country. We send Fulbright students to Myanmar. | |
| I mean, I think that’s just, to my mind, it’s extraordinary, because we are really complicit in a way. The government of Aung San Suu Kyi has hidden behind that legitimacy, and it’s very belated now that she’s made this comment that, yeah, maybe things could have been dealt with better. In fact, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but your listeners might be interested. Today, the UN released, I think, a 450-page report detailing, in a close way, the extent of the crimes against humanity committed, and saying that this could amount to genocide. So, this is a very careful, cautious study, authored by the United Nations authority. For it to come out like this is such an indictment. Meanwhile, I think it’s so regrettable that our own countries have done so very little. | |
| I spent some time with Rohingya refugees in Indonesia a few years ago, and their heartfelt desire, of course, was just to be resettled, to get back to work, to get an education for their children. They are warm and hardworking people, and it really is a tragedy, and it actually shames us. | |
| Peter B. Collins: | Professor, you reference this new UN report. The General Assembly is just a couple of weeks away. Are there agendas that address this particular situation? |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | Yes. So, I would say in this rather depressing chronicle that I’ve painted, Peter, one ray of hope comes from the fact that there are really productive discussions going on, on migration, at the UN. For the first time in the UN’s history, after a whole century really of ignoring migration obligations as a global issue, the UN has finally accepted, and international parties, states parties and the UN have accepted that migration needs to be a topic of international and global concern, like climate change, like terrorism, like other big issues that cross borders. |
| So, for the first time ever, there is a global discussion directed to trying to improve the way in which both refugee protection and migration are managed. This General Assembly is going to consider two new documents. They’re called “global compacts”. One is a global compact on migration, and one is a global compact on refugees. The final drafts of these documents are already available, and I think you can make links to them available to your audience. They are, I think, very interesting documents, very thoughtful. The product of much deliberation across the world by many governments. Regrettably not the US government in the case of the migration compact, but many other governments. The US is still involved in the discussions on refugees. | |
| So, there are many good ideas in these global compacts, ideas about how we could share responsibility better; ideas about how we could increase access to legal, safe, and regular migration for more people; how we could increase blue collar or unskilled visas so that the labor force that we need can be legal rather than irregular; ideas about how you can increase access to training and education for young people so that adolescents and youth are not pushed to dangerous journeys by despair. There’s a lot of good ideas there, and these documents are going to be discussed in this upcoming session. I really hope that they will be agreed and that they will create a platform for some positive change in this sad context. | |
| Peter B. Collins: | Harvard professor, Jacqueline Bhabha, the author of the latest book: Can We Solve the Migration Crisis? Thanks for your expertise and discussion today. |
| Jacqueline Bhabha: | Thank you for having me, Peter. |
| Peter B. Collins: | Thanks for listening to this Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. Please send me your comments. Email peter@peterbcollins.com. |
| This is where I like to ask you to do what you can to support the investigative journalism work right here at WhoWhatWhy. |
Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Rohingya displaced Muslims (Zlatica Hoke / Wikimedia / VOA).
