Since 1914, the church has been celebrating the World Day of Migrants and Refugees. As I am sure you know, the plight of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers worldwide is increasingly dire. This year, the Jesuit Conference President and Provincial Superiors of the United States and Canada have invited everyone in the Jesuit community to expand our advocacy efforts on behalf of our migrant brothers and sisters in advance of the World Day of Migrants and Refugees on September 29.

The University and its students, faculty, and staff already do much in this area, but in accordance with the letter from the President and Provincials (link below) I will be asking our cabinet and our deans to be mindful of opportunities to support migrants and refugees wherever possible, in addition to the many laudable efforts you in the campus community already make as individuals.

Thank you, as always, for everything you do in service to the human family.

Sincerely,

Joseph M. McShane, S.J.

Read the full Document: President and Provincials Letter on Migration

Two days later, humanitarian aid workers, designers, and architects from around the world gathered at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus to talk about what can be done to help them.

Design for Humanity Summit II: Design in the Time of Displacement, a day-long summit sponsored by Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs, is the second design summit of its kind, following an inaugural gathering last June. The conference explored how the intersection between design and humanitarian action can compel a more dignified, inclusive, and sustainable humanitarian response.

In a keynote address, Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, told attendees that the media can be the greatest force for peace on earth. It has the capacity to spotlight people affected by wars and climate change-driven weather events, she said, citing the work of activists such as those who protested the installation of an oil pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota.

“The way the media talks about pro-democracy movements is, it’s for other countries, because we’ve achieved democracy in the United States,” she said.

“But you never really achieve democracy. You have to fight for it every single day, and that’s what these human rights groups do. That’s why it’s critical we have a media that provides a platform for people like all of you, who are the experts in your areas, rather than pundits we get on all of the networks, who know so little about so much.”

Elevate Their Voices

Democracy Now! has covered many stories related to refugees recently, she said, including one about a lawyer representing the Department of Justice who argued before Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that the administration was not required to provide detained children with soap, toothbrushes, and blankets. Less known, she said, are stories such as that of Jeanette Vizguerra, a mother of four from Mexico who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years but has been recently living in a church in Denver to avoid deportation.

“To be able to hear their voices, that’s what will change the world. To go to where the silence is. Working with refugees around the world, it’s not often silent where you are, but for the corporate media, it is. Those voices do not hit the media radar screen. And it’s our job to elevate them,” she said.

“These are the voices that will save all our humanity.”

In addition to workshops, Friday’s summit, a partnership between the IIHA and the International Organization for Migration, also featured talks by Argentina Szabados, regional director, IOM in South-Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, and Richard Blewitt, head of delegation and permanent observer of the Delegation of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to the United Nations.

Settlement Camps No Longer Temporary

Szabados said there is cause for both optimism and pessimism in the field. On the plus side, the tools for collecting and analyzing data collection have never been more easily obtained. On the other hand, she noted, no one believes anymore there is anything temporary about settlements for displaced individuals. One camp on the India/Bangladesh border, she noted, has been open for 70 years. Therefore, it is important to consider what it means for such places to be not just shelters, but “homes.”

“The dwelling places we provide ought not be ‘just good enough’ to keep people alive in a miserable twilight of half-existence. They must also give people an opportunity to develop, to be healthy, to learn,” she said.

Blewitt said one of the lessons that has become abundantly clear when it comes to providing shelter to vulnerable populations is that aid groups should be focused on the process that leads to shelter construction, not just the finished product.  People who have been displaced should be offered a chance to help rebuild their own community.

“When we’re looking at shelter, non-specialists often think we should build something by ourselves. And this is understandable, but it might hamper a future resilience agenda,” he said.

“We want to work very much with populations that are affected, and enable them to look at incremental expansion and improvement of their shelter options, and [let them know]that they are in the driving seat, not us.”

This has the effect of bringing down costs, he said, and also allows countries to take pride in being able to care for its citizens, even if what’s built is not perfect.

“Sometimes humanitarians kind of believe they’re fixing everything, but actually that’s not the reality, he said, noting that globally, the amount of money sent to countries via remittances dwarfs official development aid.

“People are finding ways.”

Video of the morning’s session can be viewed here.
Video of the afternoon’s session can be viewed here.

For World Refugee Day on June 20, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) is asking everyone to “take a step” in solidarity with refugees. The campaign challenges people and communities to show their support in fun, active, ways—like dancing, running, or biking—and post to social media to encourage others to do the same. Other ways to get involved include attending a World Refugee Day Event, hiring and welcoming refugees, and reading and sharing their stories.

Fordham took a step with refugees last fall when the University signed on to the #WithRefugees campaign, joining a coalition of more than 500 universities, businesses, foundations, faith-based organizations, youth groups, and NGOs who are working together to provide help and support to refugees and asylum seekers.

“We live in a world in which millions of refugees—many of them children—have been driven from their homes by war, ethnic strife, and natural disasters,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “While society is a long way from addressing the root causes of the refugee issue, we can, and must, do our utmost to care for those whose lives have been violently uprooted. To do so is a duty we owe every single member of the human family.”

Fordham has recently hosted several events focused on the struggles of refugees, including a conference on women who are forced to flee their homes and a panel on leadership needed for this global crisis.

More information about how to get involved can be found on the UNHCR’s World Refugee Day website.

Verner’s March 29 visit was the last event tied to a yearlong effort by FCLC deans to enhance student’s first-year student experience through a cohesive theme of magic threaded through programming and academics.

“The actual theme that has emerged is probably one we would have never expected—and that’s a good thing,” said Professor Fred Wertz, Ph.D., acting FCLC dean.

The year began with all first-year students reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. The novel, which has inspired an ongoing television series on the SyFy network, didn’t necessarily land well with students due to concerns about diversity and gender portrayals in the book. This prompted Grossman to deliver a pointed lecture titled, “I Did It Wrong,” which not only addressed student criticism, but also examined mistakes he made during his career.

“I didn’t think the students would have criticized The Magicians, and we sure didn’t think [Grossman] would talk about it,” said Wertz. “He said ‘I’ve been doing things wrong all my life, but you learn from your mistakes and that’s life.’”

Wertz said that there were many other magical surprises over the course of the year, including when a hypnotist veered from traditional notions of what hypnotists might make people do, such act silly, but instead suggested to them, under hypnosis, that “they believe in themselves and the core of their being.”

Held just after a series of magic workshops for students, Verner’s talk too, held several surprises. Magic was at the core of the talk, but his examples of magic’s potential were mired in the very real horrors of war and violence. Having been a professor of psychology for more than two decades at Burlington College in Vermont, Verner stumbled onto the unexpected power of magic while visiting refugee camps in Kosovo during the civil war there.

Together with his wife Janet Fredericks, he was guided through the camps by a 6-year-old called Fatima to perform magic for the refugees. They met war-weary men and old women, all of whom knew Fatima. She would get them water, assistance, and a table if need be, which is not an easy thing to find in a refugee camp, said Verner.

When they came to a town “swollen with refugees,” they set up a table and within a few minutes, 350 people stood before them waiting for the show to begin. Magic commenced, and when the show was finished a skeptical old woman approached. She had seen Verner multiply flowers from a single stem. She asked him to do the same with a coin. Which he did. She asked him to do it again and he did. She stood back in belief, not disbelief. She then asked him to produce what she really wanted.

“Make us visas to America,” she said; “I can’t do that trick,” he responded.

On leaving the camps, Verner turned to say goodbye to Fatima, but she wasn’t there. She was hiding in the back of his car. She wanted to go to America with Janet and him. It wasn’t until he returned to his hotel did he realize that throughout the day no one spoke English and he didn’t speak Roma. The day had played out with magic being the common tongue. Soon after, he formed Magicians Without Borders. Many shows followed, in Afghan refugee camps, in Somali camps, and in the poor towns of El Salvador where children walked past decapitated bodies and the results of horrific gang violence.

“They all understood magic, that magic was this universal language, and then I realized another thing, no matter who we performed for, when they saw magic they thought, ‘Maybe we can go to America and realize our hopes and dreams,’” he said.

He recalled another refugee fleeing the Eastern European pogroms that had threated the lives of so many European Jews. The refugee moved to Wisconsin as Erik Weisz, a name he later changed to Harry Houdini.

“Houdini once said, ‘When I perform my magic in poor difficult situations, my magic not only amuses but can awaken hope that the impossible is possible,” Verner said, quoting the master.

It’s a realization that Verner decided to build upon by forming his nonprofit of a dozen activist magicians. Magicians Without Borders has since gone on to perform for more than 7 million refugees and orphan children, he said. They hold workshops, like the one held with Fordham students, teaching the children how to do their own magic tricks. In most of the camps, it was the first time that many had seen an entertainer.

“A south Sudanese elder told me, ‘We laugh a lot among ourselves in our huts, but for the first time in 15 years we laughed together as a community,’” recalled Verner. “These isolated people come together for wonder.”

Eventually, the stated mission for the growing group became: “Entertain, Educate, and Empower.”

By teaching, as well as performing, they left behind a bit of magic with young people who could, in turn, teach others in the camps. Some have gone on to professional lives financed through their skills.

On Friday night, after the lecture, a few of Verner’s protégés from the Yale Society of Magic mingled with the newly minted magicians who had attended the workshop from the night before. There was talk of collaboration for one of Fordham’s Global Outreach programs.

Global Outreach (GO!) was involved in planning from the start of the year, as was Student Affairs and Mission Integration and Planning. For Verner, a former professor, it was a delight to see the many departments come together to make magic.

“I was in academia for 40 years,” he later wrote in an email to Fordham News “What a joy and inspiring delight to be with a group of University folks who are deeply driven and inspired by a vision and seem to have vocations and not jobs. Everyone involved had intelligent, creative, inspiring, funny, delightful things to say. I feel honored to be associated with the Fordham family.”

For Wertz, the year’s events have the potential to spark a Lincoln Center tradition of incorporating a theme into the first-year experience.

“To have each of these scenarios take place, who knows what’s going to emerge in the years to come!” he said.

Next year’s theme? Food.

“I was persecuted for my sexual orientation, so I came here for a chance at a better life,” said Rosario, wearing a suit and tie. “I could never dress this way or be who I am. I was shamed, couldn’t live my life, and could never sleep. One thing that is ignored is the mental health of asylum seekers and the mental stress they have experienced before [coming here]. It puts you in a shell.”

Rosario was among the asylum seekers who shared their personal stories at Fordham’s “Women and Girls on the Move,” a March 16 event sponsored by the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS) and held in conjunction with the United Nations 63rd Commission on the Status of Women.

The conference, which brought together educators, politicians, social workers, health care providers, lawyers, and students, came at a time when nearly 80 percent of the 68.5 million refugees, asylum seekers, and stateless and displaced persons documented in the last fiscal year are women and young people; 52 percent are children under 18.

Held at Fordham Law School, the conference aimed to shine a light on the intensifying struggles of women and girls who are fleeing their homes in the midst of violence, persecution, and disaster. The organizers hope to use this knowledge to better help others who are also seeking new lives.

And the time for new solutions is now, presenters said. One person is displaced from their home every two seconds, noted Sandy Turner, Ph.D., director of the GSS Institute for Women and Girls, which presented the conference with the International Health Awareness Network (IHAN).

In addressing the U.N. event’s theme—social protections and public services—the conference also highlighted displaced women and girls’ limited access to health care, education, justice, and humanitarian protections throughout the process of migration and resettlement.

“This is about finding solutions to the global migration crisis,” said Sorosh Roshan, M.D., IHAN founder and president.

A panel discussion featured several women, including Rosario, who represented different communities of asylum seekers.

Mahnaz Sarachi, Ph.D., Executive Director of IHAN, said it’s important to understand the different kinds of people in crisis. “Why are they moving?” she said. “They are in search of a better life… they have left their homes to seek safety.”

A Hard Adjustment

Anna Elvira Brodskaya, an LGBTQ and asylum-seeker rights activist, left Russia, where there is a homophobic culture and the LGBTQ community is often victims of violence. In New York, job opportunities were few.

“Women are not perceived as good enough for decent jobs like ones requiring strength,” she said. “You face harassment and you can do nothing about it, because you are undocumented and you have no rights.”

Rosario spoke of how her life here was initially weighed down by locating affordable health insurance, housing, and health care. “Living in New York is expensive, so you might have to live on the street,” she said. “Yes, there are shelters, but they are not always safe.” Now, thankfully, life has improved for Rosario; she has a wife and is writing a book.

Julia Gagliardi, FCRH ’19, of the Social Innovation Collaboratory at Rose Hill, delivered a moving narrative that was created from a collection of stories from resettled students attending colleges and universities in New York City. “On my own, I had to apply for health insurance outside of my university, because I was not eligible, and pay for it at a higher cost,” shared Gagliardi, quoting a student. “On my own, I had to look for ways to finance my tuition, because I was not eligible for financial aid or scholarships. On my own, I had to meet with a lawyer several times a week to apply for a work permit. On my own, I was connected to an independent donor who heard my story and helped fund part of my tuition.”

Ideas and Suggestions

Discussion led to ideas about how universities can create safe spaces.

Brodskaya suggested schools could offer free courses to women new to the U.S. about career options. “They need to be enlightened about the possibilities … they can be employed not just as nannies and cleaners,” she remarked.

Panelists suggested college campuses would be a safe space to learn about U.S. procedures impacting migrants. “Many are now afraid to apply for asylum,” said one.

They also agreed that universities might help the public understand migrants’ lives.

“We could incubate goodwill on campuses,” said Gagliardi, an English and sociology major.

New Challenges

The conference also featured dialogue about what migrants entering the U.S. are facing, including word that the accepted number of refugees entering the country has been lowered.

Frank Kearl, J.D., LAW ’18, spoke of a “walled prison facility” in Dilley, Texas, where migrants are being held in poor conditions.

Although there are lawyers and advocates helping women and children in Dilley, more volunteers are needed, he said.

“These people are sick, they are scared, and they have no idea what is going to happen to them until a volunteer sits down with them and tells them,” said Kearl, a Workplace Justice Legal Advocate at Make the Road New York. “It’s disgusting what is happening now.”

–Meg McCaffrey

Photos by Patrick VerelIt’s estimated that right now 68 million people globally have been forcibly displaced from their homes, more than any time since World War II. With that movement comes innumerable challenges for host countries that allow refugees to settle in them.

It’s a topic of considerable interest this week as the United Nations convenes for its general assembly, and at Advancing Local Leadership in Today’s Global Refugee Crisis, a panel held on Tuesday at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, five leaders took a deep dive into challenges such as funding streams and leadership roles for local aid groups.

“The vast majority of displaced peoples are living within 10 countries. Three countries are responsible for almost 30 percent of that total,” said moderator Jeri Eckhart-Queenan, of the Bridgespan Group, a group that provides management consulting to nonprofits and philanthropists.

“The question needs to be, ‘What is the rest of the global community doing to shoulder its part of the burden, whether through funding or resettlement?’”

Daunting Challenges

The panel, which was sponsored by Catholic Relief Services and Fordham’s International Political Economic Development (IPED) program, brought into sharp focus the logistical challenges of housing, clothing, feeding, and educating traumatized people who may never return home.

Francis Atul Sarker, executive director of Caritas Bangladesh, spoke of helping nearly 700,000 members of the Rohingya ethnic group, who fled to Bangladesh and other nations after facing persecution in Myanmar last year. Years of dealing with natural disasters over the last 43 years left his organization well prepared to deal with a new geopolitical crisis, he said.

“We are grounded, we know the social reality, we have a good understanding of the cultural context, the faith context, and the different stakeholders. That is how we are at the front with more efficiency and more effectiveness than others. That is our strength,” he said.

“But we understand that it is not going to be resolved soon, and there needs to be a new governance structure, and a new local economy where there will be participation, and also a kind of co-management of the entire response. It will not be easy for a country like Bangladesh, which is already a very land-poor country.”

Local Leadership is Key

Clarisa Bencomo, program officer for global grants at the Ford Foundation, echoed Sarker, saying that local actors need to play a leadership role in defining the response strategy. In fact, she said Caritas Bangladesh perfectly illustrated why this matters when her group ran into resistance when it tried to convince the Bangladeshi government to construct more resilient structures for the Rohingya.

“Having Caritas Bangladesh, with the local knowledge and influence and relationships, combined with a technical capacity in engineering, we were able to put together a structure that was accepted by government that was more resilient, safer, and more dignified,” she said.

“We need the system to allow for that to happen everywhere. We need predictable support and financing for local actors to play a key role. It can’t just be given to those who already do it, and that’s the way it is.”

‘Like Repairing Broken Hearts’

When it comes to funding, Robert Baryamwesiga, commandant of Bidi Bidi, the second largest refugee settlement in the world, said Uganda, which is home to an estimated 1.4 million refugees, is integrating both refugees and host communities into its planning process, in an acknowledgement that displacement is no longer a temporary. Funding likewise needs to be approached more holistically, he said.

“You find that there are funds that are going directly to refugees, which is good. But refugees cover over 250 square kilometers of land, whereas staff are staying over 60 kilometers away. You expect them to move everything to refugees without transport, or without accommodations?” he said.

“The kind of funding that comes must address the conditions of the staff. As we know, hosting and managing refugees is actually like repairing broken hearts. You deal with very traumatized people. Your staff must be in a good state of mind. If you restrict the staff, and don’t give them good conditions, you have two traumatized groups.”

The panel also featured Jennifer Poidatz, vice-president of humanitarian response at Catholic Relief Services.

The summit, a partnership between the IIHA and the International Organization for Migration, explored how the intersection between design and humanitarian action can compel a more dignified, inclusive, and sustainable humanitarian response.

More than 40 presenters from the design, humanitarian, and academic communities, as well as the private sector, presented at panels or breakout sessions. An estimated 300 participants, from as far away as Europe and Asia, took part in the conference.

A Key Research Area

“Design for humanity is one of five key research areas for the Institute, and we believe it will have an impact on current thinking and practices of the humanitarian sector,” said IIHA Executive Director Brendan Cahill in his opening remarks.

“We seek to galvanize the diverse expertise of those working at this intersection through a multi-year Design for Humanity Initiative and Lab, which will include future events, research, publications, and collaborative projects.”

In his keynote session, Randy Fiser, CEO of the American Society of Interior Designers, kicked off the morning with a call to explore potential partnerships and identity gaps. To give a sense of how such partnerships between design, community, and government can work, he pointed to Regent Park, a 69-acre neighborhood in Toronto that is currently being redeveloped.

“As we know, when redevelopment takes place in neighborhoods, there is an opportunity to push out communities that were there to begin with and to displace them,” he said.

“Regent Park took a very critical look at how they could not only empower and improve the lives of the people there and add value, but also incorporate 25,000 Syrian refugees into the community,” he said.

Sustainability, health, and wellness, and resiliency should always be key dimensions of any design, he said. There are also opportunities to learn from failures, such as the Superdome, which became a shelter in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

“We knew New Orleans was susceptible to hurricanes. We knew that people would shelter in the Superdome at some point. And yet it wasn’t designed in a way to handle the volume of people that were there. We didn’t prepare, and so what happened was another cataclysmic event,” he said.

“People deserve better from us.”

The Role of Architects

His sentiment was echoed in the day’s first panel, “From Public Interest Design to Humanitarian Design: How Design Compels an Inclusive Humanitarian Response.” Sean Anderson, associate curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, began by sharing pictures of squalid living facilities for refugees that Australia had established on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and in the nation of Nauru in Micronesia, and ended with images of tents in Southern Texas that currently house refugees who have crossed over from Mexico.

“This is not architecture, and this is not design, yet it is, and there are people who are responsible for building, maintaining and preserving these systems that are happening right now on our southern border,” he said, imploring everyone to oppose them.

Another panelist, Carmen Mendoza Arroyo, Ph.D., made an impassioned plea for architects to resist the temptation to work with those who put up tent cities for migrants. It benefits no one, it creates ghettos, and it perpetuates “ unacceptable policies,” she said.

Arroyo, who is director and master of international cooperation sustainable emergency architecture at the Universrstat Internacional de Catalunya School of Architecture, suggested instead efforts to resettle refugees and migrants in cities. In response to the influx of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea, Barcelona is attempting to do rehabilitate abandoned buildings to house them.

Sergio Palleroni, professor and director of the Center for Public Interest Design at Portland State University, showed off the Partners On Dwelling (POD) initiative that the city of Portland, Oregon has undertaken to tackle homelessness. Micro houses measuring just 225 square feet have been assembled for $2,600 each and clustered together in groups of a dozen or so on formerly abandoned land. The three clusters, or “villages,” that they have created have been invaluable tools for helping people escape homelessness.

Palleroni noted that in the past, he has sent his students to study abroad to get a better sense of the world outside the United States’ borders. But extreme poverty and hopelessness is here as well.

“To me, the most difficult thing that I see [globally]is a kind of sense that people are losing faith in institutions and political processes that we have,” he said.

“The money is there to make the changes, we just need a consensus and an ability to come together to support them.”

It is hard to understand, much less countenance, the failure of empathy that such a policy represents. To traumatize children and their families for attempting to enter the United States is not merely the amoral application of national policy, but an unambiguously evil act which must be understood for what it is, and vigorously opposed by people of good will.

As a Jesuit, Catholic University, we are committed to the care of, and compassion for, the most vulnerable members of society, regardless of their race, religion, citizenship, or national origin. We will be judged not just by our actions in these troubled times, but by our lack of action. Therefore, I urge that you contact your elected representatives to state your opposition to this heartless and despicable practice, and to lend your voice to those who are committed to ending it.

While we cannot cure all the suffering in the world, our collective conscience calls upon us to do whatever we can to bring to an end the miseries inflicted upon vulnerable, desperate children and their families through these despicable actions.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., President
Fordham University

Q: This is not your first go-around with the IIHA, correct?

A: I taught in the Institute during its first couple of years. I knew Dr. Cahill, because I had been in international work my entire career. From time to time I had visited him for my own illnesses, which were usually parasitic in nature.

Q: What have you been doing recently?

I’ve been working as an independent consultant since 2009. Prior to that, I worked for organizations such as CARE International, the International Rescue Committee, Academy for Educational Development, the United States Agency for International Development, the UN World Food Program, UNICEF, and the UN Development Programme, UNDP among others. I’ve done a lot of work looking at gender-based violence. Most of the countries that I’ve worked in have been either in conflict or post-conflict.

Q: What will you be doing for IIHA?

{I’ll be} participating in the development, management, and implementation of the Institute’s academic and training programs, along with responsibilities for teaching and coordinating the academic aspects of the Institute’s undergraduate and graduate curricula at Fordham. I’m making sure that our courses are meeting the students’ needs in this area, and also that there’s a compatibility with other programs. For our new graduate program, which we’ll be launching in the fall, I’m ensuring that we have course descriptions and professors identified to teach the courses. I’m also teaching humanitarian affairs, which is a prerequisite for some of the more advanced courses. I love to see the excitement and enthusiasm among students; they’re hungry for information.

Q: Tell us about your hands-on experience.

A:  I lived for a year and a half in a refugee camp in Western Tanzania. People were fleeing genocide in Rwanda resulting in a massive movement of people into Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was a director of a HIV AIDS and reproductive health program that was funded by USAID. I lived in the camps, supervised, hired, and trained outreach educators who moved through the camps to train and educate refugees about HIV AIDS prevention. The camps kept expanding and expanding, until there were nearly 500,000 people. I originally agreed to stay for six months, but ended up remaining for a year and a half. It was quite challenging.

Q: What is the most pressing problem facing the humanitarian assistance community?

A: I’d have to say lack of sufficient funds to do what we need to do. It has also become increasingly insecure for people working in this field. I have a number of friends who have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Then there is a growing number of refugees who are internally displaced within their own borders. Their situations were initially meant to be temporary, but for some of them, the displacements have lasted for many, many years. That was certainly the case with the Afghan refugees who were settled in Pakistan. Multiple generations grew up as refugees. There’s a frustration and hopelessness among the young people in these camps.

Q: What draws you to this work?

A: I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It seems natural to want to make a tiny bit of difference. I’m not going to change the world, but if I can make the lives of other people just a little better, that’s inspiring.

That was one of the conclusions of “Global Migration and Cities: Urban Governance, Migration, and the Refugee Crisis,” a panel discussion held Friday, Feb. 9 at the Lincoln Center campus.

The panel, which was part of conference organized by the Fordham Urban Consortium, featured

-Els de Graauw, P.D., associate professor of political science, at Baruch College

-Jennifer Gordon, professor of law at Fordham Law School

-Annika Hinze, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies program at Fordham

Judy Benjamin, Ph.D, the Helen Hamlyn Senior Fellow at the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs, moderated the panel, which touched upon everything from the plight of Syrian war refugees to the estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants living in New York City.

Hinze noted that although refugees are no longer confined to camps, and immigrants in the United States no longer only settle in “gateway” cities such as New York City, cities still offer a level of integration that a nation states can’t offer.

“There are already communities in place that provide immigrants with an intermediary, rather than being plunged into a new national context with different customs,” she said.

She said it’s also important to remember that immigrants are also settling in places like Alabama and North Carolina.

“This is an important conversation to have, because in a way, it takes away this dichotomy between the large metropolis and rural areas, because rural areas are increasingly feeding immigration,” she said.

De Graauw agreed, noting that immigrant affairs offices are springing up around the country.

“Ten to 15 years ago, you could probably count on one or maybe two hands how many cities had those offices. Today, we have over 40 of them, and they’re not just in the expected places like New York City. They’re also found in much smaller places, like Memphis,” she said.

“Cities are trying to figure out what they can do, because they are responsible for creating productive, healthy and stable communities. They know all too well that if you alienate or drive underground big segments of your population, it’s going to have ripple effects in many different ways.”

Local context is still important, as a place like Detroit is more amenable to the notion that immigrants are a demographic lifeline than say Atlanta, which de Graauw said is seeing greater immigrant population growth in the suburbs. But issues such as municipal I.D. cards, which New Haven first unveiled in 2007, bring together cities into groups such as Cities for Action, which a coalition of over 150 mayors and municipal leaders.

Gordon said Amman, Jordan, is a good example of how a city can ally itself with an international non-governmental organization to push its national government in a progressive direction. The European Union and the United Nations promised aid to Jordan if it agreed to make it possible for 200,000 Syrian refugees to work legally. In August, the national government agreed, but it restricted that employment to specific work, such as that in garment factories, and it set aside 20 desirable occupations to Jordanians. Amman officials have pushed back hard though, and have tentatively received exceptions for jobs in construction.

“That to me is a potential positive story about cities, and international human rights organizations combining to successfully put pressure on the national government,” Gordon said.

How the world receives its information about such crises is a central concern of contemporary humanitarianism. At a lively book launch held at the United Nations bookshop in New York on Dec. 7, Robin Andersen, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies, celebrated the publication of The Routledge Companion to Media and Humanitarian Action (Routledge, 2017) co-edited by Andersen with Purnaka L. de Silva.

Andersen said her book presents a comprehensive analysis of how mass media portrays humanitarian crises, and a call for a renewed “ability to perpetuate a humanitarian imagination” through “the ethics of solidarity.”

Andersen and de Silva were joined at the launch by U.N. Undersecretary-General Adama Dieng, who spoke about the importance of mass media in a world that has seen a rise in xenophobic nationalism and violence towards immigrants and refugees.

According to Andersen, media holds immense power over the narratives of humanitarianism; it has the ability “to shape how we view victims of disaster, whether worthy or unworthy, innocent or guilty.” Part of the new book’s specific mandate, said Andersen, was to “help ensure that everyone, victims included, has a seat at the table when discussing humanitarian policy,” and that the dispossessed and the displaced “are represented in their full humanity.”

“There is a need to highlight peace journalism,” Andersen says, “which does not enter into our media frameworks very well, since belligerencies grab headlines.” With better media practices, “refugees fleeing war-torn countries could be viewed as like us, and brought into our communities.”

The need for better models of how media covers humanitarian crises has never been more obvious, she said. The election of Donald J. Trump has come with “a narrative that challenges the basic assumptions of the humanitarian imagination” and denies the “affirmation that when confronted by the representations of the suffering of those in need, we are compelled to act in solidarity with them.”

With 61 contributors writing on topics ranging from “Compassion as a News Value” to “Global Activism on Facebook,” Andersen said the Companion will serve as the essential reference resource for professionals both working in the field and setting policy. The book’s essays come from an internationally diverse body of contributors that includes journalists, administrators of NGOs, academics, researchers, and physicians from all over the world.

Andersen’s previous book, book A Century of Media: A Century of War (Peter Lang, 2006) won the 2007 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award, the honor society of Jesuit colleges and universities. she helped develop the curriculum for Fordham’s Master’s Program on International Humanitarian Action.

The book launch and discussion was live-streamed on the U.N. Facebook page.

— Michael Lindgren

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