tv Key Capitol Hill Hearings CSPAN September 5, 2016 4:37am-6:01am EDT
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sense of resilience for these people. and also, to suggest that they are not victims here. they are actively trying to formulate a life for themselves. i think you see that throughout the images in exhibition. these photographs have absorbed a lot of the debates about how photography shapes our understanding of political events and they are examples of photographs trying to work to actively change the way in which photographs portrayed these type of populations in the past. in many ways they are working in a way that a lot of photographs don't have a luxury of doing, which is commission to do a project and also working spending lots of time with their subjects. >> that gets into other issues. the newspapers, the media. rfer exactly. and this is not necessarily the first time they have partnered with an organization to produce a photographic body of work.
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in 1995 a book called exodus was pronoused alongside a group called signature numb which was a group of photographs just dedicated to documenting the lives of refugees and they produced a book that was purposefully trying to explore life reys through photography and use it as a tool. so they've done it before and recognized how photography done in different ways in new interpretive ways can really speak to audiences and teach them new things about this experience. >> you know what strikes me. as a reporter and as somebody whose job it is to commube kate the stories of at least in the context of where we are in los angeles. i'm always struck by just how poor of a job we do collectively in explaining these new communities that have arriveed. it's almost like they live in separate universes. whether it's a more established
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community like the vietnamese communities now or armenian communities, that are older, or new arrivals. i'm wondering if you a reaction in terms of just how refugees are covered in contemporary coverage by the media. >> i think that most americans don't know a whole lot about newer communities, refugees, immigrants of any kind. that's because american society as a whole is structured to ignore these people. o obviously i know the vietnamese refugee community intimately. so many americans said we never knew about this perspective. even people who live next to vietnamese refugees refugees in vietnamese communities. so the entire way in which american society is structured is geared not to pay attention to people who don't have power, whether refugees or just poor people. so there's so much work that needs to be done on the part of
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those of us who are scholars, story tellers, artists, whatever who are working with these communities but the deck is stacked against us because we don't have access to, say, hollywood. so the stories of everybody else will overwhelm the stories of the ub wanted. >> you see this is -- you see this is one of the thing that is shuleser trying to do is to put a face to people to show us the people that we see that we might see on the street or whatever the story behind them. he purposefully creates these images in a way. you've all probably seen maybe portraits of obama or any of the other politicians or celebrities taking photographs. and you u work consistently in the same way in order to create what he called the democratic platform. his images treat everyone the same way to speak to the common humanity that we share but also to insist that there are stories behind each of our faces, obviously behind each of
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our public presentation. >> one of the contradictions i think is that we want to argue that refugees have agency. that they have power. they've made certain kinds of decisions. and often that's true. but by definition someone who's a refugee is excluded. martin shuler is not a refugee and is taking the paragraph and he wants us to emple thighs but it's not a refugee doing this. so by the time we're doing that we're no longer refugees so we're already distanced from the population that we once were. despite the fact that they have the agency to get on that boat and risk their lives, they don't have the power to tell their own stories. >> they're trying to survive and earn that first dollar. >> but one of the fascinating things is that they are telling a story through cell phones. they're making photographs, doing their own documentation so we are beginning to see them
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tell their own stories. in their limited time obviously but people are doing that through cell phone photography but also has to do with distribution. how do those stories get out and how do we -- we tend to stumble upon them much later. but we are seeing those stories start to emerge. >> i've been on the coast of morocco with people trying to cross into spain. they've come to morocco from other parts of africa. they have nothing -- nothing -- maybe a change of clothes. but a lot of them have cell phones. and know how to replace a sim card and things like that. >> i was just going to say that i think social media and the ube quity of cell phones has made images more -- democrat tiesing is not the right word. but there's a capacity to seize on narratives through the ice of refugees even as they travel. there's an example today some of you may have seen in the "new york times" of a syrian piano man, which is a story in which the refugee both has
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footage that he took during his journey and footage of himself in the home country and upon arrival in berlin in this case and describes what that journey looked like and how he transformed himself while at the same time in the accompanying story he laments the construction that is he feels confines being a good refugee in order to flip the narrative taken hold in germany about the threat. he feels the need to tell the story. it's getting "new york times" readers and many german audiences, the pianist who is performing the story he wants to tell as the good refugee. but one of the other uses of cial media, another good exarm of humanitarian organizations deploying images, is included in the exhibit here where you have a very young man, turkish, who takes this picture. very few of our audience here
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today will habit thri seen an image in their organization. but peter, the head of the team for human rights watch, what he saw the image that he had taken and retweeted it and then et got retweeted dramatically around the world. so you had human rights watch which had been attempting to get a message out about the tragedy taking place with the drowning children and families managing to frame a narrative, which the image itself becomes of course viral and comes to speak for itself i think disconnected from the context in which it was launched into social media in the first place. but when you trace these stories you see how images are being harnessed by those agencies seeking to act on their behalf. and for a time it shifted the narrative in europe about the arriving tens of thousands of syrians. >> and this is the photo of the three-year-old washed ashore.
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which literally just kilometers from where i spent every summer of my childhood in an area where european tourists would come amount time. so it has a kind of resonance because of its location beyond what we might appreciate here in the united states for a european audience in terms of places they might know becoming a graveyard of infants. but also interestingly the image is worth noting that image shows us one picture and has the risk of precluding a broader picture which is a numbing statistic is four infant and child death t in the mediterranean a day, which is twice the number that was the case in 2015. >> does that disturb you? every crisis gets its image or two attached to it. it's almost inevitable. you think of the spanish civil war and the republican soldier
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gets shot and captures him as he falls to the ground. does that disturb you that like along with the attention that focuses on the issue, does it disturb you that that photo in particular got so much attention? or is there a drawback that we may not realize? >> i think the difference now is the number of images and the speed we see them. you mentioned the spanish civil war. that photograph was the only one of its kind for years. so we had time to meditate on these images. you can choose other conflicts, the vietnam war, these images that we have this time to sit with them and to react to them. and what i think is fascinating now is the speed in which things come out and things disappear. >> you can go on line and see millions of images of families try to cross the mediterranean that was shot last week or month. but you still get that one image that just explodes beyond
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that. and the globe starts talking about. i'm just wondering, the positives are recognizable as it focuses attention but i'm wondering if there are any drawbacks. >> once an image goes viral, the photograph loses control. so it doesn't matter what their intention is. back to the vietnam war everybody's seen these pictures. there's a picture of the general shooting a viet cong suspect in the head and he forever regretted that. he said it was actually justified. but the way the world remembers that image is not. and then the photograph of the girl burned by nay palm. and that image is now literary figuratively burned in everyone's memory. and the drawback of that and the positive part is it served an important role about shaping global public opinion. but u the drawback is the vietnamese are forever fixed in the memories of americans and people all over the world as
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victims. and that is literally crippling kind of story that is really hard for vietnamese people to get out of because -- and that's why you have vietnamese people in vietnam and in the united states reiterating this claim. vietnam is not a war, it's a country and they felt they have to keep saying it because in the west when you say vietnam everybody thinks war. and that's what that photograph depuzz. and that's the drawback. >> the 60s soundtrack in the background. >> you see these common tropes. it's both images of vunnability, the young girl obviously. images of mothers around children. images that resonate because of the christian origins of this country. the certain themes constantly come up in these photographs that people respond to. >> anything to add? i would like to make a page turn here. >> one thing i know peter experienced the human rights watch emergency directer who chose to tweet that picture was
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a backlash of people saying that there's something almost pornographic about disseminating this image. his response was it was truly grotesque was the set of policies that were forcing people into these dingies and the decision on the part of europe to exclude them and so forth. so the policies that lent themselves to this. i think that's the place where real tension lies on the one hand an image has the capacity to fully shape the narrative if it becomes seared into our minds, it just will shape the narrative of how we understand the policyings. and in this case it indicted a policy that allowed children to be drowned in the seas around europe rather than allowing them to cross. and that caused a major shift for that particular moment. but in the broader i think framing, the idea that was pointed out is that this is about a framing of vulnerability gets lost at some
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point. and instead it just comes to stand in for the identity of a population. and that's when you have the phenomenon that becomes that shifts from the immediate crisis that these individuals face to a framing of a whole society as a crisis. and that's where i think you end up with the problems that we've been discussing. >> i should also note that the photos here on display, to your right immediately when you enter into the exhibit area, and it really hits you in the gut. there's so much power to it. >> i would just say i do think that the photographs and exhibition and many photographs today do try to actively address their own position as, he was saying, privilege, as being able to speak for the problematic aspect of them speaking for an experience that is not thirs. a lot of photographs try to do something about that and i do think that a lot of photographs in this exhibition are also trying to portray something that you don't see in the
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media. there are obviously aspects of each of their images that are problematic. >> those images being just sort of normal life. >> each -- >> ordinary. >> each are trying to address, like we can go forward to maybe -- >> after the clicker. >> no. >> tell me where. >> keep going. something like this. you have a fashion photograph doing this kind of new imagery, taking a very common image that we see in quote/unquote refugee photography of a mother and a child. but here, he's doing something fascinating is that he is referencing a whole history of african studio photography and self-portrait tur. so that when these people sit for his image they are actually referencing the tradition of self-portrattur in africa. and in that way showing that
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they are agents of their own creation. that they are individuals. so you see these photographs actively trying to do something that we don't commonly see. this is a challenge himself. he doesn't usually work this way. and he kind of came one this idea using plu in particular, using color. the choice of color in is a lot of these images is important as well. color is not something you see in this subject matter because color also cannot tates life, action. we're used to black and white which conno tates crisis and drama and the past and horror. >> and it's a smile. >> these are people -- >> a image we're looking at. >> this seems to be their own portrait. not a portrait he made. >> we only have a few minutes left in this conversation and we have to simply address the united states in 2016 and this election year and the
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conversation about immigrants, refugees, we have a presidential candidate i think we know who he is, might have heard of him who has said he could look into the eyes of a syrian refugee child and say -- i'm paraphrasing, you cannot come into this country. sorry. i mentioned i was at the political conventions in cleveland. i heard a lot of people talking about refugees being a front for jihadis coming in. refugees being a way for diseases to get into this country. what do you just -- this is open to anyone. what do you make about this tenor of the conversation about refugees this year versus years past? >> just returning to where we gan which is 24 crisis frame helps entrench this. you can absolutely distort the facts. you can almost throw out
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anything. 60 million, 250 million. it would have been plausible at some level. you can say there's a crisis at border.hwestern when in fact it's the case of a net out migration from the community of the united states. it doesn't matter. because the crisis we accept as the best way to understand this. and then the question is what solutions can we come up with? walls, barriers, exclusion. i think it points to the need. obviously crisis models are constantly throid for political strategic purposes and we're witnessing that and there's nothing new about that i don't think. there are many shocking things about our current political moment but the deployment of crisis language and the depiction of refugees as a threat and so on resonates with our ordinary politics, unfortunately. so that isn't a poose to my mind that's extraordinary. it's just the depth of the
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toxic xenophobia. and it's not just in the united states. in the west and globally. there we have a challenge of can we start thinking about global migration? it's worth noting that migration trands are only going to increase. mobility is going to increase largely as a result of climate change more so than conflict. we know this now. we can address it by trying to come up with rational policies or we can do the ad hoc dance that has generated the toxic politics that we've seen in the united states and europe on a continuing basis. i think that would be a very poor choice. our current political moment helps illustrate just how ugh ugly a choice it can be. >> i think that the current climate reminds me that conimages matter and that our passive consumption of images of immigrants and migrants and refugees as hoords of nameless and faceless people kind of invading. that those images that we may passively consume them, they have an impact on a lot of
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people and it's important for us to seek out and support other venust that are showing other representations. the media, our everyday media does not have the space or the time supposedly to show images like what we see. you u might find it on a special section in the "new york times" called the lens block but that's kind of a speck tral area. but how do we find the space in our everyday media to look more deeply and differently at these types of issues. >> i go back to history. all the thing that is you say that donald trump is saying that syrian refugees or other refugees will do. bringing contamination, religious threat, mortal threat. go back again and the chinese those were the same things being said about the chinese in the 19th century. they would bring evil, destroy the american family, undermine the american working man. and that they were considered completely ant thetcal to the american culture.
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so i don't believe that simply because syrians are muslims that somehow they're different than other populations that have come to the u.s. before. and the other thing about history that i think is important that typically europe and the united states have played a major role in shaping the historical conditions that have produced refugees in the first place. go back far enough in history. the role that the u.s. and the u.s. has played in the shaping of the middle east that has led to the crisis but we don't like to think about those kinds of things. and the fact that we're in an economic supposedly economic crisis today. if you believe that. the crisis of globalization and of noo liberalism. we are putting the blame for the economic fallout of those things on refugees when refugees are only themselves the product of those very kind of economic decisions that the u.s. and europe have made. >> let me challenge you very quickly and this will wrap it
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up. does anyone have any sympathy for the argument that a country no matter how wealthy can really only sustain so many people coming in over a certain period of time? certainly that may be the larger conversation now at least in terms of western countries. is there anything to that? and the concern that you let one person in in this outflow and that guy decides to put on a suicide vest. there is raveg there. no? or are they completely just loony to even have these concerns? >> so any society may have a sort of threshhold of what it can do in terms of resources, in terms of its political context. but i think the thing to look at here is that we need an international framework of responsibility sharing. the current international framework place it is responsibility for any crisis on those who are most proximate to it. turkey, jordan, lebanon had far less to do with the circumstances that have led to the unraveling of syria than
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the united states for the reasons pointed to earlier. we look at the three largest refugee flows that we've seen over the last ten years, they've been out of syria, iraq, afghanistan. so it's one thing to say societies may have a threshhold. one has to come up with a framework of sharing that responsibility. that doesn't place the burden entirelyly on the immediate front line states. had there been a transfer of resources to those countries, commensurate with what they were calling for as an example, you probably wouldn't have had the onward migration that you saw enmass into europe. but until that occurred there was no migration crisis. there is no acknowledgment that there was a refugee crisis associated with syria until syrians started showing up on the shores of europe. so long as that determines resource allocations the question isn't do individual countries have a threshhold that are germany or the united states. there is a breaking point to the global south. to what extent can a lebanon of
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4 million people absorb another million and another million because greece and italy need to raise their barriers? if that's the world we want to live in fences, then we need to have an ability to enable people to survive. these aren't people to make a better life. these are people traveling to stay alive. so as long as the conditions to intain basic subsince -- subsistence, they'll continue traveling and questions of the threshhold are not going to be determinate of if they continue to try to move. >> i would like to thank all hree of you. [applause] and of course, this fabulous exhibition that sparked this conversation and so many other conversations like this are part of this exhibition. again, if you haven't seen it i hope you do walk over there and
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see it. and you come back and you talk to others about these issues. certainly this is the year to do it in the united states as we face elections in november. are we taking questions and answers? >> good evening, everybody. we are taking questions. so that concludes our lecture for the evening. it brings taos q&a. there will be two people with microphones. if you have a question please raise your hand. if your question is selected try to make your way to the end of the aisle so we don't have to reach over your neighbor. remember this is being recorded so if you can talk clearly into the microphone. first question to the right. >> i would just like to know why a large segment of the world seems to be exempt from the conversation of all these factors you've discussed tonight. like asia. how many refugees or immigrants are heading towards asia?
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are they welcome? are they not? japan i know doesn't take anybody. vietnam. china. south korea. why aren't they in the news? >> saudi arabia. kuwait. anyone like to tackle that? >> well, i can start with the point you made about the gulf countries. the gulf countries make the claim that they actually host patrioted, but not as refugees and they don't recognize resettlement as such. also, for what it's worth -- so unlike china, unlike some of the other countries, they do pay into a system of trying to at least create some resource. but anyway that isn't to excuse the gulf countries or any other parts of the world who have absolutely not participated. there are only 26 countries that participate in the u.s. resettlement program.
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one of the reasons that people don't head to other countries for example in asia for starters they do. there was a major crisis of people fleeing in boats leavingian mar and bangladeshi and trying to go anywhere. that they could land. anywhere in asia. they would have been willing to go. so in the moment of extremist around violence people flee to their immediate neighbors. they don't try to go to the united states or europe. they try to go to lebanon, thailand, the place where they hope to find some kind of safe haven. but the truth is those are the societies that are already in the global south at the breaking point in terms of their economies. managing a set of very challenging social and economic circumstances in which the likelihood that a large refugee population arriving is going to be able to integrate and maintain lives where they can actually have any hope of meaningful long term subsistence is more limited. so understandably the motivation for population that
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is are fleeing in an attempt to secure the conditions to stay alive are to move to places where the resources are more likely to be available. that isn't to say that refugee populations from asia are flowing to europe or the united states. they're trying to go to australia and at the beginning self-described what kind of constraints they're facing in that attempt. but in every case every region in the world has a set of destination points and almost always best described in terms of their relatively much greater resources. why those other countries are being required to join the resettlement program is one of the question that is what i'm suggesting a responsibility sharing framework in which international responsibilities for what are global crices are more fairly allocated would have to be part of that conversation for south korea, japan, saudi arabia, for a whole host of countries that have large economies and relatively small refugee populations. >> so although people may not
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settle there they can do more in solving this issue. >> we have another question right here to the right. >> thank you for coming. i'm hoping you can talk about the violence in central america and mexico, and also why the -- that's not being framed as a refugee humanitarian crisis in the same way when you think about the kearlts. and also related to photography, i also wonder seeing getting a reaction to violence and so called gratitude tuss photos. when does something become gratuitous versus showing the reality of what is happening. i worry sometimes that people here don't understand the level of violence that's happening. and maybe if we saw these photos more regularly on the media it might wake people up more. >> one of the fascinating things about the photography is the way in which she addresses
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the history of violence in mexico while at the same time telling the story of the migrants. if you look at her images, she's often staging her subjects in very specific locations. and if you read her captions you see her reference a particular historicing event. so one of the things she's trying to do is to remind us of the history of that violence that migrants have faced and that could possibly endure and that what it takes to do what these individual ors these people do. so that history is there. i think it's being interpreted in ways that respect, what you're saying this issue of gratuitous images of violence. which is very common in images of conflict in central america and mexico a lot of blood shed. she's trying to do something different by referencing the history without actually showing that gratuitous
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violence. >> if i could offer one additional thought. the refugee convention framed those who are entitled to protection and assistance when they flee violence around a well-founded fear of persecution to five categories, religion, race, political opinion, and nationality. and the challenges for those who flee violence like criminal gang violence and so forth to find a way to fit that framing and historicically they have not been found to fit the framing. so they're not -- although fleeing persecution, persecution that doesn't entitle them. one way to understand the challenge that i've been trying to describe to the international framers is that we have a basic instinct and understanding that anybody who is fleeing and has a fear of persecution and violence that is a risk to their life is entitled to some form of protection. there are two possible ways to rethink our framing. one would be to reopen the
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current refugee convention for negotiation. most experts agree that if we did that it would probably involve a scaling back instead of expansion. and i think what your question is motivated by a desire to see an expansion of protections. so a second strategy is to develop what is called soft law or guidance that it remain what it is but the subsidiary forms of protection be adopted by countries. the united states has something called temporary protected status which is a kind of protection from being returned that does not involve asylum or permanent refugee status but nonetheless offers protection for individuals fleeing the circumstances of deep instability. because as i mentioned the sources of global migration of forced migration are as much natural disaster or will be in the near future in climate change as violent conflict. the urgent need to come up with a framework of broader
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subsidiary protection that would be anyone who is at risk of their life is acute. so one thing is to develop that political will that involves individuals especially in a powerful country like the united states, which is convening a summit on the question of forced migration and population mobility. that could take up this topic. but given the political climate we've been discussing in our country there seems little appetite for a ground swell of support. without that leadership it's difficult to come up with the broader framework of expanded protections. >> i would also assume that when we think about migrants in central america there's issues of how that is, coming for political and economic reasons and to find a better life. but if a central american gang member is trying to kill you you're just as dead as a syrian soldier.
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but it's a good point. next question. i would want to follow up on that last question and what the professer said. because i think it's something that a lot of us don't eevep realize. last fall i was one of a group of attorneys that went to a place in texas where women and children from central america have been held there. when i came back to los angeles, by the way, most people said oh did you go to europe and help the syrians? i said no we have refugees crossing the border into the united states. just a couple of things since we're at the anenberg. i thought it was interesting they didn't let us take cameras or cell phones in so we couldn't actually take any pictures of the people. there were a few people that got freed afterwards and i took
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pictures of them and posted it. but i think that's one of the reasons that maybe it doesn't get as much press coverage as it should. the other thing is what the professer said. there's only five bases for asylum. the fact that you're going to die or some gang member is after you doesn't necessarily mean that you qualified for asylum in the united states. but having interviewed dozens of the women there that the typical story i heard was this. outside of their homes they would start a business, they would have a restaurant, they would sell clothing, they would do something like this. so let's say they started a restaurant and some guy would come there for lunch every couple of days and they knew he was a gang member. but he would say something like, isabellea, your little five-year-old girl she sozz cute. and i always see her going down this boulevard. and then she turns left to go to school. oh. and by the way, we have a
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little organization that's trying to help the community and you're doing pretty well with this restaurant. maybe if you could donate $100 a month or something, that would be good. and they knew that that meant that their daughter's life was in danger if they didn't come up with that $100 or whatever it was a month. they cross over to the united states. they don't try to sneak in. they immediately look for the first border patrol agent, turn themselves in, and then they end up in these camps. some of them at the time i went there some had been there for over a year in the camps. and i think it's something that we really should be cognizant of because they're right here in this country and there's no possible -- nobody as i frayed that central american women are going to go into a bus and blow everybody up or something like that so it's purely are we going to provide safety for
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these people or not? they're not a threat to the u.s. >> right. anyone response? >> i guess it relates to how people are described and categorized and the need to revisit that. i think with this woman who opens the door or -- who opened the store or people like them, there's a recognition that she could be just as dead by that gang member who kills her versus the syrian child who is killed by a soldier of assad. it's the same level of threat. and the feeling of i have to leave this place because i could die and my kids could doo i. -- die. even if the international community doesn't see that as a civil war. or an event that's worthy of refugee status. >> one thing to say is the idea that these camps exist and that americans don't know that they exist for the most part is not unusual. i think most countries have these kind of camps, detention
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camps, border camps, places where people can live in a semi-permanent or permanent or multigenerational state of statelessness is something unknown to most citizens of many countries but yet together they comprise, as you were mentioning, the 24th largest country in the world. so that's actually structurally a crucial part of many people's -- but if you're a citizen you're invested in not knowing these countries have these places. >> we also don't understand how our immigration court system doesn't work where you don't necessarily get representation at all and you have five, six, seven-year-olds going into that room without no lawyer at their side. >> we have our following question to the right front. >> thank you for being here today and sharing in this very, very important topic. i wrote a screen play about world war ii refugees. and put a very human face on the story of the refugee.
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and they went through very difficult circumstances. and ended up in china in shanghai to follow up your question about china. nd i guess my question per tains to how do we light a fire up under our nation to -- and it includes the story of the st. louis. i don't know if anyone's familiar with the st. louis where we turned away a boat load. people who went back to face the atrocities there. what can we do as citizens to continue this conversation? how do we get a room full of people having this conversation that will perpetuate change? >> i'm going to turn that over to much smarter people. >> there's almost no substantial organized political
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voice in the united states arguing for the united states to resettle larger proportions of refugees. i think that would be the starting point of lobbying your elected representatives. because really the numbers of the united states are willing o take in are such an absoidly small -- the people in displacement. and we're prepared to take ,000, 15,000 in crisis alleviation mode. that's really an absurdly low figure and that's the figure that's taken on the syrian case. so one could make an argument for broadening protective status to, for example, extend to central americans. they think the story that we just heard is typical and yet braugpoliti tendency to do the
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expedient thing in the face of this requires organizing. even if it just means organizing yourself to contact your elected representative. better would be organizing with your friends, community members, people who attend events like this one in order to engage in more meaningful political action. but basically it's a grassroots story of agencies and organizations and others pressing a case. at the top of our leadership at the moment the political climate is one that is really not for an improvement for the kind of response of our
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country. and it is a leading country both in the causes of producing the kind of instability but also a leading country in authoring the framework that determine how wee respond to them internationally. so i think a heightened obligation for citizens here to act. >> is talk to immigrants, talk to ref scombriss. we levi live in these paragraph level universes here in a city like los angeles people who were born abroad and come to this place. we don't know them at all. i think it's really important just to get outside and talk to folks. this is very plain kind of a no brain tore me. and then also talk to people who think the next immigrant could be the next jihadi and they're obviously wrong. and there's a lot of americans, i've been with them in recent months. americans have some pretty extreme views about the threat immigrants and refugees pose to this country. and i think conversations with
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them are equally important. so if we're not in our separate political camps as well. that may be a more important conversation to have. >> it's also important to support cult ral organizations telling these stories. because people do listen when people show up so a lot of these stories are being told in many places but people don't come. people don't buy the magazine or support it. so an easy way is to actually support these things. >> but i would guess there's probable not a lot of dommed trump supporters in this audience i must say. and i think it's important maybe there are. but i think it's important to reach out to those who you don't agree with and talk to them about these issues and talk to them about the future of this country and the place of outsiders. and if you are donald trump supporters my apologies. and you should give your views back. nyway.
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>> thank you for this very interesting talk. i have to say first i'm very grateful to see that this was sold out and to see how much interest there is on refugees in our city. i'm the chair of the refugee forum of los angeles and i wanted to respond to your question in terms of what we can do. here locally people don't mow that we have one of the largest humanitarian communities of agencies here working in los angeles. the forum has 21 agencies at this time that includes not only resettlement agencies but and service providers, school districts as well. i just want to point out that if you're interested, definitely go see the exhibit because it's very educational. but then also reach out to the
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agencies if you want to volunteer, if you want to participate in additional activities. in september there is going to be happening welcoming week starts on september 6. so look up for information on that about the events around the city. and then world refugee day every year around june 20th. thrlsatsdz a lot of public events. so i hope people stay informed and engaged. thank you for being here. >> certainly a ton of organizations with the central merican community. so no shortage of great groups here in southern california that help the refugee and imgrant population. >> all right, folks. that there cludes our lecture for the evening. if you can join me in thanking the panelists. [applause]
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> thank you. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national able satellite corp. 2016] captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption contents and accuracy. visit ncicap.org >> in a world of multiple different platforms where people consume media in time shifting campaigns really need data and analytics and technology to figure out which voters do we need to reach, what messages are most likely going to appeal to them and really how best do we reach them? how do we get our message to people and help them realize what the elections are, how do we get them to care about politics? how do we get them interested
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in our candidates? >> free to download from the apple aps store or google play. get audio coverage and upto the minute coverage. plus podcast times for our popular public affairs book and history program. stay up to date on all the election coverage. c-span's radio app means you always have c-span on the go. ♪ announcer: this week on "q&a," judicial watch president tom fitton. mr. fitton discusses his book, "clean house: exposing our government's secrets and lies."
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brian: tom fitton of judicial watch, your new book is called "clean house." why did you call it that? tom: we are looking forward. there's been a lot of concern about the corruption and washington, d.c., during the bush-obama era, because i think that is way to think about it. people think the system is broken and there is inherent corruption and everything the government does. i tend to share that point of view and i think our success points a way forward. that there is a way of holding the government to account. judicial watch is able to have these successes, in terms of getting government information and getting changes in the way government operates or the way politicians operate. and it is not all bad, and there are certain reforms and ways of approaching discussions of public policy in washington that ought to be thought about. we try to raise that in a forward-looking way. you know, what struck me about
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