Panel, which is going to focus on the implementation of the refugee act of 1980. And moderating that potential is eric schwartz, former assistant secretary of state for population refugees and migration under the obama administration. He was Senior Adviser for humanitarian affairs during the Clinton Administration on the National Security council and most importantly on the highest board. He also happens to be the president of Refugees International and hes seated next to the expresident of Refugees International. Eric . Thanks. Thank you, mark. It is a distinct pleasure to be here today and i want to thank hias, and the Carter Center for bringing us all together for this very important event. This is a critical time for us to be considering not only the refugee act of 1980, but also the very future of refugee protection in the United States and around the world. At a time when the number of people displaced by conflict, human rights violations, persecution is at the highest number in recorded history, governments around the world and in the United States in particular are using nativist rhetoric, designed to appeal to peoples fear and to encourage hostility toward refugees and others who are forced to flee. They are closing borders and making life more difficult for refugees. This panel and this day long event is timely. Our panel will consider refugee protection issues in the context of implementation of the refugee act of 1980. We have flee highly distinguished panelists. It is an added benefit for me that all are friends of mine, with whom i worked over decades on a variety of projects. Professor david martin, our first presenter, is a leading scholar on immigration. Constitutional and International Law and one of the countrys foremost authorities on Immigration Law and policy. He helped to shape gracing policy while serving in several key u. S. Government pot posts. While at the state department, weighs deeply involved in legal and policy developments related to the refugee act f 1980, the folk of todays discussion. He also held senior positions in the departments of justice and homeland security. He played major roles related to asylum. During the decade of the 1990s, and during the obama administration, he was deeply engaged in Administration Reforms relating to immigration and enforcement priorities as well as a range of key immigration issues. Our second speaker, ambassador frank loy, had many careers as a senior diplomat, as a business and nonprofit executive, as an attorney focusing on a range of topics from environmental issues, to economic affairs, to international humanitarianism. And refugees and beyond and i wont try to list all of franks jobs. I will say from 19with the pers rank of ambassador, and was deeply involved in the issues were considering today, between 1998 and 2001, he served as the u. S. Undersecretary of state for global affairs. Giving him responsibilities that oversaw the work of population refugees and migration, the success of europe to the refugee programs that he directed during the Carter Administration. Final speaker, lionel rosenblatt, a former american diplomat who spent much of his oversees diplomatic career oversees in southeast asia. Lionel is a legendary refugee advocate. When in the midst of the north vietnamee take over of vietnam, he was frustrated at the slow pace of efforts to rescue the vietnamese. He and a colleague made an unauthorized trip to vietnam to help secure the rescue of some 200 individuals. From 1999 to 2001, he served as president of Refugees International, establishing the organization as a critical ally of vulnerable populations around the world and it is a high honor for me to serve as the current steward of an organization that lionel put on the lap. The legacy of service and impact is an inspiration to us all. Our topic today, implementation of the act could cover a multitude of issues. I asked a panelist to consider in no particular order the following questions. First, what were the expectations around the 1980 refugee act with respect to both refugee admissions and asylum. Second, how did reality interfere . Both with respect to the cuban exodus and requiring response to protection needs that went outside the contours or stretched the contours of the refugee act of 1980. Third, how would you characterize and assess overall implelttion of the u. S. Refugee Admissions Program over the years. Finally, based on your observations, what lessons can we draw and bring to bear on current policy challenges . Each panelist will speak for about seven minutes, well move to questions from the audience and rather than offer my own perspectives on these issues now, i will assume the moderators prerogative and perhaps does one or two preliminary questions. With that, please join me in welcoming david martin. [ applause ] thank you. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure for me to be here. I want to say special thank you to mark and hias for putting this together. Also say a special word of tribute to president carter. I do wish he were here. His it was his emphasis on human rights policy as a candidate and early part of his presidency that inspired me to go to state department. I didnt know refugees were part of the package at the sotime i signed up for it. By the time a rived, the flow of the boat flow was enormous. I got called into that and it shaped my career. And i felt very happy to have the opportunity to work both on human rights policy and refugee policy. Let me begin with a few Simple Truths about the achievements of the refugee act and then introduce a few complexities that became apparent with implementati implementation. I want to say, first of all, the refugee act did achieve a great deal, very solidly in ways we dont think about very much anymore. Theyre not points of controversy. They accomplished the primary and i really want to say that, we need to say that, because there is so much cynicism about the effectiveness of Government Action and legislation. And this is generally overall quite a Success Story and we need to say that. To appreciate what im saying, i want to emphasize one distinction that gets lost. The refugee act dealt with, quote, refugees, in a couple in two situations that are related but they really have very different dynamics. One is the overseas refugee program, selecting people overseas in refugee camps, bringing them here after processing. That was the main focus at the time that was the crying issue in southeast asia. The second one is asylum. Enveloping people who get here on their own. It poses more clefhallenging problems in a lot of settings. It didnt receive top billing, not the central focus initially. Important to keep those separate. There is some overlaps. In analyzing issues about that, the Supreme Court failed to do that in a case very important called stevic versus ins which wound up interpreting to said a higher standard, more demanding standard than what applies when people are applying for asylum and they really misquoted some of the legislative history. It went clearly to overseas refugees was applied to asylum in reaching that decision. I regret that happened. Thats part of our framework now. Four things the refugee act achieved. First of all, it set the framework and the procedures for regular and timely decisions on resettlement and admissions. And replaced conditional entry and parole which for all the reasons we have been hearing about didnt hit very well or presented their own problems. It preserved a role for congress, last panel mentioned some things about that, by providing a very structured consultation process with demand for certain very specific kinds of information that are extremely important for anybody trying to follow and understand the refugee program. Those annual consultation documents. It did not give congress a specific voting role. It left that power with the president which thank goodness largely avoids deadlock that we have we didnt foresee the kind of Political Climate we have now. That puts the power on the president. Can he do it badly . Yes. We have evidence. Recent evidence. But legal design can take us only so far and i put im reminded of a comment made about James Buchanan that was widely regarded as the worst president that we had. Senator john sherman said the constitution provides for every accidental condition contingency in the executive except for vacancy in the mind of a president. Second, framework for helping resettle refugees, replaced a lot of special legislation that has specific programs for this group or that group. Expiration dates that had to get extended, did it on a more abstract basis. The assistance arrangement recognizes the role of ngos and engages the states. Third, the statute provided Clear Authority to offer asylum both to people already in the United States and people at the border, excludable aliens and deportable aliens is the old terminology. More importantly, with regard to asylum, point number four, it provided clear status for asylees. Before that, people got documents of various kinds, said parole and if youre not a refugee if youre not into Immigration Law business, you look at a card that says somebody is here on parole, you think of the criminal justice system. It didnt clarify what was going on. It provided clear status and importantly it provided direct mechanism, authorization for direct mechanism for people to become green cardholders after a year. Those were significant changes, mostly routine now and people dont think about it a lot. It is significant for those reasons, the refugee act was popular and celebrate d and people were disillusioned. I remember seeing editorials and opeds, we passed a new refugee act, why doesnt that solve the problem it turns out there is no magic bullet, no magic bullet to address situations when people come in very large numbers suddenly and without much advance notice or planning. Refugee issues are complicated. The field is rife with sudden emergencies that pose big logistical and operational challenges. And the whole business of refugee protection gets deeply involved and entangled with politics, international and domestic. So the mariel boat lift caused that problem after a few weeks of not really figuring out how to deal with it. Sending mixed signals about the u. S. Response, eventually it became clear that the bet flow had to be stopped. And the decision was made to stop the south bound flow using various kinds of maritime authorities. All the boats down there will be able to come back with the people that they had on board. It began to look like a finite problem. It led to 125,000 people coming. Meantime, the challenges of screening, and accommodation upon arrival were substantial. A lot of people were housed after a preliminary processing at tamiami park moved to the orange bowl. Various kinds of contrived tents. They were living outside in that way. That sounds like some things we have seen recently either here or in mexico along the southwest border. Eventually sent to military bases, especially fort chaffey in arkansas. That had a negative political impact. A young progressive arkansas governor was defeated for reelection in 1980. Thats been attributed to backlash against the refugees at fort chaffey, bill clinton. He ran six times for governor, won five out of those six, but the antiimmigrant candidate defeated him that one time in 1980 in the wake of that movement. Perhaps that mariel boat lift had a role in president carters loss. It is not so much the numbers that pose the problem. Carters vietnam initiatives to settle a lot of people there were accepted much more readily. It is the perception of lost control that provides red meat for antirefugee or antiimmigrant candidates and we have to Pay Attention to that. We have seen that kind of reaction in europe since the large movements of 2015 to 2016, the socalled merkel million ive heard it called. A backlash that gets rolling and response to perceptions of lost control leads not only to bad refugee policy, but quite dangerously it also leads to the growing strength of openly authoritarian parties, not just antiimmigrant. Hungary with victor orban is a key example. That really poses the greatest challenge to todays refugee and asylum policy. We are really facing an enormous dilemma. It is somewhat hard to be optimistic. Some figures put it in context in 1950 to 51, the Key International refugee instruments were being drafted, rural population was 2. 5 billion. In 1980, when the refugee act was passed, do it was 4. 5 billion. In 2020, the population was rural population 7. 5 billion, triple the level at the time of the 1950 convention. There will be more people on the move. And now today were getting the equivalent of a mariel boat lift total each month along the southwest border with no sign of a significant end point. The coast guard cant be deployed it deal with this, even if you wanted to. I think were at a very critical time and i worry this issue is going to tip to be crucial in the election. I come to the one last word, i come to the mexico agreement recently announced with great wariness. I do hope, it is not clear now whether thats going to be the case, i hope there will be something more, something in there that will really focus on what mexico says they want to major aid and Assistance Program in central america. There are ways that that can work. Socalled martial plan for that area. Thats a critical component and clearly the u. S. Administration has no interest in that, they have gone in the other direction. But in addition to that, some reduction in flow would ease some of the sheer logistical challenges. That are not fully appreciated along the southwest border. Four governments and especially for ngos who have done a heroic job meeting people at the bus station when they get dropped off by dhs to help them move forward. So maybe some slowdown would rehelp reduce the effectiveness of antiimmigrant or antirefugee demagoguery and help hold our hold us for a longterm and sustainable support for refugee protection. We have a long way to go. We have a real challenge today. Thank you. [ applause ] so this panel deals with the implementation of the act, not its justification or its origins. And i think it is important to recognize that you can write an act that sounds pretty damn right and pretty good on paper, but when you try to implement it, youre going to have a hard time. And let me just talk a little bit about the implementation problems that we faced immediately after the passage of the 1980 act. I say i want to be clear, i think president carters decision to push for that act and to implement it was a hugely important humanitarian decision. And he deserves every bit of credit that we heard here today. That said, we have to be realistic and say that doesnt solve all the problems and in fact it creates some. Lets talk about some of the ones that we in the state Department Bureau of refugee programs faced in the immediate aftermath of the passage of that act. The first thing was vietnam. And in vietnam we had a huge moral imperative to act, especially to protect vietnamese that had been working with us, had helped us, had sided with us, and were in the kind of difficulty you can imagine after we pulled out. So we were using the act to identify vietnamese who were eligible under the terms of the act and what we found is that we interviewed, we interviewed in the field, we interviewed boat people, we interviewed people that crossed borders. What we found is that most of the stories sounded the same. It was pretty clear there was a path of responses that went from applicant one, to applicant two, to applicant 25. And so the actual identification of persons who have a well justified fear by reason of their religion and so forth, after a while you realize that it is a little hard to tell who had that well justified fear and who doesnt. And we have to recognize that thats going to be with us as long as we have standards like that written into the law and we should, that means that youre going to have to make some very tough decisions and some of those may be negative and with consequences to the individual. If you dont do that, you are likely to be overwhelmed with applicants for status under the act that had questionable validity. So thats a first point. The second point that we dealt with in the difficulty of administering the act was the numbers of applicants and our ability to bring to the United States under the law certain number, but what do you do with the others . So we spent a lot of time with third countries, hong kong, thailand, malaysia, singapore. Trying to end with some considerable success, but not total success and not quick success, trying to get the country involved to accept some of the applicants for status that we had we had interviewed, we found them credible. But we had numbers problems in the United States that made it hard for us to take all of them into the United States. So one of the things that seems to me a National Refugee policy on the part of the u. S. Isnt going to cut it. You need similar attitudes because youre going to need them as places where refugees can go if they cant come to the United States. A second problem and i dont want to sound all that negative, but my aim here is to identify problems that are going to have to be resolved and one was involved in cambodia. The pol pot regime was so irrational, and the cambodian authorities were so irrational in whom they designated as enemies, that you couldnt find any you couldnt identify this person as having a well founded fear of going back by reason of their Group Identity or their status or their religion because that wasnt the test, the test might have been whether you wore glasses or not, so that all of a sudden, the standards that we used in that case were simply not applicable. Again, probably wont have that happen very often, but you did have it happen in the ca