Immigration and Democracy: Rebuilding Trust in a Changing Europe

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[00:00:03.00] - Hannes Einsporn

Hello everyone, good afternoon and good morning, I think, to all the online participants that are tuning in. I've heard there is a couple of hundred people that are actually joining this conversation online. And I think it's a very timely discussion that we're having, and I'm happy to share a few observations on behalf of the Robert Bosch Foundation. I'm Hannes Einsporn. I'm a senior expert working in the migration team. And a few observations from our side. I think we— what we observe, what's becoming increasingly clear, that migration is not only a very complex policy issue, but it's also a critical topic that's really testing the resilience of our liberal democracies today. And I think what we have seen now over the years and decades that migration is really a wedge issue with which parties can aim to really divide electorates and get more votes. But I think what we are seeing now, that these divisions are rarely overcome, but they're actually further entrenched. And in some countries, we see that migration policy is even used to test and at times undo the established democratic principles and justify government overreach. However, something that I interpret on the positive side that comes from More in Common that's also here today is that the research that More in Common has done in 5 countries in Europe is actually showing that there is a yearning to find common ground on migration.

And I think also— and I think it's great to have also the expertise here in the room— that I think we have the tested tools and approaches that can really help us overcome these divisions that we see and restore public trust in governments and in migration policy. And I think one example of this, and I think that's again the reference to More in Common, is really balancing compassion and control. And an example of this is a combination of border enforcement but also safe and legal pathways for people in need of protection. And I'm excited about this panel for a couple of reasons, and I will mention them very briefly. I think all of the panelists have been very open to debate their positions and views on migration, and I think all of them have been very much involved in also shaping governmental positions on migration, have been in very senior positions. I think they also look back on really a wealth of experience when it comes to migration. And I think today's discussions about restrictiveness versus openness, discussions about who belongs to our societies and under which conditions are not very new. I think they have existed for some time.

And I think also probably the panelists can really dwell on their experience from their longtime trajectory of work. And I'm also excited about the mission that I think all of them also share, in particular also Ben from More in Common, who is really with the work that he's doing at More in Common, really tries to identify what unites us rather than what's driving us apart when it comes to migration. And lastly, I want to say many thanks to the Migration Policy Institute, to Meghan, Susan, Lisa, all the others that have been really involved in in crafting this event, but also we are very grateful for the long and trusted partnership that we have with MPI. And MPI is having, in our view, many important contributions to the debates that we should be having. And I think today is really an example of this. I think this morning there has been a really fruitful discussions amongst senior decision makers on integration issues in Europe. The Integration Futures Working Group has convened, and now this evening or afternoon, we're having this important panel discussion. I think that's really a testament to MPI's important contributions. With that, many thanks, and I look forward to the discussions.

Over to you, Meghan.

[00:04:24.07] - Meghan Benton

Thank you so much, Hannes, for those kind words. It's really nice to be back in Berlin. I actually grew up in Austria, so I'm pretty proud of my I have one sentence of German that I can speak, which allows me to order a beer and a currywurst. But I am Meghan Benton. I'm Director of Global Programs for the Migration Policy Institute. For those of you who don't know, we're a think tank originally headquartered in Washington, D.C., but we have staff and collaborators in many places, including Germany, France, Australia, Colombia. And we exist to promote well-thought-out, balanced immigration policies Good governance in immigration and integration policy. So yeah, you mentioned there were a few hundred signed up. I think it was 600 signed up on the livestream, as well as people in the room today. So I just wanted to say a few housekeeping notes on how we're going to run things today. There is German translation available through your headsets that no one is wearing. All right. If needed, there's German translation available. There's also a separate player for those online, which will also have German translation. And I also wanted to flag we have several international experts in the room because we just came from a roundtable of the Integration Futures Working Group, which is an MPI-Bosch initiative.

So I'm hoping we can draw on some of their expertise during the Q&A, as well as have more of an interactive discussion and bring in as many people as possible, both here and, and online. For our online audience, we'll take a few questions from the livestream during the Q&A, and the way to do that is to email your questions to [email protected]. So it's been 10 years since the onset of the migration refugee crisis of 2015 to 2016. In many ways, this was a watershed moment for immigration policy. It clearly continues to have ripple effects today. In the years since, we were just reflecting on this in the meeting today, It's clear that publics have swung between solidarity and skepticism. They've offered often extraordinary welcome to some groups while also expressing deep unease about how immigration has managed. And then also in the last decade, it's really been punctuated by overlapping crises, economic shocks, wars on Europe's doorstep, pandemic, inflation, and immigration has got entangled with, with all of these. Populist movements then have been quick to, to link migration to everyday kitchen table issues, rising housing costs, crowded classrooms, hospital wait times, street crime. So immigration is rarely the main cause, but it's often been a convenient scapegoat.

Then you have the information ecosystem and the attention economy, where social media prioritizes people who shout the loudest, or have the most extreme messages over truth or complexity. And this has kind of amplified these effects. So we can make all the nuanced arguments we want about the importance of immigration in the long term to labor markets, to GDP, but these are so easily drowned out by sensationalist soundbites, by TikTok videos. And I think more fundamentally, often these overarching arguments fail to account for immigration's uneven effects. So underneath all of these averages, there's often a story of winners and losers. So all of this leaves mainstream politicians on the horns of a dilemma. Do they try to emulate the tones and the arguments of the far right, emphasizing control at all costs, even if it undermines core integration or humanitarian principles? Or do they try and push back, call out misinformation, but then risk alienating publics who already feel that their concerns are being dismissed? Do they stay silent and risk being called passive? It's a sad policy, but it's a sad reality that policy that tries to walk the delicate line of explaining these complex trade-offs and compromises doesn't break through compared to quick fixes.

But, as I'm sure we'll hear, the stakes really couldn't be higher. So nativist politicians, they don't just want to reshape the immigration landscape, they pose a threat to democratic institutions themselves. And, you know, the United States is in very many ways a different place, and one of the virtues of the electoral systems and coalition negotiations we have in Europe, however arduous, is that there is a kind of moderating effect when populists end up in government, but there are really important lessons here about the risks of not getting on top of the immigration issue. The future of democratic resilience is now bound up with the way that we talk about and manage immigration, and that is what we're going to discuss today. We're going to try and understand the relationship between immigration policy and the health of democracy. How can we regain control of migration without being cruel? How can we show publics that we're listening while also seeking to rectify misinformation? And what will the future bring? Are we on the cusp of a shift in public attitudes as demographic decline and labor shortages begin to bite? Societies are aging. Welfare systems will strain without immigrants.

Businesses are already struggling to find the right workers. Will this affect public opinion, or will publics continue to be affected by the kind of politics that widens the gulf between Necessity and electoral appetite. So we have three really great experts here today who are gonna approach this question from slightly different vantage points. Ben Mason-Sucher works for More in Common, as Hannes already spoke about. That's a nonprofit with a mission to understand and counter polarization in society. And he's gonna present some new research on how this is playing out in different countries. Then we have Frank Sharry here, United States. He's the founder and former executive director of America's Voice, which is an immigration advocacy organization. He's also a fellow at British Future in the UK, UK-based think tank, and he advised the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. And then finally, I'm sure many of you know Ulrich Weinbrenner. He was the director general for migration, refugees, and return policy at the Ministry of Interior until earlier this year. This year. So thank you everyone for joining us, and over to you, Ben.

[00:11:13.04] - Ben Mason-Sucher

Thank you, Meghan, for the introduction. Thank you for the invitation to speak. Thank you all for coming, uh, also to those of you online. I will say at the start, I'll try to keep my remarks at the beginning quite brief, so I'm not going to linger on every slide, but the slides will be available online afterwards, so don't feel you have to note down or photograph everything. So, as Meghan said, More in Common, we are a nonprofit, and our mission is to understand and counter the dynamics of polarization and division we're seeing in our societies, and that starts with research to understand the way people think about divisive topics, such as migration. So we do a lot of representative polling. We also do a lot of focus groups. And what we're seeing— well, so to frame our discussion this evening, I'd just like to present some very recent findings from across different European and North American countries. And with migration viewed in the long term, what we see is this topic, the salience of which goes up and down over time. and we're in a period at the moment in lots of countries where it's high salience, it's on people's minds, and there are high levels of anxiety and concern, dissatisfaction.

One data point that captures this overall negative sentiment, this is recent polling in 5 EU countries, and you can see in all of them, people at the moment are more likely, uh, more prone to see costs to immigration than benefits. And in our research, we're trying to dig into this and get behind it, understand what are the factors that are driving these opinions, what are the principles, the values that lead people to form their opinions on migration. And based on our work over several years in different countries, we see the same themes cropping up again and again, which we've— condensed, synthesized down to what we call the 5 Cs. We think that this is a framework which allows us, or a guide to the factors that are most important in understanding how people think about migration, people's key priorities when it comes to migration. Or to put it differently, if we're talking today about building or rebuilding trust in migration systems, I'd suggest that these are the measures on which that's going to succeed or fail. So, what I'd like to do now is just quickly go through the 5 Cs one by one, starting with competence.

So, what we're seeing is high levels of— or low levels of confidence in the institutions, the structures, that manage migration in different countries. So when we ask the question, which actors are doing a good or a bad job with regard to migration, it's the EU and national governments score especially poorly in all countries, local government and NGOs somewhat better, but still negative overall. So I think part of what we're seeing is a general mood, a zeitgeist at the moment, which is more anti-establishment, suspicious of government across the board, especially following the pandemic. I think this also tells us something interesting when we're trying to interpret the growing anti-migration sentiment we're seeing in lots of places, that a significant part of it isn't primarily xenophobic or about personalized antipathy towards migrants themselves, but rather a lack of confidence that migration will be well managed in the interests of society. Then we come on to the related principle of control. So here we're talking about a sense that people have or don't have that migration is being managed in a way that's orderly, that's fair, that's following rules, as opposed to chaos. And what we see again and again in every country is that this sense of control is hugely important, not only to conservatives, but to the vast majority of the public.

One illustration of this is, so if you ask the question about immigration levels, whether people would like to see them go up or down or stay the same, we see in most countries a tendency people want to see immigration numbers go down. If you ask the question, and we've asked this one in many countries by this point, "What's most important to you with regard to migration policy? That immigration goes up, or it goes down, or that we have control over who does and doesn't come to the country?" You can see remarkably consistent across the countries, this sense of control is a higher priority to most people. Than simply reducing the numbers. And that explains why forms of migration which people perceive as disorderly, which for people stand for a loss of control, become such a focus of attention, even when they're often a fairly minor part of the overall migration picture. So this is data from the UK. As you can see, across the political spectrum, far more— or people are far more likely to say that stopping irregular arrivals on small boats is more important than decreasing overall migration numbers. And to put that into context, small boats account for something like 7% of total arrivals to the country at the moment.

So when we're talking about, uh, creating a migration system which can command public trust, this sense of control, uh, is centrally important and we can get on to talking about what that means in practice. Uh, a caveat about what it doesn't mean, uh, the desire for control does, uh, translate into, into support for quote unquote tougher measures, tough policies. But for most people, that— I'll come back to that. I've got my order of my slides a bit mixed up. For most people, that stops short of support for policies which are seen as actually cruel or inhumane, such as the US policy of family separations. You can see that gets minority support even amongst conservative voters. The slide that I skipped over, one thing we found in several countries is the most progressive groups in society can often be outliers in their perceptions of this point of control. This is data from our US polling, and you can see that the group that we call progressive activists are alone in rejecting the idea that immigration is out of control. And that's not to say who's right or wrong on the issue, but I think for those of us working in this area, it's important to be aware that a lot of civil society and activist groups working in this space are prone to be out of step with the population at large.

Moving on to contribution, it's very clear in our European, our recent European research that that especially the economic contribution of migrants is perceived and carries weight even amongst groups in society who on other counts are more skeptical of migration. We asked the question, regardless of your overall views on migration, what do you think are the most important benefits, the positives that come from immigration? This is the data from Italy, but actually in all 5 countries where we asked the question, the same 2 answers came top, and both of them concern workforce participation. And you can see that comes considerably ahead of other more cultural dimensions. I said before that if you ask people about the levels of migration, whether they should go up or down, we see a tendency of people wanting them to go down. In Germany at the moment, 58% of people, uh, respond that they'd like to see a reduction in overall migration. If you frame the question around workforce, around specific professions, you get a very different picture. So we listed a number of professions and we asked, should the number of people coming to Germany from these professions increase or decrease?

And you can see for every single group, every profession that we asked, there is a significant majority at least for keeping numbers the same, if not actually increasing them. By community, we're talking about what happens after migrants arrive. So, we're talking about different perspectives on integration as well as the changes people see in the places that they live as a consequence of immigration. And so of the 5 principles, this is the one that's most changeable by national context or by external events. So for example, in France, you have a very particular discussion about Islam. In the UK, there's a lot of focus at the moment on the use of hotels to house asylum seekers. In Germany, we still see a strong focus on security following terrorist attacks. And these are all things that we can get into in the discussion. For now, I'd just like to share one graphic pertaining to integration and the importance people place on integration. This is from our German polling. We asked firstly whether people would support a deportation policy which was, in German, konsequent, which is a little bit difficult to translate, but sort of tougher, more rigorous deportation policy?

And you can see an overwhelming majority, including amongst progressive groups, supported it, 89% of people in total. We asked the same people in the same survey about people who had no legal right to remain in Germany, but who were well integrated and in work or in formal training, and said, "Would you support deporting those people?" you can see an almost complete reversal, uh, and an overwhelming majority of the same people saying, "No, those people should be, uh, allowed to stay." So, it's not that people's legal status is irrelevant. People have views on it. Uh, but I think this shows that for most people, the importance placed on, uh, integration and community outweighs, uh, considerations of legal status. Finally, compassion. So what we see here is, on a basic level, the value, the principle of compassion, helping people in need, is widespread across the population. For example, when it comes to refugee policy. Again, this is data in Germany. And when we tested the statement, "It should be possible for people fleeing war or persecution to find sanctuary in other countries," around 3/4 of people agreed with that basic proposition. But we also see that this willingness in theory, or the desire to help in theory, doesn't automatically translate into support for humanitarian policies in practice.

And so, when we ask people whether Germany should "Would you, in fact, be taking in refugees?" Only about half as many people said yes. So, we're seeking to understand what's going on there, understand that difference between theory and practice. I come to compassion last on the list, not because it's the least important, far from it, but because when compassion— when discussions are focused narrowly on compassion, that is when they're most likely to get stuck with people talking past each other. And what we would say is you can get further when discussions of compassion are set within a broader context in relation to the other principles that I've been talking about already, about control and contribution. To illustrate— to illustrate that point, here is some data again from the US. This was during the presidential election campaign last year, where you can see 60% of Americans supported ending all refugee admissions into the country until the perceived crisis at the US border was resolved. Here we're not— seeing an absence of compassion, but we're seeing a conditionality, people being open to compassion when the control that I was talking about earlier is ensured. So that was a very brief tour through the 5 Cs, and we can talk about it a bit more, but my overall message that I wanna give is building trust in migration systems isn't dependent on a single factor or key, but rather it's about being able to credibly speak to and address the public's priorities across these, across these 5 principles and finding ways to combine and to reconcile and to balance them.

And just to finish, Before we talk about what that means in practice, I just want to show some data that I think gives grounds for hope, or shows that this is possible and that there is broad support available for a moderate path on migration. So, we asked this question in several countries, which approach people would support to migration policy. Only border enforcement, only improved legal pathways into the country, or a combination of both. And you can see in every country, the highest level of support was for this mixed approach, which on the one hand ensures control, but also creates access in a controlled legal way. More interestingly, even if we only look at supporters of right-wing populist parties, we see significant support for this kind of, for this, mixed moderate approach. So I'll leave it there. To conclude, I would say that migration, yes, it remains complex, it remains challenging, but it doesn't have to be as difficult as we sometimes think, and there is grounds for hope, and there is, I think, common ground on which we can rebuild trust. This QR code is the link to the slides for anyone who's interested, and look forward to the discussion.

Thank you.

[00:27:22.17] - Meghan Benton

Thank you so much, Ben. Thank you, everyone. And, you know, just to share with you all, I have long been a fangirl for More in Commons research, but I love the 5 Cs. I think it's It's like it's giving empirical research and a framework to things that we've been talking about for a really long time in this space. It's— the public's more nuanced than we often make out. They want balance. They want pathways and enforcement. They want compassion and control. But they don't want things that are performatively cruel. They don't want theater. And they also don't want things that place unlimited demands on hospitality. What I want to push you on a bit, and I'm going to push the panel on, is how do we translate this into actual policies? You know, what might actually restore public trust? How do we make this actionable in the policymaking realm at a moment of lots of very restrictionist policies being brought forward? So I'm going to pose like 3 questions to each panelist, and then I'm going to involve you all in this discussion, because I want to hear from you too. So, first Ulrich, I was just wondering what your reactions are.

You know, it's been 10 years since Angela Merkel said, "Wir schaffen das," we can do this. Does that phrase still resonate? And what have you learned about the kind of interaction between public trust and immigration policy in the last 10 years?

[00:28:54.04] - Ulrich Weinbrenner

Thank you, Meghan, for the question. So, first of all, It's not the first time that I'm attending one of the MPI's events and I'm sitting on panels and at this Robert Bosch installation, but it's the first time that I'm no more active as a Director General for Migration, but the first time I am an ex-expert, hopefully, at least a former Director General for Migration. I started in this kind of business in 2016. For 2 years I did integration, and from 2018 on until May 25, so about 4 months ago, I was Director General for Migration in the Ministry of the Interior. And with the new government, with the new minister, Minister Dobrindt, he decided to start, as you might have heard about, to start a new migration policy. And together with that, it comes to choose new manpower to head the Director General for Migration, the Ministry of the Interior, and then he used his capacity in— so firing, one would say— releasing workforce at least to change the leading personnel, and that's what he did. And that's why I'm new. I'm in a different capacity here now than I've been several times before. So the question 2015, Wir schaffen das.

That's 10 years on. That was on the 31st of August, 2015. That was a few days before we had the events at the station in Budapest when— that was in the early days of September, 6th of September. So that is something that Merkel said in the beginning of what we now call a migration crisis, when the real development and the real number of people arriving in the second half of 2015 to Germany in the 10,000s per day have not yet taken place. So that has to be kept in mind. And I looked at the overall press conference when she said that, and that was something that you hardly can criticize. And what you would criticize is a head of government saying, oh, We are overwhelmed. We would never manage to do something, to manage a beginning crisis at this stage. But nevertheless, this term stood very much for the policy that was carried out in the, at least under Merkel and last government as well, when I was Director General for Migration. So we have a very vivid conversation now in Germany I personally would say very briefly, it goes without saying that in the beginning of September 2015, when we had the refugee welcome movement in Germany, we even had the Bild-Zeitung, which is the most popular tabloid, who was supporting the activity called Refugees Welcome.

And there is a picture of the then former former Deputy Head of Government, Sigmar Gabriel, sitting in the Deutsche Bundestag with a pin from the Bild-Zeitung depicting "refugees welcome." That was in fall 2015. So there was a broad, broad feeling of doing something in civil society and to let people in and to help them. That ended, I think one can really say, On New Year's Eve in Cologne, where we had criminal atrocities against women mostly, not necessarily carried out by refugees who had been coming in the month before, but rather by migrants mainly from the Maghreb countries and so on. But that changed really maybe from one day to the other, the overall apprehension of the migration and what happened. So, it's a very broad development. What always is the main aspect is we're talking about migration, but we are all aware that it's so diverse and we have so many groups and necessities of migration coming to Germany, but mainly we are discussing asylum migration and focused by security, really severe security instances on the bad aspects desperately. It's today that the guy who killed 3 people in Solingen has been convicted for a lifelong sentence.

That was in August last year, and that is something which had, I think, under an influence on public opinion which you can hardly underestimate. And all the deeper questions and the deeper consequences migration have are very hard to mention and to bring into the broader discussion when you have such an event. And last remark from my side, and I think that the campaign which we had in the last Bundestags election for the Federal Republic government, which was very much migration-focused by the Christian Democrats, and reducing migrations and cutting off borders was very much a consequence of a sequence of these kinds of events which happened in Solingen, in Mannheim, in Aschaffenburg, and in other countries. And that's what they felt has to be done in order to give an answer to this a huge problem.

[00:34:38.24] - Meghan Benton

Thank you so much. You've given us a really helpful diagnosis, I think, of some of the factors behind what we at MPI have called hospitality fatigue, including these security and criminality issues. And in a moment, I want to come back to ask you a little bit more about the sort of government response to some of that stuff and the communication strategies and the role that that played. Let me just turn to Frank now. I'm sure a lot of us in this room will be very interested to hear your reflections on what's happening on the other side of the Atlantic. And I wanted to start with a bit of a retroactive question, which is, what do you think that the Biden administration got right? What did it get wrong? And what explains some of the public backlash that we saw in the US?

[00:35:28.05] - Frank Sharry

Yeah, let's not mince words. America's democracy is poised on a knife's edge. There's lots of optimism that, oh, the institutions will hold, the guardrails will stop Trump's ceaseless power grabs. I'm not so optimistic. The guardrails are not working. The Supreme Court is ruling in favor of Trump 90% of the time. The Congress led by Republicans is supine and they're trying to rig the election that's coming up in 2026. So we're in deep trouble, which I think is a cautionary tale for all of us, which is that if we don't get immigration right, we can pave the way for the ascendancy of extreme radical right-wing populism. And that's what we're going through in America. Joe Biden is a good man. I thought he was a good president, but he wasn't fit for this moment. And when it came to asylum issues and the surge of arrivals at the southern border, it was arguably his biggest failure. I worked on the campaign for Kamala Harris, and I can tell you that while the main issue in the campaign, of course, was cost of living and inflation, immigration was the issue that drove swing voters the most. Swing voters voted in favor of Trump over Harris on immigration and border security by 20%.

As, I mean, I'm sorry, overall it was 20%. Swing voters, often the late deciding, voters that really turned the election, it rose to 42%. So how did they get it so wrong? Look, it wasn't that Joe Biden didn't cause the surge to the border. It was a post-pandemic surge that had a lot to do with push factors from Latin America. But the response was unfortunately an inability to do what the American people wanted, which was to figure out how to gain or even impose some sort of control, even as we exercise compassion. And the arrivals at the border averaged over 2 million a year for the first 3 years. How'd you like to report that to your bosses at the ministry? And the Republicans pounced. I mean, Trump was going with it. They called it the Biden border crisis. They called Democrats the party of open borders. And instead of contesting that narrative, Biden wanted to talk about anything but immigration and the border. He wanted to talk about infrastructure and jobs and economic growth and civil rights, but not immigration. What that did is it just allowed the narrative space in the country on a top issue to be filled by Trump and the Republicans.

And so the strategy advised by consultants, "Joe, don't talk about immigration, it's their issue, it's a loser," turned out to solidify the narrative so profoundly that Biden was indifferent or incompetent when it came to border security, that in year 4, and it's an underreported and underappreciated story, in year 4, my friends in the White House figured out how to bring the numbers down in a way that was consistent with our international obligations. An 81% drop in border arrivals over a 12-month period. But it was too late to make a difference in the election. In the focus groups that we were holding, saying, "Do you see that what the strategy's working?" You know, refugees can come in legally, but people who cross the border illegally are returned unless they're hardship cases. "That's an election year trick," people said. "That's a stunt. We don't believe you. And if we did believe you, why didn't you do it earlier?" So politically it was a disaster. It did contribute to the election of Donald Trump, and look what we have now. So I am now on a— I'm currently working in the UK where there's a similar dynamic, a small boats crisis that's getting extraordinary attention.

It's the number one issue in the UK these days according to recent polling. And Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, I mean, they're acting like the, the next prime minister has already won the case because they predict that the Labor Party can't get it right. Well, we can talk more about how to apply control and compassion in practice. It's not just a narrative technique, it's a governing principle. And it's not, and I say this to my progressive friends, it's not a tawdry trade-off, it's an essential synthesis. I have seen it over 40 years as an activist. You unlock compassion by asserting competent control. And if you don't have competent control, what you unlock is not only chaos, but an anti-immigrant fervor that can overwhelm a longstanding democracy.

[00:41:16.16] - Meghan Benton

Thank you, Frank. Oh, sorry. Thank you. And can I just ask a very quick follow-up? For those of us who are not tracking what's happening on the other side of the Atlantic that closely, what are some of the immigration actions that you think this room should be aware of and be tracking?

[00:41:35.18] - Frank Sharry

Okay, you're gonna watch a man break— have his heart break as I talk. The most stunning thing that's happening, and I'm sure you see the news reports and the videos, is that masked agents agents are roaming the streets, targeting people because of their ethnicity or the way they speak, arresting them, and removing them from the country without meaningful due process. It is stunning to see what's happening. Stephen Miller, the White House— the president's assistant, who I suspect will go down in history as one of the most evil men of this century, is directing an aggressive strategy of attempting to remove 1 million immigrants from the country, to slash refugees and asylum, slash legal immigration, because they want to achieve negative net migration for the first time in 60 years in America. But the cruelty is the point. The intimidation is the purpose, and the idea is to terrify people into submission or self-deportation. And this is a chapter in America that I hope we recover from, but we may not. It's certainly one that is damaging our soul.

[00:43:05.04] - Meghan Benton

Thank you. Thank you, Frank. So we've heard the— the cautionary tale, and I just want to ping it back to you, Ben. I threatened to push you a little bit on what the framework looks like, but give us an example of policies that Europeans could introduce or have introduced that do a good job of balancing those 5 elements.

[00:43:29.01] - Ben Mason-Sucher

I'm going to resist a bit being put on the spot, but in, in the sense that our role at More in Common, or our work is to understand public opinion. Translating that into policy and program is work done by— You mean that's my job? Well, some organizations have migration policy in their name. With that being said, I think, I mean, taking as a starting point the last slide that I showed, I think There seems to be clear support for a balanced approach which is enabling on one side whilst ensuring the control and the contribution which people want. And one policy that we see polling well, we're not seeing it, well, we're seeing a few pilots across Europe, but one particular policy is labor pathways for refugees. And we, so, I think most people in this room know what I'm talking about, but these are programs where there's managed resettlement of refugees, people with a valid claim to protection, with a particular professional profile, combined with certain measures to facilitate labor market integration. And when we describe that, in a polling question in non-technical terms, we see really high levels of support, especially— and if we compare it to a baseline of how many people want refugees to come to the country, it's much higher.

I think from memory, in Germany, it goes from 36% generally in favor of refugee intake to over 70% who would support a refugee labor pathway when described. So that I would offer as an example of something which shows that compassion is there, or support for compassion is there, when the control and the contribution are very clearly articulated and embodied in the policy.

[00:45:37.17] - Meghan Benton

Just a very quick follow-up, if I may, just because I genuinely wanna know the answer to the question. How does that compare to, polling generally in support of labor migration? I mean, I'm really struck in Germany that in some ways the economic, the demographic argument around immigration has been won. Is support for refugee labor pathways higher than that because it includes a protection element?

[00:46:03.05] - Ben Mason-Sucher

It's comparable. I mean, we haven't done side to side, but I think that Support for refugee labor pathways is certainly in the same ballpark to different kinds of labor migration.

[00:46:26.07] - Meghan Benton

Super interesting, thank you. I want to pick up on some of the points around messaging, because Ulrich, you spoke about what happened in Köln, in Cologne. And my understanding is that it was partly the lack of willingness of the government to address it head-on that almost exacerbated the challenge. So I wanted to ask a little bit about how mainstream parties, how governments should respond to rise of the far right and some of these developments. How should we tackle the rise of the— AFD in Germany, for instance, should we be signaling control? Should the government be emulating some of the more restrictive measures or pushing back on them? And what's the role of communication in all of that?

[00:47:17.10] - Ulrich Weinbrenner

So generally speaking, communication is an extremely relevant aspect. On the other hand, you cannot communicate a policy which doesn't exist. So it all comes down down to what you're doing, and then the second aspect is trying to properly communicate what you're doing and then aiming at getting the necessary political support in the public opinion. I think what the— my understanding of the actual government is very much migration policy is a restrictive one, is the There are some measures who have been agreed upon in the coalition agreement who have been carried out, which is the closing of the borders in a way which is not 100% closing, but at least that the rejection of entry as well applies for asylum seekers. The numbers are not very high. It's about, very roughly speaking, 5 per day, which is about 150 per month. Month, so which is in the 4 months since the government exists, about 600, which is more a symbol than really a huge number of the people who are now rejected although they are asking for asylum. That has not been the case with the former government, but at least that is supposed to be a strong signal, and the numbers are generally going down.

That trend has already started late last year, not only when this government took over in the early days of May, but it's nevertheless— it's considerable. And then we have some legal acts, for example, that the family reunification scheme for people with temporary protection— with subsidiary protection, sorry, mainly from Syria, was stopped. We had 1,000 per month, and that was stopped. And then we had humanitarian programs concerning people from Afghanistan and from other countries, from Belarus, from Russia, who have mainly been stopped. Afghanistan is now about to be restarted, but only in limited number and only if people are successful before caught because they have a legal decision that they are allowed to enter Germany and to get a visa issued. So there is a number of measures, but the overall perception, as much as I feel it, is when you look at the German government 123 days after it was formed, lots of discussions, expectations who have been met, but foreign policy, when it comes to the role the Bundeskanzler Merz plays in the international policy, be it the Ukrainian war or be it the situation in the Middle East, that is quite positively appreciated.

And the other aspect where they say we have delivered is migration, at least for the time being. And all the other things, public health system and all the labor market and so on and so forth, that is still something where it is even open what exactly the ways would be. So that is the public perception as far as I see it now. I think there is something to it, and what they are doing is, to come to your question, Meghan, is not emulating regulating, but showing a certain toughness on migration. Mainly, the German small boats is the asylum seeker entering at the border. It's not that high on the agenda like in the UK, as far as I see it, but nevertheless, there is always a symbol which, which is standing for the overall complex discussion on migration. There is a lot of attention paid to the way that Denmark choose. They have a Social Democrat government. We have been very actively cooperating with the colleagues in Copenhagen, having the EU presidency now, and, for example, For example, the Danish Minister of Migration, Bek, has been a guest to the Bavarian Christian Democrats, CSU, who meet regularly in January in some remote Bavarian place to have a few days' discussion.

They invited Bek to— that was not publicly that much appreciated, to give them hint and advice on migration. So that is something that they are looking at, and the Danes have been, as far as I see, the only ones who had a right-wing populist party of about 20%, and now they went down to 5, 6, 7, so that is really the only country in Europe where we have really a successful migration policy, has been a very restrictive one, and there are lots of people saying that's no more social democrat, but at least, if you look If you look at the polls, if you look at the political results, they have been quite successful in doing so. And the Danes have already been active in Africa for third country schemes. They have discussion— discussions with Kagame in Rwanda without any concrete success by now. That will be carried out on the European level, these external dimension aspects, I think, which are extremely important, but that is the way I think the government tries to show to the public that we are regaining control. That is the main point, I think, in migration, actually regaining control at the border when it comes to asylum seekers.

[00:53:23.07] - Meghan Benton

Thank you. That's really interesting, and thanks for sharing the Danish lesson We were just discussing that earlier a little bit, that it was a restrictive policy, but one which was internally coherent, that made sense, and that joined up values alongside some of those control signaling elements. Frank, I'm just going to push you a little bit about whether you think the Democrats' failure was one of messaging or one of policy. And then, you know, you talked about working on the Kamala Harris campaign. When we think about messages that work on the campaign, like, what did you see as the most effective campaign message that came from either camp last fall?

[00:54:09.24] - Frank Sharry

The Biden administration in the early days had a terrific message, but much like Ulrich said, if you don't have the policy to back it up, it falls flat. The message was that we're building a system that's safe, orderly, and humane. And people were seeing video images and front pages that were 0 for 3 on safe, orderly, and humane. It was none of the above. So it fell flat. And the branding of it as the Biden border crisis was in the headlines, not safe, orderly, and humane. In fairness, the Biden administration didn't have the capacity to manage the huge numbers. And they were muddling through trying to figure out how do we deal in a way that's consistent with our laws, consistent with our treaty obligations, consistent with our desire to be different than the Trump cruelty of Trump 1.0. And it took 3.5 years for them to build a system that worked. And it's quite remarkable to just talk about it for a second because I think it also relates to the small boats crisis and what labor is dealing with on it. And it's why I'm involved in— I've been involved in both. But what the Biden administration finally did was it combined international cooperation, especially with Mexico, but also with other countries and a meaningful partnership with that.

Number 2, they narrowed asylum eligibility for those who crossed the border without authorization so that most people were immediately returned back to Mexico, part of the deal with Mexico. And they opened and expanded legal pathways for the same groups. So the four major source countries were Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, particularly Venezuela. They opened up legal routes of 77,000 legal slots a month. Right? Within a year, the number of irregular arrivals at the US-Mexico border from those 4 major sending countries was reduced by 91%. In other words, can we protect refugees? Yes, through safe, legal, and orderly channels. Yes. Can we get, regain control of our border? Yes. Can we hopefully build public confidence that we know how to mind the store, we didn't have enough time to do that. So, you know, Harris did what Biden didn't wanna do. She leaned into the issue. She made it a big part of her 107 days, but it was just too late. It was just too late. And Biden's lack of credibility and her unwillingness to distance herself from him made it difficult for them to distinguish. Now, let's just look quickly at the small boats crisis.

Just recently, France and the UK came up with an agreement, a routes for and returns pilot project. And we're issuing a report at British Future next week where we're basically saying, go big or go home. If they don't ramp up safe routes, legal organized routes to make it so that the incentive structure changes and migrants get in the queue rather than in the small boat, it will fail. But what happened in the United States and the reason those numbers came down so dramatically from 250,000 a month in December 2023 to 44,000 a month in December 2024, that 81% drop, it was because migrants said, I'm going to apply for the legal pathway. Where I have a chance, not a guarantee, instead of going to the border where I don't have much of a chance. And the business model of the smugglers collapsed, not entirely, but significantly. That's what control and compassion looks like in an operational sense. And if the UK government has the guts to go big and not to play it small, I think they have a chance to smash those, smash the business model of the smugglers who are currently sending people on dangerous journeys across the channel.

[00:58:32.12] - Meghan Benton

Thank you, Frank, for pointing to those outcomes, but also some of the issues with the sequencing and the fact that in many ways it was too late to win the argument on public trust.

[00:58:42.23] - Frank Sharry

Yeah, I mean, just briefly, they had to scale it and integrate it in a way that was It's tricky. It's not like they had the answer and they just didn't do it. They had to figure out how to do it. And every country probably has their own approach in terms of, you know, making sure that it's tailored to— so I'm not saying this is a one-size-fits-all, but the idea of control and compassion so that refugees are protected, but that the irregular chaos is reduced sharply, That is a combination that can rebuild confidence and gain the kind of sustainability and durability of public support.

[00:59:21.24] - Meghan Benton

Yeah, thank you. Ben, I know you don't want me to push you on policy development, but I'm going to push you on messaging. You talked a bit about values also in the roundtable today, what's—

what's a values-based way for a politician to message? I mean, we've been calling out the UK government moment a bit here. If you were going to give advice to the Labor government in the UK right now, for instance, are they spending too long chasing headlines? And what's the way in which they can— they, any other politicians— promote more of a values-based vision that draws on the 5 Cs?

[01:00:00.24] - Ben Mason-Sucher

On the chasing headlines point, I think staying in the UK but going back a few years, it's instructive to look at how people thought about the Rwanda policy of the last Conservative government. It's, it's now been ditched, but this was a plan to, to deport irregular arrivals to the UK to Rwanda and process their asylum claim there. And what we saw when we tested this in polling and focus groups was people were pretty skeptical, even Conservative groups, even people who supported the principle wanted to get immigration down. And those people weren't very swayed by the arguments about human rights, which a lot of the activists were promoting. What we heard was people just didn't think it would work. They said, "This isn't serious. This is a gimmick that is not thought through." So, to your point about chasing headlines, I think— I think it starts with taking people seriously. And you were talking, and Ulrich was talking about the Danish model, which contains a mixed approach, but is based in a coherent and plausible set of values and principles. In terms of communicating that, I would say start by, addressing people on this level of values or people's expectations, using the language, I think, of the 5 Cs to engage.

Well, okay, well, what can we agree on? We want a system that's orderly, that's fair, that's just. Let's talk about how we're going to do that. I think framing disagreement or emphasizing the disagreements about migration policy are, are often not about differences in values, but difference in priorities. Compassion, control, you know, these things that I said are held across the population. There is broad consensus, but the ways in which they interact are what we should be talking about. And— And I think people who try to instrumentalize migration, if you look at the rhetoric of the populist right, it's often about creating binaries. Do we wanna help refugees or do we want order on the border? One or the other, which one are you going to choose? And so I think, a lot of the challenges is about challenging, rejecting those false binaries, saying and showing how it doesn't have to be a choice between those two things. You can have both.

[01:03:02.14] - Meghan Benton

Thank you. And the final question I wanted to pose to the panel is encouraging them to look into a crystal ball and tell me what the next 5 years may hold. And I wanted to start with Ulrich a little bit. What do you see the next 5 years as likely to hold for Europe? You know, we have the implementation of the Migration Pact that countries are currently mired in. We also have increasingly conversations about the future of the European Convention on Human Rights, possibly even the future of the Refugee Convention. It's possibly a moment where lots could change, but equally lots could stay the same. So what's your sense?

[01:03:47.17] - Ulrich Weinbrenner

So first of all, when it comes to the international law, the Convention of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention and so on, I think that is very hard to predict. And I, although there is discussion on that and on the court rulings as well, I think there are very clever ideas, thoughts by Daniel Thym on that, but that's— I think that's very hard to predict whether that will be of any consequences in the years to come. But the main thing will be the implementation of the pact. That is something that the European Union has been looking for for years and years to find a solution to the migration challenge and depends very much a number of aspects whether that will be successful or not. First of all, it comes— the first aspect is the implementation of the legal obligations, which is— okay, I thought it was okay. When it comes to implementing the border procedure, this kind of stuff, there is— Germany has to provide for 370 74 places in the border procedure only at the airports, which is already something we have to more or less establish from scratch, except for Frankfurt, while other countries— Italy has 2,100, and so that's really a challenge in order to organize that properly.

But that's only one of the aspects, of the numerous aspects of the There is a migration cycle, really machinery going on in prediction of migration and solidarity and all this kind of stuff. It's about to be implemented and it has to be done, the legal aspects, in June 26th. But there is something which comes to it, for example, that the European Commission has to play a stronger role than it actually does when it comes to imposing the European policy. Policies in all the countries. For example, the Dublin system is by a number of EU countries, mainly Italy and others, they have— it's not properly carried out, partly it's ignored. So that is— the pact will never work if that will be the case once the pact is implemented in— after June next year. On the other hand, all the the different border procedures will only work with the necessary cooperation by the countries of origin. For example, when you have people coming from a country below 20% acceptance rate, mainly Bangladesh, Tunisia, whatever, you have now with the border procedure on the European soil a number of measures in order to to have a quick check, to have a quick judicial check of a negative decision, and then these people have— after half a year, they have to leave the border procedure and should be returned to their country of origin.

If there is no cooperation with these countries, they have to be left and have to be allowed entering the European soil. So, if that doesn't work, the whole pact will most likely not work. So we will— that is something that I think we will see in the course of '27/'28 after a certain period of implementation and then hopefully it will be successful. The numbers will be reduced and the procedures will be speeded up and there will be the necessary solidarity, which is an extremely important aspect of— will be provided by member states. That is something that Germany will be asked for in order to grant solidarity, to take over refugees who have a right to enter the European Union, for example, from Greece. Greece is quite a small country with 1.8% of the European overall economic and population, while we have 18 and something. So that is really not something you can only leave to the countries of first entry, although that is the Dublin system. But that is something that has to be discussed in Germany as well. And I think that is the main aspect. So not 5 years, but maybe in 3 years with some extra activities on the European— by Europe on the international cooperation with countries of origin and countries of transit and the necessary steps of the European Commission to speed up and to more focus on the role of the Commission to protect the European legislation legislation and to impose it against member states who are actually not complying.

[01:08:53.24] - Meghan Benton

Thank you, Ulrich. And just, colleagues, just to let you know that we'll be opening the Q&A in 5 minutes. So, for those of you who are in the room, feel— get ready to raise your hands. For those of you online, you can start submitting your questions to [email protected], and we will line them up. Frank, I— it's been a— an intense 9 months, so I'm sort of loath to ask you about the next 5 years, but it's only fair to pose the same question to you. On the other side of the Atlantic, are we going to see more legal pushback, more pushback from employers? And if you want to duck out of this question, I'll also give you the option of giving me 5 years of the UK if you prefer. Take a pick.

[01:09:35.06] - Frank Sharry

Well, I'll say something that I've said in America and in the UK. To this wider European audience. Those of us who want a robust refugee protection system that includes resettlement of refugees in Western countries, if we don't mend the system, right-wing populists will end it. The procedural maximalism of too many of us advocates has created space for exactly the kind of backlash that we're seeing. I do think that if we can fashion systems that allow for robust legal pathways, organized, vetted, each nation gets to choose, et cetera, as part of a refugee protection system that has ample regional safe havens fully supported by the international community, and solidarity agreements, if we can impose order on this, it'll unlock, I believe, more generosity to accept people in orderly fashion. If we don't get that, I suspect the Refugee Convention, which I consider to be one of civilization's great achievements, especially in a post-World War II world where We saw the effects of when people could not rely on the international community to seek safety and protection. That if we lose that as our North Star, we're gonna be a much poorer world. So I really want us to get busy about making sure that we're protecting refugees close to where they're fleeing from, that those who are eligible for and qualified for and vetted for resettlement elsewhere are done so, where everybody's doing their fair share, that that's a system that's sustainable.

Otherwise, I don't think we'll have a system.

[01:11:39.24] - Meghan Benton

Thank you. And Ben, same question to you. What are the big threats and opportunities you see as you look ahead to the next 5 years? And within 3 minutes, if you will, so that I can keep to time.

[01:11:57.03] - Ben Mason-Sucher

I mean, I'll defer to Ulrich's expertise. I thought that was a very impressive overview of the policy situation. So to answer it on a different level, what strikes me when I listen to our focus groups is there is disillusionment, there is disappointment and frustration, but there isn't cynicism and nihilism. Not yet. There is still, in every focus group, a palpable appetite and a desire for leadership, a clear vision, a way— and I mean, we're talking more in common about visions for the future. People are crying out for for a vision of how we can prosper together as a society, which includes an approach to migration which is inclusive and respectful and to the benefit of the people who live here, combined with all these other things that people are thinking about and concerned about. What are we going to do about the green transition and climate change? What are we going to do about AI? Time where there's a lot of challenges, people are disorientated and anxious, a migration sits in a nexus of complex issues. So, I don't have the answers, but what gives me hope is that people haven't given up, people are looking for answers and leadership and orientation and clarity.

[01:13:35.12] - Meghan Benton

Thank you, thank you very much. And so, I'm gonna turn to the audience now. We have a roving mic, which I hope is already roving. Abby is going to rove it, if that is a verb. First question, second row here. I will take them in clusters of 3.

[[FOR THE Q&A PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT, SPEAKERS ARE NOT IDENTIFIED BY NAME. PLEASE SEE THE RECORDING TO IDENTIFY SPEAKERS.]]

[01:13:56.13] - Speaker 6

Hi.

[01:13:56.19] - Speaker 2

You could say who you are first as well.

[01:13:58.05] - Speaker 6

Sure.

[01:13:58.19] - Speaker 6

My name is Julian Lehmann. I work for the think tank GPPI. Thanks so much for having this interesting discussion. I have more a comment, I guess, than a question and it, I think, pertains to an assumption in this room that you can counter the populist backlash through effective, workable, sound migration policies. And I think that for me the elephant in the room currently is, at least from the German vantage point, is the polls where you see you know, some highly disruptive, if you like, okay, maybe performative, but, you know, in style, highly disruptive policies at the border, and yet, you know, the polls are showing us that the numbers of the AfD are going up. So, you know, isn't that assumption a little bit, you know, isn't that just proving us wrong? And so connecting I mean, you know, with what Ben just said, doesn't it need more, you know, looking beyond migration?

[01:15:08.06] - Speaker 2

Thank you very much. And just while you're roving, Abby, if you could take the woman in the purple. But I'm just going to first read out this question that's just come in online, which is, what does effective human rights advocacy look like in this context? And is there a risk that some of the strategies are backfiring. Okay, third one, please.

[01:15:30.06] - Speaker 7

Hi, thank you. Karoline Popp from the Expert Council on Integration and Migration here in Berlin. Thank you so much. I also wanted to come back to the point about, there was a bit of a tendency as if government policies happen in an insular fashion here. For example, I find it difficult believe that it took the Biden administration 3 years to come up with a system that essentially swaps irregular for legal pathways. That's something that's been written about and tried for a long time. I don't think it took them that time, correct me if I'm wrong, to come up with it. But what it shows, what it points to, is that there are forces and dynamics at work that go way beyond what the individual government, that particular state, that particular policy can do. And it's not to say that governments are powerless. I don't believe that. I don't believe this, you cannot do anything about migration, but they are profoundly interdependent with whether it's the next-door country and its willingness to cooperate or whether the effects of the, pandemic have died down or where the next war erupts. So to me, this then goes back to the question of communication, not just what can be done, but also what cannot be done.

[01:16:53.06] - Speaker 7

And I think that's nearly the trickier part for leadership, for governments to get across to electorates that are already scared and destabilized and not very open to change, I would say, speaking about this country perhaps, how to communicate honestly what, where you do have control from, you know, Berlin and where you don't. And I think to me that's the bigger challenge for communication and any views are welcome.

[01:17:29.01] - Speaker 2

Thank you. Thank you. 3 great questions. So we have, How do you do advocacy? Is there a risk that things backfire? The expectation management question from Karoline, which is quite similar, and then why are the AfD polls persistently so high? Or if I could carry on the order and go to you first.

[01:17:49.23] - Speaker 4

Yeah, maybe, maybe I'll start with the polls thing. I think that is one of the $1 million question that all over Europe, the parties of the— the moderate parties, let me call them like this, are worrying about what is the right way to fight right-wing populism. And I think there is by far, or there is a right appreciation that migration plays an important role, but it's by far not the only aspect. It maybe it's overestimated. At a certain level, but I think the appreciation is, at least in Germany, I think in other countries as well, if you don't get control on migration, if you cannot get the signal that you have migration under control at a certain level, all the other things which might support right-wing populism voters won't be successful. So it's the basics, maybe, in a way, of a policy which is very much addressing these kind of feelings which we have, not only all over Europe but in the United States and the UK as a non-EU country as well. So that is— I don't know any real research on that. Comparative research as we have on the migration thing, but I'm quite convinced that it's a basis, but there's a lot which comes to it and a lot which has to be done in order to reduce really the support for right-wing populists.

[01:19:35.10] - Speaker 4

And I think when it comes to Denmark, it's not only migration which helped them, it's integration and all the other things which helped. The actual Social Democrats government in Denmark to reduce the right-wing populists. Just one word on the human rights advocacy. So when I was still in the job, I thought from time to time I was a member of a small group who tried to strike a balance between a very restrictive right-wing policy and migration, and the advocacy by Pro Asyl and others who only focus on human rights and the protection of the Geneva Convention. And I sometimes, when I had lots of discussions with members of these advocacy groups, as well here at Robert Bosch, and I sometimes I thought I would like to wish to be on their side, side, because they only focus on human rights, on the individual things, and all these things which warm your heart and which have a very sound reasoning and basis, but nevertheless, which is only one aspect of the broader picture. And whether these kind of advocacy might be backfiring, okay, at least that's their job. But the job of a successful policy finally at the polls is to strike the right balance between this kind of thinking and a too restrictive thinking which does not follow any legal obligations, who does— who is really violating family reunification issues and the basic human rights that we all want to protect as Western democracies.

[01:21:25.09] - Speaker 2

Thank you, Ulrich. Frank?

[01:21:26.23] - Speaker 5

Yeah, maybe to contextualize this, because I often think that where we are in the world of refugee and migrant— refugee protection and migrant management is the 1880s of industrialization, that we're at the beginning. We have a poor vocabulary, policy levers are misunderstood or misapplied, the rhetoric is so simplistic as to be stupid, right? I mean, I don't wanna say, wow, we're having such a sophisticated debate. We could just educate the American people on how we're gonna solve a migration crisis that's insoluble. I just don't, it's not happening. But so I wanna be realistic about how early we are in the process. And I do imagine a day long after I'm gone, where we have root cause alleviation strategies and climate change interventions and regional safe havens and solidarity arrangements and resettlement programs and migration management that's probably based as much on labor as it is on family, and integration policies that are vertical and horizontal, and that, you know, I can imagine all of that all of that. We don't have a lot of that, okay? We should build, keep building it, right? And immigration is one of those issues that it does, does have a, a vertical and a horizontal aspect that makes it particularly complex.

[01:22:56.22] - Speaker 5

I will say that, um, I think there's been too many, too many advocates, if I may say so, are of the opinion international migration is beyond our control. I get the argument. I mean, these are powerful forces in a shrinking world, communications, transportation, I get it. Climate change, et cetera. I live in the Americas, I get it. And if we say it's beyond control and we can't do anything about it, well, you're gonna end up with Trumps all over the place. And please don't end up with Trumps all over the place. What he's doing now is a catastrophe of historic proportions. I spent 40 years trying to win legislation to legalize 12 million people in America who don't have papers. 85% support for it. And this is what's happening? Roving agents with masks on kicking down doors and picking up housekeepers? Separating families? Yeah, so I can get pretty outraged about it too. The fact is, is that, so I think we have to figure out, you know, management, not perfectly. Deal with integration tensions and trade-offs honestly. Deal with root cause strategies realistically. And we have to move on all those fronts and have a coherent approach that, and this is where I think that's so often, this is what's so hard for center-left governments to do, is to line up policy, narrative, and politics.

[01:24:36.06] - Speaker 5

And so the question of whether that can happen consistently and be successful remains to be seen. I'm not so sure it's easy, but I'm pretty sure that if we don't, what we're gonna end up with, and it seems to me to be the only way forward, is for us to keep working the problem, keep refining, our approaches, be as workable as we can, and stop pretending like we can move the Overton window from what's clear, what the public is screaming, do both and. Bring us control and we'll be compassionate. And it's, again, we say in America all the time, it's not some either or situation. It's like, you know, I mean, What I tell every Democrat, if they'll listen to me, say, "We are a nation of immigrants, and we are a nation of laws, and the best way to be either is to be both." That's my version of control and compassion. And that's the narrative aspects to it. So, you know, we're talking to a bunch of people who don't understand international migration in all of its complexity, or integration dynamics. Any issue, workplace, intergroup relations, education, wow, so complex. So, but let's not be paralyzed by its complexity.

[01:25:56.06] - Speaker 5

And let's have a can-do attitude of let's make it better and let's do it in a way that respects human rights but also respects public opinion. And I think we can do both.

[01:26:08.21] - Speaker 4

But if I may, very short remark on your question. I can hardly imagine that a government says openly, although openness is extremely relevant, what an aspect which is not under control. I simply, not on migration, I simply cannot recall any situation where any government said, "Ah, we don't have a relevant question for public opinion not under control," but I can recall a number of cases where it was a pretext that something was under control because that is not on migration but on all different fields of policy, be it inflation, be it whatever, that is a political momentum, an extremely strong momentum, at least pretending to have things under control. So that is an academic question, how open you you should argue and communicate, but I think it's politically excluded to be that open in communication, whatever the field of policy is.

[01:27:17.09] - Speaker 3

Yeah, I just add one thing on the— so there was the question about human rights advocacy and whether there's a danger of those strategies backfiring. Yes, it's something that I feel increasingly alarmed about. I think that the language of human rights is becoming associated more and more with court decisions on extreme edge cases, international courts and national courts, which catch public attention and imagination and, where, so we're talking about cases where a country would like to deport serious criminals who've done dreadful things and on the grounds of human rights that's being contested and lawyers arguing they should be allowed to stay. I think that that's really dangerous territory in terms of public perceptions and mood. Because I think from a starting point of people believe in human rights, people want decency, but as these stories become more visible and more salient, people will say, "Well, if that's what it means, I'm not sure." And I don't know, it's difficult as someone who, like Frank, believes passionately in the achievements of human rights law, and I'm not saying ditch it, but I'm saying I think that from a communications perspective, it's going to be difficult if that's the main lens and the main language we're using.

[01:28:55.21] - Speaker 3

And bringing it back to my presentation, I think it's— I think we're better served talking, speaking in terms of values and priorities rather than this very legal and universal language of human rights.

[01:29:15.08] - Speaker 2

I can see so many people itching to ask questions, and I— Elvio, yeah, and then one at the back there. We'll do 3, and then those of you online, just a reminder, [email protected] if you want to submit questions.

[01:29:34.13] - Speaker 8

Hello, Elvio Pasca. I'm a communication officer of the the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies in Italy. Given the importance of the contribution dimension and also of the economic aspect of this contribution, I guess, which should be, in your opinion, the role of the private sector in this challenge? That is a big challenge that requires, I think, all of society approach. For example, in Italy, we are running a laboratory reforms that give a new role to employers associations in the assessment of labor market needs, in the management of the applications for labor entries, and also in promoting vocational training abroad, yes? And employer association responded very good to this, to this. But when it comes to integration measures, they say it's not on us, no? Something different we are experiencing with employers association or companies involved in labor pathways for refugees or in agreement that we have with employers association that train and hire people in the reception centers. Okay, but given this situation, I ask how to manage this role and how to avoid also that this role has only an utilitarianistic approach, in your opinion. Thank you.

[01:31:13.13] - Speaker 9

Patrick Hoffmann from Generali and Foundation Human Safety Net. I wanted to ask about the integration piece of the puzzle which has kind of been alluded to a little bit. And I think it's really about— I think it's not so clear what the policy and the messaging should be on that piece. Right.

[01:31:30.19] - Speaker 9

I think we can all agree that integration that works is really key to shaping also public perception. It was key also of the Danish policy, as was kind of alluded to.

[01:31:40.09] - Speaker 9

But the picture is quite mixed, right? You could say that at least for Germany on labor market side, there's been been kind of moderate success, right? If we look at people who came in 2015 on housing, for instance, it's more mixed, right? And the list can go on.

[01:31:52.16] - Speaker 9

So it's not, I kind of struggle to see, you know, what should the story be, but also how should the policy evolve?

[01:31:59.02] - Speaker 9

And yeah, that's a question I wanted to put to you.

[01:32:02.02] - Speaker 10

Thank you. My name is Tom Nuttall. I'm a correspondent for The Economist here in Berlin. I have a couple of short questions. The first, maybe to Ben. I think I'm right in saying that at least in Britain, the salience of concern over irregular migration tracks the numbers of irregular migration fairly closely. Maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong on that, and I don't know if we know if that holds in other countries. In Europe, we're seeing asylum numbers come down fairly quickly, actually, in the last year or so. Does that mean that perhaps this problem is on the way to solving itself, at least for now? And the other question, maybe to Frank, you said that Biden wanted to talk about anything except for the border. I wanted to get your view on a line that you often hear from political scientists who warn mainstream parties, particularly center-right parties, against what they regard as aping the rhetoric of the radical right. They'll say, "People prefer the original to the copy. Don't do that." Now, I think I think your line rather cuts against that, but I'm interested to get your view on that. In Britain, people are saying this all the time.

[01:33:09.01] - Speaker 10

They're saying, talk up the migration issue and you're doing Nigel Farage's job for him. And Labor does seem to be shedding a lot of its support to the left. Here in Germany, as the colleague pointed out, the CDU talked about little but migration in the election campaign, even voting with the AfD back in January, and the AfD is now topping the polls. So I'd just be interested to get you to untangle that a little bit.

[01:33:32.17] - Speaker 2

Let's just take one more since there are lots of people who are trying to speak. Were you trying to ask a question?

[01:33:42.01] - Speaker 11

Yeah. Hello, my name is Melissa, and I'm also part of More in Common. And I have a question specifically to the two migration policy experts. And the debate and the discussion The conversation revolves around control and compassion a lot. This event has mentioned both of them multiple times, and I was wondering if from your many years of experience working in the migration sector, you could be able to answer the question of how to shift the focus of policymakers towards competence and contribution. 'cause what we hear in our research is that people want the impression of competence, that there's a system that can manage the migration that's coming in, and also the opportunity of contribution. So migrants being able to work, for example. And there's multiple examples around the world for how competence and contribution can be put forward, like Brazil, how it worked with Venezuelans coming in, or Spain, and it's multiple times it has legalized people and included them into their workforce. So if there's— like, those are two examples. There's many more. But if there's those examples, why is the debate inside the migration policy spaces still locked in control and compassion instead of the other C's that we present in the research that been authored.

[01:35:13.12] - Speaker 2

Okay, so we've got quite a cluster, and I'm going to ask the panel to jump in on whichever one you want to ask. We've got integration, the role of employers' associations, whether or not the problem is on the way to resolving itself, and rebalancing to the other C's in the 5 C's. Who would like to volunteer? Thank you.

[01:35:35.01] - Speaker 4

Maybe a remark on what you were what you were saying. My experience is, in 2018, when I took over the job, that was Minister Seehofer, who just became Minister of the Interior. He then was still the head of the social— Bavarian Democrat Party. And these were, in the beginning— and there were elections in Munich in September 2018— and these were weeks and months where he and others very much focused on migration. That was when there was a saying that that's the mother of all problems, these kind of things, which later have been no more repeated, and even there was, I think it was Söder who said sorry about his wording in these days. My impression is that they looked very carefully on what this kind of policy met in the polls in the summer of 2018. And they found out that that was only for the right-wing populist, the AfD in Bavaria, who helped this kind of wording. And that led to a switch in policy, trying to do— then COVID came, which changed the situation really. But try to be restrictive, but on the other hand not to hyper-mention migration as the mother of all problems and these kind of things.

[01:37:05.10] - Speaker 4

And that has been always the case with the conservative parties in Germany, even in regional and local elections. And the change was only done in January this year this year after Aschaffenburg and other things that is broadly reported, and that is my personal impression as well. So that is a little bit of the history of the German answer of the conservative parties towards this problem, and it's really, I think that's really a very small edge on which we are moving, not to really to address a problem, not to do the mistake of saying there is no problem. We don't have a narrative, we don't have a solution, we only try to communicate. On the one hand, and on the other hand, not to overestimate it and to fuel the right-wing populism by this kind of communication.

[01:38:05.22] - Speaker 5

Yeah, I guess I want to address that question too. I'm not so sure on the On the polling, maybe you know, Ben, but whether the concern goes up based on small boat arrivals or net migration levels or whatever, I'm not sure. I know More in Common does a lot of this polling. Sunder Katwala at British Future follows this closely. Christabel Cooper at Labour Together would have probably the best insights into that. I do think that this "we sound like we're aping the populist party" notion is a concern I have too. And it's because the right has done such an effective job of framing this as a binary that it's, well, if you're not for closed borders, then you must be for open borders. What? And this is where I think center-left forces have to find their voice and speak with confidence and act with competence, which is that to me, you know, I dream of the day Sir Keir Starmer can stand up and say, you know what, we've sharply reduced boat arrivals, saving lives and defending our sovereignty. We are admitting people through organized routes, people who are vetted and approved. They come to the UK and they are sponsored by members of the community who step up and make it work.

[01:39:39.06] - Speaker 5

People go to work immediately. They have— find housing through their sponsors. And this is Britain doing its fair share. We are proud to live up to our tradition as a nation that welcomes refugees, and we are proud that we have figured out how to defend our sovereignty in a shrinking world. That's the kind of both-and stuff you just don't hear. We used to in the States, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, man, they were masters of it. But we've lost the art. So, you know, so Joe Biden's like, well, I don't wanna talk about the border. That's a Republican issue. Well, it's only Republican issue if you let it be a Republican issue. So I do think that this, that the debate is not, and this is where sometimes activists don't realize their influence. Because they do make it sort of all or nothing. And we learned in the States, if it's all or nothing, nothing wins. Because of notions of sovereignty and control, not just racism and xenophobia. So I do think that the center-left has to really find their confident voice and lean in with an argument that speaks to the majority of— I'll just flash this.

[01:40:48.01] - Speaker 5

We do have polling that's that we're gonna be releasing as part of this report we're putting out next week, and the numbers are pretty stunning, just like what Ben was showing, the sort of both/and approach. People are like, why haven't we heard about that? All we hear about is, you know, Nigel Farage is gonna pick up people, as if the Navy's gonna do this, pick up people in the Channel and dump them back on French shores. What, he's gonna declare war We're gonna get out of all the human rights treaties, but that won't have any impact on our trading relations. Hey, come on, that's not serious. I know it's hard to do, but I just think that that's the approach. I do also wanna say that I think that the business community needs to be recruited, supported, challenged. At our best back in the day when we were We had a coalition working with Obama and John McCain and Ted Kennedy on comprehensive immigration reform. We figured out how to put together an alliance of business, labor, civil rights, religious groups, movement conservatives. It's impossible to imagine that today. But it's possible to build that kind of alliance because the interests have a common ground.

[01:42:08.03] - Speaker 5

And so I do think that it's really, I really encourage you, to go for it. And you're usually scared, you know, oh my God, maybe somebody, you know, some customers will be upset with us or some board members or whatever. But our experience is that again, when you lean in and you find your voice, you actually find that people are like, ah, there's some authenticity, we need that.

[01:42:32.19] - Speaker 3

I'll answer the boat question as best I can. I don't know. I don't know the— I'm not familiar with the analysis that you said that salience tracks arrivals. We can stay in touch and I can look at our data. I think that plausibly it is likely to track to some extent. If asylum goes down, it's likely to become less salient, of course. However, I'm skeptical that it will be, it will always be such a clear relationship because listening to the focus groups, just listening to lots of people talking about how they perceive migration, how they think about it, the feeling you get over and over and over is, is driven by qualitative, not quantitative. People aren't citing numbers, they aren't looking at graphs. They are talking about qualitative things. I'd split it into two categories. From the media side, or yeah, so what people are seeing through the media, things that, you know, cut through in the jargon, but things that we really hear reported reported back, things that stick in people's minds and that they think about and talk about, are often associated with arresting imagery of some kind. Alan Kurdi being a good example a few years back.

[01:44:08.21] - Speaker 3

In the US context, it was kids in cages, homeless migrants sleeping under bridges. In a German context, and Ulrich was talking about the big and lasting effect of Cologne New Year's Eve, the attacks in Aschaffenburg and Solingen. So arresting imagery on the one hand, on the other hand, things that people perceive around them in their local communities. And I tie that back to the graph I showed earlier about the, professions and whether people want more or less of particular professions. One of the things that strikes me about that graph is the professions at the top are not the ones that necessarily have the biggest impact on GDP, but it's the professions that people really notice or feel would make a difference to their everyday lives as teachers, care workers, healthcare workers. So, so I'm happy to look at the data, but my gut feeling just from listening to a lot of people is that qualitative beats quantitative in how opinions form.

[01:45:22.04] - Speaker 2

Can I just abuse my position as chair and jump in since it's about the UK and we've got too many Brits or pretend Brits on this panel? I mean, I think that the salience has really gone up very dramatically since 2020 when, you know, you really saw this huge decline immigration salience in the UK. But the one thing that I wanted to remind people of is that we used to have the epitome of a well-managed migration system in the form of free movement, which was a driver behind the Brexit vote. And there, you know, you had EU nationals performing very well in the labor market, in jobs, so contribution piece was delivered on. But this perception of unfairness fairness in that they had immediate access to benefits. So I really don't think that the UK's concerns have just been about irregular arrivals. I do think in the UK there has also been this sense of public services being underwhelmed, overwhelmed, a lack of planning for population growth, particularly in urban centers, and then huge dearth of integration. Integration policy of any kind, I mean, that was the issue with EU nationals, is that they weren't given any navigation support about how to access services, how to even put the bins out, and it was these small things that triggered public anxiety.

[01:46:46.01] - Speaker 2

And I just, I think we should remember that, because it's a really useful lesson about not getting, not over-exaggerating the extent to which it's just about small boats. I am going to just take two questions from the audience. I'm going to go back to the panel for closing remarks. Sorry, I know lots of people wanted to ask questions, so— and now you don't. So, um, can I ask if anyone who was in our meeting today, especially those who have different perspectives— Ireland, Sweden, if you'd like to jump in, Brian. Thank you.

[01:47:31.07] - Speaker 12

Thanks very much. Brian Killoran, I work with a civil society in Ireland. I'm a roaming, roving civil society person now. It's just on the back of everything you said, and Frankie touched upon it there in relation to employers, we've seen a huge demographic change in Ireland over the last 25 years. So basically 20% of the population. We are a country of emigration. That's how we always call ourselves. Now we're a country of immigration. That has largely been a success story, I would say. Now, the pressures of the last couple of years, in particular around supporting Ukrainians and increasing international protection applicants, has reframed the conversation in Ireland to be viewed through the very narrow lens of only the problem issues, in inverted commas, within migration. And that's really problematic because it is actually quite a small sliver overall of what migration is, and it's very dehumanizing. But if you looked at social media and you look at traditional media, you would swear the sky is falling, and the sky is not falling. For every single small protest issues we might have outside a refugee center in Ireland, I could show you 100 places where there is no issue.

[01:48:46.02] - Speaker 12

There's people volunteering in the community, people are building support structures, they're figuring out a way, there's no issue, you know, um, in, in those places. So it's a very misbalanced view we're getting of what migration looks like in Ireland, and that's driving politicians more to the right and more to the right inching, trying to respond to what they think are public attitudes around this. So, sorry, this is a very long way of getting to my question. We have a plethora of allies in communities. We have volunteers, we have retired people, we have community organizations, we have employers, a lot of whom are scared out of the conversation. And they're scared out of it by the extreme right, and they're scared out of it by the extreme left, of which I'm probably a part, to be honest. How do we get them into the conversation? How do we inform them? How do we empower them? How do we help to build this? Because I think that will steady politicians' hands to a huge extent. Frank, you talked about the Labor government in Sarkozy's time, or having the courage to stand up and say this at a podium.

[01:49:51.01] - Speaker 12

How do we build that infrastructure from the community up that will demonstrate that actually the sky is not falling We can manage this, we can do this, we have a whole host of allies out there, and we need to all work collaboratively around it, you know. How do we do that? Very simple question.

[01:50:09.06] - Speaker 2

Thank you, Brian. Does anyone else have a final question? Otherwise I'll throw in my own. Yes, please.

[01:50:14.05] - Speaker 13

Hi, Irene de Lorenzo of Pathways International. Um, this is a very daily dilemma I face, so I would be interested in your thoughts. We are working with with many in the room on the labor pathways for refugees in Germany and other countries that Ben was mentioning. And the funny thing about it is that if you look at the coalition agreement, for example, of, you know, the current government in Germany, you have a very clear commitment to stop humanitarian admission. But in another chapter, the chapter dedicated to economic growth, there is a very clear commitment as well to skilled migration and to facilitate that migration because Germany Germany, like, quote unquote, needs skilled migration. So we are using that entry point, of course, to continue to do, you know, humanitarian policy and to continue to bring refugees to Germany as workers. My question is, is our goal with communications to get to a point, to get back to a point where migration is a non-issue and, you know, the lack of visibility and the lack of media attention that we have, for example, with labor migration because it works, is what we need with the refugee conversation, which has become such a toxic one?

[01:51:30.15] - Speaker 13

Or are we, by not talking about it, are we, you know, risking that the labor conversation, which is now, or at least until now, safe, becomes another topic that gets polarized and that is intractable. Thanks.

[01:51:48.02] - Speaker 2

Thank you so much. And I'm going to bundle those two together before sending it back to the panel with the question as follows, which is, to what extent should questions about future immigration policies be something we should involve the public in? Immigration is often very technocratic issue. It's quite difficult to discuss the kind of trade-offs. I mean, you mentioned how easy it is to do advocacy when you're promoting extreme messages versus a more balanced framework. How much should we involve the public, and what questions should we keep them away from, essentially?

[01:52:30.03] - Speaker 4

So we only talked by now, or nearly, when it comes to the German situation on reducing illegal entry. We used to talk about irregular entry; now the actual wording is illegal entry at the borders and this kind of stuff. And the integration aspect which you are mentioning is extremely important as well, and as well the hiring of skilled labor. And there is— there are as well some programs in in the coalition agreement, and lots have already been done by the last government in that field. For example, there is now in the Foreign Office a visa-issuing electronic project which is speeding up procedures considerably. That's only one aspect, but nevertheless, we still have lots of things to do organizationally, and when it comes to the— to the acceptance of foreign education papers, whether that could be applied in Germany as well. There is a decentralized system which has to be changed, and there are plans in doing that. We are too slow, but nevertheless. But the communication is only focusing on migration, actually on the negative aspects. So that is— one of the key— and that has an influence on hiring foreign labor. So if you are a high-skilled national in some— in a given country and you are thinking about going to the United States, to Canada, or to Germany, you might think about that and you might not end up in applying— coming to Germany, even if you might meet the requirements and have the visa procedure followed properly.

[01:54:19.07] - Speaker 4

So there is an influence. What I think, and that's one of my hopes, that once we have the irregular entries at a certain level, that this question will step by step leave the public opinion and that other aspect, the positive the negative aspects of migration more, will be more focused on and will be more in the media. For example, I just mentioned the tabloid Bild-Zeitung, which you might have heard about, which is very populist-oriented. They once depicted a picture of a South Bavarian group of people caring for elderly, so a company 20, 25 people at one picture, and at the second picture, there were the same group of this company where only the German, the ones of German nationality and German origin were depicted, and there were 25 in the first and 4 in the second picture. So that is a daily experience we all do have in Germany, and that is even deteriorating for a number of reasons, the demographics situation. But I think that is— will be one, hopefully, once the restrictive aspect is more or less solved, that these aspects will be more focused, will more be in the public opinion, and as well the integration aspect. Even if we—if we—the border would be closed from one day to the other, no one would arrive anymore, a very theoretical idea, the integration aspects of the one of the 100,000s and who have been entering Germany since 2015 and later, and people from Ukraine and all these different groups remains nevertheless extremely relevant. And that is something I hope that there will be more focus, put more focus on that.

[01:56:19.11] - Speaker 2

Frank, Ben, we have to follow the cultural norms of our hosts, and that means that we have 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Over to you, Frank, for 1 minute and 15 seconds.

[01:56:29.15] - Speaker 5

I want to win the debate, not just defuse it. And what's happening in America right now is that every mainstream economic forecast includes the dearth of immigrant labor as a drag on the economy. It's remarkable. It is not showing up in the human interest stories only. It's showing up in the hardcore analyzes of the drag on economic growth. You see the polling that shows the support for the occupations and the daily experience that people have all over many of our countries. So, look, immigrants are assets. We can manage the system competently, and if we do so, we can expand legal pathways. and we can do so in a way where our integration strategies can handle those increased pathways. That's where I think we should go.

[01:57:25.09] - Speaker 2

Thank you. Ben, give us 3 words.

[01:57:27.04] - Speaker 3

3 words. I'll give you 30 seconds. We've seen times in the past when salience has been low and things are rumbling along. When salience around immigration rises, it's It's because people are unhappy. The reverse doesn't apply. You can't stop talking about migration when people care about it and hope that it will go away. So we are where we are. Salience is high, concerns are high, and so, yes, we should be talking to the public about it, all of it. And, uh, going back to the 5 Cs, we shouldn't be steering people away from certain questions. We should be steering them away from the logic of false binaries I mentioned earlier.

[01:58:09.10] - Speaker 2

Thank you, and completely agree. We need to be involving the public in a conversation about the kind of future that we want to have. I want to thank you all, those of you online who sent really great questions, those of you in the room, as well as to thank our excellent speakers. This has been a really lively debate, and yeah, have a good evening, everyone.