Refugees and the War in Ukraine

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With us now, David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, which advocates for and provides services to refugees and other people displaced by war or other extreme circumstances. He is just back from Ukraine. He has now run the International Rescue Committee for 10 years, and as some of you know, he was previously the British Foreign Minister. We'll talk about his observations in Ukraine refugee sites in Poland, which he also visited. Also get his take on the asylum seeker surge that's top of mind in New York and other US cities right now, and on this 9/11 anniversary, people still displaced indirectly as a result of that.

David, we're always happy that you come on the show from time to time. We're better for it. Welcome back to WNYC, and congratulations on 10 years.

David Miliband: Thank you so much, Brian. It's very good to be with you and very moving to hear the remembrance of the terrible day in 2001. An auspicious day to be talking to you, and thank you for giving me some space.

Brian Lehrer: We'll touch on some things that are in your work that are relevant to 9/11, but I want to start with Ukraine and Poland. Feel free to take a minute or two and tell us what did you go there to see that you didn't already know about, and what did you learn.

David Miliband: Yes, please. Thanks very much. I thought it was very important to make a second visit to Poland and to Ukraine. The International Rescue Committee, as you said, it was founded by Albert Einstein, a refugee in New York, 90 years ago. We help people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster.

There are about five million Ukrainian refugees out of the country across Europe, a couple of million of them in Poland. Inside the country, there are 18 million people in humanitarian need. That's about half the population of people inside the country. Obviously the most dangerous are those towards the east of the country. Cities like Kharkiv in the northeast, Dnipro at about three o'clock on a clock face, down to Kherson in the southeast, and then Odesa; the famous city of Odesa.

In those cities the IRC has teams - we have about 250 people in total - reaching people in areas that are under Ukrainian control and giving them health support, cash support, protection for kids who've lost parents. They're on the front line in the same way that one would use that expression for a conflict line anywhere in the world. I thought it was really important to go at this time for a particular reason because there's a danger that the Ukraine war becomes a kind of background music to our lives. The way I put it is the danger is that the abnormal becomes normal.

What's abnormal? It's abnormal to have half the country of a European state depending on humanitarian aid to survive. It's abnormal to have that many people displaced as refugees. It's abnormal to have conflict that includes the bombing of power stations and water pumping plants, which will become a real danger as we go close to winter. It's abnormal to have civilian housing bombed by Russian missiles, but that's what's happened.

The danger is that the abnormal does become normalized in such a way that Ukraine drifts away, and the need for a civilian effort in that country. We don't obviously get engaged in the military side, but dealing with the victims, the civilians, they're facing trauma of a really fundamental kind.

Just final point then look forward to questions and discussion. You ask, well, what did I learn that I didn't know? I can obviously read the statistics from New York, I don't need to be in Ukraine. A couple of things. First of all, when you talk to-- Every woman you talk to inside the country or as a refugee outside - it's only women and kids who are allowed out of the country - you just know and you can see that a husband, a brother, a son, is on the front line of the military effort, and they're just dreading the phone call to give them bad news.

The second thing is that war takes its toll in the most unusual ways. You may have covered the bombing by the Russians of something called the Kakhovka Dam. It's a very important dam. The flooding that arose from it destroyed all sorts of livelihoods, but here's something I didn't know. The flooding moved landmines many tens of miles. It carried the landmines that had been planted previously on the conflict line, planted by the Russians. It took them into civilian areas way down further south in the country. There are contaminated areas with landmines now, and so we're partnering with a demining organization to help make those areas safe as well.

Brian Lehrer: You talk about the normalization, and it makes me think again of this day, 9/11, when we honor 3,000 people or so killed on that day with such reverence every year, including reading every individual's name at the World Trade Center. I guess there's a psychological process that's just human that makes it hard not to be numb, perhaps, to the individual humanity of tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties in such a short period of time from the invasion of Ukraine, but in a situation that, as you say, is ongoing. I know you're concerned about this compassion fatigue. How do you fight it?

David Miliband: There are two things that I think are really important. There's a terrible phrase by a murderous dictator called Joseph Stalin who said one person's death is a tragedy, a million people's death is a statistic. The first thing is always to remember that there's a human story behind every statistic. That seems to me to be very, very important. Secondly, to take the voices of the people affected and let them do the talking. It's good for me to come on this show and answer questions, but there's nothing like the actual testimony of the clients that we're serving.

The women I met in Poland, who are Ukrainian refugees, how they are. They're looking for work there. They're trying to tend to their children there and keep up their spirits. I think that's very important. What an organization like the International Rescue Committee can do is to show that we can make a difference, because those clients, they're getting mental health support. They've had the cash support. They can refer their relatives who are maybe elderly or people with disabilities who can't leave the country. They can make sure that we know where they are. There's, if you like, a focus on addressing the problem, not just describing the problem.

Brian Lehrer: What did you see in Poland? I saw you wrote afterwards that more than a million refugees are living in limbo in Poland. What does living in limbo mean in this case?

David Miliband: Well, they want to go home but they don't know when they can do so. They're grateful to the Polish authorities because-- I don't know. I think we've covered this on a previous discussion. The weekend after the invasion-- 24th of February, 2022 was the date of the Russian invasion. It was a Thursday. The weekend after, within the weekend, the European Union, 27 countries, agreed that every Ukrainian could have at least three years residence, three years work permit, three years welfare support, three years education for kids. It's limbo because they want to go home and they don't know when they're going to be able to do so.

It looks like a long war, and that's what the experts are saying on the military side, but it's very hard to plan if you've got no timeline. What I found were people whose lives, if you like, were in suspended animation. They were grateful to the Poles but they don't want to live in Poland for the rest of their lives. They want to go back to a free Ukraine. That leaves people with a really, really tough set of choices to make.

Quite a few of them though go back. I spoke to a woman who went back to see her house. It had been bombed. The windows had been blown out, but it was still intact. There's no one living there. She's not able to live there at the moment. You can see that they're in this position where Europe's solidarity has made a difference to them, but it's not the final answer.

Brian Lehrer: Are there refugee camps, like tent cities, in some places?

David Miliband: Oh, I'm sorry. That's a good question. Yes, I should have addressed that.

Brian Lehrer: I'm curious because of course we have our own asylum-seeker housing issues going on in New York. How are more than a million people being housed in Poland who are recent refugees from Ukraine?

David Miliband: That's a great point. That's a very important point. I should address it. There are no refugee camps. What happened as the-- it was actually more than a million by last summer of 2022. People were immediately distributed across the country. Although Warsaw, the capital, had about 250,000 refugees, including over 100,000 kids who went into Warsaw schools, they stayed in people's front rooms, in people's living rooms. They slept on couches.

Since then, they've been able to try and get housing. There are a small number of people in government-run shelters where housing breaks down or where someone can't get a job and can't support themselves, but that's the minority of the million people. There is a safety net of a government-run shelter. Because people are allowed to work-- we might come back to this in the discussion of the New York situation. Because they're allowed to work, the Ukrainians in Poland, they can support themselves, so most of them are in private housing now.

That's obviously putting pressure on the rental market, which is a problem. There's pressure in the schools because it's not exactly the class sizes have doubled, but there's a lot of kids in schools. Ukrainian and Polish are not the same language, so there's a real effort by the Ukrainian authorities to continue online classes. What I found was that kids were studying in the Polish system 9:00 till 2:00 with extra support for language, but then doing some classes through the Ukrainian Ministry of Education in the afternoon.

Brian Lehrer: Is there backlash among the Polish people saying, "We don't want to be responsible for all this financially or infrastructure-wise," or anything like this? Like we're getting in the United States.

David Miliband: Basically no. The reason for that is that President Putin provides a particularly unifying enemy. He is the cause of this influx of refugees, the exodus from Ukraine. Obviously, given the history, the Poles have a very dark view of Russia and its intentions towards countries in Eastern Europe. They see this as existential because if the Russians had taken over Ukraine, the border between east and west then becomes the eastern Polish border.

I took the train from Przemyśl, which is just across the border from Lviv, in-- Lviv is in western Ukraine. Przemyśl is in eastern Poland. If the Russians were controlling the whole of Ukraine, then Poland would feel that "it was next." I think the backlash has been forestalled by the very serious backlash against the Russian invasion. That's what people see as the cause of this trouble.

Now, I don't want to sugarcoat this. It's a hell of a thing for a country to have a million refugees. Just for your benefit, benefit of your listeners, the Polish population is about 45 million. If you think that in American terms, America's population, 325-335 million, you can see it's six or seven times the size of the Polish population. A million people arriving in Poland is like six or seven million people arriving in the US. It's quite a strain. I don't want to pretend that people don't become frustrated, bored, annoyed.

If you've got someone living in your front room and it starts out for a week and it ends up being for three months, of course that's a strain. The degree of resilience of the Poles has been very striking.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we welcome your calls for David Miliband, former British Foreign Minister, and for the last 10 years now, president of the International Rescue Committee, which serves and advocates for refugees and other displaced persons. He's just back from Ukraine and Poland. You can call about that or about asylum seekers here or the long tale of 9/11 or anything else relevant with comments or stories or questions for David Miliband at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can also text a question or comment or a story to that number or tweet @BrianLehrer.

David, I want to ask your take explicitly on the New York situation. Some of the headlines here. Just over the weekend, Mayor Adams just ordered 5% budget cuts at every city agency to divert money to the expenses from settling more than 100,000 people who've arrived since the spring of last year, with more coming every week. The city's right-to-shelter law for anyone who asks for shelter complicates the financial and political picture locally, different from other cities that are receiving migrants in the US. The Poland situation dwarfs it.

I don't know if there's a comparison to be made financially. Like, how do they pay to care for a million plus refugees in Poland, which is such a bigger percentage of the population, as you were just describing? Or how do you see New York from the perch as president of the IRC?

David Miliband: Well, I think it's important not to minimize the situation in New York, and not to talk it down by the comparison to Poland. I wouldn't do that at all. I wouldn't minimize it. Equally, I think it's very important not to demonize the people who are claiming asylum. All of our experience at the International Rescue Committee around the world is that countries face a very clear choice. If they want to promote order and fairness in the management of the flow of people, then cruelty is not a sufficient option. Building a wall or trying to keep people out is not going to work. It needs to be effectively managed by all tiers of government together.

Now, the New York authorities, the mayor, has done some important work. He has really sheltered about-- 100,000 people are in government shelters. That's a hell of an effort. All of our experiences, they need to be transitioned and transited quickly so that those who have families in the New York area are able to stay with them as an important resource. It's also fair to say that the mayor has made the case very strongly that because the US asylum system takes so long to process cases, people are not allowed to work. Because they can't work they can't support themselves. That's a vicious circle.

He's made the case for speeding up the asylum processing system, which is a federal responsibility. I think he's right to do so. There's obviously also the case which you referred to, which is about the financial burden. All of our experience is that that burden needs to be shared and shared in a fair way. In the European context, the European Union has done an awful lot of work to send money to support Poland. The obvious equivalent here in the United States is that the mayor needs federal government support to help him here.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you about a particular thing that has come up that I don't think has gotten a lot of attention quite yet in the way that I'm going to ask you about, although I brought it up with the New York City Public Advocate the other day. In your experience, how do countries handle the large influxes of refugees or asylum seekers geographically?

Mayor Adams and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, often at odds on these issues, they're both talking about what they call a decompression strategy, which would involve the federal government or in some cases the state government doing some kind of distribution of where asylum seekers start out so no one city is overwhelmed in terms of cost or infrastructure. Some people obviously wouldn't like this idea because it's telling the refugees or the asylum seekers, "No, you can't go here. You have to go there," and restricting their freedom of movement. In your experience, do countries do this?

David Miliband: The short answer is yes. Just to state the obvious, if you move people from one part of Germany or Poland to another part, you can't stop them moving. You can't restrict their freedom of movement. Ditto if you move people from one part of New York State to another part of New York State. You can't restrict their freedom of movement either. However, I do think it's important to be clear that all of common sense, never mind experience around the world, tells you that a responsibility shared is a responsibility far more able to be fulfilled.

There is good evidence of this from the German response to the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015/16, which I remember talking to you about on your show. One and a half million people claimed asylum from Syria in Germany in the space of about six months after the summer of-- even four months after the summer of 2016, after Mrs. Merkel said that she would handle that, and they did handle it. How did they handle it? First of all, small towns as well as large cities in Germany took a proportionate number of people.

Secondly, the federal government did two very important things. First of all, it ran the asylum processing system because not everyone was entitled to stay, and secondly, it offered financial support. I think that common sense and the experience does say to you that you need to share the responsibility if you're to fulfill the responsibility.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with David Miliband and your phone calls for him, 212-433-WNYC. We will follow up at some point and ask why isn't the Biden administration doing in the United States what Mr. Miliband just described that Germany did in 2016 with even so many more Syrian refugees there at that time. That'll be for a segment probably later in the week, but anything relevant to David Miliband and his trips to Ukraine and Poland recently, or the US asylum seekers issue, or even which we will also touch on on this September 11th, 2023, the long tail of indirect displacement as a result of those attacks and the response to them.

212-433-WNYC. Call or text or tweet @BrianLehrer. Stay with us.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with David Miliband, former British Foreign Minister. Now, for the last 10 years, the president of the International Rescue Committee, which advocates for and provides direct services to refugees and other displaced persons around the world. He's just back from Ukraine and Poland. Fabiola in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Fabiola.

Fabiola: Hi, Brian and David. Thank you for taking my call. I'm very grateful that you're drawing this. I don't know if it's a parallel line or sort of a comparison between the refugee crisis in New York and the US and Ukraine. I'm a reporter. I've been covering - a Spanish language reporter - the crisis in New York. I also went to Ukraine and many people there didn't understand why a Spanish-speaking person was there trying to understand the conflict. My question is why do you think the refugees that are coming from the southern border are being treated differently than the refugees coming from Ukraine? Is it a matter of race? Is it a matter of politics?

I've known people from Ukraine that have come seeking refuge and asylum in the US and they've already gotten a place to live, they've already gotten-- I don't want to say their livelihood sort because obviously they've lost everything. What is the main difference? Many people at the border have complained that people coming from Ukraine kind of got ahead in the line, sort to say. I just want to know, what do you think is the difference? Is there a view differently that people that are coming from a country that is being bombed maybe they have a different need than people that are coming from countries that have failed governments? It's so [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: You're saying, Fabiola, not just that people from Ukraine are being more welcomed in Poland than people from elsewhere in this hemisphere are being welcomed by the United States, but Ukrainians coming here are being welcomed differently than people from the troubled countries in our own backyard, if we want to call Latin America and the Caribbean our own backyard. David, you mentioned Putin as a common enemy for the people of Ukraine and Poland. What else would you add, in the United States context, the different response?

David Miliband: Thank you, Fabiola, for your interesting question. I think the clue is in how Fabiola ended it. First of all, the situation in Latin America is long-term, protracted, complicated. The situation in Ukraine has a very clear, identifiable starting point, 24th of February. It's also the case that the Ukraine numbers are capped. There were 100,000 places offered to Ukrainians by the United States, and it was capped at that level. I think that the different nature of the crisis speaks to the different treatment. I'm not making a normative judgment about what's right or what's wrong, but that, I think, explains the difference.

Obviously, there's no equivalent invasion of one country by another in South America - thank goodness - Latin America. Our argument as an organization dedicated, now $1.5 billion organization in 40 countries with staff around the world, what we can do is say is not use the word parallels. We understand exactly why Fabiola was hesitant to use that word, but there are lessons. Our ability is to be an expert witness about what works and what doesn't work. We hope that in the process we can help promote the dignity and the livelihood and the future of each of the people that we're serving, as well as those who can benefit from our policy advice.

Brian Lehrer: There are also people who say the US contributed, though we don't talk about it very much, to the conditions in South America, Central America, which is another reason that the US should consider itself responsible for asylum seekers in some of these cases. Listener texts, "Please mention the 50th anniversary of the US-sponsored coup that overthrew the democratically-elected Allende government in Chile, installing the dictator Pinochet, who killed, disappeared, imprisoned, and tortured 40,000 souls." Yes, to people who are from Chile or connected with that. That's the other 9/11. That's 50 years ago today, as it turns out, so we at least mention that.

Here is Sylvia on Long Island. You're on WNYC. Hi, Sylvia.

Sylvia: Oh, hello. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you, yes.

Sylvia: This is my first time calling in my car phone, so I apologize. I housed a refugee family from the Ukraine for three months through Airbnb.org out here on Long Island. There are a lot of us in my church community and other communities out here that would be open to housing asylum seekers in New York City if that could be coordinated. The IRC, we have reached out to-- In the past we've had Milagros Cruz from the New York City office come out and talk to us about sponsoring. I just wanted to make one point and then I'll get off.

The difference, I think, if I understand, the situation between New York City and the situation in Poland is that once a refugee worker comes from Ukraine and goes to Poland, they could work in Poland. In New York City, there's no support to-- We've got all of these asylum seekers that would make wonderful workers. We have a labor shortage. It would be great to be able to employ the workers. I run five after-school childcare programs in New York City public schools, and it would be great to be able to offer work to those incoming asylum seekers.

One more point, sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Sylvia: Just in using services for what we have, the after-school programs that could be provided to asylum seekers, they cannot use them because there's no busing after the program in order for the children to get home to wherever their shelter might be. Parents that might be able to work or might be able to just take advantage of having a safe place for the kids to play and learn after school can't because there's no way-- Sometimes the shelters are very far away from where the kids are attending school.

Brian Lehrer: Sylvia, thank you. Thank you for putting all that out there for our listeners to know about. Call us again. David, what's the rough distribution among Ukrainian refugees of who has gone where in Europe or elsewhere? How many, if you have these numbers top of mind, would you say are in the United States? We've talked about a million-plus in Poland. Where else or how many?

David Miliband: The US, 100,000. Poland I think is probably closer to 1.5 to even 2 million. Germany, where I also visited last week, is about 1 to 1.25 million. You've then got 25 other states of the European Union who have taken Ukrainian refugees, and that explains the rest of them. Obviously, the further west you go, the fewer there are because people want to sustain their link to their own country. However, the UK is quite far west in Western Europe, outside the EU sadly, now.

My own country has taken 100,000 Ukrainians, often using the model that Sylvia mentioned just now of people volunteering to host Ukrainians. Part of the-- I don't like to use the word burden sharing, but the responsibility sharing around Europe has been quite well organized.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts, "Thank you for making the connection between Ukraine and the aftermath of September 11th. Saw the towers collapse and knew people who died, yet it's hard to not be deeply cynical today given the ineptitude of our government, both pre and especially post-attack." That from listener George in Brooklyn writing us a text. David, does the IRC as a refugee service agency deal at all with people who you would say are still displaced today because of what we might call the long tail of the 9/11 attacks, whether that means from the Iraq war or Afghanistan war that came in response to them or anything else?

David Miliband: Yes, we do. I mean, the IRC works with people who are trapped in their homes during conflict. That would be in Ukraine as a good example. We help people who are internally displaced in countries, and there are many such people inside Iraq and Afghanistan and we help refugees as well. We actually have 5,000 people working for the International Rescue Committee in Afghanistan today. These are people who didn't choose the Taliban government in the 1990s and they didn't choose the Taliban government that came in in August 2021. They are innocent Afghans who want to get on with their lives and try and improve their lives.

Their situation is a long tail of Afghanistan's tragedy really. Trauma since the late 1970s when the former Soviet Union invaded, as you will know. It certainly feels like a disordered world that reflects many of the consequences of 9/11, but also some of the forces that led to it.

Brian Lehrer: I know you've got to go in a minute.

David Miliband: Always got time for you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] I want to acknowledge that a number of people are calling or texting to say, "What about climate refugees?" I'm just curious if you think that that's going to be a major, major source of refugees in the near future on Earth.

David Miliband: Great. I'd love the listeners who are texting in or writing in to go to the IRC website, which is rescue.org. If they click onto our emergency watch list, which was published last December, they'll see something directly relevant to the question they're asking. Of the 110 million people around the world, who are today refugees or internally displaced people, we reckon about 70% of the problem, if you like, is caused by conflict. Conflicts like the Ukraine conflict, but also like the conflict that's raging in Sudan at the moment.

Then there's also the climate issue and then economics as well. We are seeing one of the things that's associated with global warming is more extreme weather events. Those disasters, they displace more people. It's also the case that climate heating contributes to stress on resources. That's something that is a driver of conflict as well. Climate is very much part of the question.

Just for the nerds amongst your listeners, be careful in referring to climate refugees, because a lot of the people who are displaced by climate crisis at the moment are staying within their own country. They're not being displaced yet across borders. They're climate internally displaced. Oourse conflict within states, climate crisis, economic distress, those are long-term factors, not short-term ones. The message I've given every week really that I've been working at the IRC, is that we have to treat the symptoms but also address the causes, and that's what we try and do in the work that we perform around the world.

Brian Lehrer: David Miliband, former British Foreign Secretary and president, for 10 years now, of the International Rescue Committee which it serves and advocates for refugees. Thank you so much for your time today, David.

David Miliband: Thank you very much.

 

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