Interview

Gregory Maniatis is the programme director of the International Migration Initiative at Open Society Foundations. His previous posts include co-director the Migration Project of Columbia University’s Global Policy Initiative and senior advisor to the UN special representative for migration. For the past 20 years Maniatis has also worked as a freelance contributor to leading media outlets.

I’ve worked in the world of politics at the national, regional, and multilateral levels, I’ve worked in journalism—that’s where I started—I’ve worked in think tanks, and I’ve been in the private sector. When I came to the Open Society Foundations four years ago, I found it to be the freest space in the world to do creative political and policy work, and to bring people together across sectors in order to co-design social change strategies. We’re in a unique position to de-risk ideas by piloting them, by building alliances and coalitions around strategies to implement them, and, if they work, urging their adoption by others who can scale them, especially governments.

We are very focused on the need to prove concepts by creating multi-stakeholder partnerships across sectors—civil society, government, the private sector, academia, faith groups, the multilateral system—harnessing the strengths of each to drive system change.

The most innovative and unfettered actors tend to be in civil society and the private sector, but bold civil servants are the ones who are in the best position to scale change through their mastery of policy and government. No single sector can make progress alone, especially at a time when extremely powerful corporate and other forces resist change or are moving society in a more divided direction.

Our role as a program is to not only be generative in terms of the ideas that should be considered by the public and by political leaders, but also to work on the implementation of those ideas by building powerful coalitions—and often bringing together unusual partners. I’ll give you an example: Five years ago, we launched the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative (GRSI), and we did so out of a very powerful sense that refugee resettlement should be community-led, that this was important in order to improve integration outcomes, to reanimate communities by bringing them together around a common cause, and to generate a powerful, broad constituency in support of refugee protection. So we created a partnership with the government of Canada, UNHCR, and the University of Ottawa in order to try—together—to take this Canadian idea of refugee sponsorship to the rest of the world.

In five years, GRSI has helped create refugee sponsorship pilots or programs in over a dozen countries, most recently now in the United States. We could not have done that without the differentiated know-how and strengths of each partner—the flexibility and civil society networks of philanthropy, the deep knowledge that resides in UNHCR and academia, and the implementing power of governments. It’s one thing for a think-tanker or a philanthropist to advocate for a good idea. It’s quite another for government officials—diplomats and civil servants who run foreign and immigration policy and who know all of the challenges in doing anything related to immigration—to engage their counterparts in other countries to help design sponsorship programs that are adapted to different contexts.

We believe very strongly that we have to take responsibility for policy and political outcomes, not just for launching good ideas. Our staff have to be nimble strategists, creative team builders, and exceptional risk managers. In this example, the policy outcome is for governments to adopt refugee sponsorship, but ultimately the larger outcome is that we want is to see community groups deeply involved in welcoming and integrating refugees and newcomers of all kinds, and in doing so to also engage in world affairs in a way that gives them a deeper understanding of all these issues.

I’ll give you an example of some work that we’ve done and that will illustrate our position. And I should preface this by saying that one of the hallmarks of OSF is that there is no single open society position on any issue—so this is my own view. When it comes to undocumented migrants, we try fiercely to ensure that they have equal access to the same public services and rights as all others. We also respect that states have the right to regulate entry into their countries, as long as they respect their international and other legal obligations to allow in asylum seekers.

A recent example of our work on behalf of undocumented migrants is in the United States, where last year, at the very beginning of the pandemic, we decided to grant $20 million to the city of New York to provide direct cash assistance to the undocumented, who were excluded from federal pandemic relief efforts. It was a moment when everyone was starting to hail the heroism of essential workers and coming to the realization that while they were stuck in their homes, it was the essential workers who were risking their lives to pick their crops, deliver their food, and attend to them in the hospitals. And that a disproportionate number of these essential workers were not only immigrants but undocumented ones.

After NYC, we quickly decided to do the same elsewhere in the US. By summer, we had helped to create funds in 30 cities, states, and counties to provide direct cash assistance to the undocumented. Now, because we know that philanthropy is just a drop in the ocean when it comes to funding in a situation like this, we twinned it with advocacy and outreach—outreach to other foundations and advocacy with governments at the local, state, and federal levels to urge them to use this moment of recognition of the role of the undocumented. Last year, New York State, for example, set up a $2.1 billion fund for undocumented workers to access direct cash assistance.

Fundamentally, the idea came about in 2006 when I started to work as senior advisor to Peter Sutherland, the newly appointed UN Special Representative on International Migration; he ultimately served in that role until 2017 when he fell ill. We wanted to focus governments on the positive aspects of migration, to create a space where we weren’t just talking about border controls, but where we could really focus the minds of policymakers and politicians on how migration was beneficial. And then to show them how some governments were doing things better than other governments. How do you take advantage of the diaspora? How do you reduce the cost of remittances? How do you regularize undocumented migrants? We didn’t want this effort to be in the United Nations. We designed the GFMD to be state-led, because we wanted the states to own the institution and to feel as if they had the right to develop the agenda. The GFMD launched in 2007 and ultimately helped inform what became known as The Sutherland Report. The ideas in the Sutherland Report are very fundamental to the contents of the New York Declaration adopted in 2016 at the UN summit on migrants and refugees, and then subsequently, in the Global Compact for Migration.

Do I think the GFMD has been successful? Yes, I think we’re in a place—in part because of the pandemic and the work done by civil society and others during the pandemic—where there is greater recognition of the role migrants and refugees play in their societies. This is a bulwark against anti-immigrant politicians who demonise migrants as a means of re-nationalising power and politics.

The balance of history shows that strength in community comes from diversity, and that those societies that have organized well around diversity have thrived, going back to Ancient Greece.

You can tell any story that you want about whether people resist or embrace diversity and multiculturalism. There is so much evidence from history of any narrative across that entire spectrum. And I think this points to the conclusion that there is not a fundamental human instinct for or against it. I think that is where our politics and our leaders come in. You can create thriving diverse societies, or you can create ones that struggle.

I think the balance of history shows that strength in community comes from diversity, and that those societies that have organized well around diversity have thrived, going back to Ancient Greece. If you set the stage for acceptance, then you are a stronger society as a result. If you decide, however, to use diversity to divide, to pit one group against the other—whether that’s an ethnic group, a cultural group, an economic or religious group, whether it’s around class or identity—then, yes, I think people are prone and vulnerable to fear of the “other.” So you can destructively use diversity to divide societies. It’s not hard to do.

One of the ways that I try to just orient folks who are considering how migration impacts society is that reflexively thinking, oh, you’re pro-migrant or anti-migrant, is unhelpful. It’s simply not so clear cut with most people, in my experience. Almost all people have the capacity to have feelings across the spectrum of reaction to strangers—even people we think of as being progressive and pro-immigration. We have to acknowledge and work with these complex feelings, and to build political strategies that account for them. On the progressive side, we often take away the space for reasoned conversation about migration because it’s a kind of litmus test: “Are you for or against migration?” And that is destructive for those who want more progressive immigration policies, because well-intentioned people who are concerned about immigration will go quiet and they will not become vocal advocates for immigration policy. This is especially true at this point in history, when, after hundreds of years of rising as nations, the West is in decline relative to the rest of the world. I think this backdrop generates a generalised fear, which is easy to exploit—and even easier to do so now than say in the 1990s or the early 2000s, when the West was soaring with confidence after the Cold War.

If we look at Denmark, for example, today we see a country that has experimented with multiculturalism, it’s attempted an assimilationist approach, and now seems to be retreating from that. How do you read that?

I think Denmark is extremely troubling. It is a small, homogenous country in terms of its self-identity, and it is experiencing some of the broader fears that we were just discussing—the fear of decline, the fear of the “other” in economically declining communities that resist immigration. The sort of easy interpretation of that is that they fear that immigrants will take their jobs. But it’s more than that: especially at a time of economic uncertainty, you cling to what you know, to your sense of tradition, ritual, and identity. I think stagnant societies tend to be ones where it’s easier to come in as a nativist and as a nationalist. This is nothing new. I think Hannah Arendt said it best in her work on loneliness: authoritarians prey on lonely communities, offering them a leader to identify with, and a sense of tradition and culture to cling to. That’s what you’ve seen in Poland and Hungary. The nativists are the ones who are able to exploit the sense of decline, as well as the memory of the 2015 refugee crisis. Viktor Orbán in Hungary scaremongers by saying that Africa’s rise is unstoppable, that it’s not a matter of a million people crossing the Mediterranean, but instead of tens of millions or more, which is why he says we have to build fortress Europe. There’s no evidence for what he says, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

Fair enough! I don’t think there’s anything controversial in saying that you should regulate who moves over your border. That pillar was pretty straightforward. So the question for me is how much work has been done on the other pillars. My sense—even before 2015, but especially in 2015—was that the progressive movement was making a mistake by assuming that governments wouldn’t be able to stop large-scale migration, that it was somehow inevitable.

This is not a winning political argument. People understandably fear the kind of chaos we saw at Europe’s borders in 2015, especially in an age of terrorism. What you need to argue is that you can regulate migration, that governments can design policies that get the most out of it and minimize its risks. This will build public confidence. The binary between “You can’t stop them” and “You can stop them”—that’s a losing one for progressives in a system of nation states. The people who say, “You can’t stop them” will lose. And what has happened in a big way in the past five years is that those who want to have really strict control of the borders have won. Added to that, the pandemic has made it really easy to shut down borders. “

Viktor Orbán scaremongers by saying that Africa’s rise is unstoppable, that it’s not a matter of a million people crossing the Mediterranean, but instead of tens of millions or more, which is why he says we have to build fortress Europe. There’s no evidence for what he says, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

My view is that countries are willing to accept relatively large numbers of newcomers. But they have to migrate in ways that are regulated. There couldn’t be a better example of this than Canada, which allows in one percent of its population or more every year and welcomed 40,000 Syrians in three months in 2015-16. And yet in 2017, when a few thousand people crossed the border into Canada from the United States early in the Trump era, it chilled the politics around immigration in Canada. You’re letting in what, 400,000 people a year, and yet 10,000 people crossing irregularly upset a country that is deeply progressive on this issue. And so I think it’s a really good example of why it is not a great idea to advocate for chaotic unregulated movement.

By the way, I am Greek—I hold Greek citizenship. Until I was 40, I could legitimately say I’d spent about half of my life in Greece. In Greek tradition, we have a deep sense of friendliness towards foreigners—there’s a frequently used word for it, philoxenia . It’s all true, it’s a profound part of our identity. But the stranger still raises suspicion when she or he walks into a café, in any society. That’s totally natural. We shouldn’t stigmatise the sense of concern people have when somebody comes into their community, especially in smaller ones, whether it’s someone who shares your nationality or not. It’s going to raise suspicion. The experience of 2015-2016 in Greece remains fresh—all those chaotic scenes on the islands and at the border—and it’s the backdrop against which today’s events unfold.

I think something else is happening in Greece, which is that the state doesn’t function very well. It’s not more complicated than this, on one level. Because the state doesn’t function well, we cannot organise around building an asylum system that functions at the level it needs to function. We cannot mobilise around building integration programs that successfully integrate newcomers into Greece. Even when there were governments in Greece that were more supportive of migrants, you just could not get the state to function as well as it needed to, and to build the systems that you needed. I understand the thinking of those who oppose bringing in large numbers of people when you have asylum systems that cannot vet people, right? This is the age of terrorism, the US government can bring in 125,000 refugees in the next fiscal year, but you can be assured that the US government will vet all of those people, right? That’s a reasonable thing to do. When systems function well it works much better.

I don’t think there’s anything controversial in saying that you should regulate who moves over your borders.

I don’t take much stock in most polling that’s done on immigration. It’s not that it’s inaccurate, it’s just that you can elicit whatever sentiment you want from polling, more or less, when it comes to difficult issues like immigration. So it does come back to that point I made about how political and other leaders develop narratives and systems. We try to do the kind of polling that gives us real insights into how people think, into how to frame issues, and how to design policies. I have a huge gripe around the imagery and narratives deployed by refugee advocates, by the UNHCR for example, which tend to be around trying to generate compassion. Compassion isn’t a great sentiment when it comes to trying to build public support for refugees and immigration. It has a short half-life and it can diminish others. There are much better ways to build support, and I think polling gives us real insights. The pandemic now makes polling around immigration really difficult to interpret. It’s natural for people to be scared in a pandemic. Even state borders in the United States—people in one state became suspicious of people from out-of-state in the early months of the pandemic. I think foreigners, depending on the state of the pandemic, will create greater fear. On the other hand, immigrants who were already in countries when the pandemic started generated greater sympathy than before because of the disproportionate risk and burden they bore as essential workers. So I think there has been a build-up of greater sympathy for immigrants over the past year or so.

We shouldn’t stigmatise the sense of concern people have when somebody comes into their community, especially in smaller ones, whether it’s someone who shares your nationality or not. It’s going to raise suspicion.

In early 2015, Peter Sutherland proposed to the secretary general to host a UN conference that could develop a comprehensive plan of action for the Syrian refugee crisis, much as had been done in the late 1970s during the Vietnamese exodus and in smaller refugee crises since then. We had been trying for years to bring European and other leaders together to address what was and had been evident for a long time—a massive shortfall in financial support for refugee-hosting countries in the Middle East and Turkey. You could see what was happening, building up from 2012 onwards, and you knew it was a pressure cooker. We knew we had to be able to get leadership, and that it would have to come from the UN; the European Union was not going to do this on its own. And we also knew that the US was willing to act. So once it became a crisis, we tried to get the United Nations to host a summit on the Mediterranean crisis.

We were not successful. There simply wasn’t enough support in the UN system. We were told that we were not successful because most countries do not focus on refugees. But they do care about migrants. Most countries in the world care about making immigration and emigration easier because it is a financial benefit to them. So we ended up with a UN summit on migrants and refugees. But we were in the midst of a moment that demanded action—not a 24-page document with aspirations, which is what the UN summit produced. We wanted action and we got aspiration. The US saw the risk and tried to get the UN to play a role. We didn’t get the comprehensive plan of action, what we got were two compacts. We were fine with that in the end, obviously, better than not having them. And the question of whether there should have been one or two is another story. Again, just to be clear, our focus at that time was, “Can we generate a comprehensive plan of action for the Syrian refugee crisis or not.”

Once that did not succeed as a plan, we had to accept what we got: the compacts as aspirational vehicles. I think the Global Compact for Migration is more important than the Refugee Compact because the Refugee Compact was kind of retrograde. What the Refugee Convention says is more ambitious in many ways than what the Refugee Compact says. On the other hand, the Migration Compact was wholly new in terms of international understanding and agreement— even at an aspirational level.

On questions of integration of immigrants, I think there will be significant progress because there is support for integration, both from progressive and from more centrist political leaders. I think when it comes to refugee protection, there will also be progress—if the progressive community focuses on policies that open up pathways that are regulated. I think there will be progress also on understanding the impact of climate on displacement and acknowledging collective responsibility, though not to create a new category of refugees—I don’t think that will happen. I’m not an open borders type; I believe in regulated migration and would have liked to have seen much more work done to open up regulated channels in recent years. I think that in general we’re in a period where nativism is at a high-level plateau and will continue to create natural political resistance to what I would consider progressive migration and refugee policies. But even in this environment we can make a great deal of progress if we come together to design and implement smart strategies, and join forces across sectors.

I have a huge gripe around the imagery and narratives deployed by refugee advocates, which tend to be around trying to generate compassion. Compassion isn’t a great sentiment when it comes to trying to build public support for refugees and immigration.