Armed conflict, increases in public debt and the climate crisis are just a few factors that will accelerate humanitarian crises globally in 2024, according to the International Rescue Committee. Meanwhile, there’s a number of practical issues that have been raised by the high pace of migrants presenting at borders and applying for asylum around the world. Our guest this week points out the importance of creating “legal routes to hope” amid increased global migration. David Miliband is President & CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), where he oversees the agency’s humanitarian relief operations in more than 40 war-affected countries and its refugee resettlement and assistance programs in the U.S. Before that, he served as a Foreign Secretary of the U.K. He joins to discuss the IRC’s 2024 Emergency Watchlist, myths about the global humanitarian crisis that have become a part of media discourse, actionable solutions and more. costs of clean tech and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
David Miliband: It’s right that people want to know who’s coming in. It’s right that there should be a proper system for deciding who has a right to stay. It’s right that those who don’t have a right to say don’t stay. And the question then becomes one of, if you like, order. I always think that there’s a danger. If you pose the choices, either you can be humane or you can be orderly, then those who would advocate cruelty are going to win.
If you say, look, cruelty does not lead to order, cruelty actually empowers the people smugglers, it increases the incentives to find irregular ways of getting around the system. And the cruelty is actually a source of disorder.
You can combine order with humanity. I think that’s a really much more secure basis to say, yeah, it’s right to want it to be orderly. It’s right to want it to be controlled. It’s right to want it to be fair.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
About a week and a half ago, the House Republican leadership, Speaker Mike Johnson, and a whole bunch of other Republicans went down to Texas, the border on the Rio Grande River. And they stood there and they had this big, you know, event to talk about the border, where there has been a lot of apprehensions of migrants who have been crossing with the intent to present themselves to border patrol and to apply for asylum as is their legal right, both under international and domestic U.S. law.
Now, when they did this, they were there sort of doing the event when this family of migrants was actually wading through the river, which was kind of a PR coup for House Republicans because the whole point of this was to be, like, look at how out of control it is. Look at these people. We’re down here doing our event. And even that, even while we’re here doing our event, they’re crossing.
And, you know, it is true that the numbers of crossings are very high in historical terms, you know, hundreds of thousands a month. But I have to say that I am just sort of, I guess a bleeding heart on this stuff.
But I was so struck by the image of it was a family. There were children. And the desperation and the grit that it would take to, you know, thinking about myself, putting myself in their shoes, like taking my kids and like having my, you know, darling 6-year-old, have her hands around my neck as I hold her and try to wave through waste high water, several thousand miles from my home to get somewhere because I’m so driven by a desire to secure a better life for my family, I just find it very affecting.
And I know that is not the way everyone necessarily feels. And I don’t want to be judgmental about the reaction people have. I think people have really different reactions to when they see people showing up at the border. And I don’t want to say that people have different reactions, which is, this is out of control or this makes me unnerved or racist or bigots.
I think there’s something deep in us that feels a sense of disorder and is skeptical of strangers. And, you know, there’s a lot of practical issues that have been raised by the high pace of migrants presenting themselves and applying for asylum. We’ve seen that in various cities across country, including New York, where I live, where there’s tens of thousands currently in shelters. And it’s just palpable. You see these folks. A lot of them have, you know, desperately trying to sort of find some sort of income or selling stuff on the subway.
And the reason I’m starting with all of this is because this experience the U.S. is going through, I think we have a tendency to look at issues like this in very narrow domestic terms. You know, this is happening at the U.S.-Mexico border.
But the fact of the matter is migration flows such as these are happening all over the world all the time. They’re particularly happening in places adjacent to conflict in Sudan right now and the countries that are near it.
Obviously in Gaza, 1.8 million of the 2.1 million Gazans have had to leave their homes because of the Israeli war in Gaza, after the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7th, you know. So 80 percent of the population is displaced in Gaza right now, and huge swaths of homes they can’t go to. And they also can’t leave, right? So they’re sort of trapped in Gaza right now, but displaced.
You’ve got Afghan refugees who’ve gone to Pakistan, many of whom are now facing deportation. You’ve got refugees that came from the Syrian war that dispersed throughout the Middle East and into Europe.
And this issue of what to do, what does a country do with people that come to its borders seeking refuge because of either political persecution, civil war, other forms of war and violence is one that is front and center in across a bunch of countries right now. It’s particularly driving politics, I think, in the U.S. and Europe.
You see this particularly in the U.K. where their version of the border, which has been migrant flows into the U.K. and more broadly in the EU in terms of boats reaching Italy and Greece has been a front and center issue.
And I thought it would be really useful to just talk about this in a little bit of a broader international context, because our discussion in the U.S. is so focused on the U.S. and Mexico, specifically so focused on the border in the Rio Grande. That’s like where the whole thing is happening.
But it’s part of a much larger set of questions that all nations are sort of asking themselves right now and embedded in a larger historical context about the failures of many nations to take in refugees, particularly in the lead up to the Holocaust and World War II and the international law and consensus that was produced after it.
And I thought, no one better to talk to that about than David Miliband. David Miliband is a really interesting guy. He comes from a quite famous British family. His father was a legendary academic and sociologist. Also his parents, as you’ll hear, were refugees, both and came to the U.K. He and his brother have been active in labor politics. He was actually the Foreign Secretary of the U.K. during a Labour government.
He is now the President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, which was founded with the interests of refugees worldwide at heart, and does a lot of work with populations that are fleeing the land that they live in.
David, welcome to the program.
David Miliband: Thanks, Chris. Really good to be with you.
Chris Hayes: Can we start a little bit with your family history? Because I feel like it’s incredibly relevant to the conversation we’re going to have and the work you do.
David Miliband: Yeah. I’m British. So I find it very difficult to talk about personal things, of course.
Chris Hayes: You know, people can’t see this because it’s an audio medium, but you sort of like winced when I —
David Miliband: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: — talked about your family history.
David Miliband: No, but I’m very proud of my family history. And the older I get, the more conscious of it I guess I become. Both my parents were refugees to the U.K. My dad was 16 in 1940 when the Germans invaded. And he came to London with his dad. He left his mother and his sister in Nazi-occupied Belgium.
They survived the war thanks to an extraordinary Catholic family south of Brussels, a farming family. And my dad came to London with his dad. He went to Acton Technical College in West London and after a year qualified for the London School of Economics and then joined the Royal Navy after a year of undergraduate study.
And my mom, also Jewish, spent the war in hiding in Poland. And she came to the U.K. as a 12-year-old in 1946.
And when I applied for the job as CEO of the International Rescue Committee, which was founded by Albert Einstein, to help rescue European Jews and oppressed minorities, and is now a global humanitarian organization, I said that one reason I was interested in the job is that in some way it helped close something of a family circle.
It allowed me to try and help support others in a way that my parents were helped. And it’s literally the case that I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t been helped.
And so I think there is some moral impulse that comes from my own family story. And, of course, conditions in all sorts of ways are different today, but horrors are often similar. And wherever you look in the world, you can see modern day horror stories that don’t just tug at your heartstrings, but speak to, in my case, some family history.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, the sort of split family, the father and son, your father and his father leaving and the mother and daughter leaving, and staying behind and then being hid by this rural Catholic family. I mean, that saved their life. It’s a remarkable tale.
David Miliband: Yeah. I mean, funny enough for ironically last year, I had the chance to go to the village south of Brussels where my grandmother and my aunt were hidden. And I met some of the successor generations to that Catholic farming family.
And also some of the relatives, including a now 88-year-old man who was a 7-year-old boy when he was evacuated to that village. By the end of the war, there were dozens of family members hidden in this village. So it was a remarkable across the village effort, not just one family doing the right thing.
Chris Hayes: The other reason I want to start with that conversation, we should note that your father, Ralph Miliband, maybe people might know him because he’s a legendary sociologist thinker, political writer of the left. It’s also World War II and its aftermath, the experience of both the war and the aftermath that produces both international and national laws about dealing with refugees, asylum seekers and the like and produces whatever international consensus there is, which is often sort of honored in the breach, about what to do when populations are desperately in danger, where they are and need to leave.
And I think it’s that regime that is under such sustained assault right now partly, I think, because the lessons of that period have gotten more and more remote. But what happened during World War II, and what stained the conscience of so many countries, was that Jews were turned away in all sorts of places.
They were seen as an element that countries didn’t want to let in. There was, you know, incredible machinations done by both U.S. and the British government and others to keep the number as small as possible. There’s notorious stories of the St. Louis, which is the ship that had Jewish refugees that was turned away from a port in the U.S.
So I mean, the ones that weren’t able to find freedom and the moral stain of that produced a lot of the kind of modern, you know, post-war consensus about what country’s obligation should be to people fleeing desperate situations.
David Miliband: Well, that’s true, but I would make a wider point. The 1951 conventional refugees, which by the way, is important to remember was originally only for European refugees. It was only after 1967 and ‘68 that it became a global standard.
But that commitment to the rights of refugees was a subset of a wider set of commitments to human rights more generally. It’s the 75th anniversary of the U.N. declaration on human rights. And the wider set of laws and norms learned a whole set of lessons.
I mean, the post-1945 settlement was the first time in human history that human rights had been put alongside states’ rights in international law. I mean, there’d been commitments to the sovereignty of states and the territorial integrity of states for hundreds of years. There’d never been a legal set of rights for human beings, for refugees, for children that all came out of that post-Second World War period of extraordinary political lesson learning.
And the point I always make to people is that we don’t actually need new international laws and norms. We need to live up to the ones that were written after 1945.
Now, it’s important to say we shouldn’t fall into a sort of golden ageism that somehow pretends 1945, the Cold War, was all sweetness and light when it came to living up to human rights, et cetera.
But I do think it’s important to say that this isn’t that complicated in at least one sense. Those laws and norms have been written. Laws and norms against impunity, most obviously for human rights of a wide range of kinds, including for refugees.
And the work that we do at the International Rescue Committee, which is about people who are caught up in war, people who are fleeing from war within their own country, people who are fleeing across borders, whether as refugees or asylum seekers, is all about trying to uphold the practical, social, economic meaning of those rights at a time when in all sorts of ways they’re under political attack.
Chris Hayes: That’s a great way to frame the conversation because I think why don’t we start a little bit with what those rights are? I mean, what is the sort of post-‘45 consensus about if someone is fleeing for their life, fleeing persecution, fleeing war, fleeing famine, in some cases? What are our commitments? I mean, what rights do they have?
David Miliband: Well, the right is, in a way, simple. It’s, if your life is in danger, you have a right not to be sent back to danger. That’s the essential right as it relates to refugees and asylum seekers. And that is the fundamental point.
Now you mentioned famine and there are far fewer rights for those who are fleeing famine, social and economic needs than a fleeing persecution. The legal terminology is a well-founded fear of persecution, but it’s not confined to political rights.
Those fleeing war have rights and above all the right to have their case heard. And if they are in danger at home, not to be sent back home. But it’s also important to say to your audience that case law has updated that meaning of a right not to be sent back to where it’s unsafe.
So for example, 40 or 50 years ago, if you were a woman fleeing persecution in your home, your homeland or literally your home, that wouldn’t have been considered core to a refugee right today.
If you are a woman fleeing from domestic violence and crossing a border and have a well-founded fear of that violence, you have a right not to be sent back. It’s very important, I think, that we don’t fall for the argument that it’s impossible to uphold that. It is possible to uphold that if you develop the mechanisms and the policy procedures and the practices to determine that those rights are sacrosanct.
Chris Hayes: One of the things that’s important, I think to understand about this is that distinction that you just referenced when I said famine. And as the words were coming out of my mouth, I almost wanted to take it back because there is a real distinction in the international law.
I can only speak to American domestic law because I don’t actually know the law in the U.K. very well. But in American domestic law, there’s this distinction that’s very important between essentially kind of persecution, credible fear of persecution and the other reasons that are perfectly legitimate and rational that someone might flee a place, You know, a horrible economic circumstance, right? And that distinction ends up being this sort of much more complicated in reality than it might be when you set it down about whether someone is an economic migrant or fleeing persecution.
Obviously, countries have systems put up. We have a set of interviews that are done by case workers and folks in the immigration bureaucracy that do this. It’s actually very hard to get asylum in the U.S.
But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. You say that we have the tools we need if you look at the sort of post-World War II settlement on these questions. But do we, when the causes of mass migration and migrant flows are so complicated and can be difficult to untangle?
David Miliband: Well, the first thing to say is that some cases are not that complicated. The baker whose bakery is bombed in Damascus by his own government, he’s a pretty straightforward case. But you are right that there is a lot of what’s called mixed migration and it’s mixed in two ways.
One, there are some people fleeing politics, and there are some people fleeing economics. And in some people’s cases, it’s a mixture of both. So Venezuelan refugees would be an example where the mixes of both kinds. So there are gray areas.
My point is that there are enough examples of countries that have processed a hell of a lot of asylum claims in a way that has done justice to the basic rights of those who are fleeing, but also to the common sense that says, not everyone has a right to claim refugee status.
It’s important in that context to say that there’s quite a lot of mythology around this. I mean, we’re talking as if, so far, most refugees flee to rich countries. Actually, they don’t. Most refugees flee to poor countries. So the largest refugee hosting states are countries like Pakistan. They’re countries like Ethiopia or even Uganda from South Sudan. Bangladesh has a lot of refugees from Myanmar.
So it’d be wrong to say there aren’t major challenges, whether it’s Southern border of the U.S. or in Europe with people fleeing from Sub-Saharan Africa. But it’s also important to say that 75 to 80 percent of the world’s refugees are in poor and lower middle income countries, not in rich countries.
We just published the IRC’s, International Rescue Committee’s 2024 Emergency Watchlist. It is 20 countries at greatest risk of humanitarian disaster this year. And fully 75 percent of the world’s refugees are contained in those 20 countries. And they’re not rich countries. They’re poor countries.
Chris Hayes: This, to me, is a really just important point to spend some time on because the politics of this issue in rich and developed countries like the U.K. and the U.S., and all throughout Europe particularly, and Australia to a certain extent, it can be very demagogic. It can be very sort of shot through with backlash. This kind of like, well, what do you want us to do?
This very sort of like, obviously, it’s ridiculous. You don’t even have a country if you can’t control who’s coming in. When countries from, you know, Pakistan to Bangladesh, to Uganda, as you mentioned, to Colombia next to Venezuela are seeing flows of refugees in incredibly dire circumstances at literally orders of magnitude beyond what any rich country is seeing.
David Miliband: Yeah. I think that’s a good point, equally. I mean, I used to be in politics. And I think it’s important not to start by saying, this is all demagoguery. Let’s start by saying, yes, there are real challenges posed here.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
David Miliband: And it’s right that people want to know who’s coming in. It’s right that there should be a proper system for deciding who has a right to stay. It’s right that those who don’t have a right to say don’t stay.
And the question then becomes one of, if you like order, I always think that there’s a danger. If you pose the choices, either you can be humane or you can be orderly, then those who would advocate cruelty are going to win.
If you say, look, cruelty does not lead to order.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
David Miliband: Cruelty actually empowers the people smugglers. It increases the incentives to find irregular ways of getting around the system. And the cruelty is actually a source of disorder.
You can combine order with humanity. I think that’s a really much more secure basis to say, yeah, it’s right to want it to be orderly. It’s right to want it to be controlled. It’s right to want it to be fair. Both fair to those arriving and those who are already here or in Europe or in the U.S.
It’s also important to say, and this is more of a European point than an American point. One of the things that has bedeviled European policy in this area is that different European countries have had different standards and taken different numbers of people.
And that’s been a source of blowback because it’s been perceived to be unfair to Sweden and Germany over France, Spain, and Portugal, and certainly seen to be unfair to Italy and Greece, which is where most refugees arrive compared to the rest of Europe.
It’s important to say that there has to be fairness between countries. That’s why this notion of shared responsibility is important. And it’s also important to say that if you want to help control and organize the flow of people, you have to make sure that there’s support for those poor countries that are putting up the most people.
An abiding complaint of the Jordans of this world, which has between 600,000 and a million Syrian refugees for the last 10 years, and of Colombia, that you mentioned, is that they don’t get proper support for delivering on what is a genuine global responsibility.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Let me sort of clarify this because I agree with you that it’s all the concerns that you’ve articulated. There are totally fair concerns. My point about the demagoguery is about the scale. That’s I think what gets me a little bit, which is —
David Miliband: Yeah. That’s a good point.
Chris Hayes: — that it’s in the U.S., if you just compare the scale of how many folks are showing up the southern border, which is a lot, I mean, you know, a hundred thousand plus every month right now, sometimes more than that. It’s a lot of people for sure. And the strain that it’s put on certain parts of the infrastructure of even a city like where I live, New York City, where I think you live as well, is real.
David Miliband: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, it truly is. And you can see it.
I mean, you know, I walk past one of the hotels where folks are staying. Like the scale of what’s happened in the U.S. is just nothing like what happened in Pakistan or what happened in Jordan during the Syrian war or in Colombia. You know, societies, and I’m not saying like this is great. You know, it has been hard for those societies to absorb those numbers.
But there are many societies. They are sort of out of sight because they are in the developing world and they’re poorer that take on enormous flows of desperate people in insanely quick amounts of time. That is at a scale that’s nothing like what countries like the U.S., U.K. or any of those countries are facing.
David Miliband: Yeah. That’s a really important point. It’s important also though, because your listeners will immediately think, well, hang on, it’s not just poor countries. Sometimes rich countries have done it in an orderly way as well. If you think about six million Ukrainians who left very quickly during 2022, they were quote, unquote “absorbed.” I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word, but they were integrated, is a better word, into European schools because half of them were kids, also into the European labor market.
Now, the minute you mention Ukrainian refugees, people think, well, hang on, they’re different. They’re richer than the most refugees. They’re whiter than most refugees. Their religion is different from most refugees as well.
And so I think it’s worth unpacking that, but there was a system put in place. I think you said overnight in the European case, it was over a weekend, the weekend of the 24th of February 2022. The European Union decided that every Ukrainian would have a right to three years residents, a right to three years’ work permit, a right to three years welfare benefits, and a right to three years in schools in the case of kids.
And that was then organized. And there was —
Chris Hayes: Great point.
David Miliband: — voluntary effort. There was a wide range of state-led effort. Some people say, oh, that just proves how hard it is. No. It proves the exception, if you like. I think it shows a standard that should be upheld more widely.
Chris Hayes: That’s a really great point. And also the fact that the other side of this coin, of course, right, is that the kinds of backlash politics that you see in some places like in the U.S. right now, they’re also pretty universal as well. That’s the other part that I want to make. The other point I want to make, which I think is also important.
It’s like there are really nasty anti-refugee politics in Turkey directed at Syrian refugees. In fact, it was a defining political issue in some of their elections, particularly local election disassemble. There’s a very nasty sort of anti-refugee mood in Pakistan right now, which is in the midst of expelling hundreds of thousands, if not more, of Afghan refugees.
There has been some of that politics in Colombia with respect to Venezuela. So in the same way that like, you know, it’s not the case that the U.S. is facing some, like, you know, unprecedented quote, unquote “deluge.” It’s also the case that the frictions and the conflict that can be inherent with mass migration in any context are very real. And you have to kind of deal with them head on in any context, whatever society you’re talking about.
David Miliband: Well, I think that is the nub of this. And my point is always, look, the choice is not, are there going to be flows of people? I mean, if you look at —
Chris Hayes: That’s the thing. Yes.
David Miliband: — the wars will come onto that. The choice is not whether people try and come or not. The choice is, do they come in irregular, illegal, people smuggler enhancing —
Chris Hayes: Yes. Right.
David Miliband: — dangerous ways. Or do they come in legal, orderly, organized, and humane ways? And that’s why this argument that cruelty is not orderly, that actually —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Miliband: — treating people as human beings and having an orderly system go together is I think the absolute nub of this argument.
Chris Hayes: Well, you see this. I mean, in the American context, this is very clear to me because one of the things that people don’t understand about American immigration law is when people say, well, they should just come legally, or they should come in some way other than showing up at the border and presenting for asylum, which is legal, we should be clear, right?
These are not people who are like trying to like get over on the authorities, right? What they are doing is they’re going through a legal process. And they’re not trying to, quote, unquote “sneak around.” They are coming to get asylum, right? The legal process.
But if people say, well, that’s disorderly. And, you know, that’s not crazy. Like having hundreds of thousands of people present at the border really does tax the system in certain ways. If you say, like, well, then they should come some other way. They can’t is the answer.
I mean, they really truly can’t. I mean, the number of refugees the U.S. took, particularly under Trump, went down to something preposterous like 25,000 a year.
David Miliband: No, less. I mean, this is a really good point. We always say, look, there need to be legal roots to hope. The best way —
Chris Hayes: Right. That’s correct.
David Miliband: — to undercover people smugglers is to have legal roots to hope. This is a massive issue in U.K. and in Europe at the moment. But it’s also an issue in the U.S.
Although to be fair, the Biden administration has made important strides here. Look, this may stick in your gullet. I don’t know whether I can say this on your show, but the president who admitted more refugees than any other was Ronald Reagan, in the early 1980s, mainly with refugees from Vietnam.
And the historic average, since the passage of the 1980 U.S. Immigration Act, which you mentioned, is more or less 90,000 refugees a year admitted for refugee resettlement. And the Obama administration got up to 95,000. Trump cut it right down to 12,000. He wanted to try and abolish it completely.
By taking away the legal route to hope, you don’t end the desire or the aim or the effort of people to get here. What you do is you give a great big recruiting sergeant to the people who want to smuggle them here.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: This is the inescapable, both logic and almost physics of this question, right? I mean, just to broaden out for a second, right? Human migration is one of the first things humans did. It’s one of the oldest stories about people.
I was just in Hawaii. And in Hawaii, I got just obsessed with how people settled Polynesia because you’re sitting in the middle of the ocean. You’re thousands of miles away from the nearest inhabited place. And you think yourself, oh, my God. How on earth did they get here? And the answer is, we don’t know for certain, but people got in boats and using just incredibly sophisticated means of navigating using stars and wind currents and swells. They found their way. And this is true of the entire Pacific, right?
Now, that’s one we don’t even know the motivation. But what we do know is that throughout human history, people have moved from place to place for all sorts of different reasons at all sorts of different times. It is a human constant.
We also know that we have the most connected world we’ve ever had in terms of modes of transportation and also communication. And also, you can know now looking at your phone if you are in a very poor country, that the poverty or the crises you’re experiencing are different than what people are experiencing in other places in a way that has never been more present.
You combine those things like people are going to go. They don’t want to leave home. But if they are desperate, they will go. That is going to be a constant for whatever policy you figure out about it. And what ends up happening is the policy posture is, how can we make them not come here ends up being the primary driver of the policy, so that you have this kind of beggar-thy-neighbor thing, which is like, well, we don’t want them. Go somewhere. Go knock on someone else’s door. The inn is full.
David Miliband: Well, let me just add to that because I think there is something else going on as well. In the last decade, more or less, the number of people fleeing war, civil war, has grown dramatically. It’s more or less double.
And I think we’ve got to try and recognize what’s going on because it’s not just the general global trend of a more connected world. There are more than 50 civil wars going on around the world at the moment. And this presents a whole new vista, really, for international movement of people. Because, of course, the refugee convention that we started off talking about was developed for wars between states.
Now, there is a very major war between states in Ukraine and Russia. There’s obviously the Israel-Hamas conflict in Garza. But the 50 plus conflicts going on around the world are happening within states.
And the tools of diplomacy are very weak when it comes to tackling wars within states. Those wars within states are marked by a number of things. One, they’re very long indeed. I mentioned earlier the 20 countries on the IRC emergency watch list. There are seven of the top 10 countries that haven’t seen a year without war in the last decade. So there’s longevity of war.
Secondly, there’s the internationalization of civil conflict. Number one on our watch list is Sudan. Sudan’s got a civil war between two factions, 25 million people in humanitarian need. One and a half million people fleeing as refugees. It’s got United Arab Emirates supporting the rebels. It’s got Egypt and Saudi Arabia supporting the government. You’ve got the international support for players in conflict.
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Miliband: You’ve also got big now serious contribution of the climate crisis to conflict. I want to be very careful here. I don’t talk about climate refugees. There is evidence that there are people fleeing within their own country as climate conditions change. I’m leery of embracing the idea of climate refugees. People are fleeing across a border just because of climate change.
What I do know and what IRC teams see around the world is that the climate crisis. And I prefer that phrase to the phrase climate change. The climate crisis is contributing to resource stress and resource stress does contribute to conflict.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Miliband: And it also contributes to the elongation of conflict. So there are, if you like secular trends driving this particular aspect of what I would call forced migration. There’s migration, if you like, by choice. I made a choice to move from the U.K. to the U.S. 10 years ago. That was not —
Chris Hayes: It’s great to have you.
David Miliband: But it was my choice. There are forced migration. If you’re fleeing for your life, that’s a different kettle of fish entirely.
Chris Hayes: I was going to sort of use all this to sort of prompt this climate question, right? When I think about what this next century’s going to look like, you know, this combination of all the factors I said before, you know, and to loop back around like climate migration is probably the first kind of migration that happened in human history. Like it’s literally the ore (ph) migration of humans is like, it got too hot there, it stopped, it got too dry. It got too cold. We had to leave because the climate was no longer hospitable. Like that’s the original reason people move around probably.
Whether in some sort of direct the predicate itself is climate or not, the fact of the matter is as the world gets hotter, it will do the following things. It will put more stress on the poorest places. And that stress will lead to all kinds of social effects, you know, more conflict, more competition for resources. And those social disruptions are going to have huge migratory effects.
And all the people that have looked at this, including, you know, your organization, project that there are going to be many more people forced to flee or in the throes of involuntary migrations as you called it, in the coming century, as the world continues to warm.
And my big fear about this is that anti-immigration politics is a kind of superpower for charging right-wing politics more broadly. This is my real fear. I think you’ve seen this in Europe. You’ve seen it in the U.S. that it speaks to something that is both very available to almost all humans, which is sort of fear of the other, fear of the stranger, fear of disorder, fear of being invaded.
So it’s a very potent tool and it’s also a kind of gateway jug or sort of empowering message for the most reactionary elements of a society’s politics, right? The worst sort of authoritarian or revanchist views can use that politics.
And the sort of nightmare scenario I see is the sort of super charging those politics, which we’re already seeing in lots of parts of the developed world, you know, as we see the sort of climate crisis play out.
David Miliband: Yeah. Let’s be very careful here though. I’d be interested in your view on this. I’m very nervous of the argument that says, we should fight climate change because it’s going to produce all this migration. I know that’s not —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Miliband: I know you’re not saying that.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Miliband: But many of us are incredibly frustrated that in the last 30 to 40 years, logic and reason have not led to much greater action on climate. Some in their desperation have said, look, if we don’t tackle —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
David Miliband: — this climate issue, you’re going to get all these hoards of people flow.
Chris Hayes: Because it’s fundamentally a reactionary argument that plays into precisely the reactionary instincts that I’m describing.
David Miliband: I think we’ve got to make the argument not to use that argument —
Chris Hayes: Right. Yes.
David Miliband: — if you know what I’m saying. I don’t think that kind of catastrophism is going to produce the right kind of climate policy.
Chris Hayes: Oh, I agree.
David Miliband: Secondly, let’s be very aware that the climate crisis is displacing people because average rise in global temperature are associated with more extreme weather events. More extreme weather events do displace people.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
David Miliband: The climate crisis is putting a stress on resources that does lead to conflict. But a lot of those people are moving or the vast bulk of those people are moving within their countries, not across borders. Let’s remember that.
Then thirdly, we have to recognize that climate is one of a number of factors that’s driving more forced movement of people, and that does need addressing. And the 110 million people figure that’s quoted. 110 million people is the number that the UN says is forced migrants around the world, forced refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced.
The majority 55 to 60 percent are internally displaced. The minority are going across —
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Miliband: — borders. But in total, that’s one in 74 people on the planet, which is a hell of a lot of people who are being, quote, unquote, “forced to move.”
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: What I want there to be is a 21st century refounding, a recapture of the commitments of the post-World war II without the World War II, right? It’s like we had to learn the lesson the hard way in the most brutal way, right? With the most punishingly horrific, you know, moral and human disaster, you know, possibly in history or certainly up there is one of the worst.
And it was only in the wreckage of that. And then we should also say, the subsequent enormous population flows, which I think is the thing that Americans don’t realize is how much after the war there were these insane amounts of people moving all over Europe as the kind of ethno nationalist states got settled. You know, there were German speakers who were in Romania who fled. There were all these different groups that moved around, right?
Is there a way to kind of re-found that international consensus in the absence of the catastrophe now? Because it feels remote in many ways. I mean, it’s on the books in a certain way, right? Like the laws are there, but it doesn’t feel like it’s animated in the polities that are the ones that we’re talking about.
David Miliband: Well, look, I think, first, I agree with you that clearly the extraordinary unique horror of the Second World War was a big driver, but I’d also argue that it was two wars on the European continent in this place of 25 years.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Yeah.
David Miliband: That’s really what led to the refounding. And the failings of the interwar period, the determination to learn the lessons of the failure to learn from World War I, I think that created this —
Chris Hayes: Right.
David Miliband: — extraordinary and special moment alongside the fact that American hegemony became or American super ordinance became so dispositive in the global system.
Now, what do we do now? And I’m glad to get onto this because we’ve been in hard territory up to now. It’s even harder what the hell to do about it. Here’s my take that we have to ally two instincts. One is that to those that have the most is the greatest responsibility given. And there is a real justice element to this and the injustice that’s felt by huge parts. I don’t like the term of the global south, but we know what we’re talking about.
The poorer countries of the world, they feel a sense of injustice that globalization has been mismanaged for 30 years and that there hasn’t been sufficient international responsibility. But I think that in vying for international responsibility from rich countries, some of which are undergoing enormous struggles of their own witness what’s happening here in the United States, it has to be allied with a second thing.
And this is really explains why I’m in the NGO sector. We’ve got to be in the solutions business. We can’t just be in the suffering business. And my attempt, our attempt at the International Rescue Committee is to say, look, don’t hide behind the excuse that there’s nothing to be done on this.
Nothing will be done if there isn’t international responsibility that those are the richest and most powerful. And by the way, that’s not just the traditional West. It’s the Gulf countries. It’s newly enriched countries around the world.
But there are solutions that can be invested in. There are solutions in respect of climate adaptation. So that farming livelihoods don’t have to be wrecked by changes in the climate.
There are solutions in respect of peace building and peace making at a local level that mean you don’t just have to live with the idea that the most likely outcome of a civil war is renewed fighting. It doesn’t have to be that way. We know much more than we did about political systems that can be inclusive rather than exclusive.
Thirdly, we know much more about how to tackle poverty and inequality than we did 30 or 40 years ago. It doesn’t have to be the case that nine countries around the world have threatened with famine today, but we actually know much more about how to tackle malnutrition and how to prevent famine.
So what I would say to people is, don’t just study what the IRC does for a long list of what’s going wrong. Look at what we say about solution making, because that’s where I think our politics has to go.
Chris Hayes: Okay. So I think this is an interesting area of some disagreement between the two of us. So I want to stay on this. So let me sort of back up and put it this way. So starting in 2014, we started to see large amounts of folks showing up southern border presenting for asylum.
Most of them were coming from Central America. And they were coming from countries, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala that were in the midst of an incredible sort of epidemic of civil violence driven largely by gangs. And these were harrowing, horrifying stories, right? Like moms were like, they came to try to take my son at 11 and they basically said, you know, you’re joining the gang or else, right, and people were fleeing.
And one of the sort of fashionable views that I think you found in liberal center left circles was this sort of root cause thing, right? And this was actually the Obama administration, you know, went down and they started giving aid to those countries. They started a new sort of expedited visa, sort of halfway between asylum and refugee program so that people could actually apply at the embassies so that they didn’t have to show up to the border, which I thought was a smart idea. But the idea was like, let’s tackle the root causes, right? Now, here we are in 2023. It’s not that that isn’t the problem anymore.
David Miliband: My point is that if this is to be contained and managed, both in the interests of the countries that people are coming from and above all in the interests of the people themselves, we shouldn’t allow the excuse to be there that this is unmanageable. That’s my point.
And I don’t —
Chris Hayes: I totally agree with you on that. Yes.
David Miliband: — want to sugar-coat it. I don’t want to pretend it’s easier. You’re absolutely right that society’s fashioning the narrow corridor that allows them to navigate between a state that’s too weak and a state that’s too strong. It’s very tough. I don’t want to deny that. But I don’t want us to be in a situation where we’re saying, yeah, it’s going to be chaotic, we’ve just got to put up with that. I think that’s a political loser.
Chris Hayes: No. That I agree with. But I think there’s a distinction between it’s going to be chaotic and there will be people that want to come or are being forced to flee. Here’s the example in Europe, right? The debate of the last decade in Europe was almost entirely around Syrian refugees. I mean, enormous numbers, right? And that was the thing that gripped both the sort of political imagination and Angela Merkel’s decision to take 1.6 million.
And then what happened? Well, the Syrian war, more or less, ended. It continues in some ways. That enormous migration flow has slowed, but there’s tons of people coming from Afghanistan, particularly last year.
Like my point is that you have to start with the universal idea for this policy, that there’re going to be people who are going to be desperate somewhere in the world that don’t to want to come to these countries as just fact about the world.
And a question of how do we, I agree, orderly and humane fashion, make sure that people are not sent back to their debts and that they are processed and integrated in a way that does not create enormous and kind of chaotic strength?
David Miliband: Let me throw something else into the discussion here, which in a way it’s surprising we haven’t talked about this. It’s very hard diplomatic way of saying impossible to have a coherent and effective way of running your refugee and asylum policy if you don’t have a coherent and effective immigration policy.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. Yes.
David Miliband: And they are different. And so the fact that —
Chris Hayes: That’s exactly right.
David Miliband: — America has had no immigration since 1986 means that the whole thing is running up or down an escalator. I can show you from European countries. I can show you from the U.K., which is still a European country, even though it’s left the EU, if you don’t get your immigration system working —
Chris Hayes: Correct.
David Miliband: — it’s well now impossible to get your refugee and asylum system working effectively.
And I think that that immediately raises though the fact that the rationale for your immigration policy is going to be different than the rationale for your refugee policy, that your refugee policy is about universal rights. Your immigration policy is about the needs of the country.
And if I think about this stunning statistic that America —
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point.
David Miliband: — was 25 percent of global GDP in 1990, what percentage of global GDP is America today? Well, it’s still 25 percent. Despite all the talk of the rise of China, America is still 25 percent of GDP, but it’s a different America.
In 1990, 250 million people lived in America. In 2023, 2024, 340 million people live in America. It’s a bigger country. That’s sustained its place in the international system, in part, because it’s had a de facto immigration policy without being able to legislate for it. But until you legislate for it, it’s very hard to convince the public that you’ve got control of your system.
Chris Hayes: That’s a great way of putting a fine point on what I’m reaching for. Because I think part of the issue that people have with people showing up the southern border is the suspicion that some of them are just showing up ‘cause that’s the kind of loophole to get in and also not wrong.
Like if you look at the data on where credible fear, like some of the people that show up at the southern border are determined by American processes, and those are by no means, you know, un-airing, to basically be economic migrants will not have credible fear. A huge percentage of them are, right? Do have ultimately when they’re adjudicated. And again, the adjudicated process is by no means fair. It is completely stacked against the asylees.
But my point being that your point about these are two different forms of policy, the rights of people to not be killed or sent back to a place where they will face enormous persecution or death, and the way that a country manages who comes in are actually distinct.
If you completely leave one of those systems to rot and make it functionally impossible to come through, you’re going to create stresses in the other way. And I think that’s another huge unanswered part of the American question.
Let me ask you. Can I ask you this? I’m going to ask you the biggest philosophical question to end this conversation. When I spend a lot of time thinking about this problem, which is how to adhere to our commitments of the universal rights of human beings and their equal dignity, that there’s something fundamentally incommensurable or a circle that can’t be squared between our liberal universalist commitments and the reality of the nation state and the natural lottery, which is to say like at an intellectual level, like, someone born in the Congo or in Afghanistan or in Paris or in the U.K. or in Israel or in Gaza or in New York, are all equally deserving of dignity.
But I live in a nation state that has just very different relationships with those places. Very different. And so doesn’t actually act like those people are equally deserving of dignity. It just doesn’t. And I would say most nation states don’t. And that fundamentally like the natural lottery, which is like some people get to be born, like I did, in the richest country probably that’s ever existed, in a nice middle class household and, you know, and some people are born to a mother fleeing war, the nation state doesn’t embody that universal view of dignity.
And the place for those two values come to conflict and war is at the border. It’s at the border where the commitment to the universal human rights and the equal dignity of each person, despite where the natural lottery put them on earth, and this being our country of our people, us British people, us Americans, comes to a conflict that at some level is almost philosophically irresolvable.
David Miliband: Well, that’s a very powerful way of putting it. And I think it’s where we’re tested. And that’s why I always say to people that those people fleeing, you started with my parents, the people who are fleeing today are being tested in unimaginable ways, but so are we being tested.
Five or six years ago, I wrote a book called “Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time.” And it ended by saying that this was a test of our values and whether or not we were able to live up to them.
And living up to them doesn’t mean saying anyone who wants to come to America can come to America. It does mean saying that those who have a well-founded fear if they’re sent back to Syria or Democratic Republic of Congo or wherever, that they’re going to be killed, that they should be allowed to stay. That’s absolutely fundamental.
And that’s why I think it’s right. It’s really important to say the post-war pioneers got it right in the standards, the laws, the norms that they set. I’m the chair of the advisory board or something called the Atlas of Impunity, which is an attempt to try and address your Meta question but in a practical way.
The Atlas of Impunity says the big debate in the world today is not democracy versus autocracy. The big debate is about power and it’s about the abuse of power. And the ultimate abuse of power is impunity. Impunity is a crime without punishment. It’s power without responsibility.
And the opposite of impunity is accountability. And we posit those of us working on the Atlas of Impunity, that you can understand all the countries in the world by the balance between impunity and accountability.
We look at it in five dimensions for every country in the world. Yes, there’s conflicts. There’s human rights. There’s governance. There’s also economic exploitation. And there’s also environmental degradation, which it’s a separate podcast, but the abuse of the planet is actually an example of impunity because the planet hasn’t got a vote and future generations don’t have a vote.
Now the Atlas of Impunity ranks every country in the world on those five dimensions of impunity, including how they treat refugees, but also including whether or not they’re at war and spilling out refugees.
And I can only speak to how I resolve this. One, is to work on projects that do try and take a global view, that take a global view about the standards that have been set, which I think are good standards and the extent to which they’re being lived up to or increasingly not being lived up to.
And the second thing I can do is that in my professional life, I can try and live up to what I was brought up to believe, which is that if you can make a difference, you should. And if you don’t, it’s a waste.
And that’s what we are trying to do through the International Rescue Committee, because what we see, and maybe this is a way of getting to your question. We see a lot of governments running away from big problems. Sometimes they run away by demonizing people. Sometimes they run away just by displacement activity.
We’re saying at a time when governments are in retreat from big problems, you need civil society. You need NGOs. You need sometimes the private sector to step up and say, well, here’s the solutions. And that’s what gets me back to where I was trying to take your political line of argument, which is that if you haven’t got answers in politics, then you really are stuck. And I think there are answers and that’s where the politics needs to go.
Chris Hayes: There is an essay I was just reading by an incredible writer named Tom Scocca of New York Magazine. It was about of illness that he suffered that was mysterious. Basically his body just stopped working and it was very scary.
And he’s got a line in it where he says, you know, disability advocates have been saying this forever that the disabled and the abled aren’t two sets of people. They’re the same people at different times.
And I think one of the things that was fresh in the minds of people who made that consensus like your father, right, is that those fleeing and those not fleeing, aren’t two sets of people. They’re the same people at different times. That there but for the grace of God go I. And I think on the European continent, that was fresh in people’s minds. It was immediate and clear.
And I think that that idea that that could be me in some places in the world is very acute, you know. And I think in, you know, Syria took in over a million Iraqi war refugees, right, in that place.
But in other places it’s received, right, that that could be me. And I think that sort of recapturing that is part of the sort of moral project here.
David Miliband is the President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee. He was a member of Parliament for the Labour Party as well as the foreign secretary for the U.K. It’s always just such a great pleasure to get a chance to talk to you. Thank you for making time today.
David Miliband: Thank you so much for your time.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to David Miliband. I always find our conversations incredibly enlightening. They always sort of stick with me afterwards. I’m really appreciative for him making the time.
We’d love to hear your feedback on that conversation. I know this is a topic that a lot of people have a personal connection to because they have family members or they themselves migrated or had to leave a place that they love because it was too dangerous. So I’d love to hear your feedback about that conversation, WITHpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the #WITHpod on any of the various social network platforms. You can search for WITHpod on TikTok. I’m also @chrislhayes on Threads and on Bluesky. You can find me @chrislhayes, Bluesky as well.
“Why is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. Engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?