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The Refugee Crisis: Perspectives on Europe and Beyond

Image for The Refugee Crisis: Perspectives on Europe and Beyond

Please join us for a discussion of the current refugee crisis, its impact on Europe and global implications. How will the EU cope with the continuing influx of migrants? Will Germany respond to political pressures and become more restrictive? How does the situation in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey impact the crisis and are there remedies?

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Duration: 1:39:21

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Keynote Address

  • Gregory Maniatis, Senior European Policy Fellow, Migration Policy Institute: "The Mediterranean Migration Crisis: Political Impact & Global Implications"
  • DISCUSSANT: Asli Bâli, UCLA Law School

Panel

  • Stefan Biedermann, Deputy Consul General, Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Los Angeles
  • Laurie Brand, Director, Middle East Studies Program, USC
  • David FitzGerald, Co-Director, UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
  • MODERATOR: Roger Waldinger, UCLA Department of Sociology

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

ASLI BÂLI
is Director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies and Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where she teaches in the International and Comparative Law Program. Recent work includes “Turkish Constitutionalism Under the AKP” (Theory & Event, 2016); “Constitutional Design Without Constitutional Moments: Lessons from Religiously Divided Societies” (forthcoming, Cornell International Law Journal); “The Wrong Kind of Intervention in Syria,” in THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE ARABS (eds. Vijay Prashad and Karim Makdisi) (Oxford, forthcoming 2016); and “Negotiating Non-Proliferation: International Law and Delegation in the Iranian Nuclear Crisis,” (UCLA Law Review, 2014). She currently serves as a Turkey page editor for the e-zine Jadaliyya and as chair of the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch-Middle East.

STEFAN BIEDERMANN is Deputy Consul General and Consul for Cultural and Press Affairs at the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Los Angeles. He studied History and Japanese Studies in Berlin, Kyoto and Tokyo, and received his double Master’s degree from the Free University of Berlin. From 1988 to 1993, he worked as a journalist, and covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification for Japanese TV in Berlin. In 1993, he joined the German Foreign Service, serving in Japan, Cameroon and, since July 2012, Los Angeles.

LAURIE BRAND
is the Robert Grandford Wright Professor of international relations and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California. She served as director of the Center for International Studies from 1997-2000, as Director of the School of International Relations from 2006-09, and currently serves as Director of its Center for Middle East Studies. A past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (2004), and currently chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom, she specializes in Middle East international relations and inter-Arab politics. A Rockefeller Bellagio Center resident scholar in fall 2013, a Carnegie Scholar for 2008-10 and a four-time Fulbright scholar to the Middle East and North Africa, she is the author of "Palestinians in the Arab World: Institution Building and the Search for State" (Columbia University Press, 1988), "Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations: The Political Economy of Alliance Making" (Columbia University Press, 1994), and "Women, the State and Political Liberalization" (Columbia University Press, 1998); "Citizens Abroad: States and Migration in the Middle East and North Africa" (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and "Official Stories: Politics and National Narratives in Egypt and Algeria" (Stanford University Press, 2014). Her current research interests include state-expatriate relations and national narrative construction. She has carried out fieldwork in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Kuwait.

DAVID FITZGERALD
is Professor of Sociology, Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations, and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego. His research program aims to understand the laws and policies regulating international migration as a total system of interactions among actors in countries of origin and destination; he examines how and why legal norms are diffused, the social origins of policy variation across time and place, and how the application of policy is experienced by actors in daily life. FitzGerald was awarded the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) International Migration Section “Award for Public Sociology” in 2013. His co-authored book, Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard 2014), won “best book” awards from the ASA International Migration Section, ASA Political Sociology Section, and American Political Science Association (APSA) Migration and Citizenship Section in 2015.

GREGORY MANIATIS is a Senior European Policy Fellow and oversees European programs for the Migration Policy Institute. He is also advisor to Peter Sutherland, the UN Special Representative for Migration. Mr. Maniatis consults the European Commission, Member State governments, the European Parliament, and international organizations on all aspects of immigration and integration policy. In 2007, he led MPI's advisory work for the European Union presidencies of Germany and Portugal; in previous years, he oversaw MPI's work with the EU presidencies of Greece and the Netherlands. Prior to his positions at MPI and the United Nations, Mr. Maniatis was Founder and Publisher of Odyssey magazine, an English-language bimonthly that is the leading international magazine about Greece and Greeks around the world, with over 60,000 readers in 35 countries. He is also a writer and producer whose reportage and commentary have been featured in the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, The Washington Monthly, PBS Television, and other media outlets.

ROGER WALDINGER is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of International Migration at UCLA. He has worked on international migration throughout his career, writing on a broad set of topics, including immigrant entrepreneurship, labor markets, assimilation, the second generation, high-skilled immigration, immigration policy, and public opinion. The author of six books, most recently, How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor (University of California Press, 2003), Waldinger is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow; his research has been supported by grants from the Ford, Haines, Mellon, National Science, Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations.