Marina Kaneti: Yeah, actually, that's a very easy question. Thank you for starting with that. Well, in hindsight it appears almost natural that I would focus on migration because I grew up in a family where you can say, at least half of my family was migrants. I grew up in Bulgaria, which is not so unusual, right? People grow up somewhere, but my grandmother was Chinese and she was the only Chinese living in Bulgaria for many, many years. I'm pretty sure she would never call herself a migrant, but at the same time she never changed her passport, she remained a Chinese citizen until she died.
David Austin: I see.
Marina Kaneti: And just being in Bulgaria with a family that was a combination of Chinese and Jews made me kind of quite different from the mainstream population, and then I moved to the United States, where I joined the many immigrants - somewhat skilled immigrants.
And initially I was not looking into immigration or migration, but as I was going through my life, I realised that any time someone else was doing work on migration, I was very interested and very passionate about it, and at some point it was sort of... I need to start working on migration because my heart is there.
David Austin: I was reading your bio - you worked as an equities trader for a while as well?
Marina Kaneti: Yeah,
David Austin: That seems like the one thing that's kind of out of place in your history. Can you tell me about that, just a little bit?
Marina Kaneti: This is the part that I used to leave out when I moved to academia, because there were many people who said, "No, nobody will be interested in your life as an equity trader", but actually, if we're talking about migrants - this is what migrants do. They need to find, or they will find whatever opportunity presents itself in order to make ends meet, and as someone who went to the United States to study, and then I also happen to be a single mother at the time- raising a child as a single immigrant mother, so many labels - I needed to find a job.
And I was lucky enough to come from an institution that, you know, it was easy to get a job. I graduated from an Ivy League school, and so it was sort of easy to, to get a job on Wall Street, which at the time was booming. There were so many new companies coming into Wall Street to take advantage of the irrational exuberance of the stock market, and so, I ended up staying there for seven years.
David Austin: So you've seen that part of the world; right in the heart of the global finance system, and then also in New York, you worked for the UN as well, which is a totally different world. What have you learned from those experiences that now help you in academia to address these huge global problems?
Marina Kaneti: The way, my experience helps me the most is to always remind me that there are a lot of different sides in which you can look at issues. And that a lot of times when things look black and white they're actually far more complex, and there are a lot of interests
Working with the UN was very useful to also understand not only the opportunities that the UN system allows, but also the limits that the system has. And that's something that I always remind students, or I have to educate students on that. There are reasons why a lot of times when we think that the UN is failing or something like that, it's not because of the UN itself, but because of the structure of the broader system. And so, a lot of these things that I learned as an equity trader as project manager at the UN are not things that you would understand from books, and that's kind of what brings perhaps a different angle on my work now.
David Austin: Can you give us an overview of how you would describe global migration right now at this point in time?
Marina Kaneti: I remember a professor of mine who always used to say, "Tell people something nice, finish with something optimistic," and I thought about it a lot, particularly in thinking about migration, and unfortunately, I don't want to be optimistic when I talk about migration.
And the reason for that is not so much to add yet another voice to the choir of people saying, "It's really difficult for migrants or they're underprivileged. There is a lot of injustice, they're victimised." All of these things are happening and that's true, but for me, the reason why I don't want to be optimistic and I want to voice this very clearly is because I want us to start understanding that being optimistic about migrants is a nice way for us to not take responsibility for what is happening in the world today.
And migrants right now are losing the battle in many ways.
David Austin: As someone who's trying to add to the conversation of possible solutions, what's your first step? Where do you begin?
Marina Kaneti: Where I would begin is where I usually begin when I think about my work as well is the level of systemic problems. There should be no reason for us to think of migrants as people who are different from ourselves.
And this is something that comes across very often when we talk about, or we want to educate others about migrants, and this is what migrants themselves say, "It can happen to you. It can happen to anyone." Anybody can be a migrant, and to put it in a little bit more of a context and to show how it's a systemic issue - I always go back to the 19th century where a lot of the treaty agreements that would allow for people to go back and forth; would say that the inalienable right of every human being at that point, it was only men, but let's assume it's every human being; was that they have the freedom to move and settle wherever they want.
And we have lost that. That is not part of our world. It's not part of our mentality. We cannot expect to pack up and leave whenever we want to. But unfortunately, we also live in a world where, this sort of natural desire of people to find better conditions for themselves has become a privilege, and that is a systemic problem.
David Austin: Are you saying that the treaties that you were mentioning in the 1800s, is that right?
Marina Kaneti: Yeah, .
David Austin: I'm surprised that they were as open-minded you know, because the first thing that comes to my mind is the, United States Chinese act or something like that, banning or limiting immigration by racial barriers.
Marina Kaneti: This is actually the treaty between the United States and China, or the Qing Dynasty, and it precedes the Chinese Exclusion Act with about six, seven years. It was called the Burlingame Treaty.
Chapter five of the treaty talks about the inalienable right of men, sorry .... to settle, to travel and settle depending on their choosing. And that was not just United States and China; that was prevalent in entire understanding of how human beings move around.
Obviously you can say that because these treaties were promoted by Europe and the United States, it was for the purposes of European and US travellers to have the opportunity to go to these countries; settle there, do business and things like that. But because of the nature of reciprocity that these treaties would propose to have, then others would be entitled to the same rights - this changed. And again, it's nice that you're bringing up the US Chinese relationship and the Chinese exclusionary laws, because that set the new system or what we know is the modern system of a system of immigration.
However, what we always forget about the Chinese exclusionary laws, which were draconian by all means. What we forget is that there was a part of the law that said that it does not apply to diplomats, merchants and students. So what the Chinese did, and this is again, part of the modern system, is they all became merchants and the US immigration system could not figure out ways in which they would know who's really a merchant and who's not a merchant, because how do you prove who's the merchant? Students it's easier, but with the merchants was not that easy.
But so, you know you asked for other examples, I consider myself a privileged migrant. I packed my bags from the United States and came to work in Singapore.
There will be a lot of people who do not have this opportunity, which now only happens because mobility is linked directly to some skills that a person has or wealth, right? Which is, again, going back to the Chinese exclusionary laws, if you have wealth, you're set. If you have certain skills, you're set, but otherwise you cannot do it. So, this is sort of where we are in the world today.
David Austin: Well then let's just talk about the underprivileged. Those people who would like to move or feel they have to move, but then they're not wealthy and they don't have status - social status. What is happening in general?
Marina Kaneti: So this is again, a systemic issue for me, because... supposedly in 1951 and based on the experiences of the First and Second World War, there was a push to create a situation where people will not fall through the cracks of the systems and those who we might say underprivileged, or just are caught in circumstances. A lot of them are actually quite wealthy, but were still caught in circumstances that here was just no way around, right?
Think of all the Jews that were on a ship going to the United States and the ship turned back, and they went to concentration camp. And so 1951, the refugee protocol was precisely supposedly the language and legal structure that would allow those who are caught in special circumstances to have a way out so that they can actually move forward. But then what happens; that very broad legal framework is left to the interpretation of individual states.
And so right now what's happening is that there are a lot of people that technically would probably meet all the conditions of the convention, but they don't receive the status. They are completely in limbo; stuck between states, usually at borders or in detention camps, waiting for someone to hear their case. And because the system does not facilitate their integration, rather it facilitates their exclusion - a lot of them end up staying in these places for years,
David Austin: Right, you mentioned refugees and the people that fall in between states - should we speak about them differently than other migrants? Or do you see it as it's all part of the same system that's failing?
Marina Kaneti: Yeah, to me, it's all part of the same system because technically, you know, what happens is in order for some people to... to get through, there's a lot of random luck involved in that. You happen to be on the list and they accept that many people you managed to get through the system, others don't.
So it's a...it's a very random process, right? So this entire thing that was created in the first place to facilitate some processes has become extremely random, has been left to various interpretations by individual agents. And so what happens is that you basically have to be very lucky and again, it it's not even a question of - you have the means, you have the money, you have the skills. It boils down to pure luck. How do you know that the boat that you get on will not sink?
David Austin: And again, it talks to those very many levels of grey in the black and white situation that you mentioned before. How would you try to rectify this at all?
Marina Kaneti: What was happening in the late 19th, early 20th century when this modern system of immigration was sort of codifying itself, is that a lot of it was of course, left to the migrants to figure out, but there were also a lot of networks of supporters. So lawyers, businessmen, diplomats, they would all find ways in which to get people into a country such as the United States.
And now it seems that these systems of support in networks are breaking down, and that could be because there is an overwhelming number of people who are moving from one place or another, or perhaps, within the local communities, there isn't so much support as... or so much interest as there had been in the past. The amount of xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, is on the rise. This is why I'm also not optimistic of about what's happening in the world.
Going back to the question of "If we start over, how do we do it?" Is we have to kind of go back to thinking about who we are as human beings, and to think about what are our values, what, what matters to us in life?
David Austin: Yeah. Sad, but true. I see that. Of course there's exceptions. The kind of incredible ingenuity of migrants, and the way that people find ways to survive and... and work around the system or through the system. Would you like to talk a little bit about that, and just...
Marina Kaneti: You want me to be optimistic?
David Austin: I'm going to come back to being pessimistic after that, but yeah.
Marina Kaneti: You know, a lot of the ingenuity of migrants whether it's in thinking of how to... to manipulate the law or thinking about the economic opportunities on the ground are always framed within certain conditions of possibilities. It's not like the world is unlimited to them.
And I'll give you an example with someone who was undocumented in United States. And he left as they say, now, he 'self-deported', which is actually something that a lot of lawyers told him, "You should absolutely not leave. What are you going to do when you leave? The world finishes when you leave the United States," and this person now is...is a much happier person. He doesn't feel like he's caged anymore.
But he's still bound by those years when he was in the United States, because he lived there. There are certain... certain obligations that he still has. He has family still there. So, you know, even when you're very resourceful, and when you find a way out, and you can move on with your life and make your life better, it's still within constraints. Which is again, a systemic issue, right?
So otherwise of course, we can talk about migrants being able to overcome certain circumstances and doing incredible things. But, more important is there's always challenges along the way.
David Austin: To go back to the pessimistic side again; climate change and the migration crisis is going to be brought about by the climate crisis. Will there ever be a reckoning of some sort of understanding that this is something that's going to have to be dealt with at such a large scale?
Marina Kaneti: The short answer is no, but I want to say a little bit more here and I want to start with another crisis, which is the crisis in Syria. There was a very clear understanding , from people even as myself and I'm not a politician. I'm not somebody who's watching the crisis very closely. We all knew that there will be millions of people who would flee from the region and will need a place to go.
And the world was woefully unprepared to deal with that, because it chose to ignore the crisis from a human perspective, of course, from war perspective and selling weapons perspective, everybody was there. But for the people who were caught in between, there is still no solution.
And looking at the Syrian crisis, and how people respond now to climate change leads me to believe, unfortunately, that there is a very similar pattern of simply ignoring what will be happening, and it's not like there are no warning signs. It's not like there are no UN reports coming out. It's not like people are not talking about it, but those who have the power to do something prefer to behave like ostriches and put their heads in the sand.
Or we can talk about it differently; we can say there is climate apartheid. I'm not the first one to say that, and I'm pretty sure I will not be the last. A lot of people see in this an unintentional way of dealing with those who are not desirable. Those who are, if we were talking about survival of the fittest and sort of evolution of humankind, certain people will be left out.
David Austin: Well, yeah, that's a horrible thought too, and again, not to try to always end on a rosy note, but I noticed also that you have some history in activism, so maybe...maybe we could talk about what... what can people do, where...where would the activism be most effective?
Marina Kaneti: I think activism actually would be most effective, not with politicians, but with local communities. Because at the end of the day, migrants need to go to communities and communities need to go to migrants. There has to be some local understanding that again, there is a hospitality and human engagement on a very basic level.
And this can happen with, or without policies as there are plenty of examples of people embracing migrants and living together with migrants, not because there is some policy decision or not because that's in the interest of a corporation or you know, migrant worth as a business proposition and things like that, but more of a human value.
And so I think the work of non-profit organisations, community organisations is really to have local communities understand what is the value of embracing those that are pretty much like them, except that they have lost what they've had before.
David Austin: Was there anything else that you wanted to mention, any work that you're doing or any other perspectives you'd like to share?
Marina Kaneti: Perhaps the only thing that we didn't talk about is the extent to which migration now has become a very profitable enterprise. Detention centres are quite a lucrative business and detention centres are on the rise.
This is another reason why I cannot be very optimistic for the future. Precisely because a lot of people in power have seen how this is a wonderful profit making mechanism for them, both in the United States and beyond. And this is something that we need to be... if we talk about activism in civil society, we need to be vigilant about that because the money that goes to fund detention centres are our tax paying dollars.
David Austin: Right Well, you warned me that you were going to be pessimistic and I don't blame you actually, but well, thank you very much. I think, I think that's enough for right now. Thank you.
Thank you very much.