Immigrant Cities and Democracy's Future

So you are both keen observers of what's happening in cities and of migration.

And I think of this as a conversation where practice meets research.

But I want to throw this at you first, Rachel, and then Ian, feel free to weigh in.

So there's a lot going on in cities right now.

You know, if any of us paid attention, it was hard not to, to what happened in Minneapolis a couple of months ago or in L.A. a few months before that or in the U.K. several months before that where there were riots among people who were opposing asylum seekers.

in England, it would be easy to get the impression that cities are really struggling, excuse me, I'm struggling right now, with migration.

I'm gonna pull it together.

Cities are really struggling with migration.

I don't wanna assume anything, so I wanna ask the question, but I would guess that you have a different view of things, given the work that you've done with practitioners, with city governments, and your work with Auckland America.

So what are you seeing in cities right now?

First of all, it's really wonderful to be here.

Thank you to CASBIS and thank you to you for organizing us around this intersection of immigration and democracy.

I think, you know, the narrative, there is a deliberate narrative that's being painted about cities and the experience of migration, that it's something chaotic and out of control and that very much feeds into the narrative that's being peddled in ways that try to undo our democracy right now.

And that's one of the things that has been motivating me to try to draw this connection between immigration and democracy so that we understand that many of the things that are in the public discourse around immigration are really about walking back the core protections that democracy offers for all of us.

Maybe we can come back to that a little bit later.

I think what we've seen over the last year in cities has been a real split screen, I would say, of the worst of what humans can do to one another in the way that... indiscriminate sweeps of communities, people being picked up just based on their race or their job or where they happen to live, things that are fundamentally un-American.

And people murdered.

I mean, it's terrible.

And we've also seen, I think, the best of what humans can do in standing up for one another in neighbors and you know I think if we look at many of the cities that you know some of the that have been in the news over the last year, the way that people stood up for their neighbors came out of longstanding work in the community to really create the conditions for people to exercise their voice, to organize, to connect at a human level with one another.

And so when this moment of friction came, Those communities were maybe not as prepared as they would have liked to be, but they understood what was at stake.

And so I think in this moment, when we think about the role that cities are already playing and the role that cities can be playing, it's really... how can cities prepare themselves for the worst of times? Whether that's political violence, whether that's a natural disaster, or the best of times, embodying the values of a democracy.

And I know that we'll get into that.

But I think, you know, contrary to the chaos and scarcity narratives that we're hearing, this is really a story about resilience.

It's a story about capacity.

And it's a story about neighbors coming together to see one another's humanity.