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George Rupp, the president of the International Rescue Committee -- a human rights organization active in 25 countries, including Iraq and the Sudan -- had no trouble finding his way to the Low Memorial Rotunda recently to deliver the second annual Emma Lazarus lecture, "People on the Move: Refugees in the Context of Globalization."
That was because he served as Columbia's president from 1993 to 2002. Jagdish Bhagwati, University Professor of economics and law, and author of In Defense of Globalization, introduced Rupp, calling him a worthy successor to last year's inaugural speaker, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who had used the occasion to announce several UN initiatives. Bhagwati noted that Rupp's successor, Lee C. Bollinger, is committed to making the University a center for discussing the thorny issue of global migration.
Rupp, a former Harvard divinity professor, mentioned his gratitude to Emma Lazarus, whose poem "The New Colossus" -- "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . ." -- is engraved on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
His parents, Rupp said, were immigrants to this country. Upon their arrival in the United States, they were treated like full members of society -- a privilege not afforded to millions of today's refugees, who are forced by social and political unrest to cross national borders into hostile territory. Right now, he said, "the world is confronting more people on the move than at any other point in human history."
The United States, with its diverse population, is better suited than some other countries to shelter refugees, Rupp said. And his organization, which was founded in 1933 at the suggestion of Albert Einstein, has offices in 16 U.S. cities to assist them with starting new lives. "We have an agenda of tough love for new arrivals," he added. "A new start within six months is the goal."
But, Rupp said, in the wake of September 11, 2001, the United States has "drastically curtailed" refugee admissions -- a trend he urged the Bush administration to reverse.
Worse, for every refugee who makes it to America, hundreds or thousands don't. That's why, he said, it's particularly disappointing that U.S. foreign aid as a percentage of gross national product (GNP) is near the bottom among developed countries. Six European countries give 0.70 percent of their GNP to foreign aid, meeting a target set by the UN General Assembly. For the United States, by contrast, the figure is about 0.17 percent, or less than a quarter of the target.
"What's surprising," Rupp went on, "is not just that the U.S. ranks at the bottom among developed nations in giving foreign aid, but the extent of our national self-deception on this issue." Many Americans believe that their country gives more than it does -- which Rupp attributes to their having been raised at a time when the United States did, in fact, send far more aid abroad. In 1948, the United States gave 25 times more as a percentage of GNP than it does now, he said.
America's current stinginess, Rupp said, is short sighted -- as it will almost inevitably result in far greater expenditures later.
"If aid is carefully targeted to basic health care and education, the result could be a major transformation in the developing world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa," he argued. "We can and should do more."
Commenting on Rupp's remarks were Pulitizer Prize-winning writers Nicholas Kristof and Samantha Power. Kristof, a New York Times columnist who has written extensively about recent atrocities in the Sudan, noted that in Darfur there "are 700,000 dead as a result of our failure to respond, and we should all think of that as a deep shame." Blaming the media, in part, for focusing on events like the Michael Jackson trial while death tolls mounted, he said wryly, "You can't help wishing that the Michael Jackson trial had been held in Darfur."
Samantha Power, a former journalist and author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, spoke of the need to create safe havens for refugees. Power, who currently teaches at Harvard, described her own parents' journey from Ireland to the United States, where there was a large population of Irish-Americans acting on their behalf.
"The Irish have a political constituency here who look out for Irish immigrants," she said. "But often that kind of constituency doesn't exist for people who are most in need of it. For example, you don't have a wide base of naturalized Darfurians who can demand help for people who are fleeing for their lives."
Power warned of proposed federal legislation that would eliminate judicial review of asylum cases. "That's very, very disturbing," she said, adding that it reflects a new form of isolationism most likely rooted in the American failure in Iraq.
"Because of the reality of having been led astray and our incompetence in carrying out nation-building, there's a real tendency toward isolationism, just when we really need to engage," she explained.
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