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Good morning, dear colleagues and friends, it is a tremendous honor for me to be amongst each of you today. Before I begin, I’d like to express my deep gratitude to you Daniel, Frances, and the Kaldor Center team, for your hospitality, and for the gift, of giving me the opportunity to share this room with such an esteemed group.

Back when I was in college, I stumbled on a quote that’s become central to my thinking —  there are leaders, and then there are those who lead. I am entirely partial, towards the  latter, and I know, this is a room, and a Center, that since 2013, has been committed to growing the scholarship of leadership across our space.  

Never before, has leading, in verb-form, been more vital to the prospects of our work, and it is directionally proportional, I think, to the persuasive quality of our ideas.  

I’d like to start today, by also reminding myself, of wisdom I was given years ago.  

Speeches shouldn’t be something we give, but rather, something we share. So, in that  spirit — I welcome hearty dialogue, and my remarks this morning at the top, are simply an appetizer for what I hope will be a lively discussion soon after.  

Sydney, holds a special place in my heart, because from where I grew up, a small refugee community baked into the borough of Queens, NY — Sydney was just a fixture of my  imagination — seen through the blurry images that beamed into my 13-inch television screen on new year’s eve as fireworks climbed and streaked into the skies above your harbor (since the future always arrives early here).  

When my life was bound between the borders of a few blocks, this became the only portal through which I imagined a life beyond, and so, that’s to say, imagination costed me nothing then, but it means everything to me now.  

And, although the times are uniquely difficult for each of us, for those we advocate with, for our friends and our colleagues, and most honestly, for displaced people here, and everywhere, I remind myself, that this work, our journey, is generational — so, I refuse to let today’s mere seconds of uncertainty, steal away the minutes and the hours of the future  we’re wanting to realize.  

Imagination, I believe, can serve as connective tissue, a means through which we bridge from here towards anywhere.

I am deliberately using “imagination” as an anchor,  because it is a methodology, more than it is a word, that we can organize ourselves around at this time, and at this place.  

It is a methodology that has been employed by displaced people, who see in their hopes, a real chance that someday, that one day, they would find what they sought — and if we are asking of them to remain hopeful and patient, then we must have the gumption and the courage to remain so, ourselves.  

Now — let me be also clear, I know that what I’m asking of us, is not easy.  

Our politics have led us into an era of recessive policymaking, that remains true across every corner of our planet. Driven in large part by demographic and ethnographic anxieties that have been triggered, and falsehoods that have chiseled perceptions into  extremism. I do fear, that if we don’t chart a recourse, it may well lead to the flatlining, not  so much of the protection regime, but of the character of our system. And undermine its  core tenet — to protect, to safeguard, to welcome.  

And that, dear friends, has consequences far beyond this room.  

The theme of today’s conference, “building bridges” is a rather insightful and timely choice, and for the better part of my career, I’ve attempted to translate its meaning, and infuse its wisdom into the heart of my legislative and political work.

Our world is not just contending with a historic level displacement of people across borders, it is also, in parallel, contending with a fastening degree of misalignment of trust,  of understanding, within our own societies and across government and multi-lateral institutions.  

Echo-chambers, that seem to grow larger, with even lesser overlap.  

Combined with the breaking nature of our politics, and the narrowing of our policymaking, it has fractured the ability to agree on basic realities — what constitutes a refugee, what are our obligations under the convention and international law, what is fact vs fiction — and when we lose shared facts, we also undermine the ethos of shared responsibilities.  

And yet, while some may see this as a reckoning, I see this moment, a bit differently, instead as an invitation, to lean into the complexity, to solve through the ambiguity, to encode our vision, your vision, into the makings of what our system becomes.  

But to do so in a way that endures, we must first name what we are truly facing together. Now, I can stand here and speak to you about about the extraordinary gaps in funding that UNHCR faces (which it does), or how the Trump Administration’s actions have led to the  dismantling of the global aid infrastructure (which it has), or the growing attacks on asylum (which is happening in real time) — however, these are merely pit-stops, they are not finish lines.  

I believe that the larger challenge for us to wrestle with, is ideologically epistemic, meaning, we are reckoning with a crises of truth and trust, born from the slow, but steady tearing apart of our ability to sit in the discomfort of having to massage through disagreement, and difference, a shaping of a certain kind of moral economy that seems capitalistic towards quick returns on righteousness. Being ideologically right, may sometimes be practicality ineffective.  

And, the danger is this leads to greater degrees of polarization that warps our political standing, but also erodes our competence, our efficacy in shaping solutions to match the demands of tomorrow.  

So, if this is the moment we’ve inherited, then leadership, real, verb-form leadership —  requires something entirely countercultural — the discipline to rebuild consensus, to  bridge, in an age that profits from breaking.  

How do we start to shift course? Well, let’s start with where our feet are.  

As I consider the overall scope of the architecture we operate in, and our roles in it, I’m reminded daily, that the refugee protection system, is not centralized around a single UN  agency, or a single border crossing, or a single admission or complimentary program. It is a breathing web of laws, institutions, organizations, norms, people — local, national, and international.  

The temptation toward centralization serves no good, when so much of the work of protection and integration happens in localized contexts — in the hands of municipalities, civil society, schools, neighbors, and refugees themselves.  

The next evolution of the system won’t come from Canberra, New York, Geneva, or  Washington alone — it will come from communities, like the more than 170 refugee welcome zones across Australia (from example), that have learned how to do the hard, generational work of welcome, with both structure and spirit. This reframe, is simply  logistics that have worked, do work, and will continue to work.  

Which brings me to my next point.  

Our societies, aren’t as polarized as their politicians.

That may seem to come as a surprise, but across the spectrum of ideology and identity, across our nations, most citizens still agree that families should be safe, that rules should be fair, and that our countries have an obligation to be welcoming.  The data on this is quite clear — and it is as true for America, as it is for Australia, with sizable majorities supporting resettlement and protection.  

The challenge is to learn how to harness that data, and on that, I believe that our job is not to convince people to care — it is to show that caring works.  

That best narratives, the ones that have stickiness factor, are simply good policies made  visible, and are materially felt — which over time, fundamentally readjusts the calculus  around our policymaking, precisely because of a realignment in the public-attitudes that shape our politics. 

This narrativizing, the telling of the story, making good policy visible cannot happen, if  refugees and their contributions are made invisible. The erasure of refugee voices, even the limiting of it, frankly hides the evidence of what works. Greater visibility, including on our organizational charts, is not charity; it’s strategy. And, it’s evidence of generational work, realized in the most proximal form. Our institutions can choose to become an access point, in actualizing what is already in principle.

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