Twenty-six faculty from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health wrote a letter to President Trump urging him not to sign an executive order severely restricting the United States refugee program. Hours after the letter’s publication, Trump officially signed the executive order, which bans travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries and indefinitely bans Syrian refugees.
As the director of the Program on Human Rights Health and Conflict and signatory of the letter, Len Rubenstein played an integral role in gathering Bloomberg faculty across different disciplines to draft the letter. He considers speaking out against policies that attack human rights to be an integral part of being an academic or a medical professional.
“It can have a major impact on the realization of human rights when [academics and healthcare professionals] get involved. Particularly through both the knowledge that they can bring through evidence-based findings and the use of their voice,” Rubenstein said.
The three page letter stresses the public health impact of ignoring refugees, citing research conducted by many of the signatories.
It also explains that refugees do not pose a threat to the U.S., but add value to our communities. Bloomberg is home to the Center for Humanitarian Health, which conducts research on the health of refugees across the world, including Syria, Lebanon and Somalia.
Dr. Stefan Baral, another signatory of the letter, directs the Key Populations program at Bloomberg. Baral agreed with Rubenstein, and explained that they had a duty as academics to act.
“The genesis of the letter was to say that there’s no evidence supporting this particular policy initiative,” he said.
Dr. Paul Spiegel, director of Bloomberg’s Center for Humanitarian Health and former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, reaffirmed the need to advocate for refugees and ensure that people are well informed.
“Our role as academics, even if some don’t wish to hear the facts or wish to gloss over them, is to make it very clear that here are the facts, here is the evidence,” he said. “We’ve worked with these people, and we know the heartache and the suffering.”
The executive order raises questions about the future of one of Bloomberg’s initiatives to provide full-tuition scholarships for two Syrian health care workers so that they can complete the school’s 11-month master’s program. With the current ban on Syrian refugees, the ability of the selected students to enter the U.S. remains unclear.
Many students have welcomed the letter against the executive order. Junior Samantha Igo, who recently returned from an alternative break program focusing on immigrant and refugee rights, was pleased that the Bloomberg professors took a strong stance on the issue.
“I feel like Hopkins has not always been the most proactive with a lot of social issues, so it’s nice to see that they’re reacting,” she said. “When they put their weight behind something I feel like a lot of people will follow suit.”
Freshman Evan Drukker-Schardl, another participant in the immigrant and refugee rights program, agrees with the letter’s public health focus when discussing the refugee crisis.
“A bunch of public health and medical professors pointing out... the complexity of the human rights situation in IDP camps, refugee camps and war-torn countries like Syria and South Sudan. It’s not just people suffering,” he said. “There’s the potential for widespread public health problems.”
Igo also believes that informing people about the refugee crisis could lead to more effective policy initiatives.
“I want organizations like the International Rescue Committee to change the narrative of refugees and educate the public. I feel like so many people have uneducated opinions about it because they don’t understand the vetting process or how long it takes to get a visa,” Igo said.
Despite the lack of compassion for refugees in the executive order, Spiegel remains optimistic.
“One of the things that’s very heartening is the amount of individual and community activism that is responding to this,” he said. “If you have to look for something good in a bad situation, if these sort of executive orders that are discriminatory and possibly unconstitutional are able to actually activate the American people in such a way that they haven’t be activated in a long time, then that’s a wonderful thing.”
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