Tim Hirschel-Burns
@TimH_B
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Working @GDP_Center for a global economy that advances development and addresses climate change. Prev: Oxfam, @YaleLawSch , 🇧🇯. Views my own.
Washington D.C.
Joined July 2012
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It was driven home to me today how our immigration system isn't about coming "the right way"—it's about having money, the right passport, and the right skin color.
After waiting 8 months for a visa appointment, Anicet—my longtime best friend from Benin—was rejected in 2 minutes
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What does it say about us that we make people wait 8 months, take their money, and reject them after 2 questions? What does it say that we have people work with our government + welcome Americans into their homes and then toss them aside like rotten fruit?
What's wrong with us?
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I got to Benin as a Peace Corps volunteer in 2017. I stayed with Anicet for two weeks when I first arrived in my community. He was also my tutor in the local language. We quickly became friends.
This pic from the day we met is still his cover photo on Facebook
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We tried to do everything right, but the consular officer saw an African who makes a modest living, and in those circumstances the only answer is no.
And an impossible, opaque process is the norm. Anicet said 17 of 18 ppl there this morning were rejected, most summarily like him
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Anicet never had the chance to say he had worked with Peace Corps or show the printed photos of us he had. He never could explain how I would pay for the trip or all the reasons he had to return home. He never got to talk about Michigan or Smithsonians.
Two questions, rejected
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When I visited in 2022, we decided that we wanted to try to have him visit the US. He has hosted me time and time again—it's only right that he comes to see my home.
When he applied for a tourist visa, there was an 8 month wait for an appointment. October 16 was the date for it
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He met my family when they visited Benin. Just in August I stayed at his house for several weeks when I was back in Benin.
He also administers my fund to provide health, food, and educational support to people in the community—taking no money for his work
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I signed a document pledging to cover all the expenses of his trip. He had documents showing he had a house, kids, and a job as a high school teacher to return to. We were going to schedule the trip during a school break so he could return to his job w/out missing work
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Few things give me as much joy as making Exxon’s lead lawyer speak in front of this chalkboard
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I knew it would be hard to get a visa. US law says a consular officer should presume the tourist will not return to their country when their visa expires. We were going to convince them that Anicet had a legitimate reason for a tourist visa and would return to Benin afterwards
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When the consular officer
@USEmbassyBenin
called Anicet in, he asked Anicet the purpose of his visit. Anicet said tourism. He then asked Anicet his job, and Anicet replied that he taught high school. The consular office then said Anicet was ineligible and told him it was finished
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Last night Anicet recited our planned itinerary to me on a video call, doing his best to pronounce the "Smit-son-i-am" museums he would visit and how he would go to DC and "Mitch-ee-gon" before leaving.
This morning he arrived at
@USEmbassyBenin
early and paid the $185 fee
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The scale of the responses to this underlines that Anicet’s experience is not an anomaly—it’s the norm.
And it’s not just friends hoping to visit. It’s scholarships lost, relationships broken, family members separated
It was driven home to me today how our immigration system isn't about coming "the right way"—it's about having money, the right passport, and the right skin color.
After waiting 8 months for a visa appointment, Anicet—my longtime best friend from Benin—was rejected in 2 minutes
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@rosenthal_jon
Thank you. I knew that to be true (I've even published articles on it!) but still find myself surprised by just how dehumanizing the whole thing was
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@NorbAwino
Thank you, and I'm sorry you've had that happen. I knew how discriminatory the system is and how frustrated Africans are with it and somehow I still find myself surprised by how dehumanizing Anicet's experience was
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This is both a good decision and wildly out of step with how the US treats Black and brown refugees.
This is almost ten times the number of refugees the US admitted *in total* last year
JUST IN: Pres. Biden announces the U.S. will welcome 100,000 Ukrainian refugees "with a focus on reuniting families," and commit more than $1 billion in humanitarian assistance to Ukrainians affected by Russia's invasion.
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If losing your ability to live in sovereign territory due to foreign invaders is bad because you had no say in that decision, then losing your ability to live in sovereign territory due to foreign greenhouse gas emissions over which you had no say is also bad
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Spent the last month in the rural Beninese community where I lived 2017-2019. Couldn’t help but think about how increasingly popular efforts to “center the voices of marginalized communities” have so little to offer this community, even though in theory it’s meant for them (1/17)
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I am once again asking people to recognize that w/out strong support for global vaccination—including in poor countries that aren’t “strategically important”—this cycle of declaring COVID over and then going back to masking and then maybe needing boosters will go on and on and on
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Today is a big day for a little immigration program. Little-known in the US, it's wildly popular globally.
And @ 12 ET today, news will come out that will forever change the lives of 55,000 people. People like my friend Djissa, whose visa lottery story starts 6,000 miles away🧵
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I always find it a bit strange that a prevailing left position is that organizing on the basis of self-interest is legitimate while organizing on the basis of moral commitment is suspicious.
Leads ppl to present themselves as having a different class position than they do imo
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Bet you the next think piece criticizing the use of the term “Global South” and saying there is no North-South divide won’t talk about this
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@tess_e_graham
Thanks Tess. That's something I've been thinking about too: I really wanted Anicet to visit but he didn't "need" to in the way some others do. But it could be partners, or close family members people haven't seen in years, and the same thing happens where they never had a shot
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When Americans ask me if I feel safe in Benin I don't think they expect that the primary threat I face is dying of overeating because people insist on feeding me enormous quantities of food. There were four separate lunches prepared for me today!
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In simpler terms, my hot take is that climate change is the greatest threat to self-determination in the 21st century
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So much depends on whether the global north will invest significant resources in the global south.
It hasn't happened yet, so it's assumed that global north voters don't want to share—but that's not really true.
My new piece (in a personal capacity)
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Pretty perplexing how—even as Global North countries double down on green industrial policy—the message coming out of the World Bank and IMF on climate action is that Global South govs should let the market lead: voluntary carbon markets, carbon pricing, private finance, etc
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Quite the shade from Tedros when asked if he was surprised pharma companies haven’t participated in the WHO’s vaccine IP sharing pool:
“Social responsibility is just something you would expect from a decent human being when the whole world is burning.”
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A Beninese friend sent a message saying "we had a little Timmy" yesterday. I had no idea what this meant, so I figured a thumbs up emoji was probably an appropriate response. I now learned it meant they wanted to NAME A BABY AFTER ME and my response was a single thumbs up 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
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I'm in
@LAReviewofBooks
, with a piece on
@car1ygoodman
's excellent new book "Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction."
It's a history of how the US (accidentally) created one of the world's most egalitarian immigration programs
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2. The idea of centering the voices of marginalized communities can also place the burden of addressing injustice on *them.* But we’re a lot more responsible for climate change than them - there’s something weird about making them take time to tell us to stop screwing them (8/17)
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Yale Law School students are protesting the recruitment reception of
@PaulWeissLLP
, telling the law firm that we won’t work for them until they
#DropExxon
In the face of climate crisis we refuse to help climate polluters buy their way out of accountability
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That’s a somewhat shallow moral view, but it also can stretch reality.
In many ways my life is more comfortable bc I’m towards the top of a lot of social hierarchies. A more equitable world would redistribute some of my comforts. That’s good! But it’s not a self-interest case
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So why haven’t efforts to center marginalized communities benefited them?
1. How are their voices supposed to make it to the center? Visa policies block them from physically coming to rich countries. Almost no one speaks English, some French, but many people illiterate (3/17)
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My god: because Europe buys up any gas they can get their hands on, developing countries get outbid for energy.
While Europe's response to its "energy crisis" includes turning the lights off on the Eiffel Tower an hour early, Bangladesh *has to shut school an extra day per week*
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Without serious thought about how people with relative power determine who is a marginalized community and how to reach them, the list of marginalized communities that get centered is going to be in large part a function of the biases and proximities of those people (6/17)
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And if their voices are to be meaningfully included, then things like visas, decisionmaking structures in int’l institutions, access to quality education, and making them less poor would do a lot more than offering up the mic in a way they could never take you up on (16/17)
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If your representative isn’t on this list, they have some serious questions to answer about how they looked at the $740,000,000,000 we spend on weapons and war and wouldn’t even support a 10% reduction
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I got vaccinated today. I am relieved, but it is absurd that I am vaccinated while the vast majority of health workers and elderly people in the Global South are not. Above all, it is a reflection of how much we value corporate profits and how little we value the lives of so many
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It's great that YLS hosts mentors in residence who are investment analysts in Bermuda. Too often there isn't a clear pathway to careers that definitely, 100% have nothing to do with helping rich people stash money in tax havens
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Please read this report, if for no other reason than that I spent way too much time stalking people on law firm websites for no one to read this.
I even had to debase myself and get LinkedIn Premium so I could gather data without getting locked out for too much stalking!
NEW REPORT: 40+ law schools have withdrawn from the US News rankings, saying it offers a flawed notion of prestige. They're right.
Our new research shows the top 20-ranked law schools have produced fossil fuel lawyers at *over 3 times* the rate of the average US law school (1/6)
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I have my first blog up for
@OxfamAmerica
!
Two US companies recently disclosed the country-by-country financial information that is necessary for adequate tax transparency. What are other US companies waiting for?
Quick 🧵on why this matters (1/9)
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Very excited that next year I will be a Bernstein Fellow with
@OxfamAmerica
's Extractive Industries team! I have long admired Oxfam's work fighting the systemic causes of global poverty and inequality and I can't wait to be a part of it
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Key point from
@kmac
and
@70sBachchan
. Reducing rich country energy consumption would accelerate the energy transition and make it much more just, but it has been virtually absent from policymaking in the last few years
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My roundup of the recent World Bank/IMF Annual Meetings in Marrakech.
The good news: Everyone is saying that we need to transform the global financial architecture to meet climate and development goals.
The bad news: They're not really doing it
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Glad to see the surge in concern for Ukrainians. Tragically, the US can’t do that much to help them rn.
But if we care about the wellbeing of non-Americans, there are many things the US can do at any time: admit more immigrants + refugees, decarbonize, redistribute wealth, etc
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A really insightful piece on the lack of African coaches and why Aliou Cisse’s success is so encouraging
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The people supposed to be centering marginalized communities don’t have equal access to all voices. The most marginalized communities are likely to be the most distant from them (5/17)
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Coverage of the
#SOTUResponse
hasn’t been focusing on the question we all want to know: why did they choose the ELHS cafeteria over the auditorium?
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It's absolutely infuriating that solving global problems that kill millions is seen as unaffordable but spending money on war is seen as common sense.
This is $12 billion. Congress added an extra $25 billion to the $715 military budget three weeks ago!
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It’s a clear case of a community that should benefit from movements against injustice, esp climate injustice: their ancestors were enslaved + colonized. And now, despite have contributed essentially nothing to climate change, they’re facing devastating impacts (2/17)
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1/ Here’s why I protested
@PaulWeissLLP
tonight to tell them to
#DropExxon
Before Yale Law I taught English in Benin. I know the people most vulnerable to climate crisis. Some were my students. I watched many educations end in 6th grade because they couldn’t pay $20 school fees
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For much of the world, economic + climate policy are *the* key global issues.
Western powers don't seem to have any real understanding that they won't get global support for their priorities unless they make meaningful progress on these challenges facing Global South countries
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I think part of the origin for this thinking is an intellectual lineage based around struggles of workers vs bosses, colonized vs colonizers, etc.
But often our social position isn’t as part of the oppressed group. That’s ok! Still should work for a fairer world
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Yale Law School is a weird place. This week I both read a news story about how we’re a hotbed of woke anticapitalism run amok and went to an event on the opioid epidemic where the speaker noted that many YLS students go on to work for the law firms representing the Sacklers
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I’m not going to pretend to have expertise on Afghanistan but I will say that letting people come to the US is almost always one of the simplest and most effective ways the US can help people abroad, and if someone doesn’t support it l question the sincerity of their concern
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You always imagined the decline of democracy would be terrifying, or violent, or at least somewhat dramatic. I didn’t expect it to look so stupid
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Based on recent travel I can confirm that the developing country knockoff soccer jersey market is nimble and strong.
A healthy supply of Inter Miami + Saudi club kits, indistinguishable from real ones, has quickly emerged.
Truly one of the great subversions of corporate profits
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Really like this formulation of climate democracy from
@OlufemiOTaiwo
, + also how it points to need to democratize the int'l system. When much of the Global South has functionally no control over their climate, national democracy can only be so democratic
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First Harvard, then Yale, and tonight NYU! Wherever
@PaulWeissLLP
goes, law students will tell the firm that we won’t work for them as long as they work for Exxon
#DropExxon
…
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Me on how Aung San Suu Kyi's fall from grace follows a broader pattern of advocates' remorse+heroes letting us down
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Almost no one has email addresses, and video calls are patchy. People (if they’re relatively better off and literate) use Facebook and WhatsApp, but they would have no idea how to find sympathetic activists or how to frame their demands in terms that would be understood (4/17)
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We're really going to need to replace political systems + moral outlooks premised on the idea that most effects derive from local causes. Economic globalization changed the game + climate change has blown it open entirely.
(Reconsidering Reparations is a great starting point!)
"the Clean Air Act was built on one main fact...if you regulate local emissions, you improve local air quality...But that logic no longer holds. Look at the Canadian fires — number one, it's not a point source, and number two, it doesn't stay locally."
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IMO, what ends up happening is activists look for localized injustices where there is a singular identifiable cause (i.e. local pollution from fossil fuel infrastructure) instead of the systemic injustices that cause the most harm (i.e. global climate crisis) (13/17)
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Anyway, grateful to thinkers who have helped to think through these ideas, especially
@OlufemiOTaiwo
’s concept of rooms, and grateful to many people in the community of Agbon who welcomed me back this month (17/17)
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I’ve seen pressure in organizing spaces not to say that you care about climate change, economic inequality, health disparities, etc because they hurt a lot of people. Instead, it’s seen as better to explain why they hurt *you*
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And plus, the same systems that marginalize them are the ones that often deprive them of the knowledge and capacity to unwind that marginalization. For example, people in this Beninese community have deep knowledge of the devastating consequences of climate change (9/17)
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Really excellent from
@OlufemiOTaiwo
on the need “to be accountable and responsive to people who aren’t yet in the room, to build the kinds of rooms we could sit in together, rather than merely judiciously navigating the rooms history has built for us”
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PEOPLE PAY MCKINSEY $67,500 SO THAT ONE (1) 23-YEAR-OLD CAN MESS AROUND WITH A SPREADSHEET FOR ONE (1) WEEK?!?!?!?!?
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Just the way I thought law school would work out: you meet some friends, start an org together, try to do some good, and end up getting a generous donation for said org from Lil Dicky
Happy Earth Day! Thanks to your support. FOUR years after the release of "Earth" we have now donated ALL the proceeds to help combat climate change. That is $1.7 MILLION going to the most amazing nonprofits! I hope you'll show them some love - check them out!
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Excellent
@RachelStrohm
piece on why both lockdowns and income replacement are necessary for African countries
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I have a lot of respect for
@KAnthonyAppiah
, but this response is very disappointing.
Fossil fuel corporations don't get lawyers to tell them what the law is. They hire armies of highly-skilled lawyers to ensure the law is enforced in the most favorable way possible to them
Looks like
@Ls4Ca
campaign condemning law firms like Paul Weiss for representing Exxon is making some students think twice about taking corporate law jobs. Interesting to read Kwame Appiah’s take as The Ethicist, generally advising the guy to take the job.
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And for many other ppl in organizing spaces that mostly consist of well educated people in the Global North, that’s largely true for them too.
I’m not convinced it helps anyone to say that *we* are the ones who inequalities are really screwing over (sometimes, but often not!)
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If you have any high-risk college seniors in your life, please send them this work of art.
Only you can save them from working for McKinsey
Here's our story from last night about McKinsey & Company...
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Barack Obama got rejected by Swarthmore so I would say I'm ahead of schedule to be president
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Had a free burrito for lunch and brought home a free sandwich and two free pies. It's starting to feel like the real Yale Law School is back
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You might have been seeing the letters ISDS recently. What is ISDS, and why is it such a threat to climate action?
The problem is well-summed up by the title of a recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment: ISDS requires "paying polluters"
🧵
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But hardly anyone knows that fossil fuels are the cause, what technologies and political systems could unwind fossil fuel dependency, and who has the power to make those changes. And why would people who have had little exposure to education, travel, or news know that? (10/17)
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3. There is a big conceptual gap about how to center the voices of marginalized communities when the cause of marginalization is distant from the the marginalized community, as in the case with many systemic injustices (11/17)
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In my community, the girls' soccer team chose the name "Les Amazones." To teenage girls who play a sport typically reserved for boys/men, the fact that Beninese women fought on par with men is more meaningful to them than the fact that those women enslaved some of their ancestors
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Exxon, Chevron, + ConocoPhillips provide woefully little tax transparency—though evidence suggests they extensively dodge taxes.
Read my colleague Diana Kearney and I on
@OxfamAmerica
's proposals for the companies to publish country-by-country reporting
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I considered a mature, calm retweet, but instead I am going to tweet my truth: omg omg David Wallace-Wells tweeted my article
"This hard-headed framing assumes that global north populations will naturally oppose the increased redistribution of money and power for the benefit of people abroad who they’ve never met. But what if this widely held assumption is not true?" (1/x)
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It's of course good that YLS is increasing the # of 1st-generation professionals, but I always find it striking how YLS seems so proud of this stat.
The flipside of 26% FGP students is that 74% of YLS students have a parent w/ a graduate degree! Only 13% of US has a grad degree!
The Class of 2024 is the most diverse in YLS history. Read more fast facts about our 1L class.
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Now back in Paris, the US wants to return to global climate leadership. There's one big problem: the US hasn't followed through on any of its promises.
I wrote about why US climate credibility hinges on passing strong climate legislation in the next few months
New from
@TimH_B
on the blog: on the need for domestic US climate action to generate credibility in global climate negotiations.
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🚨BIG news in our newest
@OxfamAmerica
release: investors with $10 trillion in assets under management have supported public country-by-country reporting.
That's 10,000,000,000,000.
This represents huge progress in the fight for tax transparency
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Today, a day I've spent corresponding with Beninese friends who were sheltering in their homes to avoid soldiers' bullets, I have an article out in
@ForeignPolicy
on this Sunday's presidential election in
#Benin
. It is an election in name only (1/9)
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Never has anything more deserved the world’s tiniest violin
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It's so popular bc it so uniquely addresses global inequality: billions of ppl face hardships that stem from being born in a poor country. The visa lottery is the 1 way they could ever legally get to a rich country.
Today, tens of thousands of people will be granted that chance
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So excited to share the product of six months of work with the best team of law students one could ever ask for!
@alisaewhite
@MaCamilaBustos
@KarenAnds
@r_stryer
@ScottWStern
and Lexi Smith
THREAD: We just released the Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard, the 1st ever study of top law firms' role in the climate crisis.
A large majority of top law firms are on the wrong side of history--and we have the data to prove it (1/8)
#ClimateScore
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Exciting to see this coverage of our shareholder resolutions in the Financial Times!
If Exxon, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips don't have anything to hide, why won't they publish basic tax transparency?
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I spend my whole semester writing a paper about an obscure WTO provision that's only ever been used once and then the night before it's due Bolivia has go and use it! Couldn't have given me at least a couple days to work this in, Bolivia?
The WTO says it welcomes a deal by a Canadian company to export 15 million J&J vaccines to Bolivia under a compulsory license (without J&J approval). Could use WTO provisions that have rarely been used in the past. Bolivia is calling the WTO's bluff.
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Not trying to brag but I built Staplehenge off-camera while looking like I was very seriously paying attention to my Zoom class
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Both seniors teams lost in the final, but we have the most top scholars in history. So that's pretty much the same thing
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My vote is probably in that tranche that was just counted. I made sure to get my ballot in weeks in advance. It didn’t get counted until Wednesday morning because the GOP legislature wouldn’t let MI count absentee ballots before Election Day. Don’t dare say my vote doesn’t count
Another tranche of Michigan votes has just been reported from Democratic-leaning Ingham County and Trump's statewide lead dropped from 1.3 points to 0.5 percentage points.
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I have a Note on tax avoidance in the African extractive sector out in the Yale Journal of International Law.
For African resource wealth to translate to quality living standards, fighting multinational corporations' tax avoidance is a must (1/12)
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Me, booking my Connecticut to Michigan Amtrak ticket: It’s long, but it will be nice to look out the window and watch the country pass by.
Me, watching the sun set at 4:30 and realizing I booked this trip for the shortest day of the year:
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I get anger at anti-vaxxers but man would it make a difference if people directed just 10% of that anger at the rich country governments blocking global vaccination.
The next variant won't come from people who refuse to get vaxxed—it will happen because billions can't access one
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Oh god the law professors have already started with the “I know Amy Coney Barrett and she was nice to me and thus deserves to be one of the nine people authorized to give authoritative interpretations of the law” op-eds
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Really shocking—or at least, it should be—that global powers still have no serious plan to achieve global vaccination even after seeing the emergence of Omicron, the exact thing that everyone warned would happen if there wasn’t global vaccination
We've updated our end-of-year projections for global vaccination targets.
We now project that 116 countries (including the US, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Russia) are not on track to have fully vaccinated 70% of their population by mid-2022.
Read more:
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