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Amanpour

Following the Trail of Egypt's Child Migrants; U.N. Rep Explains the Case for Migrants; Transgender, the Latest Frontier; Imagine a World. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired June 16, 2015 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[14:00:11] CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight: Europe again has failed to reach an agreement on the migrant crisis while even

children risk death to reach these shores. Our special series on the dangerous future of Egypt's child migrants continues.

Also ahead, searching for identity: is the transformation of Caitlyn Jenner also transforming society?

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AMANPOUR: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.

The European Union may stand for peace and solidarity but today the migrant crisis is sending off signals of tension and division and interior

ministers who've been meeting in Luxembourg have failed yet again to agree on how to resettle more than 100,000 migrants who survived the dangerous

Mediterranean crossing this year alone.

Italy, which for months has borne the brunt of the crisis, is threatening to get tough if its neighbors refuse to take in their fair share.

Meanwhile, we continue CNN's exclusive investigation into some of the most desperate of them. Yesterday we showed you Egypt's child migrants, whose

parents in the small fishing village, want to know what happens when and if their children make it to Italy, which is where our Nima Elbagir travels to

next in part two of her series.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIMA ELBAGIR, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Rocked by the waves, fleeing from ship to ship, huddled together below deck, this hidden camera footage

was shot by illegal migrants crossing from Egypt to Italy. It's a trip so many don't survive.

This is Sicily's boat graveyard. This is where the hulls of the ships that brought migrants to shore here are laid to rest, each one of these ships

carries with it a tale of human misery. The hold where hundreds were found asphyxiated, the ship found empty because people out of fear had plunged to

their death, these are the wrecks of the vessels that carry people and their dreams here to shore.

Over the past years, they've brought with them thousands of unaccompanied Egyptian children. The lucky ones are brought here, so are the many

underage migrant homes dotted across the Sicilian countryside. We've been granted access by Italian authorities but asked not to disclose the name of

the town the center is based in.

Karim (ph) is a translator and all-around big brother to the younger boys here. He arrived from Egypt when he was just 12 years old. He'd already

been working since his 8th birthday.

KARIM (PH) (through translator): You leave home not knowing whether you're going to return or not. You kiss your mother goodbye, not knowing whether

you're ever going to see her again because no one knows what the sea can do to you.

ELBAGIR (voice-over): Too many of the boys' parents, he says just don't care.

KARIM (PH) (through translator): Someone manages to send 500 euros home and his family fix up their house beautifully. Then others will look at

that and say, why don't we send our son? They're convinced that here in Italy money is just thrown about.

ELBAGIR (voice-over): It's that pressure that has allowed many kids to become easy prey for the networks smuggling them in, trafficking them into

a life of crime.

This young man agreed to speak to us but he doesn't want to appear on camera for fear of what might happen to his parents still at home. He was

a so-called child captain, one of the children trafficked on board the cruise smuggler ships when he was just 15 years old. He said he had no

choice.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): I left my home to work, fishing. We had been at sea for two days. And after these two days, a small boat

approached. They loaded people up, around 170 people, asked the captain, where are we going? He told me we are going to Italy.

ELBAGIR (voice-over): He now works with newly arrived Egyptian boys trying to convince them to stay in school and out of the hands of the criminal

gangs.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Europe is very, very tough for someone as young as these kids are. They run away from school to any big

city, they can't find anything to eat. They don't know where to sleep. They'll want to work at anything, anyone who comes and says work for me,

whether it's drugs, even cocaine. They'll work at it because they don't have any money.

ELBAGIR (voice-over): Even the sex trafficking of children,

[14:05:00] I asked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Yes, there's also child prostitution because they don't have anyone looking out for them. Some

young kid, 14 years of age, what else are they going to do on the street on their own?

ELBAGIR (voice-over): But even here, there is no real respite. A group of boys from the home agree to speak to us in the church square. One of them

is just 12 years old. It's clear they carry the burden of the thousands of dollars their parents paid to get them here.

I ask them if they call home and if they tell their parents how tough life in Italy really is.

"We can't tell them," one of them says. "We can't tell them how difficult it is for us. We chose this. We chose to come to suffer so that we can

help them."

But is it really a choice?

Francesco Teresi (ph), a Sicilian lawyer, was tasked with representing three migrant children. Three days before a hearing set to determine their

legal status, they disappeared.

ELBAGIR: These documents are contracts that three of your clients, who were 16 and 17, that they were found on their person when they came in.

And these were contracts between their families and the smugglers.

FRANCESCO TERESI (PH), SICILIAN LAWYER: Well, they decided to escape, looking at this contract because they had something more important than

them -- than their life, return money to their family. That's why, because they have to starve, they have to starve to find the money to return back

and to honor those contracts.

ELBAGIR: Though many of the kids go, Sicily is just an initial stopping- off point. Thousands of them have been disappearing out of the system and making their way by bus and rail to Rome. And that's where desperate to

pay off the debts their parents incurred to get them here, they had to find work wherever they can.

ELBAGIR (voice-over): To find out what happens to them there, we also have to head north to the Italian capital -- Nima Elbagir, CNN, Catania, Italy.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: And we'll bring you that final part of the story on this program tomorrow. So here is a quick look ahead.

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ELBAGIR (voice-over): (INAUDIBLE) is one of the country's main rail terminals. This is where thousands of illegal migrant children are

desperate to make money however they can.

ELBAGIR: Groups of boys were clustered together. We saw them in a known pickup location.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The illegal stuff, that's the easiest and not just here in Rome but across the country.

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AMANPOUR: An incredible and tragic journey indeed.

And now we want to bring in our conversation, Peter Sutherland, the U.N. Special Representative on International Migration, welcome to the program.

You've just seen with your own eyes and really remarkable report of the sheer desperation and there's rather new phenomenon of children choosing

themselves to try to come over here to make it better for their own parents back there.

What can be done for them once they get here?

PETER SUTHERLAND, U.N. SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE ON INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION: Well, let me make a preliminary point. This has been from the beginning of

mankind part of the human condition. You try to improve yourself; you try to get a better place to be. And in these particular circumstances, I

would like to make the first point that we do not have a continent overrun by immigrants.

AMANPOUR: So in other words, the politicians --

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: -- saying and the fearmongering are just wrong.

SUTHERLAND: The overall numbers are not the sort of disastrous picture that is presented of hundreds of thousands coming to Europe each year. We

have 355,000 in total in terms of refugees last year. And when one compares that with, for example, Lebanon, Turkey or Jordan, it's a tiny

fraction of our total population of 500 million. So we have --

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: -- millions of them, OK.

SUTHERLAND: -- we shouldn't look at it as a sort of a flood.

AMANPOUR: Well, then, that's a really important point because that's what all the governments, that's what all the opposition, that's what all the

populist parties are saying.

So why haven't governments then made the case that you're making right now?

And I ask you in full light of a failure yet again by Europe's governments to deal with these migrants today in Luxembourg.

SUTHERLAND: I think that the economic argument for migrants is not properly made. And the result of that failure to make the argument is that

there is an increasing fear -- and that's the only word to be used -- by many societies in Europe, which gives life to some of the more extreme

political parties in Europe.

In fact, migrants are vital for our economy and vital in some places for the demographics of the countries in question, like Germany.

AMANPOUR: Well,

[14:10:00] exactly. And Germany actually stunned us all over the weekend by saying actually we want this immigration, we are going to have nearly 2

million too few workers by 2020. They actually want these skilled migrants, apparently many of them from Syria, who've been coming over.

SUTHERLAND: Well, last year in terms of refugees, to take them as a category, Germany took 47,900. Sweden took 36,000. The United Kingdom

took 14,000. And yet in Germany, the overall opinion polls indicate a positive attitude to migrants. And this must be the result of political

explanation of Germany's need. And it's a demographic need. The population is going down.

AMANPOUR: We talked about this story is simply not being told; indeed, the reverse of the story is being told. What then about quotas? You have now

several attempts to get Europe to take in their fair share; again they have refused to do so.

Is quotas a good thing?

SUTHERLAND: Well, first of all, the word "quota" itself has a sort of I think negative implication, although in reality it probably reflects --

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: Should people take in their fair share?

SUTHERLAND: -- there should be a fair share. And there isn't a fair share. There is a huge difference, five countries effectively are taking

virtually all of the refugees that are coming into Europe. A significantly greater proportion than many of the others.

Why, if we are a union, shouldn't there be some form of sharing of this burden?

Why should Italy carry the whole can in respect of those who are coming across from Libya, for an example? It seems to me, at least, that the

commission's idea, which is a sharing mechanism, is fair.

AMANPOUR: And yet it keeps failing and we have these dramatic pictures of police having to wrestle these migrants, you know, away from borders and

into detention areas and special centers. And here is what the Italian prime minister has said.

If it's Italy's problem because Europe closes its eyes, then Italy will do it on its own. But in that case, it would be a defeat, not for Italy, but

for the very idea of Europe. And he has also threatened to grant them all visas and let them carry on in terms of showing an ability to travel into

Europe.

Doesn't he have a point?

SUTHERLAND: I think he has a point. I think he has a point because it is only fair that we should share what in fact is not a burden but is

presented as a burden, naming dealing with the dire plight of people who are persecuted and are, in the main, running away from persecution. And I

think that that's important.

Fifty percent of the people who come across the Med are escaping persecution, Syria or Eritrea being the two main sources of where they are

coming from.

AMANPOUR: So you said 50 percent are legitimate refugees and asylum seekers; presumably the other 50 percent are those in search of a purely

better economic life.

SUTHERLAND: Yes.

AMANPOUR: But given the fact that we still need migration, we still need a labor force on this continent, is there not something that the United

Nations, for instance, can do to knock some European heads together and change the narrative?

SUTHERLAND: Well, in a sense, that's what I'm trying to do with you this evening and the U.N. is trying to do it. We've made statements over the

last four weeks. The leaders of the Human Rights Commission, High Commissioner and the Commissioner for Refugees and I have tried to make

statements and the head of the International Organization for Migration about the absolute need to have a constructive engagement with this

problem, not an entirely negative one.

AMANPOUR: It is extraordinary that they don't get the dollars and cents part of this equation.

SUTHERLAND: That is correct. I think that the dollars and cents argument is very clear. If you take, for an example, the United Kingdom, lower

unemployment rates from the migrants, less benefit seeking from the migrants than from the national community. Positive contribution to the

economy, all of these things are part and parcel of the positive story of migrants.

AMANPOUR: Totally drowned out. We hope to have made a little wave tonight. Peter Sutherland from the United Nations, thank you so much

indeed.

SUTHERLAND: Thank you.

AMANPOUR: And from finding life on distant shores, as we've been discussing, we turn next to people finding their true selves. With the

arrival of Caitlyn Jenner and the promise -- prominence of Laverne Cox, has the world reached the transgender tipping point? We'll explore what this

might mean when we come back.

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.

Transgender is the latest frontier being breached in the war of sexual identity as celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner, formerly the American

Olympian, Bruce Jenner, helped put the issue on the map recently.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CAITLYN JENNER, OLYMPIAN ATHLETE: My brain is much more female than it is male. It's hard for people to understand that. But that's why my soul is.

I look at it this way: Bruce always telling a lie.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: So a recognition of difference keeps growing as Andrew Solomon, my guest tonight, writes, quote, "We like categories and clubs as much as

we ever have; it's only that the ones we thought were inviolable turn out not to be and others that we never imagined are taking their place."

That's from his exhaustive investigation, "Far from the Tree," which, since it was published in 2012, has become the definitive study of children

searching for their identity.

Andrew Solomon is in New York. Welcome to the program.

ANDREW SOLOMON, AUTHOR: Pleasure to be here.

AMANPOUR: So are we right? Is there a tipping point? Is identity no longer the big conundrum and difficult issue that it was and we've got

Caitlyn Jenner, we got all sorts of magazine covers. We've got the White House installing gender neutral bathrooms.

SOLOMON: The rate of change has been nothing short of astonishing. When I started working in this area in 2001, it was absolutely at the margins.

And now almost everyone is at least aware that transgender people exist and understands that it's a complicated issue and one that requires social

accommodation.

AMANPOUR: So how do you define gender? I mean, we used to sort of think we knew. It was male, female or gay and now it's every other thing coming

to play as well. Let's just take the South African athlete, you remember, a few years ago, the runner who was lambasted by the public, was she a boy,

was she a girl, you know, how does she do so well and it turned out that she had evidence of two sets of sexual organs.

What is gender? How do we define it?

SOLOMON: Well, in the first place we have to distinguish between gender and sexuality and does one transact with -- to mean my gender is who I am

and my sexuality is who I bounce it off of.

Gender is really one's inner perception of who one is. And most of us have an understanding of ourselves that fits with our anatomy. You're born a

boy; you feel like a boy; you think of yourself as a boy. But there are some people who many of them even from early childhood feel as though

there's been a terrible mistake, they're absolutely certain that they're a member of a different gender than the one that they were born to.

And there are some people who come to that realization later and there are some people who are born male but believe themselves to be female and

there's an increasingly large number of people who are actually out and open about being transgender and who effectively are living a life in which

they acknowledge that they are in some sense a blending

[14:20:00] of multiple genders.

AMANPOUR: You also talk about horizontal gender, I think.

What does that mean?

SOLOMON: I drew the distinction in my book between what I called vertical identity, passed down generation to generation like your race and your

ethnicity and your nationality and often your religion and usually your language. And the identities that exist that come into a family and the

parents have no previous experience of them, so various kinds of disability, being a prodigy, being a criminal or being transgender, these

are all circumstances in which a family that perceives itself to be normal has a child who may perceive to be different or abnormal.

And transgender has been a very fraught area in that arena especially as we've got on with the debate about whether being gay is something that's

biologically determined or not biologically determined. We've now decided by and large that it's unacceptable to submit gay people to conversion

therapies, but we still often think that we can do that to people who are transgender, that we can really get them not to be transgender. And it's a

vivid and running argument about whether in effect is their anatomy what needs to be fixed or is their brain?

AMANPOUR: Well, I'm going to move on to some of the stories and case studies that you wrote about in your book. But first I want to ask you

about yourself because you are gay.

And you have written in your book, "I have a great life as a man and I've made it all work. But I know that at 12 I'd have chosen to be a woman if

it had been an easy and complete transformation. Perhaps that's only because being a woman looked more respectable to me than being a gay man.

And 12 is a conformist age."

That's a pretty remarkable statement.

SOLOMON: One of the questions when you're looking at people who begin to identify in a gender atypical way is whether they're going to go on to be

transgender, whether they'll be as it were just gay or whether actually it's a phase and they'll move beyond it. Now it takes a lot of expertise

to work it out.

When I was 12, I thought that the lives of gay people were going to be very lonely, very isolated and very sad. The world has changed; I'm married to

a man. We have children. I have actually a very good and happy life in most regards.

But I think that that social shift has really changed the way that I understand the question of my sexuality and I think the social shift we're

in right now is going to change the way people experience their notions of gender.

And what we want to do as a society, I think, is not to prevent people from inhabiting their authentic identities, because an authentic society is

always a finer one than a place where people are living a lie. But at the same time, not get people who made decisions in which they'll then feel

trapped or who undertake really quite complicated physiological experiments with surgery and hormones and so on if that isn't quite what's right.

And the trick is figuring out how to steer between that Scylla and Charybdis.

AMANPOUR: Well, it's still an issue, obviously, for transgender. I mean, we used to hear a lot about young gay kids being bullied, some committing

suicide, some attempting. Now the figures show that 41 percent of transgender Americans report attempting suicide. And here's a story that

you have in your book, a kid who wanted to be a boy, stun their parents and the parents, quote, "went back to their pediatrician and asked what he

thought about gender identity disorder. He told them, 'Those children mostly committed suicide. So they should go to the Christian bookstore,

read up on it and pray.'"

SOLOMON: The Caitlyn Jenner story has called a great deal of attention to the fact that there are people who are making transitions and are

triumphant. Laverne Cox is another one. Those stories are very inspiring. They give hope to people who are concerned and lost.

But transgender people are unemployed at twice the American national average. They are four times as likely to be living below the poverty

line. In the year so far of 2015, nine transgender people of color have been murdered in what appear to be hate crimes. So we have a split

situation in which there is a remarkable transformation taking place among a more informed group of people, who are taking a more liberal attitude

toward this and saying everyone should inhabit his or her authentic identity. And then we have also a society in which the level of prejudice

and the level of violence against trans people is enormous, in which non- trans people seem to feel terribly threatened by trans people. One person I spoke to recently said, "Gay is the new straight and trans is the new

gay."

AMANPOUR: Which just shows how society is moving and that should be a good thing.

Andrew Solomon, thank you very much indeed, author of "Far from the Tree," president of the PEN organization. Thank you so much.

And of course PEN is all about freedom of expression and we will explore the crackdown on free speech at the first-ever

[14:25:00] European Games. That's after a break. Imagining a world beneath Baku's extravagant debut onto the global sports stage.

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AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, we know this week the world of sports has been bedazzled by the first-ever European Games, its spectacular new

stadiums and opening extravaganza. But imagine a world behind the glitz where, instead of using the European Games to promote respect for European

values, the host, Azerbaijan, is doing the opposite.

At these games, human rights and free speech are finishing last. Notorious for its censorship, Azerbaijan is barring many foreign correspondents and

locking up many of their own journalists.

Recently, from her prison cell, the award-winning reporter, Khadija Ismayilova, wrote, "The truth is that Azerbaijan is in the midst of a human

rights crisis. Things have never been worse as those at the top continue to profit from corruption, ordinary people are struggling to work,

struggling to live, struggling for freedom. And we must struggle with them for them."

And that is what we here will continue to do as well.

And that is it for our program tonight. Remember you can always see the whole show online at amanpour.com, and follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.

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