Borderline (One Lane Bridge (Isabelle Roughol))

Show notes
[00:00:20] Intro
[00:03:22] "A large number of first-generation people"
[00:04:54] "Fufu is a far superior lunch"
[00:09:09] "It's three identities I'm juggling"
[00:11:43] “The tension between the collectivist culture of most of the world and this very individualistic American culture”
[00:13:54] "People raised in that context approach the world with a different eye"
[00:16:23] "If I was not (multicultural) and I was saying the same things, it would be received much differently"
[00:18:27] "You can't be an expert of your own experience"
[00:22:05] "The people in charge are worried about everyone else's biases when the core problem is their own"
[00:26:04] "The Great Resignation? I was way ahead of that curve"
[00:31:08] "This value of humility that I was raised with is outdated"
[00:39:42] Outro

Follow Michael Rain on Instagram and on Twitter
Watch Michael's TED talk
Photo by Pamela Chen

Susan J Cohen is an American immigration lawyer who has seen the last few decades of US immigration policy. She talks about the situation Joe Biden has inherited, after Donald Trump changed more than 400 immigration laws, rules and processes; why a record number of arrests has been made at the US Southern border; what is happening in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala or Haiti that is making people move north; and what the impact of the Trump presidency has been on immigrants, lawyers and activists. 

Cohen is the founding partner of the immigration law practice at Boston firm Mintz, an author and a songwriter. In 2017 she was part of a small band of legal minds who fought the so-called "Muslim ban" in court and won a short-lived victory.

📚 Journeys from There to Here: Stories of Immigrant Trials, Triumphs and Contributions. Susan J Cohen, with Steven Taylor. River Grove Books, 2021. Buy it here. (This affiliate link supports Borderline.)
🎶 Beyond the Borders and Looking for the Angels, written by Susan Cohen and performed by students and alumni of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachussetts. 

Show notes
[00:00:16] Intro
[00:01:32] The immigration situation Joe Biden inherited
[00:05:21] Title 42 and Remain in Mexico: How the US keeps lawful asylum-seekers at bay
[00:08:49] What it's like to wait at the US Southern border
[00:12:43] A historical record for arrests at the Southern border
[00:15:13] What's happening in Central America and Haiti to push people north
[00:18:42] The massive problems we'd need to solve to stem migration flows
[00:22:27] Patterns of discrimination and aggression at the border
[00:26:58] How the American public feels about immigration
[00:29:46] Changing the perception of immigrants

In this conversation, Zoe Gardner, policy advisor at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, covers: 

• How immigration exposes women to a higher risk of violence and abuse
• Why policing and immigration enforcement must be decoupled
• WTF “no recourse to public funds” and the “hostile environment” are
• How legal migrants are pushed into undocumented status
• Getting your COVID vaccine even if you’re undocumented
• The exodus of European migrants from the UK & the post-Brexit settlement scheme
• How US immigration activists inspire the British movement
• What a safe and constructive immigration system would look like

Show notes

00:00 Intro
02:18 "All women understand how all women have felt over the last week"
03:28 "We have a deeply unfeminist immigration system"
06:21 "It's by dividing ourselves that we are doing the work of the oppressor for them"
08:09 "MPs must put their vote where their mouth is"
10:32 "We feed the business model of the worst criminals in our society"
16:38 "The hostile environment extends into our NHS"
21:55 "Tens and tens of thousands of new undocumented immigrants in our country just overnight"
26:27 "If you make a mistake, you are out"
29:38 "The movement in the US is a real inspiration to us in the UK"
33:52 "People move. People have always moved. People will always move."
37:43 Outro

Reports cited

When the clapping stops: EU Care Workers after Brexit. JCWI.
Migrants with No Recourse to Public Fund experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. JCWI.
Migrants deterred from healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. JCWI.
Estimating the UK population during the pandemic. Jonathan Portes and Michael O’Connor, Economic Statistics Center of Excellence.
More on the case of Osime Brown

"The hostility that you feel, one of the purposes is to make you feel ashamed and to hinder you, to make sure you don't act, or you don't aspire, or you don't fight back." 

Marcela Kunova has been an immigrant in four countries in the last 20 years. She's had time to deconstruct xenophobia. In a deeply personal conversation, we discussed how shame can be internalized and weaponized against immigrants, how it limits us, but also how we can rise in spite of it. We chatted about mental health, vulnerability, belonging, language barriers and how the tide is turning against immigrants. Perhaps the most intimate episode yet. 

Explore further: 

• Brené Brown's TED talk on shame
• My episode on the journalism.co.uk podcast

A decade ago, journalist and "American without papers" Jose Antonio Vargas outed himself as an undocumented immigrant in a national magazine. Today he works with Hollywood and TV studios to humanise the immigrant story through pop culture.

In this episode
📺 Trafficking in empathy and the power of story to change minds
😢 Why he regrets his mom sending him away to the US
🇺🇸 Reaching America's "moveable middle"
💸 How the economic argument for immigration backfired
😰 Why progressives abandoned the fight
📖 Stories as the last place for nuance and complexity

Show notes
[00:00:16] Intro
[00:02:27] "Home is where I can do my work"
[00:04:05] "Being a journalist is the identity I figured out before all others"
[00:05:22] "All definitions are suspect"
[00:07:28] "Why is it that only a certain portion of the population gets to be an activist?"
[00:09:52] "Legalizing pot is a higher priority than legalizing people"
[00:10:33] "Imprisoned by the language we use on immigrants"
[00:14:09] "We can call immigrants essential labor, but we don't think of them as essential people"
[00:16:16] "Storytelling is trafficking in empathy"
[00:18:09] "The only time many white Americans meet a person of color or an immigrant is through the media they consume"
[00:24:51] "We work on shows that reach the movable middle"
[00:28:23] "We have yet to find some sort of language that talks about how borderless business and money is and how people are still very much, you know, locked up by these borders"
[00:32:55] "If I had a say in the matter as a 12 year old, I would have told my mom, don't do that"
[00:35:39] "That's the power of story"
[00:37:51] "Narrative is not a slice of the pie. It's actually the pan."
[00:39:39] "Storytelling is the only place where nuance can happen"
[00:42:38] "White is not a country"
[00:49:05] "I traded a life of being in the closet as undocumented in limbo to being a public undocumented person whose life is still in limbo"
[00:52:46] Outro

Jose Antonio Vargas's works
🇺🇸 Define American, a culture change organization that uses the power of narrative to humanize conversations about immigrants.
📚 Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018, Harper Collins). Upcoming: White is Not a Country (2023, Pantheon Books)
🎬 Documented: A film by an undocumented American (2014, CNN)
🎭 What the Constitution Means to Me, a play by Heidi Schreck (producer)

Works referenced
📚 Beloved, Toni Morrison
📺 Superstore (NBC)
📺 Roswell, New Mexico (CW)
🎬 The Lost Daughter (Netflix)
🎬 Drive my Car

If globalists want to build a more united world, they need to look at how nation-states did it – at a smaller scale – in the last couple centuries, says Hassan Damluji, author of The Responsible Globalist. It’s a 100-year project, but one we can start now with concrete steps, he adds. 

Note: this episode is a rerun of a June 2020 interview, in a new edit. 

00:00 Introduction

01:42 How the nation brought people together

04:48 Nationalism vs. patriotism vs. globalism

08:45 How to create a global sense of belonging

15:32 Why we might want to stop talking about immigration

18:40 The rise of a global culture

24:11 Let's start with fixing the global tax system…

28:34... and then the United Nations

33:57 Outro

Crossing the Channel without preauthorisation is legal, the vast majority of people crossing are rightful asylum seekers and there is no such thing as the "first safe country" rule. Also, there is no queue to wait in or to jump, most people aren't trafficked or smuggled, and only a trickle of the world's refugees arrive in rich countries. Refugee rights consultant Daniel Sohege breaks down the false arguments about asylum seekers making the rounds in media and on Twitter.

Show notes
[00:00:22] Intro
[00:03:05] Is this a migrant crisis?
[00:06:01] Channel crossings are for many the only option. Still, very few take it.
[00:07:25] There just isn't a queue to jump to apply for asylum
[00:09:43] "First safe country" is a myth
[00:11:55] Arriving by boat without pre-authorisation is not illegal
[00:12:46] Most border crossings are not arranged by smugglers
[00:16:14] Hard border controls can feed smuggling and trafficking businesses
[00:19:47] Airlines and other carriers can be fined for unknowingly helping people carry out their legal right to seek asylum
[00:21:35] 98% of those people who cross the Channel seek asylum
[00:26:22] How French police harasses asylum seekers
[00:27:57] What do we prioritise: the border or human life?
[00:31:10] There are better ways to spend our countries' money than on draconian border controls
[00:33:08] What a better refugee system could look like
[00:36:11] Rich nations are not taking their fair share
[00:41:43] Outro

🐦 Follow Daniel Sohege  at @stand_for_all

Why do we feel the need to put people into boxes, to assign categories in order to decipher them? And what happens to those who fit in many... and none at all? I discussed this and other things with Ferdous "Danny" al-Faruque, a third-culture kid all grown up. The second episode in the Borderlives series, exploring the lives and identities of global citizens, and what home even means. 

Through dogged reporting in The Guardian, Amelia Gentleman showed that British residents and citizens who had arrived from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s had been mistakenly classified as unauthorized immigrants. That came to be known as the Windrush Scandal. 

Three years on, I caught up with Amelia Gentleman ahead of Windrush Day to talk about its aging victims, the compensation scheme and the Home Office’s promises of reform. And in the waning days of the EU settlement scheme, we ask: Just as the Windrush generation was caught out by the end of free movement in the empire, could the Brexit generation be Britain’s next immigration scandal? 

00:23 Intro

02:42 Amelia Gentleman's career story

04:20 The Windrush scandal: a primer

08:14 Malice, incompetence or both?

10:49 People screaming into the void

14:42 When austerity and the hostile environment meet

17:31 Individual cases were solved, but systemic issues ignored

19:51 How these stories became "The Windrush Scandal"

25:29 Has the compensation scheme held its promises?

29:08 Could the EU Settlement Scheme be the next Windrush scandal?

35:53 How do you relate to a country that has turned its back on you?

44:07 Outro

📚 The Windrush Betrayal, by Amelia Gentleman. Guardian Faber Publishing. 2020.
📰 Read Amelia's work in The Guardian.
🐦 Follow Amelia on Twitter.

🎧 Related episodes on the British immigration system:

• 34 Wtf is going on at the Home Office? with Daniel Trilling
• 24 "We have a deeply unfeminist immigration system" with Zoe Gardner
• 30 Should we abolish borders? with Leah Cowan
• 23 When your passport locks you in with Selda Shamloo
• 05 How being nasty to immigrants became law with Colin Yeo

The border isn’t a line on the periphery of the country, says Leah Cowan, author of Border Nation. It is a fog that covers all of society and can descend upon you at any time if you’re an immigrant or racialized as “other.” It wasn’t always thus and it can be ended, she insists. 

00:43 Intro

02:06 What are borders for?

04:12 Borders, capitalism and racism

08:41 Did borders ever truly disappear?

10:15 The border isn't on the periphery, it's everywhere

13:07 Immigration enforcement is invisible to the rest of society

19:25 How the border breeds crime and violence

23:38 Do borders do any good?

24:43 Immigrants don't owe you a thing

29:11 The case for abolishing borders

34:20 "The pandemic is a portal"

36:14 Outro

👀 The pandemic is a portal, by Arundhati Roy. The Financial Times. 2020. (free to read)

📚 Border Nation: A Story of Migration, by Leah Cowan. Pluto Press. 2021.

If we all can't travel or see loved ones across borders, please tell me at least it’s working. 

In May, I found myself in tears when the British government decided to impose quarantines on anyone returning from France in order to combat covid-19. That was the last straw. How dare they close *my* border? Did it even serve a purpose? When in doubt, go to the library. I turned to science to find out if I had been right to cry or if indeed, the government was doing the right thing. What I found out is... it's complicated. 

🍎 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts 

🎧 Subscribe on Spotify 

📺 Subscribe on YouTube

Sources & further reading

• Delaying the Covid-19 epidemic in Australia: evaluating the effectiveness of international travels bans, Adeshina Adekunle, Michael Meehan, Diana Rojas‐Alvarez, James Trauer and Emma McBryde. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 2020 Vol. 44 No. 4. 
• Mobility restrictions for the control of epidemics: When do they work?, Baltazar Espinoza, Carlos Castillo-Chavez, Charles Perrings. PLoS ONE 15(7).
• Travel restrictions and infectious disease outbreaks, Ria Vaidya, MSc, Asha Herten-Crabb, MSc, Julia Spencer, MSc, Suerie Moon, PhD, Louis Lillywhite, MSc. Journal of Travel Medicine, Volume 27, Issue 3, April 2020. 
• Covid-19 pandemic planning scenarios, US Centers for Disease Control, updated 10 September 2020
• WHO Director-General Dr Tedros address to the 146th Session of the Executive Board, 3 February 2020
• Simulating an epidemic, 3Blue1Brown, 27 March 2020
• Ski, Parti, Seed a Pandemic: The Travel Rules that Let Covid-19 Take Flight, Selam Gebrekidan, Katrin Bennhold, Matt Apuzzo and David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times, 30 September 2020.

Credits 

Music by Dyalla. Additional music by Chris Zabriskie.

Sounds by PiR2, straget, thorvandahl and InspectorJ on freesound.org, under Creative Commons license

How can one institution be so universally criticised, not just by the immigrants and citizens who at one point or another must use its services, but by all those who encounter it, whether lawyers, judges, activists, journalists, or even those who work there. Daniel Trilling, a journalist who has been covering immigration for a decade, spent six months investigating for The Guardian the organisational culture and history of the Home Office to answer this simple question: wtf is going on there? He talked to me about what he found. 

Sources & further reading

📰 Cruel, paranoid, failing: inside the Home Office, Daniel Trilling for The Guardian, 13 May 2021

Also on Borderline:
👀 The post-Brexit immigration scheme ends in a month. Its flaws could show up in a decade. 3 June 2021
👀 Yes, Europeans are being turned away at UK borders. Not all Europeans though. 28 May 2021
🎧 How being nasty to immigrants became law, with Colin Yeo. 13 July 2020
🎧 "We have a deeply unfeminist immigration system,"with Zoe Gardner. 23 March 2021
🎧 When your passport locks you in, with Selda Shamloo. 16 March 2021

It’s got the Big Brother and Newspeak of 1984, the predictive policing of Minority Report, the monitoring and neighbourly delation of the Stasi and the cultural erasure of the Khmer Rouge. And concentration camps. In Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party may well have created the perfect police state. Journalist Geoffrey Cain investigates the Uyghur genocide and reveals what happens in the real world when you combine totalitarian ideology with artificial intelligence.

Show notes
00:17 Intro

02:26 A day in the life of a Uyghur woman

07:28 Every totalitarian dystopia wrapped into one

10:16 A 21st-century genocide

12:32 The technology doesn't even need to be that good

15:48 Why China went after the Uyghurs

18:06 Membership ad

19:47 How the return of the Taliban might impact the Uyghurs

21:45 Dystopia in the dark

24:34 How China exports its surveillance

27:51 How Western corporations and economies got trapped

30:44 The New Cold War

32:46 The death of techno utopianism

35:23 First let's fix the financial system 

38:35 Outro

📚The Perfect Police State, by Geoffrey Cain. Public Affairs. 2021. Buy it here.

Samsung Rising, by Geoffrey Cain. Penguin Random House. 2020. Buy it here. 

🐦 @geoffrey_cain and @iroughol

Stories referenced

🇦🇺 Facebook’s battle with Australia

🇺🇸 Amazon and the NSA

🇨🇳 Xinjiang’s cotton and Western brands

💻 Apple’s terminated supplier 

Listen, read, support at borderlinepod.com. Chat with me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. 

Remember Brexit? That's still in the agenda for 2020. The UK and EU have less than two months to agree a free trade deal and avoid a cliff edge. I caught up with Luke McGee, a journalist at CNN who's covered Brexit for years. We talked about where the negotiations stand, what's at stake, whether the British ever felt truly European and who can most afford to walk away. 

Travelers from 33 countries – nearly half the planet – were long barred from entry into the United States for pandemic reasons. They’ll be allowed in again from early November as long as they can prove they are fully vaccinated and provide a negative Covid-19 test. People who do not have access to the vaccine, however, can add one more item to the list of reasons why they may never set foot in the world’s richest country. Journalist Anna Lekas Miller discusses how the United States’ pandemic travel restrictions fit into the larger historical and political picture of American borders, from white supremacy to Biden's policies.

Show notes
00:00 Intro

01:47 How US travel restrictions are changing

05:53 Vaccination status will increasingly condition travel

11:22 Has the pandemic opened privileged immigrants' eyes? 

16:47 White supremacy was enshrined in immigration law

21:01 Immigration enforcement targets racialized people

23:13 Membership ad

25:08 Has the Biden administration fundamentally changed the tone?

29:49 Kamala Harris's message to Latin America

32:44 Looking ahead

34:59 Outro

📬 Sign up for Anna’s newsletter, Love & Borders

🐦 Follow Anna on Twitter @agoodcuppa

Listen, read, support at borderlinepod.com. Chat with me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. 

Liberalism – a belief in the primacy of individual liberty – has built modern democracies. Now it’s in an existential crisis, caught between rising authoritarianism and identity politics. I look back and ahead for liberals with British political journalist Ian Dunt.

00:14 Intro

01:24 Another TCK childhood

04:19 Why write a book that goes back 400 years?

08:48 What is a liberal?

14:16 How liberalism failed to stand for the liberty of most individuals

19:28 Identity politics are both a threat and a gift

23:00 How to become a Borderline member

23:41 “The people” does not exist

27:44 Can liberalism make room for tribalism? 

30:18 The immigrant’s whisper of loneliness

32:37 How liberalism survives the pandemic

36:11 Outro

📚 How to Be a Liberal, Ian Dunt, Canbury Press, 2020. On sale here.
Ian’s podcasts are Oh God, What Now? and The Bunker. His writing is on politics.co.uk and on Twitter.

Music by Ofshane.

Welcome to a new series of intimate conversations with global citizens, who talk about their identity, their choices and what home even means. This week, Janet Matta, an American working mom from Seattle, talks about leaving the United States and continuing a long American tradition – leaving your country to make a better life for the next generation. 

An emergency podcast with immigration lawyer and founder of freemovement.org Colin Yeo on the British government's bare minimum help to Ukrainian refugees, the gap between pronouncements and practice, and how Europe's own programme is putting Britain to shame.
Plus:
- the Nationality and Borders bill under scrutiny,
- non-white refugees discriminated at the border,
- lessons from last summer's Afghanistan promises, and
- can we trust the EU long-term on this?

Show notes

[00:00:10] Intro
[00:00:42] "Half a million people have fled"
[00:03:10] "The UK has done almost nothing"
[00:11:01] "The government's been very consistent in being anti-refugee"
[00:12:59] "The asylum system is in a really sorry state"
[00:15:08] The Nationality and Borders bill
[00:18:21] Europe's response is a sharp contrast
[00:20:52] International students and other non-white refugees stopped at borders
[00:24:53] How you can help
[00:26:47] Outro

Colin Yeo is an immigration lawyer, the founder of freemovement.org and author of Welcome to Britain. Follow him on Twitter at @ColinYeo1.

Evacuees from Ukraine seeking free immigration advice or lawyers who want to help can find information and contacts at https://advice-ukraine.co.uk.

Zach Honig, editor at large at The Points Guy and ultimate frequent flyer, shares how he plans to stay safe on planes, how airlines have abused customers during the pandemic and why you might want to stay local. "Those of us who are used to enjoying the journey as much as the destination are going to have to keep an open mind." --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/borderlinepod/message

If we can work from home now, why not work from the road? A laptop and decent wifi is all many of us need. "To be able to work and live wherever you feel happiest and most productive," that's the digital nomad lifestyle as explained to me by Mandy Fransz. She started on that road herself a couple years ago and has become an advocate for remote work. On this week's episode, she explains how she made it work and how you can do it for yourself. With so many us stuck between four walls, the road calls now more than ever...  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/borderlinepod/message

When she was 7, Qian Julie Wang – just Qian Wang then – landed at JFK airport in New York City. Her airsick mother leaned on her for support. Her father, whom she hadn't seen in two years, had skimped on food to afford the cab driving them from the airport. Thus started her life as an undocumented child in America.
 
Show notes
00:00 Intro
02:32 "A privilege, power and responsibility to share my secret"
06:13 "What it means to be a writer"
07:56 "At bottom we're all not really that different"
09:49 "The before and after of my childhood and my life"
13:10 "We had to be everything for each other"
15:22 "It was my job to keep us from being noticed"
17:44 "Salvation and refuge in books"
18:39 "Split between the two worlds"
20:48 Membership ad
22:19 "Public school in Chinatown"
27:49 "I went to school hungry every day"
31:18 "Everything I thought was wrong with me was simply a part of being human"
34:10 "There's nothing we are afraid of now"
39:01 Outro

📚 Beautiful country, by Qian Julie Wang. 2021. Penguin Random House. Buy it here.

When they narrowly escaped the Third Reich and found refuge in Britain, Peter Gumbel’s parents and grandparents cast off their German Jewish heritage to become a perfectly British family. Cricket, Marmite and Church of England. Two generations later, deeply unsettled by Brexit, Gumbel reaches out to Germany again in search of a new passport – and a reckoning with history. 

In conversation with Isabelle Roughol, Gumbel explores the fragility of identity and who we still are when we can no longer recognize the nations we call home. It’s the story of one family and the story of Europe. 

Show notes: 

00:00 Intro

01:47 "Home is where I am"

03:14 From the Third Reich to Cool Britannia
06:35 How Brexit tore through his identity

07:56 Choosing a new passport

11:21 Coming to terms with a German Jewish heritage

15:10 How identity diverges within a single family 

17:09 Reconnecting (or not) with a Jewish identity

22:57 How to become a Borderline member

24:06 His relationship with Britain since Brexit

29:26 Could this all happen again?

32:08 Outro

Sources:

Citizens of Everywhere: Searching for Identity in the Age of Brexit, by Peter Gumbel. Haus Publishing, London, 2020.

📬 Read, join & support on Substack | 🍎 Listen on Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Listen on Spotify | 📺 Watch on YouTube | ⭐️ Support on Patreon | 🌍 borderlinepod.com

People of all kinds – yes, people of color too – go abroad to live, love and learn. They study a language, they follow a partner, they go just for the heck of it or for a midlife crisis. Sometimes, they flee war or poverty, but not usually. 

Tired of not seeing her story represented, Amanda Bates created The Black Expat – a media centering the stories of Black global citizens. In this episode, she discusses her TCK childhood between Cameroon and the US, the challenges of life in-between and who gets to be called an expat vs. an immigrant. 

00:00 Intro

01:55 A TCK childhood

06:14 An American teenager in Cameroon

09:08 A Cameroonian student in the US

12:56 Why TCKs and first-gen college students relate

16:43 Minority students and the study abroad experience

18:34 How to become a Borderline member

19:40 Centering the Black expat experience

22:27 Blackness is not monolithic

29:07 Expat vs. immigrant and the power of words

38:17 Outro

The Black Expat is at theblackexpat.com, on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. Its podcast, The Global Chatter, is on all the usual podcasting platforms. 

📬 Read, listen, subscribe & support on Substack | 🍎 Listen on Apple Podcasts |
🎧 Listen on Spotify | 📺 Watch on YouTube | 🌍 borderlinepod.com

Immigration isn't a one-way ticket. For many, the homeland calls back. From the Basque region to Israel, Jamaica to Taiwan, Kamal al-Solaylee talks to those who've chosen to make their way home as he plans his own return. Will reality match the fantasy? Why is the call of home so powerful? And what if you're still a foreigner there?

Show notes
[00:00:30] Intro
[00:01:29] Migration isn't just a one-way ticket
[00:05:27] Ghana's Year of Return
[00:07:25] Return is big business, politics and emotion all mixed up
[00:09:08] Can reality match the fantasy?
[00:13:44] Return is not a failure of the immigration journey
[00:16:54] The irrational call of the homeland
[00:18:48] The pain of feeling like a foreigner at home
[00:23:00] The exploitation of nostalgia
[00:25:07] Return can feed or soften the edges of nationalism
[00:29:14] Whose return is actually wanted?
[00:31:12] Deportees, the unwanted returnees
[00:35:02] Kamal's own return plans

📚 Return: Why we go back to where we come from. Harper Collins Canada, 2021. Find it here.

In 2012, then Home Secretary Theresa May announced the plan: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants." The idea, borrowed from counterterrorism, was to make life so difficult for unwanted visitors that they would give up and go home. Instead, the hostile environment became a policy of systemic discrimination against all immigrants, authorised or not, their British families and any person that could be mistaken for an immigrant. And rather than leaving, many were pushed into illegality by changing rules, long waits and exorbitant fees. Colin Yeo, immigration lawyer, author of Welcome to Britain and founder of freemovement.org, explains how the policy came about and what it's meant for Britons, wannabe Britons and the country's own future. 

Kids who grow up between cultures develop invaluable skills. But having to figure out one’s cultural identity, on top of the usual teenage challenges, can make adolescence even harder. Mental health, belonging, conflict, rites of passage… A pediatrician who specializes in multicultural teenagers helps parents navigate a challenging decade. 

00:32 Intro

02:26 What is a teenager?

07:00 Inside the teenage brain

09:38 Global living makes adolescence trickier

11:24 The importance of telling your story

14:08 The mental health challenges of global teens

20:47 Conflict resolution, prolonged adolescence and grief in global teens

26:31 Screamers, mirrors and wallflowers

28:44 The adults global teens become

32:35 Outro

🎬 One Small Visit. A short film in pre-production, directed by Jo Chim, on the Abrahams’ true story.

📚 Raising Global Teens: A Practical Handbook for Parenting in the 21st Century. By Dr Anisha Abraham. 2020. Buy in US. Buy in UK. 

📚 Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds. By Ruth Van Reken, David Pollock and Michael Pollock. 2017 (3rd edition). Buy in US. Buy in UK. 

Read the essay and find all links at www.isabelleroughol.com.

When New York Times media columnist Ben Smith and Bloomberg CEO Justin Smith quit to start “a new kind of global news media company,” many of us sniggered at the thought that two middle-aged white American men with literally the same last name could be the ones to bring together all of the world’s news consumers. The Smiths may not be the ones to do it. But can anyone create a truly global news source? And most vitally, would there be an audience for it?

I’ve spent my whole career expanding news brands across borders and trying to address audiences as more than just inhabitants of a single nation-state. And I’ve come to this conclusion: We don’t need a global media, we need a globally literate one.

Asad and Marian’s family fled conflict in Somalia and found refuge in eastern Kenya, one of the world’s largest refugee camps. That was in 1991. Three decades later, the family still hasn’t been allowed to build a permanent home together anywhere. Their story, like a novel you couldn’t make up, is that of the broken refugee resettlement system and of responsibilities no one wants to take. American journalist Ty McCormick tells it. 

What was it like being an American abroad during the Trump years? How do they feel about the election and the years ahead? Is it time to go back and give back? This week, I brought together three American expats to talk about politics, home, what was broken and what remains.

Sarah Browne is veteran innovation catalyst based in London. She is a proud member of IDEALondon, a partnership of UCL, EDF and Capital Enterprise. She is from Wisconsin and California. 

Geoffrey Cain is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. He is the author of “Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech.” He is from Chicago. 

Lauren Tormey is a content designer at the University of Edinburgh. She has written about her experience of the British “hostile environment” immigration system and wants you to help her change it. She is from New Jersey. 

The great divide between nationalists and globalists is the political story of our times. But are they that far apart? "What would a united world look like other than people feeling, on a global level, something like what they do about their countrymen?" asks Hassan Damluji, deputy director at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and author of "The Responsible Globalist: What Citizens of the World Can Learn from Nationalism."

The nation was in fact one of humanity's most successful idea, he argues. To create a feeling of global citizenship, the same playbook applies. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/borderlinepod/message

How World War II is a British psychosis. Why we don't talk about empire. French universalism vs. British multiculturalism. How the nation state was made up. And a geopolitical utopia out of Star Trek. A freewheeling conversation with author and journalist Jonn Elledge.

📚 The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything, by Jonn Elledge. Headline, 2021. Buy it here and support Borderline.
📬 Sign up for the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything.
🎙 Listen to the Podcast of (Not Quite) Everything.

Show notes
00:00 Intro
02:52 How one of the world's largest countries dumps its migrants on one of the world's smallest
05:25 Insular news and why you may never have heard of Nauru
07:12 A worldwide obsession with US news
08:34 It's appalling how little we knew or know about the EU
10:17 How Brexit gave rise to a pro-EU movement
13:00 We're finding geopolitical solutions in Star Trek
15:12 The nation-state is such a recent mythology
19:46 Countries that think too highly of themselves
26:02  How WWII mythology shapes current politics
31:31 Poppy season is upon us
33:32 Newsletter ad
35:02 Could we create a global nation state?
37:00 French identity, multiculturalism and things I pretend to be an expert in
44:20 Britain stopped showing its best features

"Ukraine has provided us with, I think, the most striking, the most rapid, the most swift and complete legal offensive or lawfare strategy that has ever been implemented."

In this episode
🇺🇦 Ukraine's aggressive lawfare strategy
⚖️ International justice finally comes for the West
🤐 Why former great powers can't cope with their colonial crimes
🇫🇷 Reckoning with the Algerian War
🇨🇩 The DR Congo schools us on prosecuting environmental destruction
🇨🇴 Transitional justice lessons from Colombia, New Zealand, Scandinavia and more
🕊 Restitutions, reparations and truth commissions – justice beyond the courts

Show notes
[00:00:16] Intro
[00:01:42] "There is a before Ukraine and an after Ukraine"
[00:07:18] "Justice has become the third weapon of Ukraine's strategy"
[00:11:46] Is lawfare a communication tool?``
[00:15:39] The slow wheels of the ICC
[00:18:43] Justice gets much more pragmatic at the local level: the example of environmental crimes in the DRC
[00:25:52] A renewed interest in justice for indigenous people
[00:28:58] Colombia, a case study for all-encompassing transitional justice
[00:30:14] Why are some countries better than other at looking into their colonial past?
[00:32:26] The restitution of pillaged objects
[00:34:28] A generational reckoning with colonial crimes: the French Algerian war
[00:40:13] Statues, history vs memory and the new frontline of transitional justice
[00:42:53] Outro

🌍 justiceinfo.net
📚 The Master of Confessions, by Thierry Cruvellier. Ecco Press. 2015. Find it here.

🧬 Check out The Guardian's Science Weekly podcast, where I'm executive producer for the next few weeks. 

Tips from a digital nomad and a global team manager on how to work from anywhere successfully. (Audio from a LinkedIn livestream on 7 July 2021)

See it on LinkedIn.
See it on Youtube.

Globalisation isn’t just the stuff of airplanes and container ships. It’s not colonisation and circumnavigation alone. It started much sooner. Dr Valerie Hansen, professor of Chinese history at Yale University, points to the year 1000 as one early watershed era when the world expanded and became smaller at once. Trade routes criss-crossed the Americas, Islamic scholars mapped the globe and major religions spread across Asia. In large cities, exotic merchants set up shop, black and white people lived together… and sometimes mobs descended on reviled foreigners.

01:38 A convergence of global events in 1000

06:26 250 million people and an agricultural boom

09:20 Trade and religion made the world smaller

14:02 Slavery introduced the masses to a wider world

15:48 Southeast Asia, world factory

17:13 How to become a Borderline member

18:07 The globe and the average Joe

20:17 Xenophobia back then

25:02 A series of constantly expanding rings

29:50 How that globalisation differed from today's

📚The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began. By Dr Valerie Hansen. Simon & Schuster, 2020. Buy in US. Buy in UK.

Who are you when no nation claims you? Millions of stateless people navigate daily life and personal identity unrecognised by any country. They are the literal citizens of nowhere.

Show notes
[00:00:00] Intro
[00:01:42] What is statelessness?
[00:04:51] Born in Germany but not German
[00:09:48] Turned around at the airport
[00:13:31] Creating a source of truth for stateless people
[00:15:24] How one falls through the nationality cracks...
[00:22:07] Ad
[00:23:00] ... and other ways of becoming stateless
[00:26:06] Belonging and self-worth without a national identity
[00:32:04] Is citizenship owed or earned?
[00:35:34] How "passported" people can help
[00:41:14] Outro

🌍 statefree.world

Related episodes
36 Dina Nayeri on the immigrant's gratitude
23 Selda Shamloo on passport privilege
41 Qian Julie Wang on growing up undocumented

Join me on November 3rd (and 4th) to watch US election results come in together. Or not come in. Bring your own pizza. 
Sign up here to receive the call link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-very-borderline-election-night-tickets-127128864857 

Reza Pakravan has everyone's dream job title – explorer. He just released on Amazon Prime, his latest travel series "The World's Most Dangerous Borders" for which he traveled uninterrupted the width of Africa, across areas any foreign ministry generally tells you to keep clear of and which rarely see a film crew. It's full of stories and chance encounters, of the magic and the messes that we make on the road. It's everything we've missed in 2020 and why I wanted to end the year on this episode. 

Venture capitalist Chris Schroeder travels the world to invest in emerging markets. To the entrepreneurs he meets, Silicon Valley is just one of many models, China is everywhere and South-to-South exchanges are constant. To succeed in this distributed world takes humility, agility and a certain comfort with the uncomfortable. 

Show notes

00:00 Intro

01:33 Can you travel over Zoom?

03:11 What's been on global entrepreneurs' minds?

05:51 How technology unleashed talent

08:01 Silicon Valley isn't exactly irrelevant, just less central

10:23 Why it made sense for so long for Silicon Valley to be ethnocentric

15:24 You have to find wonder in being wrong

18:41 America is back. But back to what?

26:48 A return to sovereign industries, or the balkanization of the economy?

32:09 Capitalism, democracy and the mind models we can't let go of

39:32 The skills required to succeed in this world

45:03 Outro

Subscribe to Chris’s newsletter on Substack. 

Follow him on LinkedIn

👀 “America is back!” But to what? by Chris Schroeder. The International Economy. 2021.

📚 Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World. Snigdha Poonam. Harvard University Press. 2018.

Ariane Bernard founded Helio in 2020. Her startup has never known a world where you could network in person, meet clients and investors easily or work from a common space with your employees. How do you lead a team you've never seen? And in a multinational startup, how do you work past cultural barriers and incomprehensions when you can't look your coworkers in the eye? She had to find out the hard way.

Highlights
- "A lot of good team culture is safety, ultimately. You want a culture whose first achievement is the ability to say the words "I don't understand. I don't agree. I propose that we do X. Has anyone thought about Y?" If all team members, whether they are the most junior all the way to your executive team, equally feel like they have access to these words without risking something, then you have the making of solving for many other problems."
- "Everything that helps you understand whether people are connecting with a particular goal, everything that helps you understand whether people understand, everything counts because the distance does not help us."
- "The uncertainty is, what am I not getting and what is this company not getting if we are not as fully present and as fully engaged as we could be?"
- "The complexity of the distributed team is compounded by our cultural differences."
- "I don't have a problem going to an American and being like, "turn on your camera, what the hell!" Because the worst thing that happens is that they'll be like, "no, and here's why." But when you're working with folks who come from cultures that you only know in a much more superficial way, those are exactly the things that become like, what am I actually asking them? It feels like I'm just asking them to turn on the camera. It can't be that much. But I don't actually know this. I don't know what this stands for."

Show notes
[00:00:00] Intro
[00:03:14] Making the jump from intrapreneur to entrepreneur
[00:06:57] Anchoring a new company culture without an office
[00:10:12] Zoom cameras on, please
[00:14:07] Take every opportunity to reduce uncertainty
[00:15:52] When physical and culture distance combine
[00:19:43] Do we still need culture?
[00:25:54] "Do as I say" vs just one man's opinion
[00:27:51] The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
[00:29:31] Good culture is psychological safety
[00:36:03] Resting bitch face and the curse of the screen
[00:37:39] The benefits of hiring worldwide
[00:41:29] If you had a choice... centralised or distributed?
[00:44:32] Outro

📺 Watch the full interview on Youtube
🔆 Learn about Helio and apply to become an alpha user here

Nationalist or globalist? It may come down to psychological health.

Strong attachment to group identity is born out of insecurity, explains psychologist Dr Steve Taylor. Psychologically healthy people feel connected to all humans and are able to think beyond borders. Could we lessen nationalistic stife by promoting psychological health? 

Show notes
00:29 Intro

03:17 Are humans naturally tribal? 

05:04 When humans developed individualism

08:55 "Psychologically healthy people are not nationalistic"

10:42 The theory of terror management

12:07 Post-traumatic transformation and identity

15:18 Could we attenuate nationalistic conflict by encouraging psychological safety?

17:49 Transnationalism should include more than the human species

19:56 Did the pandemic divide or bind communities?

22:36 Machiavels and narcissists in power 

24:53 What psychologically healthy leadership looks like

28:35 Building institutions that encourage good leadership

30:52 Outro

What if the world was one country? A psychologist on why we need to think beyond borders. Steve Taylor for The Conversation, January 2021
How to stop psychopaths and narcissists from winning positions of power. Steve Taylor for The Conversation, April 2021

Earthrise: The 45th anniversary. Video by NASA.

Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages. John McWhorter for The Atlantic, October 2015

Economic collapse, political chaos, wildfires, protests, pandemic and then a devastating explosion. Lebanese journalist and expat Lynn Chouman talks about how she and her countrymen are dealing with it all, why resilience is a double-edged sword, and how one relates to a country that keeps pushing you away, yet calling you home. 

Movement is core to the human experience and to the emancipation of ambitious young people all over the world. Leaving home – really leaving – is the final step of one's education, says Felix Marquardt, author of The New Nomads. But globetrotters must leave another place – La La Land, the magical world where their privilege isolates them from the world as it really is for most of humanity. And just as important as the moment we leave, is the moment we come home. 

For the first episode of the new season, a wide-ranging conversation about belonging, climate, addiction, the lessons of indigenous cultures and why we've been thinking about nomadism all wrong, with author and recovering "global schmoozer" Felix Marquardt. 

00:15 Intro

02:07 Meet Felix Marquardt 

03:37 Who are the New Nomads?

06:12 The two most important moments in one's life

08:37 The limits of digital nomadism

12:22 We've been thinking about nomadism all wrong

16:39 What indigenous cultures can teach us 

18:41 (Ad) The genesis of Borderline 

20:57 A civilization of addicts

27:13 How we resist despair

30:27 Leaving La La Land

38:51 Outro

📚 The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place, by Felix Marquardt. Simon & Schuster UK. 2021. Buy it here. 

🐦 Follow @Feleaks on Twitter

Listen, read, support at borderlinepod.com. Chat with me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. 

Refugees are modern Scheherazades. They trade their story for another chance at life. The sultan is an indifferent asylum officer behind her desk, a well-meaning charity worker or a hostile native citizen. But so much truth goes untold. 

The exhausting expectations of gratitude, the long wait that douses your inner fire, the battle for dignity and the big impact of small acts… Iranian American novelist Dina Nayeri lifts the veil in The Ungrateful Refugee, her first memoir, weaving her personal story with reporting in Greek refugee camps. 

02:18 Why she made the move from fiction to nonfiction

05:07 How the refugee experience has changed from the 80s

07:30 A culture of disbelief in immigration offices

09:54 When refugees become storytellers to security guards

14:18 How culture changes storytelling

17:21 What you lose when you wait

21:51 How womanhood and refuge interplay

24:19 Why do we make a difference between political refugees and economic migrants?

26:46 Stop asking what refugees can do for us

28:45 Why dignity matters

31:21 What are we entitled to as human beings? Why aren't others?

33:16 Rawls' original position and American exceptionalism

36:54 The US president changed, not the system

38:53 What individuals can do to help

40:19 Gratitude is private

44:09 Political engagement is assimilation

46:17 Outro

📚 The Ungrateful Refugee, by Dina Nayeri. Canongate, 2020. Find it here.

👀 The ungrateful refugee: ‘We have no debt to repay.’ By Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. 2017.

📸 Anna Leader

To close out Borderline's first calendar year, which will I hope not soon be matched in hardship and heartbreak, I looked back through the first 17 episodes to pick out moments of hope for what lays ahead. Because if there's ever a moment for an absolutely not rational belief that things might be okay, it's surely the new year. 

A conversation with anthropologist and National Geographic explorer Wade Davis about the unraveling of America. The full-length and unedited interview from September 2020.

What does the mishandling of the covid-19 crisis reveal of the United States?

Canadian anthropologist, author, and National Geographic explorer Wade Davis wrote a blockbuster essay this summer, "The unraveling of America," and hit a raw nerve. 

He joins Borderline to discuss the grandeur and decadence of the United States, and what comes next if America is no longer a superpower.

Australians abroad are stranded: 23,000 have registered their desire to come home urgently, but they can't. Ostensibly to reduce the spread of covid-19 and the burden on the country's quarantine system, the federal government has instituted flight caps that reduce international arrivals to a trickle. Only 4,000 people may enter the country every week, less than two hours' worth of inbound international traffic in the "before world."  Getting one of those golden tickets is an expensive and harrowing lottery for Australians left abroad by circumstances beyond their control. 

Four stranded Australians speak about their fight to get home, the backlash from fellow Aussies and what it is doing to the fabric of the nation. 

Exchange students aren’t just the butt of jokes in American teen comedies. They’re young people going through one of the most transformative experiences life has to offer. Expanding it to more children – dare we say, to all children? – could change not just them, but the world.

Katherine Alexander-Dobrovolskaia was dropped in Iowa from the newly broken-up Soviet Union in 1993. Borderline host Isabelle Roughol landed in New Jersey two weeks before 9/11. They reminisce and reflect on the impact of those formative years and share guidance for young people leaving home now – or returning, changed. 

00:00 Intro

01:23 Pandemic and cancer

04:01 Vulnerability and what it means to be there for one another

07:13 From Moscow to Africa to Iowa

12:10 Being a young stranger in a foreign land

15:14 How technology ruined it

18:39 Dreaming of a borderless world 

22:37 Imagining an universal youth exchange

24:32 How to become a Borderline member

25:36 Learning empathy through lots of cringe

32:19 The returnee’s blues & fitting in nowhere and everywhere

38:33 Outro

💪 Help out: Kate’s daughter, Masha Shishkina, is raising funds to help rare cancer patients like herself fund their treatment. Donate here. 

📬 Read, listen, subscribe & support on Substack | 🍎 Listen on Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Listen on Spotify | 📺 Watch on YouTube | 🌍 borderlinepod.com

A podcast for those whose lives straddle borders, with host Isabelle Roughol. Coming soon on all your favorite podcasting apps. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/borderlinepod/message

How did a concept meant for counterterrorism become an immigration policy? Over the last decade, the UK set out to build a hostile environment that makes daily life a battle for many migrants and pushes even lawful ones into illegality.  Colin Yeo lifts the curtain on the British immigration system in his book "Welcome to Britain." He's my guest this week. We talked about the UK, and a bit about the US, but it's really about all of us and how we behave to one another, badly often, which is quite universal. 

Colin Yeo is an immigration lawyer in London and the founder of freemovement.org.uk. He just published “Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System.” --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/borderlinepod/message

It starts with unauthorised migrants and doesn't end there. Filmmaker Sonita Gale follows professionals, students and British citizens whose lives were upended by the UK's immigration system.

Sonita Gale is the director and executive producer of Hostile, a documentary film about the UK hostile environment, now in cinemas.
 
Show notes
[00:00:09] Intro
[00:03:54] "The home of my parents is the home of the migrant story."
[00:07:29] "A film about the migrant struggle"
[00:13:08] "Different experiences, all interlinked by the hostile environment"
[00:16:27] "People will start having more empathy, love and understanding"
[00:21:04] "Where have you been the last 20 years?"
[00:28:30] “I started to question whether that hostile environment is going to turn on me”
[00:32:10] Where to see the film
[00:33:21] Outro

🌍 www.hostiledocumentary.com
🐦 Follow @hostiledoc on Twitter
📷 Follow @hostiledoc on Instagram

A continued pandemic and fresh vaccines, a new US president with old problems, China triumphant and mistrusted, Brexit done at last, and global institutions on the fritz... Let's take a world tour of the geopolitics we can expect in 2021, with Eurasia Group founder and president Ian Bremmer. 

Selda Shamloo is taking the Home Office to court. Her mother, who’s Iranian, has been repeatedly denied a simple tourist visa to visit her. This is life on an ostracized passport.

For many of us, our passport is a symbol of our wanderlust, a badge of our freedom. It’s been gathering dust for the past year and we can’t wait to get it out. But if you’re Iranian or from any other country at the bottom of the passport power rankings, pandemic or not, it won’t get you anywhere. The Passport Index ranks Iran 193rd, ahead of just Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Only four countries let Iranians in without visas at the moment, and those who require them, often simply don’t grant them. For ordinary families caught in the politics, it can mean years of anguish and administrative complications simply to spend a few days together. Shirin Shamloo hasn’t been allowed to set foot in the UK, where her daughter is a citizen, since 2007. And she can’t see why. 

00:00 Intro

01:36 A Tehran childhood

05:22 Leaving Iran and becoming British

09:37 A father’s visit to London

13:09 How to become a Borderline member

14:10 The first visa rejection

18:45 Reapply at your own risk

21:06 Taking the Home Office to court

29:50 The emotional impact of family separation

34:13 "Going back to Iran would be a second immigration" 

36:26 "A lot more people can understand my story now."

👀 Read the full transcript at borderlinepod.com
🎧 Related episode: Colin Yeo on the UK’s hostile environment policy
🎶 Music by Ofshane 

Climate change and economic inequality are pushing people of the Global South to move north. Countries in the North are depopulating, losing their workforce and their tax base. It shouldn't be that hard to put two and two together and create migration policies that benefit all of humanity. So why won't we?

📚 "Move: The Forces Uprooting Us." Parag Khanna. 2021. Scribner. Buy it here.

Show notes
00:00 Intro
02:41 We are a migratory species
04:57 Domestic migrants are migrants too
07:55 Lockdown was actually a massive migration
09:35 Reverse migration is also migration
11:08 Britain's immigration policy has killed people
17:21 A tragic lack of imagination
19:22 Three doom scenarios, one hopeful scenario
22:35 Not moving is not really an option for billions
26:13 There will never be a global migration policy
28:59 Could allegiance to the city replace the nation state?
31:17 London vs. Britain
34:04 Doing away with the outdated passport
37:38 We'll do everything wrong before we do it right
41:31 Failed nativist policies

Universities have been battling it out to woo international students. Can they survive without them? Schools in the US and UK, but also now China, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea... have been racing to attract international students from Asia, Eastern Europe or Africa, and cash in on a $300 billion market. Then Covid-19 came on the scene. I discuss the new normal with Jamie Kanki, who spent years traveling the world recruiting students and now works for Grok and Concourse, two startups in digital student recruitment. "Universities are furiously looking at their financial model right now," she says. "The value of an experience and of a degree are really going to be put under a microscope over the next few years."

Sources:
 Universities set to turn away hundreds of thousands of students, by Robert Bolton, Australian Financial Review

Beyond $300 Billion: The Global Impact of International Students --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/borderlinepod/message

The Trump administration has reinstated the rule that forbids international students from staying in the US if they are taking online classes only. The rule had been relaxed in the spring because of the covid-19 pandemic. Now despite institutions such as Harvard planning to go entirely online in 2020-21, the US government is telling students they must be in the classroom or back in their country. I caught up again with Jamie Kanki to understand what that means for the more than 1 million international students in the US and their schools. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/borderlinepod/message

Will Buckingham gave me my new favourite word. He's a philosopher so it's only right the word should be Greek. Philoxenia is the word. Love of the foreign. It's that sense of curiosity, desire to connect and good will that make us seek out those we don't know and invite them to share our hearth. It's the cat that runs up to a house guest to smell his hand and rub against new legs. But we fear the stranger too as much as we wish for him. The cat hisses, scratches and hides under the sofa. You know that word – xenophobia. 

Will Buckingham explores what the stranger means to us and why philoxenia is worth cultivating. In this episode: 
🤝 home is a social network 
💪 stranger danger is male danger 
🏡  safety at home, danger abroad is a false story 
👀 how busy-buddy neighbours keep us safe 
👥 sorry introverts: you'll never be rid of strangers
Also backpacking in Pakistan, slow Ubers in Bangalore, Manggarai villages in Indonesia, a vicarage in Norfolk, a foggy morning in Prague, a Lithuanian philosopher called Emmanuel Levinas and paper-thin walls in Paris.

Show notes

[00:02:38] "You can think about home as a set of social network of belongings"
[00:08:48] "I'll never again be lost in a foreign city"
[00:11:49] "A split between the safety of the home and the risk of the outside"[
00:15:15] Philoxenia vs xenophobia
[00:18:31] "That notion of the inviolable home is quite culturally specific"
[00:22:25] "Somebody would end up putting me up"
[00:24:35] "There's always going to be somebody rocking up to break up your solitude"
[00:28:39] Become a Borderline member
[00:29:57] "Concentric circles of how we imagine belonging"
[00:31:41] "The stranger brings me more than I can contain"
[00:32:57] "An inconvenience worth having"
[00:34:57] "Fear in the face of strangers is not wholly unreasonable"
[00:39:50] Outro

📚 Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World, by Will Buckingham. Granta. 2021. Buy it here.
📬 Sign up for Will's monthly newsletter
🐦 Follow Will on Twitter @willbuckingham

The UK is reopening, but not transnational families. Visiting friends or relatives abroad is the second most frequent reason for foreign travel. It's about one in four trips out of the UK, twice the volume of business travel. Travel restrictions have reduced these trips to a trickle. For millions who love across borders, spending time together has been impossible for most of the past year. Even illegal.

Yet, media coverage of travel restrictions has had a near pathological focus on foreign holidays. This week, we hear the voices of those who wait, still, to reunite.

With Arietta Deick, Mary Wooldridge Eligu, Jane Copland and Marion Specker 🇬🇧 🇭🇷 🇨🇭 🇺🇸 🇺🇬 🇳🇿

#LoveIsNotTourism

Show notes

00:00 Intro
04:03 Arietta Deick
06:04 Marion Specker
07:08 Mary Wooldridge Eligu
15:22 Jane Copland
20:03 Outro

👀 International travel restrictions stop more than just holidays. My op-ed in The Independent.
🇳🇿 Our Side of the Clouds. Jane Copland for Entropy magazine, about the tensions between New Zealanders and their expats.

More than half of Covid-19 vaccines administered so far have been in high-income countries, which account for just 15% of the world population. Four out of five doses are purchased outside COVAX, the UN-backed procurement scheme that had attempted to set up fair and equal access for all countries. The most successful vaccination campaigns, in the US, UK and Israel, were unabashed us-first operations. Has vaccine nationalism definitely won? I caught up with Tania Cernuschi, team lead for global access in the World Health Organization’s vaccine department, to understand how things got so unequal and whether there’s hope to change that. 

Show notes

00:27 Intro
02:36 The state of the worldwide vaccination campaign 
05:57 Why can poorer countries not access the vaccine?
09:22 Should rich countries be vaccinating their young people right now?
16:04 Should vaccines be made a public good?
19:55 When will enough of the world have been vaccinated?
23:27 A note on the AstraZeneca vaccine
24:17 What we should learn for the next crisis
26:06 Outro

Sources & credits

Here’s just how unequal the global coronavirus vaccine rollout has been, The Washington Post (with helpful interactive data visualization)
India is a warning, The Atlantic (26 April 2021)
'Vaccine prince': the Indian billionaire set to make Covid jabs for the UK, The Guardian (27 March 2021)
Why the UK doesn’t need a coronavirus vaccine export ban, Politico (20 March 2021)
Joe Biden hints U.S. could share more unused AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines, The Globe and Mail (21 April 2021)
American export controls threaten to hinder global vaccine production, The Economist (22 April 2021)