"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 Colomb...
May 05, 2022•44 min•Season 4Ep. 53
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...
Apr 19, 2022•55 min•Season 4Ep. 52
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 experienc...
Mar 28, 2022•34 min•Season 4Ep. 51
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 [00:00:4...
Mar 01, 2022•29 min•Season 4Ep. 50
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:...
Feb 23, 2022•41 min•Season 4Ep. 49
Sure, burnout is not *just* about overwork. But it *is* about overwork.
Feb 16, 2022•9 min
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 b...
Jan 16, 2022•13 min
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 ...
Dec 23, 2021•53 min
A conversation with anthropologist and National Geographic explorer Wade Davis about the unraveling of America. The full-length and unedited interview from September 2020. ★ Support this podcast ★
Dec 14, 2021•53 min
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 activist...
Dec 08, 2021•45 min•Season 4Ep. 48
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] I...
Dec 01, 2021•44 min•Season 4Ep. 47
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 emotio...
Nov 24, 2021•38 min•Season 4Ep. 46
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 ...
Nov 11, 2021•45 min•Season 4Ep. 45
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 ...
Oct 28, 2021•59 min•Season 4Ep. 44
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 s...
Oct 21, 2021•43 min•Season 4Ep. 43
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 kno...
Oct 14, 2021•42 min•Season 4Ep. 42
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" 09:4...
Oct 07, 2021•40 min•Season 4Ep. 41
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 firs...
Sep 30, 2021•46 min•Season 4Ep. 40
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 tra...
Sep 23, 2021•37 min•Season 4Ep. 39
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 02:2...
Sep 16, 2021•40 min•Season 4Ep. 38
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 ...
Sep 09, 2021•41 min•Season 4Ep. 37
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 . ★ Support this podcast ★
Jul 09, 2021•46 min
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 st...
Jul 06, 2021•49 min•Season 3Ep. 36
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 ...
Jun 22, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 35
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...
Jun 08, 2021•42 min•Season 3Ep. 34
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...
May 25, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 33
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 sen...
May 18, 2021•35 min•Season 3Ep. 32
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 ex...
May 11, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 31
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 ...
May 04, 2021•37 min•Season 3Ep. 30
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 a...
Apr 26, 2021•28 min•Season 3Ep. 29
