Borderline

"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. 

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

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

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.

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

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.

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. 

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

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