"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 🇫🇷 Re…

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 sendi…

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] Intr…

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 discriminat…

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 …

Sure, burnout is not *just* about overwork. But it *is* about overwork.By One Lane Bridge (Isabelle Roughol)

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 t…

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 dis…

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 ★By One Lane Bridge (Isabelle Roughol)

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 S…

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 r…

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:…

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 K…

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…

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 sou…

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 h…

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 p…

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…

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 …

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 Uyghu…

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 w…

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 ★By One Lane Bridge (Isabelle Roughol)

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 t…

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 …

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 mon…

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 In…

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…

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…

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 …

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 U…

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 Ameri…

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 undocumen…

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…

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 y…

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 stori…

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 br…

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…

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. ★ Support this podca…

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 enc…

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. ★ Support this podcast ★…

"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 c…

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 prou…

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 ★ Support this podcast ★By One Lane Bridge (Isabelle Roughol)

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…

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 globa…

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…

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. ★ Support this podc…