Ideas - Democracies 'stay true to your values' tackling borders, says U.S. expert

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

A German, a Canadian, and an American meet to discuss national borders — crossing them, defending them, and reimagining what they could become before the century is out. Our three experts dig into what’s happening to the concept of borders, how they work, and how border policies have changed in the past 10 years.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. Good evening everyone. Bonsoir tout le monde. I'm afraid we're going to be a little bit delayed this evening, but it's good news. We actually have a bit of a line-up still around the block. So I ask you for your patience. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Eyand. I would now like to invite to the stage the president of McGill University, Deep Sainey, to say a few words.

Today we're in Montreal, at the Mount Royal Centre, to say a few words. Today we're in Montreal at the Mount Royal Centre to talk about borders, crossing them, defending them and reimagining what they could be. States have imposed rigid policies which have made migration a privilege for a cosmopolitan elite while limiting legal pathways for others. This event is part of an annual series called Conversations, hosted by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. With me on stage, three experts on how borders work and how border policies have changed in the past 10 years. They are Peter Altmeyer, Julian Castro, and Ayelet Shahar.

Thank you also to Nala Ayat, host of Ideas on CBC Radio 1, for agreeing to moderate the discussion today. I wish you all an excellent evening. Merci, bon soir, etus. Merci beaucoup. Good evening. Good evening. Can you hear me here? There we go. Good evening, everyone. Ayelet Shahar is a political scientist and law professor at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Her award-winning books on migration and citizenship include The Birthright Lottery from 2009 and The Shifting Border from 2020.

In 2019, Eilert received Germany's most prestigious research award, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. And in 2024, she won a career achievement award from the American Political Science Association. She was the youngest scholar ever to get that award, and the jury pointed out that her work influences quote every corner of our field. Please welcome Ayla Shahar. Peter Altmaier was elected to the German Bundestag for the first time in 1994 and was a member

for a total of 27 years. He's among the founding members of the Christian Democratic Union Party of Germany, the CDU. Among several government and party positions, he was federal minister for economic affairs and energy. And in 2013, Angela Merkel appointed him head of the federal chancellery and federal minister for special tasks, and that included coordination of the refugee crisis in 2015. Peter Altmaier studied law at Saarland University and completed postgraduate studies in European integration in 1986 with a certificate in European studies.

Please welcome Peter Altmaier. Last but not least Julian Castro is currently chief executive officer of the Latino Community Foundation, the US's largest in service of the Latino community. the U.S.'s largest in service of the Latino community. He served as mayor of his home city, San Antonio, and was the youngest mayor at the time of a top 50 American city. In 2014, he became the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama, and in 2020, Julian himself ran for the Democratic nomination for president.

Julian earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University In 2020, Julian himself ran for the Democratic nomination for president. Julian earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University and a law degree from Harvard Law School. His memoir, An Unlikely Journey, Waking Up from My American Dream, was published in 2018. Welcome, Julian. Thank you all for being here. Ayelet, I want to start with you. A simple and yet complicated question. What is a border?

What a simple question. Thank you. It's such a pleasure to see such a fantastic audience here. So borders have two core functions. One of them is actually very traditional. I would not have imagined that I would have to explain this in 2025, but it's very present and important to remind ourselves.

Borders have a protective function. They protect the territorial integrity of a given country. It's a very established principle of international law. No country can force another country to change its border, to erase its border, et cetera, et cetera. So that's just as a reminder given the current moment. For the purposes of our discussion about migration and borders, borders have a peculiar function that is they regulate mobility.

They regulate who may get in, in some countries, also who may exit or under what conditions. You either enter, remain, or leave the country and then reenter it again. If I asked people in this room and hopefully people who are listening to us at home to just think about the image that comes to mind when you think about a border, I think most of us, many of us, would imagine a line on the map or a very fortified manifestation of a border, something like the border wall, US-Mexico, the Great Wall of China,

Peter Altmaier sitting next to me, so the former Berlin Wall. So these are all the traditional static ways of thinking about the border. I think what's fascinating in the past few years, the recent developments that we have seen, is that countries are trying to regulate their border long before a potential migrant actually arrives to the border. So regulation occurs before a person reaches the border and often from far, far, far away,

almost half a country, half the world away, or even after a person crossed the border. If I can give two real quick examples. One example, anyone who has traveled internationally, say to Canada, knows that your documents are checked before you embark on a plane. So I know, Peter, you embark on a plane. So I know Peter you came from Frankfurt yesterday so probably an airline personnel checked your visa, your ETA, your electronic travel authority, etc. authorization. It may seem very simple if you have the authority to move, that is if you're permitted to move,

but if you're an asylum seeker, most likely that would be your border. Now, this matters a lot because the person who's actually regulating your mobility is not a government official. You can't seek asylum, although if you managed to get on that plane and land here in Montreal, you could have done that. So, that's one way of the border stretching out. Borders also stretch in, in the way that... I'll just tell you an example from my own experience. I was just travelling to NYU to give a talk two weeks ago, and I was supposed to cross

the border. That is, we all do... Canadians do pre-clearance when we go to the US, so you're actually regulated by customs and borders officials before you leave Canada. And our plane got delayed, and we had to switch to another plane, and we had to wait for an hour for an immigration official from the US to walk with us because technically we were physically in Canada but legally we were in the US.

So these are two legal fictions or examples of how the border shifts inside or outside the actual territorial border. Thank you for that. We'll obviously get very deep into the conversation of what the borders are like today but I do wanna ask you Peter if we could just take one step backwards

and talk about the time before borders are the way that we know them today. In fact, there was a time in history where borders didn't even exist. How would you characterize that time? Well, borders did always exist, I would say. It is a human characteristic to protect the borders, but I cannot see any borders around towns

in the Stone Age, in the Bronze Age. I cannot see any border without gates. Borders are protective, but borders have also an enabling role. And I was so touched when Mr. Bronfman in his introduction said, the friendly neighbor across the border seems to be no longer the friendly neighbor. And this reminded me, Mr. Bronfman, that many years ago in Germany after the war was in a very dangerous neighborhood to Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

Our freedom was protected by very brave people from Canada for decades. And there are lots of question marks today with regard to new developments, but there is a strong feeling amongst my German compatriots that we have to be in solidarity with our Canadian friends, whatever will bring the future. And the second thing, and the second thing with the border is, it is in our national interest to protect our sovereignty, but it's also, and it is in our national interest

to fight crime and terrorism. When I look around in the world, I cannot see any successful country with a brilliant culture and a decent standard of living without interaction with its neighbors, other countries, and other people in the world. And if ever a country would try to permanently close its borders and to allow no exchange with other nations, it would destroy its own future in a modern and globalized world.

That is my personal conviction, and therefore let's protect the borders, but let's also keep them open for ideas, for people, for goods, and for services. Thank you, Peter. Julian, in your lifetime, how has the idea of the border shifted? You know, I remember when I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and San Antonio is probably about two and a half hours from the Mexican border.

If you go down I-35 to Laredo. I grew up in a time where people would cross the border between the United States and Mexico much more frequently. To shop, for work, some people for school, Mexicans who would come to the United States. For school here, that does not exist any longer the way that it used to. Yes, some of it still happens but not in the volume that it used to. And so the idea of the border was much more free-flowing, much less of a militaristic, line in the sand kind of symbol of stay out when I was growing up. And it's become a bit more of an identity marker.

Yeah, I'd say so. Although, you know, as a Mexican-American, that's also always been layered because people have had family history across that border and still do. And culturally, Spanish is spoken in South Texas frequently, right? Of course, Spanish is spoken on the other side of the border in Mexico, but many of the customs, the music, the traditions are very similar. And so I see culturally the borders in some ways more like a color spectrum that's, you know, changing colors but not right away, not with a bright line.

As has already been mentioned, Ayelet, here in Canada, of course, the border has been a very hot topic. And after complaints from the Trump administration, both about the movement of asylum seekers and about concerns about the movement of fentanyl, Canada has tightened what is called the world's largest undefended border. There was an article recently in the New York Times that talked about the fact that there is, because of the attempts at mass deportations in the US, that there have been some undocumented movement from south to north into Canada. And so I wondered what tensions you see this creating for Canada,

especially as it's having to fend off talk of, quote, being a 51st state. Well, we'll have to see what the numbers are. We don't yet know. There was a fear actually prior to the current situation, if I can take us back even just a couple of months back, if you recall immigration was actually very high on the agenda in Canada and changing the kind of consensus that we have had in this country. So Canada for the last few years has been a real outlier in the sense of still being pro-migration, whereas we know many, many other countries in the world

have actually restricted mobility, have closed the border. Canada actually upped the numbers of people that we admit either permanently or temporarily. But in the last couple of months and even few years, that conversation has shifted. And you can see it in public polls that's sort of checking the temperature.

What's your view on migration? We have seen a shift and the public opinion really soured. The sense was that too many people were getting in and one of the most crucial aspects of immigration and it's not sufficiently well discussed is the fact that oftentimes so much of it is about trust. Do individuals have trust in the government being able to control who gets in, being able to know where people are? Is there a loss of control? And I think the sense in Canada was that the government doesn't have the kind of control that it had before and that, as I said, really changed the conversation. So

this was before the new Trump administration, before we had this current discussion about the border and its closure. But people moving from the south to the north was actually a concern, just given that we have seen this before. We know everyone in Quebec would know what's rocks on her road, right? So we had this, the fear was that individuals, especially people on temporary protected status in the US, would actually move to Canada as a safe haven. To some extent, we haven't seen such high numbers but if this will occur we could see a very

quick shift in terms of public opinion and I would also assume that the government would take a very very strong position. Well on that just I want to follow up Mark Miller recently who was Canada's immigration minister said that whatever fallout there is from the latest US crackdown on migration that, quote, Canada will be firm and fair. We will absolutely not be cruel. I'm wondering how difficult you think it would be for Canada not to be cruel. You know, borders are in some way, as I said, for people who have no permission to cross a border, to some extent borders can feel very cruel and very, it's one of the most expressive ways of a state to exercise its power over the individual. We usually think of such

power say in a criminal context but then you have so many procedural protections with an immigrant who's coming in especially if they're unauthorized there are very very, very, very few protections. So this would require a lot of thinking how to do this in a humane, in a fair, compassionate way, while also upholding the legal requirements. So this is, it's a very, very complicated balancing act. I hope that Canada actually does stand to its promise, which traditionally has been a more humane policy, but it will, it will be very, very difficult. I don't think we have any easy answers, and this is why our topic is so pressing today,

and most likely in the next few months and years. Pullian, it's no secret, of course, how the US administration feels about borders, both North and South. I wonder if you are able to take us to the moment. When was the moment that you think that the Southern border became the political lightning rod that it is today? Probably when Trump announced in the summer of 2015 when he came down the gold escalator and he said that the Mexicans are coming, they're rapists and murderers.

I forget the exact language, but basically, you know, characterized the people who were coming from the southern border as criminals. And then in 2016, used that as his signature issue to demagogue on the issue of immigration and continued to do that throughout his first term, continued in the years that Joe Biden was president, really weaponized it in the years that Joe Biden was president, really weaponized it in the 2024 election and because we saw very heavy numbers of people coming from

the southern border during the 21, 22, 23 years, it was an even riper time in 2024 for him to demagogue with it. So I would say we're going on 10 years now. Now it's gone through waves. I mean, we've seen times like this in the United States before. What's new, I think, is the animus toward Canada. And at least new in the modern era. This is a signature Trump lunatic articulation,

just for him to aim his fire at Canada. I mean you haven't seen that when we had presidents before that were anti-immigrant. This seems to be just a particular fascination with Trump. We will come back to that again also in a moment but Peter I want to talk about Germany which has just gone through an election. It has a new government and it is leaning more to the right than what we're accustomed to in Germany, I would say that's an accurate statement. I'm curious where you see the control of movements across borders being among the list of priorities for the government, for the new government. Well it is a priority because we have seen over the last couple of years a number of regional conflicts and wars,

civil wars especially, authoritarian regimes attacking their own people, and this has increased the number of refugees. Not all of them are illegal, but some of them are illegal. And this is a big challenge for everybody. Germany was in a position in 2015 that one and a half million people from the failing state in Afghanistan

and the civil war in Iraq, and especially the terrifying regime of Mr. Assad in Syria, went to Europe. And then the question was what to do with these people? We have to control immigration, we have to protect us against criminal and terrorist activities, but we should not fight immigration

by giving up our own Western values that made us winning the Cold War. And these Western values based on humanity, on the respect for the dignity of the human being, these values are important and they are a fire of hope across the world. So Peter, I want to interject here and bring us to the year 2015 where you were at the center of the decision making or close to the center that allowed people to enter Germany in such large numbers back then.

What convinced you? What moment, what image, what thought convinced you at the time that you were making the right decision? Well, it was an enormous problem when we saw all these hundreds and thousands of people moving. And politicians should take decisions by rational arguments. But I admit that I was touched in two specific moments. One, when a family crossed the sea between Turkey and Greece, Syrian family, and they had four children,

and three of them thrown in the water. And the picture of that was in our newspapers. And it was so devastating. And the second was we had 10 million Syrian refugees, decent people in the majority. and they had no work permit in Turkey, four million were staying in Turkey, no work permit, no health protection, no schooling for the kids. And all these refugees working on the illegal labor market for lousy, bad salaries have

saved some money to give it to the teachers amongst the refugees to organize teaching for the young kids during their stay in Turkey. And it has touched me because then I have seen these very human beings like we, desperate people, they lost their home, they lost everything, their jobs, their families. Then I said, well, if we are as a rich country, as a country who has benefited so much from the solidarity of others, if we are unable to provide protection, then we have failed in history. But at the same time, Chancellor Merkel and myself, we were aware of the fact that this cannot go on forever.

We have to integrate the people who are allowed to stay. They have to learn German. They have to get a job. By the way, 86% of all refugees who arrive from Syria have now a job. They are employed people, and almost all of them are fluent in German and have learned our language. So coincidentally, actually, Ayelet was also in Germany at the time as the head of the Max Planck Institute.

I was there as a journalist as well, and we, of course, well remember the scenes of welcoming Germans, helping those people who were streaming into the borders. And I just... We also saw, of course course how quickly, fairly quickly that sentiment changed. And so Ayelet, I wanted to ask you, what is the main factor that determines when a population turns against migration? I think we know from some of the studies,

the concern at some point was indeed that more and more and more and more people will come in. And Germany has a universal right of asylum, so there was no legal stopping point. And I think that got people very anxious. And we have seen this repeatedly in other examples as well. That is when there's a very high flow in terms of numbers, when there's not a clear endpoint, then we tend to see this very strong and it could be a very sudden switch around. And as I said, part of it is perception. It's not that Germany, most likely a country, a strong country with more than 80 million people, with a government that was very

much vested in ensuring that the asylum seekers would at least have a hearing and could stay. Nevertheless, it's that sense of loss of control. And once you get that sense, you'll always have politicians who would take advantage of it. But I really do think that's that shifting moment. And once that happens, it's so hard to bring that genie back into the bottle, if at all possible. Yes, but if I may respond quickly. That was the sentiment, yes, but if you look at the facts, we were very active to change this flow of migrations and we concluded as a European Union, in agreement with Turkey,

all the refugees received a work permit, health protection and we have spent some money to build hospitals, housing, etc. And then the flow of migrants went down considerably. And then something happened that nobody expected to happen. It was the Russian aggression against Ukraine. And then many, many million of Ukrainian women and children arrived in the EU, in Poland, and most of them migrated to Germany. These people are very popular in the country, but the pressure on schooling, on housing

went higher and higher. And this has fueled support for right-wing and left-wing extremist parties, but the most important root cause for this development was the fact that the democratic parties of the center were not able to agree amongst them on effective measures to be taken. It became an issue of an election campaign and people expect us not to campaign, but to act and to solve the problems. And that was perhaps the point that was missed by the political parties

like my own party and SPD and FDP and Green Party and many others. On Ideas, you're listening to Reimagining Borders, recorded on stage at the Mount Royal Centre in Montreal. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris,

and you can stream us around the world at cbc.ca.ideas. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayaad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto,

we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Ten years after what's been called the European migrant crisis, when 1.3 million people came to Europe requesting asylum. Much has changed at the borders of European states. Germany has extended what were meant to be temporary border controls at land crossings.

The Swiss upper house of parliament passed a motion to tighten its own border controls. Several governments across Europe have done the same. And on this side of the Atlantic, the Trump administration has invoked an 18th century law – the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – to deport Venezuelan migrants. Some of these measures are said to be temporary. Ways to deal immediately with today's crises. Not a long-term change in how richer countries see their duty to people whose lives are under threat.

Julian Castro ran for the U.S. Democratic presidential nomination in 2019. He's now the head of the Latina Community Foundation in the U.S. I wanted to know if he thinks today's border crackdowns are in fact temporary or whether they've simply become the new normal. I hope not. I think that Trump is unique in American history and I don't think that anybody's going to be able to replicate what he's done electorally to put the coalition together that he's put together. There's nobody that's going to be able to do it as charismatically or as effectively when he's gone. And I believe that this he's not going to be on the ballot again, as much as he'd like a third term and so forth. Also, we do see it go in cycles. And even in the last election that I ran in in 2020, you know, we had Joe Biden that was talking about halting deportations. That was a reaction. The country was in a

different place because they were reacting to family separation, the images of children being taken from their parents, all of those stories, the overreach of the Trump administration. I actually think in the midterms of 26 and in the presidential election of 28 that you're going to see that pendulum swing. How far it swings, who knows. But I actually think it's going to swing in the other direction because of the cruelty and the overreach of Donald Trump. And then Republicans are going to have a time trying to replicate what he's been able to do.

Is that optimism, or are you actually seeing signs already of a change of opinion? Well, no, I think it's very early, right? But I don't see signs of it yet. I mean, we're like two months into the administration. So it's a little...but you do see already a sense of alarm and that it's woken people up, both, of course, in the Democratic base, but also in the middle.

And so it may be a slower thunder that builds up than it was in 2017. But I actually believe that it's possible that we're gonna see in 2026, basically what we saw in 2018, which was a wipeout of the Republicans in the midterm year. One quick thing that I wanted to say also about migration and how people feel,

it's a very, of course, emotional issue. And it plays, it's very easy to demagogue in politics. And we always note, of course, emotional issue. And it plays, it's very easy to demagogue in politics. We always note, of course, that the people coming in are usually different skin color, different culturally, and also, oftentimes, religiously. But a lot of it also, I think, is that people are poor. Where, even amongst ourselves and our nations, do people, just to put it bluntly,

approve of, of like being around poor people. Think about how many people show up at meetings on zoning cases or planning cases at city halls or town councils and want to keep people who are low income out of their neighborhood. They don't want a low income apartment building or something like that. And this was central to your bid to become the presidential nominee. You talked a lot about this. I wonder if you could talk about the notion of decriminalizing desperation, which you raised repeatedly in your bid to become... Yeah, I mean, I raised that issue because I felt that Trump had weaponized a law that had been in existence for decades, but never really been used

to basically criminalize parents who were bringing their children migrants, but really enforced it against parents and then separated those parents from their children. And I said, you know, that we had gone decades and decades without using it in that way to criminalize these migrants. And I thought that we could have a system that did not abuse that law. Still, there would be a penalty. So it's not that people would not end up getting into a system and their case being adjudicated and then, you know, the fact is that most people who seek entry end up going back to their home country or another country now with what the Trump administration is

doing. But there's another way to do it that is not cruel. Ayala, I just wanted to add something. Yeah, I just wanted to add the discussion about unauthorized migrants. People really had in mind people who were criminal, who were like, it wasn't your next door neighbor, which might happen to be a person who has no status. So I think there's tons of room there for building solidarity when people really realize what the implications might be. I want to address something you've all kind of referred to even in the introductory comments,

and that's the harm that can occur at these sort of hardened borders. In an article titled The Myth of the Hardened Border in the March 2025 edition of Foreign Affairs magazine, the writer said that, quote, border-first approaches may be increasingly popular and politically appealing But they are certain to fail and to hurt many innocent people in the process They go on to say that in 2023 alone more than 3,000 migrants died in the Mediterranean and more than 700 died along the US Mexican border Certain to fail. What do you think Peter Peter, certain to fail, hardened border? Well, it is a kind of a dilemma.

I was dealing already in 2008 as a state secretary with illegal immigration from Libya to Italy and Malta. Traffickers and human beings are organizing the boats, bringing the migrants to the coastal areas of Italy or Malta, and then they make the boats sink, and then the people are in danger of life. And then you have no choice other than let the people drone or rescue the people. Both is unpopular. And this was the reason why we have always said we have to complement our humanitarian aid and the acceptance and admittance of refugees by a policy that

will allow them to stay in dignity in the neighborhood of their countries where they have been forced to leave. This was the reason why we have tried to help stabilize entire regions in the neighborhood of Europe. I agree, by the way, that you have to respond very quickly when you have new developments. But unfortunately, politics can't be very quickly. When we tried to convince Turkey to give work permits to the refugees and health protection, then Turkey said, okay, yes, but we need 10 billion euro and you have to give it to us, unconditional, unconditional.

And then we said, no, we will not give it to you. We give it to the companies building the houses and building the schools and the hospitals. And this was, of course, half a year of negotiation and half a year where the issue was not resolved. Therefore, I believe we should not wait until the next humanitarian crisis arises, but we should act beforehand together

with countries in the regions concerned to provide help. And the second thing is, many of our countries, especially Germany, are in need of labor market migration for demographic reasons. And I believe this artificial division between humanitarian aid on the one hand for refugees and legal migration on the other side has as a consequence that we have the legal immigrants

we welcome, and we have the others who arrive and cannot be returned for one reason or the other. And therefore, I would suggest to make a conversation between the two. That means if somebody is really forced to leave his country and he's a refugee, then he should be integrated much more smoothly into the labor market after affecting to make sure that he's not a terrorist and

not an Islamist but we have to realize that the two are not completely separated otherwise we will have to pay a higher price and have less security for our citizens. Huling you've spoken publicly also about the economic benefits of exactly what Peter was just talking about, the movement of people who might be contributing to the labour market. Can you just outline the argument and why it's difficult to make that argument in the environment we live in now? I mean, I think in many ways because a lot of people don't want to face reality. In the United States, the reality is that several industries depend in large part

on immigrant labor, documented and undocumented, and would absolutely fall apart if a plan for mass deportation took place. I don't think that Trump is going to be able to fully carry out his vision. He doesn't have the resources right now, but let's see what Congress does. It may unfortunately give him a lot more resources to carry out his plan. But as I see it also, there's a compelling counter argument here, which is that those industries

need immigrant labor. The birthrate of the United States, like other Western nations, has been dropping precipitously. At the same time, we have a wave of baby boomers who are now fully accessing Social Security, our Social Security fund, and so you need a strong, vibrant labor force. All of that adds up to that if we're not careful and we make the border wall the symbol of our country instead of the Statue of Liberty you're going to be begging people in the years to come to come to the United States. And I have a twin brother who's in politics and every now and then he

comes up with a line that I wish I had come up with and Joaquin used to say that the scariest time for the United States will not be when everybody wants to to come it'll be when nobody wants to come and and with a with a Person like Trump at the helm. He's accelerating that day for the United States Let me stick with you for a minute Julian because I am curious about that because Amnesty International has said that the right to seek asylum in the United States is non-existent at the U.S.-Mexico border in violation of its obligations, both national and international obligations. And I'm wondering, maybe I'm asking kind of an obvious question here, but do those international obligations register at all with the current administration? I don't think so. I mean today we saw an example that the law of the United States itself and the ruling of a court is not

registering with with the administration when it comes to matters involving immigration and so we have a constitutional crisis that now is at the doorstep of the United States and We're gonna figure out in short order whether people who should step up to check Trump's power are going to do that, or they're going to continue to be cowardly because they're afraid of losing their political position. Ayelet, where does that leave the important international, I guess, legal framework governing the way asylum seekers are treated around the world? I mean, do they mean anything? I think they still do mean a lot,

but I want to just first respond to Julian and to Peter on the demographic point. I think states have been exceptionally sophisticated in their way of dealing with migration, and they might well decide that they prefer to go for temporary migrant workers rather than permanent migrant workers. So we will see a cycling. So I think the demographic argument is vital,

but I'm not a hundred percent sure that the response would actually be that countries would welcome migrants in. I also want to remind ourselves that when we speak about migrants, we're actually talking about very, very different categories of individuals who are entering. In Canada, typically, the bulk of permanent residents who enter the country are actually selected on the basis of their skill and economic ability. So Canada has for many, many years had the point system and various other mechanisms of ensuring that people who come in actually very swiftly can contribute to the economy. That's partly the reason why we had this consensus for so many years. People arrive on the basis of family reunification.

Again, that's another value which all our countries share, and that is a very significant route of admission. And then we have the humanitarian causes. Actually in Canada for years it's a small category. It's roughly 10% of the intake per year. Again, different countries have different regimes. Some people can get to the territory, as I mentioned, either the territorial waters or physically arrive to the territory. Then you can seek asylum. But the United States for many years used resettlement,

right? People were already determined to have been refugees through the United Nations, like a high commissioner, et cetera. And then they got their admission to the United States already with the status determined. So there are many many different ways. So I think international law is not out of the picture, but I do think our mechanisms are so antiquated because the current convention that we have is the 1951 Refugee Convention. It was designed for a particular era. This is post-World War II, post-Holocaust. It was actually specifically temporally limited for people up until 1951 and it was also regionally limited for Europe. It was1 and it was also regionally limited

for Europe. It was supposed to have expired. We then had the 1967 protocol which expanded the same convention globally. So our mechanism, so to speak, for asylum seeking is very, very antiquated. No one thought about climate refugees at the time. So we are really dealing, even the tools that we have are not the best tools. According to the UNHCR in June of 2024, 122.6 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced. No doubt that's an understatement. Plus the millions who are seeking a better life.

And so, Julian and then Ayelet, I mean, what is a government to do in the face of an endless stream of asylum seekers arriving at the border? What is the top piece of advice that you would provide, Julian? Number one, to stay true to your values. So whether there are a few people trying to come or a lot of people trying to come, you have to treat people humanely and compassionately and reasonably, consistently. Secondly, I think it's an argument for working for the United States understanding that we're part of a neighborhood and that there are pressures of lack of economic

opportunity, of safety, you know, climate of other things that drive people to seek asylum, seek a new life in the United States. And so it's an argument for being proactive to work with our neighbors to try and ensure that people can find safety and opportunity and a good quality of life where they live. Because I really believe people don't just pick up and go somewhere else and uproot their entire family and leave them and bring their kids but leave their extended family for no reason. I mean they're compelled to do that and we I think we have a greater role to play not in paternalistic or condescendingly working with these countries but in earnest working with them to create a

better life for people. I think the point that Julian made about our need to... The way I would put it is the problem is too large for any country to address it single-handedly, even the strongest country in the world, right? Even let's assume the US, which actually still has the highest number of migrants in the world, right? In terms of numbers of migrants who are in one country, the United States is still leading. Any future-oriented policy, I think, would require us to think about greater cooperation across nations. It might be regional, it might be global, the only way we can really find a humane solution, a

productive solution, one that migrants would have their voices as well as citizens in the recipient countries, would require us to be much more collaborative. And the concern that that's the third point that currently migration is so closely linked in our thinking to sovereignty that it becomes something that each nation upholds dearly. And we actually know that historically that's a very, very recent moment. It's really roughly in late 19th century when we're seeing this association of control over the border in the sense of regulation

of who gets in with questions of sovereignty. Historically borders were actually mostly designed to ensure people don't leave rather than not enter. So this is actually, it's not, it's just that we take it for granted today. It has shifted in the past. I don't see any good reason why it wouldn't shift, and I think that's our only hope for a sustainable future is actually to have that.

We will now move to climate change, Ayelet, because as you say, it is a game-changing development in the field of human movement. There have been reports that the Canadian government, for example, has studied the possibility of applying the principle of not returning people to a place where they may be harmed by climate events. I'm wondering how monumental a change to refugee policy you think that would be? It would be monumental, no doubt. The lowest predictions are saying that we would have by 2050, so not too far, right? Something that we can see over the horizon 25 years.

The lowest estimates are that there would be 25 million people displaced by climate-induced reasons. The highest projections are 1.2 billion. I think the IOM, which is the International Organization of Migration, estimates moderately between 200 and 300 million people will be displaced. Now usually the story is that people usually first move internally within a country. If they can't find either safe land or some kind of a sustainable future, they would cross an international border. Let's assume we're looking at that moderate estimate

of 200 to 300 million migrants. I didn't do this, I usually do this with every room, but if I had asked you what's the number of migrants in the world, I'm betting based on my past experience that people would say something like 1 billion or 2 billion. The current number is actually between 200 and 300 million migrants internationally. That means we would have

under the more moderate estimation a double of that number. Now we spoke about 2015, 1.2, 1.5 million entered a country of 80 million. We're still feeling the ramifications 10 years later, more restrictive. What are we going to do? And I think there are two scenarios. One to me is the frightening one, the dystopian one. We will see just the story of restriction in such a way that countries would just really wall themselves off, maybe use live ammunition to shoot people, right? That would be sort of the worst case scenario. I think a more optimistic scenario would be that at some point we would catch ourselves, realize that this is happening. These are

Earth systems, it's no longer in our hands. We would have to collaborate and if we can find a peaceful way to actually respect humanity, respect the basic dignity of the individuals who need to move, and I agree with Julian, people don't want to move. Actually people are now fighting in some of the Pacific Islands that are drowning. People are claiming don't want to move. Actually, people are now fighting in some of the Pacific Islands that are drowning. People are claiming a right not to leave. It's the reverse, they're not asking to go, they don't want to move.

They're actually seeking still mitigation so they could stay in their home countries. So that's the future, and it's a very different future from the current reality. Julian, could you address just how you see the question of responsibility changes when we talk about climate change, especially given what we all know, which is it is, you know, Western countries that lead, so to speak, in the greenhouse gas emissions and leading

to the climate change crisis that we're in. The United States, of course, right, accounts for a disproportionate amount of the world's emissions and has compared to other countries exacerbated climate change and I believe in part because of that that the US has a particular responsibility to help address it even as it includes climate refugees and so I think setting aside a category of the ability to take people in who are experiencing essentially an uprooting of their quality of life and their ability to exist where they're at because of climate change makes sense in the future. And we know that militaries around the world have studied this, that the United States

military and governments have studied. It is a reality. I wish that right now I could say that we're going in the right direction like with everything else just about in the country we're going in the opposite direction including scaling back from our commitments that were part of the Paris climate accords and so forth and so we're gonna have a lot of catching up to do in the years ahead. Peter does climate change or the responsibility related to climate change, could that

change the conversation in Germany about migration? I don't think so, because I'm deeply convinced that we will never ever be in a position to accommodate all the people suffering from climate change. The only chance we have is to slow down climate change and to prevent climate change in the future. The second thing that is perhaps underestimated but directly linked to climate change

is demographic growth of population. A country like Niger, not Nigeria, Niger. It's a very poor country, a small country. They have 19 million people, average age is 14, and the population will grow within the next couple of decades to 100 million people. And the question is, in what way or the other, can we enable these people to deal with climate change in their country and how can we give them access to education in their country via the internet and modern tools. Otherwise many of them will become for desperation illegal

migrants desperately trying to find a safe haven elsewhere in the world. And therefore, we have a responsibility to have a dialogue with these countries. Europe perhaps has a higher responsibility because we are closer neighbors. You have a closer neighborhood with South American countries. But it is not something that can be left to the local politicians and these countries alone. Otherwise, it would have devastating consequences for all other countries in the world as well. So the stakes, as you've all outlined, couldn't be higher right now, and they are quite literally a matter of life and death.

Who gets to come in, who gets to stay, and who doesn't, and who gets to decide. So the title of our discussion that we've been having is Reimagining Borders. So to end off, I wanna ask each of you, the image that comes to mind when I ask you to reimagine borders in the 21st century. Peter, and then Ayelet and Huyen. Peter.

Borders will ever exist, but she must be scary for people in need, and she must be protective for the local population in the country concerned. This can be achieved only together. If I see how dense the tensions are between the US and Canada now, what is a pity because we are the western countries

and western values, but let's pull together our ideas and our thoughts to shape something that maintains border but allows humanity as well where it is justified. And I think this would be a signal not only to the outside world but also to our friends in the United States. In the United States people are deeply divided and many are asking questions and get no answers. And therefore, we owe so much also to you in the U.S. and we should make sure that the Western values that are made are strong will survive in the modern world in the future.

That's beautiful. I think we usually think about borders as walls. I want to give you other images. There's the International Peace Park, right, which is North Dakota and Manitoba. It's actually, you can enter from both sides of the border and it's a peaceful place. People congregate for music to interact, to think together. So that's a very different image. It's full of flowers. It's a totally different atmosphere of how the two countries interact. I want to remind people in the audience, Gander, do you remember post 9-11 when the US airspace was closed? A tiny, tiny town of less than 10,000 people had almost 40 flights

diverted there and people opened their heart. They gave everything to the people who came in, which was of course an extreme moment. I don't think people thought for a minute that to me is a different image of a border. And the last thing I would say is just a quote from one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost, which is to say, good fences make good borders. And that might be our thought for today, that maybe that's the way to actually maintain the integrity of both sides, but also to make sure that we can communicate and interact across these borders and be there if there's a time of need. I think of borders as less of a militaristic kind of dividing line and more as like the

relationship between neighbors that are friendly and the gate that exists but where neighbors can visit each other and do and share a relationship and often share, you know, a history and a culture and a way of being with each other that adds to both of their lives at a societal level, at a national level. That's how I think of what our border should be. There's an order to it and there is a marker and a way to control it, but it's based more in friendship and an aspiration and a community than it is in a division. Beautiful image. Julian, Ayelet and Peter, thank you so much for your insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you. You were listening to my conversation with Julian Castro, Peter Altmeier and Ayelet Shahar. We were on stage at the Mount Royal Centre in Montreal.

Thanks to Deep Saini, Jennifer Elrick and everyone at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Special thanks to Nicolas Bernard, Axel Kluender, Donna Williams, Petra Saroudis, Natalie Walter, Lorraine Rojas Jardin, and Jill Thomas-Mirrick. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly and Tom Howell. You can go to our website, cbc.ca.ideas, for more information on the panelists. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you like the episode you just heard,

check out our vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nicola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. [♪ Music playing. Vibrant music playing. Fades out.]

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.