CFR Fellows' Book Launch Series: When the World Closed Its Doors

In When the World Closed Its Doors:The Covid-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders, Edward Alden and Laurie Trautman tell the story of how nearly every country in the world shut its borders to respond to the pandemic threat. The book details the enormous human costs of the travel restrictions and argues that governments are becoming overly reliant on borders to address external threats from terrorism to drugs to migration. This wide-angle view of a singular shock to the international systems of travel and migration highlights why those living across borders need better protections and governments more robust guardrails.

The CFR Fellows’ Book Launch series highlights new books by CFR fellows.

O’NEIL: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. I am Shannon O’Neil. I’m a senior vice president and the director of studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations.

And I am joined today—very happy to be joined today by Ted Alden, who is a longtime senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations, and his co-author Laurie Trautman, who is a director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University. And we are here to talk about their newly released book. It is, When the World Closed its Doors: The COVID-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders. So a small subject that really has no relevance to us today. (Laughter.) But you know what? We’re going to find it.

So I want to start out—I had the pleasure of reading this book in manuscript form, and then rereading it this last weekend, and going through the various stories and arguments. But I want to start actually with a story. And I want to start with the one where you start your book, because it’s an incredibly powerful vision. And this is a story of the Peace Arch Park, which is between the United States and Canada, sort of, you know, if I get my geography—you’re the ones living out there. But I’m going to make it up here on the East Coast. You know, not too far from Vancouver, British Columbia. Not too far from Bellingham, Washington. Along the border. And tell a bit about what happens in this park during COVID, during the depths of COVID, and sort of what it says about the way the United States and Canada addressed COVID.

ALDEN: Do you want to start us off? Go ahead, Laurie, yeah.

TRAUTMAN: So the Peace Arch Park is a very unique place. It’s the only place along the Canada-U.S. border where people can come together from both sides of the border and be in the same space. You may have seen this Marble Arch, which was a symbol of friendship and unity between Canada and the United States. And in March 2020, almost five years ago, when Canada and the United States agreed to close their shared border to essential travel as part of, of course, a global effort of many countries doing this, this park was actually the only place in North America where people could be together from both sides without actually crossing the border. Which meant that all of those millions of people who didn’t have essential reasons to cross the border and see loved ones or see family members could come to that park and be in the same space.

And the result was the park actually became completely overrun with people. Ted and I joke in the book that there was tents set up in multiple areas of the park. Some of them were kind of an adults only section where people—(laughter)—could be together during the day, but lots of friends and families and kids really taking advantage of this space as sort of the only breach along the northern border during the COVID restrictions.

ALDEN: If I could add, this was very personal for me. So some of you know, I moved back to the West Coast about five years ago. The big reason was my family, my wife’s family, were on the Canadian side of the border. My dad’s in Bellingham, but the rest of the family—including our kids, at the time, who were up there in university—was in Canada. And this was the only place where it was possible to see my family. And, you know, we were aware that lots of other people in the world didn’t have that extraordinary privilege. Peace Arch really was a unique place across the world. And we checked out some other places with some similarities.

So I saw my mother there basically every month, even in the cold months. And in that summer of 2020, as Laurie said, there were, you know, a thousand people in the park, tents everywhere. Our opening chapter is called “The Summer of Love.” (Laughter.) So that’s where it begins. And the book is, you know, for me, very personal. I hadn’t really intended to write another book. But as this played out, and Laurie and I were talking, there was, like, this is—this is a story, right? This is something we need to talk about.

O’NEIL: Maybe you could remind us—and especially for people who didn’t have connections to Canada—remind us a little bit about what the United States and what Canada did. Sort of how their policies differed in terms of addressing COVID at this time.

TRAUTMAN: So we had our agreement on limiting nonessential travel, which in theory was the same with the United States and Mexico. And we—but we did things very differently. We sort of agreed to let cargo continue to move. We agreed to let what we defined as essential to move back and forth across the border. But that was sort of where our coordination largely ended, I would argue, because from there we sort of had drastic different approaches to managing COVID, both domestically and actually as they applied to the border. So Canada had a very, very stringent quarantine program where if you were returning to Canada or traveling to Canada for nonessential purpose you had to quarantine for two full weeks. And you would get phone calls from their health service, a lot of contact tracing, pretty stringent requirements. And also domestic restrictions on movement at some point in time as well.

We’ve all lived through probably what happened in the United States. Those restrictions were much different. And we applied those differently, again, to the border. So the United States actually never limited air travel from Canada. We said, you can travel by air from Canada for any reason whatsoever, but you can’t get in your car and drive across the border and see your grandmother. We also defined “essential” different, and we had different testing regimes, and even different definitions of how we would accept vaccinations. So we had very different approaches, both domestically and even to what was supposed to really be a shared border policy.

ALDEN: And just kind of two things to add on that. The first book I wrote after I joined CFR in 2007 was about the border and immigration measures after 9/11. And the level of U.S.-Canada cooperation at that time was extraordinary. It really created a lot of the models that became used for border management across the world. So the sort of default assumption was, in a crisis, these two governments were going to work really closely together. And they didn’t work closely together at all in the COVID crisis.

And the other issue which Laurie raised, which we talked about in the book, is this definition of “essential.” There was a decision made that certain people would be permitted to cross the border. And, you know, some of it makes a lot of sense, health care workers. All trade was declared essential, which, again, is sort of an interesting decision when you think about it. You go back to wartime. We would ration things because we wanted to save resources for other things. But all trade, you know, whatever needed to cross borders to fill up the grocery store shelves, that was all essential.

But when individuals tried to cross, you had these individual border guard decisions on what was essential and what wasn’t. We tell a story about a couple, you know, Canadian girlfriend, Washington state boyfriend. She discovers she’s pregnant after the border closure, has a miscarriage. He wants to come join her. They’ve got a letter from the doctor. This is urgent. The boyfriend needs to be with her. And the guard says, no. That’s not an essential reason for crossing. So we do a lot of writing in the book about this concept of “essential,” and what that meant in the context of border closures—who was essential and who was not. And then, of course, domestically there were a lot of essential workers who had to go and show up at work, whether they wanted to or not. So we do a lot of thinking about that in the book.

O’NEIL: Well, in the book you look very closely at the United States and Canada, but you really look at policies all over the world and what people did in borders all over the world. So could you put—you know, we experienced what happened the United States, many of us, others—you know, Canada. You experienced that. Where did this fall on the spectrum of sort of heavy hand or lighter hand? So perhaps you could give us a, you know, example of sort of the most extreme, sort of the harshest measures, and what the thinking was there, and what they did. And then maybe we could talk about, you know, a country that perhaps had a different approach to this and didn’t close their borders so tightly.

ALDEN: Yeah. I mean, maybe I’ll start with the harsh example and, maybe, Laurie, you can talk a little bit about Europe, which tried to find what we saw as a little more sensible middle ground. The strictest measures were taken by Pacific Rim islands, particularly Australia, New Zealand, Japan. And there’s some logic to that, right? You know, we have a big, wide shared—long, shared land borders in the United States. Closing those borders is very challenging. If you’re an island, it’s a little easier to shut off. And so those countries relied heavily on border restrictions.

But they did so in a way that, you know, the more that we began to delve into this the more kind of shocking it was. I mean, New Zealand was seen as an outstanding performer during COVID because it kept its case numbers quite low. I mean, New Zealand was a great place to be during COVID. They suppressed the virus for long periods of time. But they did it through this very rigid border and hotel quarantine system. So the only people who could come back to New Zealand were New Zealand citizens. And when they came back, they had to stay in a limited number of hotel quarantine facilities for two weeks. And there were never enough of those facilities to meet the demand for people to return, so it became a lottery system. You know, one of the New Zealand members of parliament called it a sort of Hunger Games, where you found out whether you could—you could come back or not.

The prime minister in New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, used to talk about our team of five million in New Zealand. Well, there are six million New Zealanders in the world, and a million of those were outside of New Zealand when the—when the pandemic hit. And we tell one particularly wrenching story that that got some attention at the time but was sort of forgotten since. This woman, an Al Jazeera reporter, New Zealand citizen, working out of Afghanistan, goes back to Qatar, to Doha, to the headquarters of Al Jazeera. Discovers there she’s pregnant. Goes to the doctor. Doctor says, you got to get out of here, right? This is a fundamentalist Muslim country. You are an unmarried, pregnant woman. She tries to apply to the lottery for hotel quarantine. Her number keeps not coming up. She petitions the New Zealand government. They say, no, you just got to keep applying.

Finally, desperate, her boyfriend’s back in Afghanistan. He’s a New York Times photographer. She petitions the Taliban government. And the Taliban says, yeah, OK. You can come back and have your baby in Kabul. And she gets back to Kabul. We have this amazing picture that she shared with us in the book of her standing on the porch, and the rubble of Kabul in the background, and her just showing a little bit at that point. And once she gets to New Zealand, applies—and gets a lawyer in New Zealand, applies for emergency override. Says, you know, I need to come back, right? This an urgent health situation. Government says, no. And finally, she goes public with, writes a piece in the New Zealand Herald, and the government’s embarrassed enough that it relents.

But she was not alone. Their lawyer—her lawyer that I talked with, he represented about thirty women who were in similar situations. So I—in our book, I think, more by this sort of order than anything else, we declare New Zealand the harshest extreme. (Laughter.)

TRAUTMAN: Yeah. Maybe another example of an area that reacted in a similar way at the beginning of the outbreak, but then sort of moved beyond it, would be Europe. So most countries in Europe took very similar approaches, very, you know, nation-state based, restricting movement across their borders. But there was such an outcry in Europe because there is a codified freedom of movement. And what does, you know, the Schengen European project mean if you don’t have mobility? And so many people living their lives across borders, so many people working across borders. And so I’d say fairly quickly, really by the fall of 2020, there were some systems in place, and there was some movement beginning.

And Europe actually is also one of the few areas we’ve looked at that has actually tried to sort of overcome this reaction with policies that are supposed to put in place better protections to prevent this sort of reaction from happening again. So one of the things in the book that we talk about a lot is how many governments resorted to these tools, and how they were actually quite publicly popular. And the European situation was different, because there was a lot of pushback holding the government a little bit more accountable to that commitment to the freedom of movement.

O’NEIL: Mmm hmm. Well, you know, you note in the book that this isn’t the beginning of border controls. And in fact, the whole twenty-first century has been a story of increasing sophistication of border controls. Partly 9/11, partly, you know, other things happening. So, you know, more intelligence sharing on flights, more, you know, bio-screening, and the like. But talk a little bit about how, you know, what had been evolving over twenty-plus years, sort of how governments used that in the moment. And, you know, maybe what—you know, what they expanded or what they innovated with during COVID. How do you see that in different places? Sort of the use of the tools that had been there, and then what did they—what did they do with them?

ALDEN: Yeah. I mean, we argue in the book that COVID, in a way, became a kind of proof of concept for border control tools that had been in development for a quarter century at least, longer in some ways but particularly since the mid-1990s, and then really after 2001. So border control has become much more sophisticated, you know, with identity documents and screening tools and advanced information. We know a lot more about who is crossing borders than ever before. And all of these tools were deployed during COVID, particularly as part of a selection effort, right? Figuring out who would be allowed in and declared essential and who would be kept out.

And, you know, we hear a lot in the debate—we hear it today, and we heard it in the 2024 election—about borders being out of control. Well, COVID shows that actually, if they’re determined enough, if they’re willing to declare an emergency, if they’re willing to use all the tools at their disposal, governments today, in fact, can exercise a great deal of control over borders. I mean, the scale of the borders during—border closures during COVID has no historical precedent. I mean, even in wartime there was never anything as dramatic and comprehensive as what we did during COVID.

So I think it showed both the capacity of the tools that have been developed to exert greater control over borders, but also the potential for misuse. The massive executive, in many cases, overreach that we saw, and the lack of either legal or public constraints. Laurie can talk a little bit about how popular a lot of these measures were. And so there really weren’t countervailing forces telling the governments, you know, maybe in some ways—we get that you’re worried about COVID, we get that it’s serious—but this is overreach. And there really was no mechanism for pushing back on what the governments were doing at the borders.

TRAUTMAN: Yeah, and then the key difference maybe too that we talk about in the book is that we kept cargo moving. We kept goods moving. And after 9/11, that didn’t happen immediately. We had trucks lined up waiting at the border. Businesses were really angry. Supply chains were falling apart. That didn’t happen this time, because of sort of this new experiment with how to manipulate what we thought should continue to move, and then what we thought shouldn’t continue to move. And one of the points that we raise in the book is that this is sort of a little bit of a theater, right? The border can be kind of a place for political theater to take place to show publics that you’re protecting them, even though the border really isn’t necessarily the place to be exerting that sort of control, at least for infectious disease.

ALDEN: I mean, we argue that COVID made border closures much more usable than they had ever been before. They legitimized border measures to a far greater degree than we had seen before.

O’NEIL: Mmm hmm. Well, given that, let me ask you, sort of as you look forward—taking what you learned with COVID and looking forward to where we might be headed. And, you know, we were talking earlier, I noted there’s a hearing in the Senate on Thursday that is about putting back in place the remain in Mexico policy, and also potentially Title 42. So bringing back health care—or, health emergency as the way to close the U.S. border, particularly to migrants that are coming over. So that will be a discussion happening Thursday morning in the Senate.

So talk a bit about, if you would, well, what are your thoughts on that, bringing back Title 42? But what this means, as you look into a new government coming in, a new set of policies. How do you—how do you see the Trump administration using some of these things?

ALDEN: So the last—the final chapter of our book is based on a series of interviews we did with Dr. Martin Cetron. And Marty Cetron was the director of global migration and quarantine for the Centers for Disease Control. Had been for several decades when COVID hit. He was the one who organized the Ebola response in 2015, when there was an Ebola outbreak in Africa and there was efforts to institute screening at U.S. airports to try to prevent Ebola from coming to the United States. He was the doctor, the scientist with the most history and knowledge about this.

And then February and March of 2020, Stephen Miller and others in the White House—and Stephen Miller, you know, will play a big role in the new administration, began to put pressure on the CDC to use this tool. It had never been used before. It exists in U.S. statutes. Allows the United States to close its borders in the event of communicable diseases of various sorts crossing the borders. And Dr. Cetron said, no. He said, my scientific judgment, the judgment of my team, is that COVID is already widespread here in the United States. That the likelihood of significant introduction of additional cases from Mexico is very low. This is a misuse of Title 42. I won’t sign off on it. It got kicked up to his boss, Dr. Robert Redfield, who signed the order.

The incoming Trump team is talking about bringing back Title 42 on day one, and finding some other rationale. I mean, I don’t think it’ll be COVID. Maybe it’ll be tuberculosis. Maybe it’ll be RSV. That is—and to those of us who care about policymaking integrity, that’s an even more egregious misuse of the statute than we saw during COVID. And I think it highlights the danger that we’re talking about of executive overreach, that the president yells fire, declares an emergency, and can do things that really are inappropriate. It’ll be interesting to see how the courts react.

The Supreme Court upheld the maintenance of Title 42. The court history is slightly complicated. But some were quite critical. Justice Gorsuch, for instance, said this is appropriate—is inappropriate. We’re using a health statute for another purpose, which is immigration and border control. So I think it’s a very bad idea. They will clearly do it anyway. (Laughs.)

TRAUTMAN: And even in Europe, where there is this effort to have more policy directed at protecting this reactionary use of borders, I mean, we’re still seeing border controls go up and be targeted for different reasons, largely reactions to terrorism. But it’s sort of this tool and this mechanism that we argue was almost popularized during the pandemic. And I think we’re going to see more and more.

ALDEN: You know, the one other thing that maybe we can touch on—I’ll just mention briefly, and maybe people want to ask questions about it. But one of the things we came away with very strongly, it’s not that that, you know, border controls weren’t necessary during COVID. I mean, a lot of ways they were, of course. I mean, restriction of movement was one of the ways you prevented the pandemic from spreading. But they only worked well in conjunction with a lot of other measures. And I would argue very much the same thing about, you know, dealing with unauthorized migration, or terrorism, or drugs.

The notion that you can set up this wall, as it were, and keep out all these bad things is fantasy. You have to work with your neighbors. It has to involve other domestic tools. Border controls have to be part of a more sophisticated suite of responses. But we seem to be going in the other way. Laurie talked about the political theater. Border controls are popular. And so governments say, yeah, we’ll put the wall in place, as it were, and keep bad things out. And that just hasn’t worked and isn’t going to work in the future.

O’NEIL: Well, how do you elaborate? Because you have the case of South Korea, that had a little—had a much more coherent and cohesive policy. And that one seemed to work a bit better. So explain what they did, perhaps, in this case.

ALDEN: South Korea is a really interesting case. South Korea, I would argue, was the one significant advanced economy that actually followed what it agreed to do under the WHO rules. The International Health Regulations were quite clear that in pandemics countries should use border controls very sparingly, temporarily if they needed to. There was worries that if borders were going to close countries wouldn’t report outbreaks early, and you couldn’t get scientists in there. That it was a—you know, there was a disincentive to report if countries thought that they would be cut off from the rest of the world.

South Korea never closed its borders. You could go to South Korea throughout the pandemic. You had to quarantine. And that dissuaded most people. If you didn’t have a very, very good reason to go, you wouldn’t go, because you had to quarantine for fourteen days. And they monitored it pretty closely. But part of the reason South Korea could get away with that was they had the best domestic contact tracing system in the world. They had a massive outbreak very early on in the pandemic, thousands of people infected. It was a particular church in in South Korea where all of the—many of the worshipers had become sick. And the government succeeded in stamping it out, traced down all those people, got them into isolation.

And so South Korea felt confident that if some cases got through, because of the somewhat laxer border controls, that they would be able to deal with it. You know, a good contrast is Australia. Australia had some cases break through its border quarantine. They didn’t have the capacity to trace it. So Melbourne, for instance, suffered one of the longest lockdowns in the world because once the disease had spread the government had no other tool but to essentially lock everybody in their homes until it went away. So it’s kind of the point about you need sophisticated tools, in this case public health tools, working alongside whatever your boarder measures are.

O’NEIL: So let me ask you a bit about—I mean, Laurie, as you said, you know, these were pretty popular measures. You know, maybe because in many places they were not used against citizens, though, as we know, in New Zealand they were, in some ways. A few places. But let’s talk a little bit about if—you know, if these become more prevalent, what are the avenues or potential for pushback? You know, how should we think about civil rights, whether of those who are not citizens or those who are citizens? How should we think about human rights? I mean, as you look at the various reasons people want to stop crossing the—others crossing their borders, how should we think about the legal, humanitarian, you know, overall, global, you know, universal human rights in this process? Is there any way to sort of stop this juggernaut, or is it—is it out there?

TRAUTMAN: So we tried to have—it was the penultimate chapter—sort of look at what are the policy angles, what are the prospects? Is it multilateralism? Is it checks on emergency powers? And we sort of delve into those different aspects. And at the end of the day our takeaway was sort of it’s really the people that are impacted by these restrictions that are going to be the ones that are going to hold their governments accountable. And that’s not just individuals who might have loved ones on the other side. That’s students. That’s workers. That’s a multitude—millions of people around the world who would be impacted by these separations, who are really otherwise able to cross borders.

So the book really does focus on people who were sort of playing by the rules, built their lives around this ability to cross borders, and then that rug was sort of pulled out from under them. So in the book we focus a lot on these stories. And a lot of our outreach around that is, you know, how do we have this mobilized group of people that want better protections, if governments are going to encourage them to come abroad and go to school or to have businesses in another country?

ALDEN: And talking about the organized—there was some organized opposition, right?

TRAUTMAN: Yeah. So one of the stories we tell in the book, which was a really key story, was the story of Donna McCall. This was a Canadian woman who married an American man, moved to the U.S. They had their kids in the U.S. And then they moved back to Canada when they retired. And Donna was an ER nurse. And she had a lot of knee pain. And she ended up going into liver failure, for various reasons. And this happened right about the time that the Canada-U.S. border was essentially closed.

So her children obviously wanted to cross the border to be able to be with their mother as she was nearing death. And they had Canadian birthright citizenship because their mother was Canadian, but they didn’t have Canadian passports. And so they appealed to the Canadian government. They said, our mother does not have long to live. We want to cross the border and be with her. And the Canadian government said—

ALDEN: They were prepared to quarantine. They said, I’ll we’ll quarantine for fourteen days. We’ll follow the rules.

TRAUTMAN: The Canadian government said, the best route is to apply for citizenship. And then you’ll have your passports, and you can cross the border. That didn’t happen in time. And they had to say goodbye to their mother on FaceTime.

And the reason we focus on this story in the book was we’ve interviewed the husband, and he was very active in the media sharing his story. And his story actually drove an advocacy group in Canada called Faces of Advocacy that eventually did petition the Canadian government for better family exemption. So there was examples all around the world, not just in the Canadian case, in Europe as well as other places, where citizens really mobilized and said: Look, we’re willing to take sacrifices. We’re willing to be safe during this time. But some of these policies, not only do they not make sense but they’re also causing a lot of damage.

And they went on for a very long time, is the other thing, in the Canada-U.S. case. Well over a year, year and a half, depending on, you know, how you spin it. So those people are still living with a lot of really kind of loss and traumatic experiences during a time when many of us were struggling with issues around COVID. And then imagine being separated from your loved one on top of that. So they’re an engaged citizenry. They have been able to push the needle in certain places. Again, Europe is another example where people really pushed back and were able to push policy in the right direction. So that’s one avenue that we’re hopeful for.

ALDEN: I mean, it’s a hard one, because, you know, the courts, of course, don’t recognize the rights of noncitizens. So it’s hard—it’s really, I think, more a self-awareness. And, you know, for me this is very personal. I’ve lived my whole life back and forth across the Canadian border. And really think, you know, that there should be, you know, if not full rights some basic set of rights that accrue to people who choose to live their lives that way. And, of course, a lot of governments encourage people to live their lives that way.

You know, I see Esther Brimmer here. We encourage all sorts of foreign students to come, right? They study in the United States. And then COVID hits, and we’re, like, sorry, you got no rights, right? If you go home, we’re not going to allow you back. You’re maybe going to get kicked out of your dorm. There were a lot of foreign students who really suffered during COVID. And it feels kind of like a bait and switch. We’re encouraging people to come because it’s good for us and good for our economy, but when push comes to shove, sorry, you don’t have any rights, right? We’re going to look after our own in a narrow way.

O’NEIL: So I’m going to open it up in just a minute to your questions, but let me ask you this. Ted, you put on the table that, you know, border enforcement can only be—it’s just part of a larger suite of policies and the like to deal with challenges. And, indeed, there are challenges at borders, right? We’re worried about illegal substances, whether it’s, you know, fentanyl or other kinds of illegal drugs. We’re worried about, you know, people who we don’t know who they are, and they might be coming over the border, who don’t have documentation, who don’t have—who don’t have legal access to the United States. We worry about terrorism. There’s a lot of things that one can worry—all kinds of contraband, human trafficking, there’s lots there. So as you think—if you were advising the U.S. government, or the next U.S. government, what would you do? How would you get that, quote/unquote, “secure border” that we all are looking for?

ALDEN: I would argue that the only way you’re even going to move in that direction is through cooperative initiatives of one sort or another. Beth Simmons, the University of Pennsylvania academic, has done some great writing on borders as spaces of shared management. I mean, if we just, you know, take the issue of the southern border and people arriving, which was so damaging to President Biden during this election, one of the real—the real tragedies is that in the last maybe eighteen months of the administration, the Biden team really got this pretty right, you know?

And it was coming out of the Los Angeles declaration, much closer cooperation with countries in the region, setting up processing facilities in different countries, allowing people come directly to the United States and not have to work through the smuggling gangs, tougher rules between the ports of entry to say if you’re arriving illegally and seeking asylum, you’re probably going to get turned back, unless there’s some extreme case. And then a lot more temporary programs, parole programs in this case, allowing people in. And, you know, in the case of some countries, the ones who are most eligible, you saw illegal entries almost disappear entirely.

So to me that was—has been one of those rather sophisticated policy approaches that includes pretty tough border stuff, right? A lot of the human rights groups have not been happy with what the Biden administration did at the southern border. But coupled that with a lot of cooperative initiatives working with its neighbors to try to do an end run that would encourage people to use legal channels. I’m not an expert on drugs at all, but there’s not a single example anywhere in the world ever where drug smuggling has been stopped through border measures alone. In fact, if you look at the pandemic what we saw was a surge in fentanyl smuggling because you had much less traffic coming through the ports of entry, which is where most of the drugs come through, and there was the potential for greater inspection. And fentanyl is much easier to conceal than heroin or cocaine or other bulkier drugs. So it actually backfired in terms of drug control.

So I was talking with a friend today who’s worked on this stuff for a long time. And I find the border stuff baffling because we have spent twenty-five, thirty years now—I think I see Doris Meissner out there. And she can correct me if I’m wrong. We spent twenty-five or thirty years securing the border, spending more and more hundreds of billions of dollars over the years, hardening that border. And we have no more control over it than we did twenty-five years ago, if you’re concerned with sort of crime and smuggling and everything else. And yet, the American public seems convinced we should just double down on that approach. And, you know, the implications of our research on COVID is didn’t work during COVID, and it’s not going to work on these other issues either.

TRAUTMAN: Yeah, maybe I’ll just add. I mean, the U.S.-Canada case, which is sort of my sphere, you know, a key component to that cooperation is intelligence sharing to develop a risk management framework, which we did really well after 9/11. We did some amazing things. You know, we have trusted traveler, trusted trader programs that have taken off that have allowed us to secure the border while still enabling flows of people and goods to move through pretty efficiently. And unfortunately, coming out of COVID, even before the recent events in Canadian politics, we really weren’t innovating like that together moving forward.

It feels like Canada and the U.S. went into COVID with very different hats on and came out even farther apart in terms of coordinating on our border policy. And that does not bode well for the Canada-U.S. relationship, for border management more broadly. And, I suspect with the new administration coming in, we may unfortunately see a little bit more of the Canada-U.S. border relationship resembling a bit of what’s happening on the southern border. We’re already hearing that in a lot of rhetoric.

ALDEN: One quick note to add to that. They’re shutting down Peace Arch Park.

O’NEIL: I was just going to ask you. (Laughter.) You say that at the end. So what happened to that park?

ALDEN: Well, it’s there, but the nice meeting areas where I met my mother all the time are on the Canadian and U.S. sides. They have picnic tables and facilities and restrooms. There’s a sort of area in the middle around the Peace Arch where you can meet, but there’s almost nowhere to sit. You know, it’ll be OK on a nice summer day where you can put a blanket on the grass. But the Canadians have fenced off their side of it and the U.S. hasn’t built a structure. I mean, it’s not a big fence. It’s about that high. You could jump over it. But the symbolism is clear. On the U.S. side, Border Patrol agents are now posted in the park. You can’t walk from the Canadian side to the U.S. side anymore. And during the pandemic, a lot of them came directly from Canada. Sorry, go ahead, yeah.

TRAUTMAN: Yeah, and it used to be a place where you didn’t have to have your documents on you. And now you have to have your documents on you. Which also gives you a sense of how that whole atmosphere and that whole idea of a peaceful, you know, relationship in that space has just really, really shifted.

ALDEN: It was in some ways the most famous peace park in the world, and the one that actually worked. And they’re shutting it down.

TRAUTMAN: They’re shutting it down.

ALDEN: They’re not going to let that happen again, yeah.

O’NEIL: Well, on that note, I’d like to open it up to your questions. (Laughter.)

ALDEN: The anti-Peace Park.

O’NEIL: I’d like to invite members to join the conversation. I’d like to remind everybody that this is an on-the-record meeting. And so please raise your hand if you have a question. Please, right here in front.

Q: John Yochelson, a CFR, member and a friend of Ted.

ALDEN: So this is going to be a softball, right? (Laughter.)

Q: Yes. Yes, softball question. The topic of the Mexican-U.S. border didn’t come up in the conversation so far. And I wondered whether or not you could share what happened in cities like San Diego and El Paso, where the economy is built on a lot of cross-border personal and goods, all the time. What happened in those places?

ALDEN: Do you want to take that, Laurie? Or do you want me to?

TRAUTMAN: Yeah, well, it was an interesting situation, to a certain extent, because you couldn’t—Mexicans couldn’t travel into the U.S. if they didn’t have nonessential reasons. A lot of Mexicans have border crossing cards, so they could still cross. But Americans could cross into Mexico pretty much unhindered for most of the pandemic. So that economic boon of Mexican cross-border shoppers coming into the U.S. obviously pretty much dried up. And there was a bit of the reverse.

But what we saw was a lot of mixed families who were unable to do that sort of back and forth to get the goods that they were reliant on. There’s a couple stories of people who had elderly family on the Mexican side, and they used to be able to drive up to San Diego, or Laredo, or wherever, get the pharmaceutical goods that they needed, and come back. And even for people that were still able to cross, who might have had a border crossing card or an essential reason, they found themselves waiting at some ports of entry for hours because of the reduced staffing and because some ports were closed. So even on paper, if the policy enabled them to cross, in reality their lives were incredibly disrupted.

ALDEN: Mexico never put much in place in terms of controls. Mexico was pretty wide open. And probably one of the reasons their case numbers were so high, there was actually very little effort by Mexico to restrict movement. They closed the border some, but only because the U.S. insisted on it, so.

O’NEIL: Right. Other questions. Kellie.

Q: Thanks. Kellie Meiman Hock with McLarty. Can’t wait to read the book.

I’m wondering if there were any lessons learned from the COVID period, as far as the impact on sectors of the U.S. economy. Everyone’s speculating if we’re going to have a clamp down on immigration, ag sector, meat processing gets talked a lot about. Just wondering if there were any surprises as you were researching the book, as far as other U.S. sectors that were impacted by the decrease in immigration and migration. Thank you.

ALDEN: Yeah. I mean, I’m not—I’m not certain that what the Trump administration is talking about now will have the same impact as some of what happened during COVID. I mean, COVID’s biggest effects were in service sectors of one sort or another. And a lot of the impact was on the workers themselves, including a lot of migrant workers. And you saw this across the world, not just in the United States. I mean, we write in the book about cruise ship workers and container ship workers, and the effect on a lot of global service workers. And it was—it was really, really harmful to these individuals and to the industries that they were connected with. There was also a general slowdown in immigration in the United States because a lot of the processing shut down.

I think what we’re talking about now with the new administration’s deportation plans is going to hit much more directly at those sectors that employ a lot of undocumented migrants. So think, construction. And we’re going to need to rebuild Los Angeles. I mean, it was a lot of undocumented migrants that rebuilt Houston after the hurricanes. Lot of those people may be removed. Agriculture. About 40 percent of the California agriculture workforce is undocumented. Hospitality industry. So service industries are somewhat affected there. So I think the economic impacts will be a bit different than what we saw from COVID. But, you know, much—the parallel is that there are a lot of sectors of our economy that depend on migrant workers. And those got hit during COVID. And they’re going to hit hard if the removals are like anything like the scale this administration is talking about.

O’NEIL: Well, let me ask you about how—I’ll come to you in a second—let me ask you how they were able to segment the movement of people and the movement of trade. And I particularly think about, as we look at, you know, a new administration hardening, perhaps, of the U.S. southern border, at a time when U.S.-Mexico trade has increased dramatically, right? It’s become the number one trading partner of the United States, depending on the month and depending on the flows. We’ve seen sort of a nearshoring boom that happened. How do you manage to let the goods flow but not the services and not the people?

TRAUTMAN: Well, during COVID I’d say that very broad brushstroke of these buckets of essential and nonessential allowed for a lot of wiggle room. And as Ted mentioned earlier, it really depended on the officer who was in the booth when you arrived. So if you were somebody crossing for a commercial purpose but not in a traditional sort of driving a big truck, you just had to make your case at the border that what you were doing fell in line with what was essential. And the officer would just basically decide. So a lot of discretionary authority for the movement of goods, and a little bit less so for the movement of people, which is what we certainly saw during COVID.

ALDEN: I mean, mostly in North America all trade was declared essential. And that was even true internationally. I mean, container ships continue to come. The container ship workers were trapped on their ships. You had a lot of them who were there eighteen months and more. Couldn’t get off their ships because, you know, no country would let them come into the port. But the goods moved back and forth. There were some countries that tried to control the trade element more seriously.

China being a good example. So, you know, in China, when goods were dropped off you had, you know, these teams, you know, in hazmat suits, essentially, in the ship workers couldn’t get off and the stuff all had to be transferred there. At the land borders with China, you actually would have, you know, trucks from Kazakhstan come up, and there were machines that would crane the load over to the other side. And the Chinese driver would take the truck. So, I mean, China was aiming for zero COVID and so that actually required a rather more rigorous set of controls on trade.

In North America, we seemed quite willing to tolerate the COVID cases that resulted from the movement of transport workers. If you look in South America and Africa, the studies all showed that the spread of COVID followed the transportation because they never shut down the trucking industry. And the truckers would, you know, invariably spread the load. But that was—there were a lot of tradeoffs made. And that was a price that most countries decided they were willing to pay, right? If their grocery store shelves were empty they were going to cause public panic, so trade needed to go. It’s not that there weren’t shortages. There were. But the disruptions were much less than on the movement of people side.

O’NEIL: Great. I think we have an online question.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Sean Randolph.

Q: Hi, Ted. Sean Randolph in San Francisco. Great to see you.

ALDEN: Hi, Sean.

Q: I may have missed a bit. When you were talking about Europe, during COVID Sweden was something of an outlier in keeping its economy more open, certainly than anywhere else in Europe and here. I haven’t heard much since then about how in retrospect that played out. So are you able to say something about the Swedish experience and how that worked out, compared to Europe more generally?

ALDEN: This was one of our favorite reporting trips. Over to you, Laurie. (Laughs.)

TRAUTMAN: Yeah. So we went to the Sweden-Norway border, specifically because this was an area where free movement had been in place for decades and decades, well before the European Union existed. And the idea that the Nordic countries would close borders to each other was almost unimaginable, particularly Norway and Sweden that share an incredibly long land border and where you normally don’t even know where that border is. I mean, it’s not—there’s not demarcated. There’s nothing to show you where that is. And so we wanted to kind of talk to people there and understand how did that border closure impact not only commerce and travel, but also sort of people’s feelings of having a Nordic identity and trusting each other. And there was a lot of damage done.

ALDEN: And just to be clear, sort of in the sequence, it was Norway that shut its door, exactly for the reason in your question, Sean, that Sweden was—sorry, keep going—but it was—it was a Norwegian action to shut the border, yeah. Yeah.

TRAUTMAN: Yeah, the Swedes did very little on the border. At one point in time they sort of did a little bit of a counter-border measure, but for the most part, yeah, they had a very different approach to COVID. They had—you know, I mean, I think epidemiologically it’s questionable as to whether or not it was a success or a failure. They had a lot of deaths early on, particularly in nursing care facilities. But over time, you know, their tradeoffs were keeping the economy going. And, you know, I don’t know if we look at their infections if they—

ALDEN: Pretty similar to the—pretty similar to the rest of Europe really at the end, yeah. In the long run it wasn’t much different. But, I mean, it was traumatic, right, for the people? Yeah.

TRAUTMAN: Yeah. I mean, there was—so if you think about a border where there’s free movement, there’s been a Nordic agreement that predates the European Union, and all of a sudden there’s Norwegian police patrolling with guns. And where you used to go cross-country skiing through the park, you can’t even go there anymore. I mean, people were really, really hurt and really upset. And we talked to a number of people, we were never able to sort of dig into this, who talked about as Swedes going to Norway to work as day workers, and having to wear, like, a yellow jacket.

ALDEN: Yeah, to be identified as Swedes, yeah. (Laughs.)

TRAUTMAN: Just to identify—to identify—

ALDEN: So the Norwegians could stay away from them, yeah. (Laughs.)

TRAUTMAN: Yeah. And so some of the people we talked to, you know, they brought up memories from World War II days of how horrible and ostracized things were there.

ALDEN: And there was one little kind of funny coincidence. There was a peace arch along the border there that looked a little bit like the peace arch in peace park. And people would meet there. Only it wasn’t a shared space. They had to meet physically—you know, the one side of the border and the other side of the border. They could set up chairs and talk. But the problem is that the only bathroom was in a gas station on the Swedish side. (Laughter.) And if the Norwegians went over and used the Swedish bathroom and were found by Norwegian police coming back, they had to pay, what was it, an $1,100 fine, or something like that? It was—it was big, yeah. (Laughs.)

O’NEIL: Anya.

Q: Anya Schmemann, Council on Foreign Relations. Congratulations on the book.

I’d like to share a short personal story and then a question. And Ted knows my story. My family owns several cabins in Quebec. They’re called cottages up there. And like other property owners, we were blocked from traveling to Canada during COVID. When we got word when the border finally opened, August 9, 2021, we jumped in the car and drove ten hours to the border. We were car number ten in line at the border at midnight when the border opened. And it was very celebratory. Everyone was honking and, you know, cheering out the windows, and music was playing. Then we crossed the border, and then essentially went into hiding. We all parked our cars behind bushes and hit our license plates because Canadians were throwing eggs and tomatoes at cars with U.S. license plates. So my question is—it follows on this previous one—is how did these COVID border closures contribute to nativism, nationalism, otherism? And are those consequences still with us today?

TRAUTMAN: I think they’re still with us. And I think—I’ll just take the Canada-U.S. example. You know, going into COVID we had pretty bad relations at the national level between Trump and Trudeau. And we actually saw that playing out on the ground even where we live, between western Washington and western British Columbia. I run a border survey where we stop people as they’re crossing and we ask them why they’re crossing. And we had some students come back one day from the border and said, gosh, a lot of people were really angry at Americans for these tariffs, for example, that we put on Canadian aluminum and steel. So I would argue, in the Canada-U.S. case, we sort of already had some anti-American sentiment leading up to COVID.

And then to a certain extent, I mean, Ted might differ in this opinion, but I think the Canadians were pretty happy to close the border to the United States because that was already feeding into Canadian sentiment. And then you had, you know, the observation of how we were handling COVID down here, which was very different from how the Canadians were handling it. And I think that has fed into what, unfortunately, probably is going to be another four years of not great Canada-U.S. relations. And, again, it’s not just at that political level. It’s actually on the ground as well.

An interesting side note to that is I talked to a number of dual citizens who felt like they were sort of trapped as well between—moving between countries, and feeling like the Canadian government was leaving them out of being able to return home, and not facilitating their ability to move back and forth. Which was an interesting kind of different angle on being a dual citizen, and where do you belong, and what rights do you have. But I think those people that I’ve spoken to within the last six months still feel a lot of anger at their own governments as well.

O’NEIL: Mmm hmm. Right back here.

Q: Yeah, hi. I’m Ben Ziff. Just out of the State Department, but for the first two years of the Biden administration I was managing the migration affairs unit at the State Department.

So very, very busy trying to get other countries to sign onto sort of a collective approach to migration. And my team authored the Los Angeles declaration. And trying to get stuff done there. And, I mean, you all obviously have a lot of experience during that—the U.S. and Canada and Mexico side of things. I’m wondering, looking forward, in the absence of a Title 42 or in a Title 42 under different circumstances, how will other countries, whether in the hemisphere or in the world, react now, as opposed to how they did back in the day?

ALDEN: To react now to what?

Q: If indeed we intend—we, the new administration—intends to reenact, you know, COVID border security, you know, as of January 20.

ALDEN: I mean, I think, you know, border closures, beget border closures. And, you know, to the extent that we’re further legitimizing in this country the use of those tools, it’s going to make it easier for other countries around the world to do the same. You know, I thought—I thought the question was, you know, if we have another pandemic what’s going to happen? And we’re going to shut down again exactly as we did this time, and probably quicker, and probably more thoroughly. So, you know, I’m afraid we’re in a political moment—I’m afraid, because I don’t like the political moment—but where we see unilateral actions at the border as sort of a central part of what it means to be a nation-state, and we need to assert our sovereignty at the borders. And those forces—not just here in the United States, but Laurie talked about Europe as well where they’re struggling to maintain the Schengen arrangements—I think those forces keep growing stronger and stronger. I was hoping that would not be the case, but I think that’s what we’re seeing.

O’NEIL: OK, right here.

Q: Jimmy Kolker, part time at the State Department’s Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy.

And you rightly pointed out that no country that actually closed borders followed the International Health Regulations, which set out conditions under which border closures would be justified for public health reasons. Not a single one. And almost none of them even made reference to what the conditions would be. What—Title 42 is, again, going to be a misuse of public health for other reasons. What can the public health or global health community do, like Marty Cetron was talking, just to try to make this rational, so that if there are border closures they’d actually be effective in protecting people from disease, rather than a political theater?

ALDEN: What Dr. Cetron told us, and I think what other people are working on, you know, I don’t think they can influence these political arrangements all that much. I mean, there’s been a renegotiation of the International Health Regulations. I’m not a public health expert. Laurie and I, we talked to public health experts about it. There’s some good things in there, but it’s pretty quiet on these—on these border issues. I think where, you know, his work was focused at the end, and the people who have followed him, is early warning. That, you know, we are developing gradually more sophisticated early warning systems to try to identify pandemics sooner.

And hopefully, in that case, the actions that they’re taking—which could well include border closures—will be quicker and shorter. I mean, We’re quite sympathetic in the book, particularly the governments in the early stages of the pandemic, because, you know, think back. We didn’t know how contagious COVID was. We didn’t exactly know at the outset how it was transmitted. We didn’t really know what the death rate was. We knew it was serious, but we didn’t exactly know how serious. And we knew from the public health research at the time that if you were going to use border measures you needed to use them pretty quickly. They needed to be hard and they needed to be quick. Otherwise, you know, the disease had jumped into your country already.

So there was some pressure on governments to act very quickly if they were going to use border measures. Looking back on it, no country acted quickly enough. And we can imagine, I hope, if the—if the science on this stuff keeps getting better, when we confront a similar situation the action will be quicker, it will be more effective, and hopefully shorter. I mean, a lot of our criticism of the border measures in the book is not at the outset so much. Remember, there was no vaccine. There were reasons to be quite worried. But how long they lingered.

You know, New Zealand, Australia didn’t open till well into 2022. China didn’t reopen until beginning of ’23. We didn’t get rid of Title 42 until May of ’23. And so those measures became less and less justified as the pandemic wore on. So I think that’s what the public health professionals are trying to do, but they’re not going to control these decisions. They didn’t control it during COVID.

O’NEIL: Right here.

Q: Steven Beller. I’m a historian.

Did you—did you look at the effects of the Spanish Influenza on politics, especially the 1924 immigration law? It strikes me that pandemics create fear, and a fear of communicable diseases, which ends up being completely exploited for completely for the wrong reasons, which is the 1924 immigration law. But the irony is that also leads to terrible economic choices, so that Herbert Hoover, in the spirit of the ’24 immigration law, ended up having American jobs—real jobs for American citizens, or American jobs for American citizens, and had deported two million Mexicans doing, including about 1 million American citizens—back to Mexico. Plus the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which was a disaster for the world economy as well. So what’s you—I guess, does history teach a lesson here?

ALDEN: I mean, there are, you know, not just on immigration but on trade and a lot of things, a lot of parallels between the 1920s and today. And we don’t know how that’s going to play out. But the place where we saw the biggest impact, interestingly, was New Zealand and Australia. And if you’re looking for a historical answer to why those countries shut down so hard, it went back to the experience of the Spanish flu. New Zealand stayed quite open during the Spanish flu. Never particularly restricted movement in and out. There was a lot of movement associated with the First World War. New Zealand never really closed down and had very, very high number of deaths from the Spanish flu, particularly in its indigenous population, the Māori population.

Australia was tougher. It still got hit, but it was tougher in restricting movement. And a lot of Australia’s biosecurity legislation comes out of the experience of the Spanish flu. And the Australian government has pretty extensive powers, largely immune to court oversight, to shut down the country in the event of communicable diseases. And New Zealand, very much learning from that experience, went much more down the Australian road this time. So that was a sort of case of historical memory where both countries, particularly New Zealand, felt like they hadn’t acted quickly and effectively enough the first time around to shut. And I would argue, this was a kind of over correction to the Spanish flu here. So that was where we saw the history stuff I think most profoundly.

O’NEIL: The question back there.

Q: Thanks. Solomon Wong from InterVISTAS in Vancouver.

I’m not too far away from you and I grew up playing under the arch. (Laughter.) Children of a common mother, may these gates never be closed. I appreciate the language as well in reminding us that we develop this vocabulary—PCR versus rapid antigen, essential, nonessential, and it goes on. I was quite taken by what you said about threat, risk, and consequence in terms of the transparency. The question is, how do we deal with this as the perception of individual states for each of those terms—threat, risk and consequence—is wildly different? And how do we deal with a range of other threat, risk, consequent measures, and the equation that’s different between countries?

TRAUTMAN: Maybe I’ll just take a first stab at that. Again, in the U.S.-Canada case where, as you mentioned, you know, we defined our test requirements differently, you’d think that if any two countries would agree on that it would be us. And that didn’t happen. But, you know, at the same time, like, our economies are so intertwined, our communities are so intertwined, and at some point, you know, agreeing to a common standard—whether that’s something like regulatory cooperation issues where Canada might have a different standard than the United States, but we sort of come to a common understanding and something that enables us to continue to allow the goods and people to move across the border, rather than sort of two different approaches that have no symmetry at all.

I mean, I think it’s a work in progress. And it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is why I don’t have a great answer for you. But it comes back to that cooperation, I think, and that trust. Which maybe—we haven’t even really talked much about trust, but trust was a big piece, getting back to the question earlier around the lasting sort of impacts in relations between Norwegians and Swedes and Canadians and Americans. And trust is a really key component to cooperating on the border. And I don’t see that we have a lot of that trust built up in our multilateral relations right now, unfortunately.

O’NEIL: Jennifer, did you have the last question? You get the last one.

Q: Hi. Jennifer Hillman from the Council on Foreign Relations and Georgetown Law, and our Center on Inclusive Trade and Development.

I’m curious about what you really learned about this concept, you talked about it a lot, of what is an essential person. And whether conceptually that was a good idea but was just flawed in its implementation. In other words, if that term essential had included, again, the pregnant woman that needs to come home, et cetera, et cetera, if it had a real humanitarian component to it, a family component, is it conceptually a good idea badly executed? Or is even just the notion of somebody being essential and somebody being nonessential not the road to go down?

ALDEN: Yeah, please.

TRAUTMAN: I would say it’s the latter.

ALDEN: Yeah. (Laughs.)

TRAUTMAN: And it’s partly because if what the goal was, was to control the spread of an infectious disease, whether you’re essential or nonessential has really no bearing on that at all, right? If you’re a safe traveler, which is something we tried to argue early on in the pandemic, that makes sense, right? If you’ve had your test or you’re vaccinated, then you might actually be supporting the goal of why those border policies were put in place. But if you’re essential versus not essential, it has absolutely no meaning on the communication of disease.

ALDEN: And it’s an interesting concept. Of course, it was borrowed from labor relations, right? You know, you can—the government can order essential workers back. And there is—there is a coercive element to it, right? And there were a lot of people—this was more domestic than at the border—who were coerced into going to work because they were declared essential. And they ran much higher risks and they died in much higher numbers than those of us who were lucky enough to be able to teach our classes online during COVID. And in the border context, it became in so many cases—and we highlight a lot of them—a really, really arbitrary distinction.

So I’m very much with Laurie. I don’t think it was a good concept. It actually gets to the risk management question in part, because what you really want to be doing is trying to assess what sorts of movement pose the greatest risks, and how do we mitigate those. As opposed to these very, very crude categories, which is what we used. And, you know, you’re working on a project with folks at SFU, I think, to try to get more sophisticated on that stuff going forward so we have a better set of tools and understandings if and when, in fact, we confront this situation again.

O’NEIL: Well, as you found, there are many reasons—while this is really a lesson in what happened in recent years, in our recent history, there’s many lessons for today and for the years to come. So please check out When the World Closed its Doors. If you want to share this conversation with others who weren’t able to be here tonight, either here or online, it’s going to be posted on CFR’s website. So please share it. And for those in the room there are books in the back that I’m sure our two authors would love to sign. So in the meantime, please join me in thanking Laurie and Ted for an excellent conversation. (Applause.)

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This is an uncorrected transcript.