Who’s Coming to Canada’s Borders?

Migration is not a new phenomenon, nor is it unusual. Since the day life appeared on this planet, it’s been on the move. Plants, animals, and ultimately people followed needed resources as climate, geography and man-made borders evolved — a pattern that continues to this day. In our new inter-disciplinary series, we examine the impact on geopolitics, societies, public health, the environment and ourselves.

In this presentation, Doug Saunders discusses who is coming to our borders, why, and the impact.

Doug Saunders is an author, journalist and consultant of Canadian and British citizenship. He is the international-affairs columnist for the newspaper The Globe and Mail and author of the books Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World (2011), The Myth of the Muslim Tide (2012) and Maximum Canada (2017). During 2019-2021 he was resident in Berlin as a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, and in 2022 designed a self-integration framework for urban migrants on behalf of the International Organization for Migration. He served as the Globe and Mail’s London-based European bureau chief for a decade, after having run the paper’s Los Angeles bureau, and has written extensively from East Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, the Middle East and North Africa. He writes a weekly column devoted to the larger themes and intellectual concepts behind international news, and has won the National Newspaper Award, Canada’s counterpart to the Pulitzer Prize, on five occasions, as well as the Schelling Prize for Architectural Theory, the Donner Prize and the National Library of China Wenjin Book Award. He was a co-designer of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale’s Germany pavilion, which was based on is book Arrival City. His current work examines the neighbourhood-scale manifestation of larger social and economic crises, with field work in seven countries.