Edward Alden & Laurie Trautman — When the World Closed Its Doors: The Covid-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders - with María Teresa Kumar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More people traveled internationally in 2019 than in any year in history. After COVID began its rapid spread throughout the world, though, international travel plummeted, and nations across the world hardened their borders. For the first time, governments took the same tools that have been used against less privileged migrants and asylum seekers and turned them on citizens from countries that had long enjoyed relatively unfettered travel--and sometimes on their own citizens. In When the World Closed Its Doors , Edward Alden and Laurie Trautman tell the story of how nearly every country in the world shut its borders to respond to an external threat and explain how this global shock to the system ended up transforming state border policies around the world. They detail the consequences of the COVID border restrictions--couples separated for years, children blocked from reuniting with their parents, container ship workers moving essential goods trapped at sea, pregnant citizens barred from returning home--and explain why governments used their harshest containment measures on those coming from outside. Throughout, Alden and Trautman focus on human stories to show the multiple impacts that states' increasing restrictiveness has had--economic, demographic, social, and political. And the fallout continues: governments left unchecked will continue to restrict borders with little regard to the collateral damage and disruption they cause. A sweeping overview of the re-bordering of the world, both during and after 2020, this synthetic, wide-angle view of a singular shock to the international systems of travel and migration highlights why citizens need better protections and governments more robust guardrails. Edward Alden is Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Alden's career spans more than three decades in journalism, think tanks, and academia. He was the bureau chief for the Financial Times newspaper in Toronto, Canada, and Washington, DC before joining the Council on Foreign Relations in 2007. In addition to his own books and articles, he has worked with senior US policymakers on in-depth investigations of issues such as US immigration policy, US trade policy, border security, and the future of work. Since 2019 he has also been a visiting professor at Western Washington University, and he currently writes a column for Foreign Policy . Laurie Trautman is the Director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University--the only one of its kind in the United States. As a leading expert in Canada-US border policy issues, she works across academia, government, and the private sector to improve cross-border mobility and collaboration. In addition to authoring policy briefs and academic publications, Dr. Trautman is an active participant in cross-border working groups and a regular contributor to the media. She is also a Global Fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Center's Canada Institute and holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Oregon. Alden and Trautman will be in conversation with María Teresa Kumar, the co-founder and President of Voto Latino Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan 501(c)(3) organization, and its sister 501(c)(4 ) advocacy organization, Voto Latino. Voto Latino Foundation and Voto Latino are the largest Latino voter registration and Latino youth advocacy organizations in the country, respectively. Together, Voto Latino Foundation and Voto Latino, jointly known as Voto Latino, have registered over 1.4 million Americans in key battleground states since 2004, 79% of whom went on to vote. A sought-after political leader and strategist, María Teresa advised President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and she currently serves on the National Task Force on Election Crises and the Brookings Institution’s Working Group on Universal Voting. She is chair of the Latino Anti-Disinformation Lab. Raised in Sonoma, California, María Teresa lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, Raj Kumar, and their two children.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".