Doug Saunders's Blog

From the migration-policy chapter I contributed to the Canadian Council of the Americas report “Beyond the Build: A New Canadian Strategy for Latin America and the Caribbean.” Some of the most important relationships between Canada and the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean involve the movement not of goods and services, but of people. […]

Four Steps to Fix Canada’s Immigration System

These proposals are adapted from my Globe and Mail essay Borderlines: Canada’s Border is Broken, but Not the Way Trump Thinks.   There has to be a sensible Canadian space between Trumpist mass deportations and closed borders on one hand, and on the other the current reality of a set of policies and institutions that […]

Doug Saunders

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is faced with the difficult task of trying to both placate the mercurial US President Donald Trump while simultaneously engineering a shift away from Canada’s biggest trading partner.   This essay appears in the Summer 2025 edition of Internationale Politik Quartetly.    At the G7 summit held in Canada’s Rocky […]

The Lost Economies of Irregular Migration

A version of this essay appears in the 2021 edition of Mixed Migration Review.   By Doug Saunders[1] Border closures and mobility controls imposed by governments during the COVID-19 pandemic have brought to light a subject often absent from national policy discussions — the important, and in some cases indispensable, economic role played by irregular [...]

Doug Saunders

Hot zones – the first global pandemic of the urban migrant district

This paper appears in Mixed Migration Review.  The Covid-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon uniquely driven and shaped by the migratory populations of cities. It has been concentrated disproportionately in the districts in which immigrants, refugees, and domestic rural-to-urban migrants live and has been spread to vulnerable regions by failed efforts to control their movements. [...]

Doug Saunders

How Mainstream Ideas Become Mass Murder: Anders Breivik and the Authors Who Inspired Him

This is adapted from the opening chapter, “Crescent Fever,” of my book The Myth of the Muslim Tide.   Shortly after lunchtime, Anders Behring Breivik logged on to his computer, inserted a memory stick, and pulled up the Microsoft Word document he had finished formatting late the previous night. On this warm holiday Friday in [...]

Doug Saunders

Why I Compared 9/11 and 01/20 — And Why We All Should

In our lifetime, we have watched the United States experience two sudden, historic turns into the dark and frightening unknown – moments when everything changed. One began with a terrorist attack of unprecedented horror. The other began with Friday’s inauguration. Both of these moments have held dramatic implications for the security and well-being of the […]

Doug Saunders

The Non-Flood: How Europe Created Its Migrant Emergency

This essay was published April 24, 2015 in The Globe and Mail. Read the original here.  I met Marlon, a Sudanese man who had walked across great expanses of desert to Libya, on the edge of Tripoli as he prepared to visit a remote beach at midnight and pay a hard-saved $2,000 to get onto [...]

Doug Saunders

Canada’s long history of turning newcomers off

Did it feel like a slap in the face? When the federal government revealed this week that only 6.3 per cent of Syrian refugees living in Jordanian and Lebanese camps, when offered the chance, wanted to come to Canada, did we feel just a bit spurned? Like we had cooked a three-course dinner and vacuumed [...]

Doug Saunders

The three refugee mistakes Canada keeps repeating

The refugees had piled up in camps by the hundreds of thousands, had often made perilous crossings with sometimes tragic outcomes, and had become the subject of enormous public concern, before Ottawa even thought to help them in any significant way. That’s because the refugees, despite being hailed by the public as freedom fighters who [...]

Doug Saunders