View this email in your browser 

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here.

March 12, 2021

Fareed: Biden’s Immigration Policies Could Backfire

As the US faces a surge of migrants arriving at its southern border, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column that President Joe Biden’s rollback of harsh Trump-era policies has likely provided more incentive to seek entry. Former President Trump, Fareed writes, “smells blood” and is already attacking Biden over it.

“The tragedy,” Fareed writes, “is that this border crisis—and Trump’s demagoguery around it—could hinder Biden’s efforts to achieve comprehensive reform of the whole system.” Asylum seekers make up a small share of America’s yearly influx, Fareed writes, and America needs to stop turning immigrants away more broadly.

“You can see it in the numbers,” Fareed writes. “With pandemic restrictions on top of everything else, immigration to the United States has plunged to levels not seen in four decades. Some of the world’s best and brightest are choosing to go to more hospitable countries, from Canada to Australia. Census data show that without immigration, the United States faces a dire demographic future. It would mean fewer people and especially fewer young people, which would mean less growth, dynamism and opportunity for everyone. This is the real immigration crisis, not the one at the southern border.”

Can Europe Emerge More Unified After Covid-19?

Europe has struggled mightily against Covid-19, as Economist Editor in Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes laid out on Sunday’s GPS. But at The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash sees a chance to forge unity.

“There have been other moments of shared European experience, such as the 1968 protests or the end of the cold war, but to find one that simultaneously affected so many people so personally you must go back to the second world war,” Ash writes. “When else since 1945 have we been so conscious that our individual actions, and those of our governments, can directly determine whether we and those we love will live or die? Yet this time Europeans have been fighting not each other but a common enemy.”

So far, in the face of Covid-19, it’s been feast or famine for the project of a united Europe: Collective borrowing for economic relief marked a high point, but slow vaccine procurement marked a low. More trials await, Ash writes, with the next one likely to center on allowing vaccinated citizens to travel. If the EU wants to turn crisis into cohesion, it will simply need to deliver on the challenges to come.

Is Russia Getting More Aggressive vs. the Open Internet?

This week, Russia slowed Twitter’s performance within its borders, CNN’s Anna Chernova and Zahra Ullah report, after the government had “vowed to act against social media platforms in the wake of protests in support of opposition figure Alexey Navalny." (As Reuters notes, Moscow alluded to tweets illegally encouraging children to take part in protests; Twitter denied that it allowed users to promote illegal behavior.)

At Rest of World, Vittoria Elliott hears a suggestion that this signifies Russia is turning more repressive in its approach to the Web. “Russia is not like China,” Natalia Krapiva, a lawyer and digital-rights activist with the group Access Now, tells Elliott. “[T]he internet has been relatively free” there, with Russian citizens and businesses relying widely on big social-media platforms and search engines. The government may not have the capability to shut off access entirely, but its move against Twitter “is a sign that Russia is going to be more aggressive in its responses,” Elliott quotes Krapiva as saying.

The Quad’s Mission, Should It Choose to Accept

US President Joe Biden convened on Friday the first-ever leaders’ meeting of “the Quad,” a grouping of the US, Australia, India, and Japan. While many see it as a coalition to oppose China, Salvatore Babones writes for Foreign Policy that the meeting was launched with a tepid agenda focused on Covid-19, the economy, and climate change.

Cooperation on those fronts is well and good, Babones writes, but if the group wants to be effective, it would do well to acknowledge its raison d’etre: “Chinese coast guard vessels, newly empowered with government authorization to fire on foreign ships, have repeatedly entered Japanese waters and confronted civilian boats. In the Indian Ocean, Chinese military survey ships operating without navigational transponders have been detected mapping the seafloor in support of potential submarine operations. Australia has been confronted by the threat of a massive Chinese base, allegedly for its fishing fleet, just over 120 miles off its shores,” Babones writes. “History is littered with the remains of multilateral partnerships that failed because they had nothing to do,” and if the Quad is to succeed, “full-spectrum Indo-Pacific maritime security is the only mission that makes sense.”

Others are more optimistic. Also at Foreign Policy, Michael J. Green notes a pledge by the four countries to cooperate in providing 1 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to Southeast Asia. It’s an important first move in what could become a significant partnership to deter Beijing, Green suggests.