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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza? Interview With Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers; Interview With British Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired July 20, 2025 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:48]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, genocide. It's an extraordinarily powerful word that describes an unthinkable event. The intentional destruction of all or part of a population. Think Rwanda. Remember Srebrenica. Now one of the world's top genocide scholars has affixed that label to a new place. Gaza.

I will ask the Israeli born Omer Bartov why he is convinced that his own people are committing this ultimate atrocity.

Also, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers on why he's ashamed of America over Trump's big, beautiful bill.

And Britain's Conservative Party, the party of Thatcher, has been called the world's most successful political party, but now it is struggling. Why?

I'll talk to party leader, Kemi Badenoch.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

You've seen the blizzard of scary images. Immigration agents taking parents away in front of their kids. Masked officers raiding neighborhoods. Men detained in remote centers. But here is the surprising fact behind the mayhem. Donald Trump has deported fewer people per month than Barack Obama did, and barely more than Joe Biden during a similar span last year, according to ICE data obtained by NBC News.

Trump signals that his administration is fearlessly executing mass deportations but the numbers reveal a somewhat different reality. Since February, his administration has deported 14,700 people per month on average, according to NBC. That's far below Obama's peak in 2013, when he deported 36,000 per month. And it's not even close to the administration's reported goal of deporting one million people in a year.

Trump's deportation dragnet is less effective than those of his predecessors because it is chaotic, theatrical and detached from the systems that actually work. Rather than effectively coordinating with local law enforcement, following rules, norms and laws or expanding and expediting legal processing, Trump has prioritized optics over outcomes. What his administration lacks in strategy, it tries to compensate for with spectacle. Sweeping up school children, targeting families, broadcasting raids on social media.

But this is a rare case of Trump's Teflon wearing thin. Immigration was once his strongest issue politically. Today, it is fast becoming a vulnerability. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, Trump's approval on immigration has dropped sharply, with 55 percent disapproving and only 40 percent approving. A recent Gallup poll showed that the number of Americans who view immigration as a good thing has risen from 64 percent in 2024 to 79 percent now, a record high.

Even more telling is the erosion of support among independents. Many of them suburban voters who had once been sympathetic to a tougher border stance but are now recoiling at scenes of cruelty and overreach.

The numbers are striking. Support for deporting all undocumented immigrants is now below 40 percent. Support for a pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants has climbed to nearly 80 percent. Most Americans, including many Republicans, back a path to citizenship for Dreamers.

In short, Trump has managed to move the country not to the right on immigration, but to the center and even left of center. The public, it seems, is rebelling against extremism in both directions.

[10:05:03]

Under Biden, many Americans accurately perceived chaos and lawlessness at the border, prompting a backlash. Now, under Trump, they are reacting just as strongly to what appears to be a lawless and authoritarian approach, one that disregards legal precedents, court rulings and legislative prerogatives.

The lesson here is clear. Americans want immigration to be managed with competence and decency, not bombast or cruelty. If the U.S. had a functioning political system, this would be the moment for comprehensive immigration reform. The outlines of a deal are obvious and have been for years.

First, the asylum system must be totally overhauled. It cannot remain open ended and unmanageable. There should be clear numerical caps and rules about where and how asylum can be claimed preferably outside the United States, through a structured process.

Second, those who have lived in the U.S. for years paying taxes and raising families should be given some path to legal status. Deporting them makes no economic or moral sense. And third, America needs to expand high-skilled immigration if it

wants to remain at the cutting edge of technology and innovation.

This is the litmus test for Trump. Is he actually interested in solving America's immigration problem, or does he prefer it as a political cudgel? When he was out of office, he chose the latter, torpedoing a bipartisan Senate immigration deal that would have toughened border enforcement and reformed the asylum process. Now that he is back in power, he has another chance. Will he take it?

Democrats, too, face a crucial choice. The mistake many of them made during Trump's first term was to define themselves primarily in symbolic opposition to his nasty rhetoric, promising not to enforce the laws and chanting to abolish ICE. That stance energized the base, but alienated moderates, in fact alienated the country. Remember, this is the issue that has fueled Trump's movement most since he came down that golden escalator in 2015, and it has helped bring him back into the White House a second time.

The recent shift in public opinion on immigration is real but fragile. If the Democrats go crazy left, the public will turn against them again. To earn back trust, Democrats should sit solidly in the center advocating secure borders, strong law enforcement, humane treatment and realistic reforms. That's good politics. More importantly, it is the right set of policies for the country.

America is a nation of immigrants, but it's also a nation of laws. Immigration reform must honor both traditions. It's finally time to replace fear-mongering with solutions and turn away from performance towards policy. The polls suggest that the country is ready. Are its leaders?

Go to CNN.com/Fareed for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

It has been 652 days since Hamas's horrifying attacks on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 kidnaped. And the scale of devastation wrought in Gaza since then is staggering. More than 58,000 people have been killed, including 17,000 children, according to the Hamas controlled health ministry. The United Nations estimates that more than 90 percent of all residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.

In a "New York Times" op-ed this week, a leading authority on genocide says the destruction and the intent behind it meets the legal definition of genocide. Professor Omer Bartov is Israeli born and served in the Israeli Army, and says that his conclusion was painful but inescapable. He's the Dean's professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.

Welcome, Professor Bartov. Let me ask you first to tell us a little bit about how difficult it was for you to come to this conclusion. You have deep ties to Israel. You served in the Israeli Army. What for you was the conclusive piece of evidence?

OMER BARTOV, PROFESSOR OF HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES, BROWN UNIVERSITY: This was a long process, both because of my own links to Israel. I have family there. I lived there the first half of my life. As you said, I served in the military. I taught at the university there. Many of my best friends lived there.

[10:10:06]

But also because determining whether genocide is happening or not is a difficult thing, because the definition of genocide, the only one that really matters, which is the one provided by the U.N. Convention of 1948, calls to show both an intent to destroy a particular group in whole or in part, as such, and the implementation of that intent. And so that's a -- it takes a while to determine that.

I came to that conclusion around May of 2024, when the IDF moved into Rafah, into the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, where there were at the time about a million Palestinians who had been displaced there by the IDF, and the IDF moved those million people to the beach area, which had no infrastructure whatsoever, and then went into Rafah and demolished it. And by August the city was gone.

And I asked myself, was this in pursuance of what the IDF had said were its war goals, which was to destroy Hamas and release the hostages? And then looking at the pattern of operations between October 7th, following the Hamas attack and May-June, 2014, I concluded that that was not the main goal of the IDF. What the IDF was actually doing was systematically destroying Gaza, making it uninhabitable for its population.

And as we see, since its main goal is to move the population to the south and concentrate it there with eventually hoping that it would move out of the Gaza Strip, either because it would be completely debilitated by lack of water, sanitation, food, and so forth, or maybe some country would agree to take it in.

So in that sense, the statements that were made by Israeli political and military leaders in the immediate aftermath of the massacre by Hamas, which was, we will flatten Gaza, the people, they are human animals, they should have no water and no power and so forth, were not simply made in anger in the heat of the moment but in fact, it turned out, were being implemented during those months and have since.

Of course, as we know, that implementation has become much worse. As you were saying, most of the buildings in Gaza have been either destroyed or damaged, and that includes not only places of habitation. It includes universities, schools, mosques, museums, anything that would make it possible for a population after a war to try and reconstitute itself. So that is appears to be the clear goal of ethnic cleansing.

But if you carry out ethnic cleansing without any chance for the population to leave, to go anywhere else, you end up in genocide.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, many people would disagree with Omer Bartov. I will put to him the arguments against his claims, and hear his responses, when we come back.

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[10:18:07]

ZAKARIA: And we are back with the Israeli born scholar of genocide, Omer Bartov.

So you know your position is very controversial, and there are people who argue vigorously against it. And I think there are two arguments, I'm going to ask you to, you know, to respond to both. The first is, look, there isn't intent. Of course, what's going on is terrible and there's a humanitarian catastrophe, and there may even be war crimes by -- in specific cases.

But the idea that there is the intent or the genocidal intent, you're reading into loose statements made by the defense minister, you know, the day or two after the war, statement by Netanyahu that, you know, Hamas will pay mightily for -- things like this that do not have the same clarity and weight that you normally expect, that you're taking a bunch of things that politicians said in the heat of the moment and claiming that these are clear statements of genocidal intent, that you don't have -- you don't see the intent. What do you say to that?

BARTOV: Well, you know, I mean, there are a number of things that you can say. The first is that most regimes that carry out genocide don't publicize it. They don't say, we are going to carry out genocide, we are carrying out genocide. Even Nazi Germany wasn't saying that clearly. We actually don't have any order by Adolf Hitler saying, let's carry out the genocide of the Jews. Politicians, other executives don't like saying that. They have a sense that they may, you know, be harmed for that.

In the case of Israel, however, statements were actually made and are still being made. They were made right at the beginning and making genocidal statements is itself a breach of international law because it serves as incitement.

[10:20:04]

When a minister of defense says they'll have no water, they're human animals, he is speaking to his soldiers. You know, 300,000 Israeli reservists were mobilized and sent to Gaza, and they were hearing what their minister of defense was saying. Those are not human beings. Don't treat them as human beings.

But since then, there have been numerous statements, including just recently, you know, Netanyahu was saying we need them to leave Gaza. Of course, he's been supported in that by President Trump most recently, and we are looking for states that will take them in. That is an international crime to move a population, to forcibly remove a population from where it lives. So we don't actually have a problem of statement.

ZAKARIA: And let me ask you about the other argument, which is, look, what, again, what is happening is terrible. It's humanitarian catastrophe. But 60,000 people have died roughly, maybe it's 100,000 as the "Haaretz" report suggested. That's out of 2.1 million people. That's 5 percent of the population. That's not genocide. That if they -- if you were to look at the numbers, you know, when you look at previous cases, Cambodia, you know, obviously the Holocaust, the numbers, the percentages are much more staggering that this is -- this is, you know, this may be a case where too many civilians have died, but it's not genocide.

BARTOV: Right. So if one has to, again, we have a tendency to say, is this genocide or not, by saying, does this look like the Holocaust? And obviously what is happening in Gaza doesn't look like the Holocaust. But what we need to do is to see whether what we are watching on the ground conforms to the U.N. definition of genocide and the U.N. definition of genocide says it is the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part as such. It does not necessitate the killing of all the people.

And sometimes I have to say somewhat shocked when people say, well, 50,000, 100,000, that's still no genocide. 17,000 children, that's still no genocide. So just on the -- on the moral level, this is highly disturbing. But legally, what you have to show is that the intent is to destroy the group as a group, not to kill all members of it. And if you remove, forcibly remove a group from a territory and you make it impossible for it to reconstitute itself, and you do that by starving it, by bombing it, by destroying everything there, then that can, and in my opinion does, conform to the definition of genocide.

ZAKARIA: Professor Bartov, when you -- when you say these things, you realize that you are -- there are a lot of people in Israel, there are a lot of people in the United States who support Israel, who feel that you are taking a country that was the victim of a terrorist attack and now blaming it for its actions that it regards as doing it in self- defense. How do you respond to that?

BARTOV: Well, look, I'll say two things about that. First of all, the Hamas attack was a war crime, a crime against humanity, and could be described as a genocidal act, especially when you relate it to the Hamas charter. And there's no way to defend that. However, that does not mean that the country responding to it can respond by carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

A massacre does not justify a massacre. A genocide does not justify a genocide. So it's -- Israel had a right to respond. I think it should have responded. But the response should have been both military and political.

The second thing I would say is that the main argument is that Israel was created as a response, as an answer to the Holocaust, and therefore it's a scandal to say that the country that was created in the wake of the Holocaust is carrying out a genocide, and I think it is a scandal. It's terrible. And for me personally, it's devastating to think that that country that was created as a result, not only as a result, but in large part received international acknowledgment, international support after the Holocaust, when a third of the Jewish people was murdered, now engages in numerous war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions.

That is indeed a scandal. But it cannot make us deny that. Denying it will not stop it.

[10:25:06]

ZAKARIA: Professor Omer Bartov, thank you, sir.

Israel, of course, totally rejects accusations of genocide, and we have reached out to Israeli officials to get a response in the coming weeks.

Next on GPS, why former Treasury secretary Larry Summers is ashamed of the United States of America. I'll ask him next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: "This Law Made Me Ashamed of My Country." That was the headline of a recent op-ed in "The New York Times," written by the former Treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers. He was responding to what he described as the cruelty of the cuts to social services contained in Donald Trump's big beautiful bill which was recently signed into law. And of course, it's not the only economic policy of the Trump administration that could put a strain on the average American. Another recent one is tariffs.

Joining me to talk about all this is the former treasury secretary, Larry Summers. Larry, welcome. Tell us -- you know, tell most people who may not have been following this as carefully as you have, what is the thing that that offends you most, that upsets you most about this what is -- what has just passed?

LARRY SUMMERS, FORMER U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY: So, there's numbers and there's stories, Fareed. The numbers are that this is the biggest cutback in the American social safety net relative to a baseline that we've ever had. If you look at the welfare reform bill that was passed during Bill Clinton's presidency, or if you looked at what happened at the beginning of Ronald Reagan's presidency, the cutback here is a much, much larger cutback. Those are the numbers.

The stories which I heard from my daughters who work in Madison in Northern New Hampshire, really are harrowing. There are stories of people who used to be able to get rides to the hospital for their dialysis treatments, and now won't be able to. Stories of people who are facing discharge, who now will have no place at all to go, and hoping for a homeless shelter.

Stories of people who needed the kind of intensive care that the hospital can provide but can't get it because all the rooms in the hospital are filled with patients who can't be discharged because there's no Medicaid supported rehab facility.

So, it's the combination of the numbers and the human impact that have left me very troubled by this legislation. I think we can be better than this as a nation.

ZAKARIA: And yet, despite these cuts, Larry, it adds trillions of dollars to the -- to the debt. We are now running a deficit that is 6.5 percent of GDP. What do you think -- you know, where does this lead us? Are we going to be able to find markets to fund this kind of deficit spending?

SUMMERS: You've touched on what I think is a very important issue that nobody can know the answer to. How long can the world's greatest debtor remain the world's greatest power? And there are all kinds of reasons why people want to invest in the United States, why they want to invest in treasury bonds.

So, I'm not somebody who's got a track record of being cry wolf about the budget deficit or the accumulation of debt. But here it is. We're in good times, and we're borrowing at such a heavy rate that our debt is going up much faster than our income, in good times when we don't have a major emergency that we have to spend money on. And that's not something we can do forever. And it's the responsibility of those who are stewards of our country to try to put things on a more sustainable path.

ZAKARIA: So, Larry, you look at the deficits. You look at the tariffs and the chaotic way in which they've been put in place. And, you know, they're now -- we're at very substantial tariffs, much higher than Smoot-Hawley on average, highest in a century. Why is there not been much of an effect on the economy or the stock market so far?

SUMMERS: You know, there has been, Fareed, a economist who've studied populist economic policies. And in a way, that's a description of what we're doing. You follow the short run instincts of large numbers of people, and that means tariffs to protect jobs. That means borrowing to finance spending. That means cutting back long-term expenditures.

And what the record -- this has been tried a lot in Latin America, in various European countries. And the general experience is that it looks pretty good in the short run and pretty terrible in the medium to long run.

[10:35:00]

And so, when you eat your seed corn, you can eat well for a while but -- then you have a problem down the road. So yes, I think it is fair to point up that things have been less grave so far than many expected.

But I think to take away a sense that all is well and that these policies are going to produce success, I think, that would be very much a premature conclusion. And we all need to be watching the data very carefully going forward.

ZAKARIA: Larry Summers, always a pleasure. Thank you.

SUMMERS: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the United Kingdom's Conservative Party has often been called the world's most successful political party. It's one of the oldest, if not the oldest. Now, it's barely surviving. What's happened? I'll ask the leader of that party when we come back.

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[10:40:44]

ZAKARIA: Britain's seemingly indestructible Conservative Party, the party of Margaret Thatcher, is floundering. Last year, it suffered the worst election defeat in its nearly 200-year history, upending British politics. Its prospects have only worsened since -- as Tories continue to poll abysmally. Where does the party go from here, and what could this mean for the future of conservatism?

Joining me to discuss this is the leader of the United Kingdom's Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Kemi Badenoch, pleasure to have you on.

KEMI BADENOCH, BRITISH CONSERVATIVE PARTY LEADER: Thank you, Fareed. It's a pleasure to be here.

ZAKARIA: So, this is a kind of fascinating and difficult moment, it seems to me, for the Conservative Party. Oldest political party in the world by some measures. Founded in the 1830s, The most successful political party in the world, people often say. And you're now polling fourth. You're behind Reform, which is Nigel Farage's, you know, kind of Brexit party, as most people would know it. What do you think that tells you?

BADENOCH: So, last year we had our most historic defeat. Many people thought 1997 was the worst it would ever be, and we went down to an unprecedented low number of MPs. We're not polling fourth, we're third, which is still bad. We should be doing a lot better.

But after 14 years, many people were disillusioned with conservatism. And my view, which was my pitch for the leadership, is that we lost our way trying to appeal to too many groups rather than staying rooted in what many would recognize as authentic conservatism.

We were doing a lot of things, you know, raising taxes, for example, which upsets some of our base. Immigration also rose on our watch, which was something that we promised to bring down, and that has had a significant impact on the reputation and brand of the party. So, what I said I would do was try and renew our party and remind people of what conservatives have always been and why we have been as successful as you described.

ZAKARIA: So, when you talk to the people around Donald Trump, they will quite honestly and frankly admit that what they did was a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and transformed it into something quite different. If you look at the sort of Republican Party's mantras, you know, free trade -- you know, look at somebody like Reagan, he was a free trader. He was fairly soft on immigration, did a big amnesty bill, spread democracy abroad. It was -- it was a very open, expansive view of America in the world.

I think it'd be fair to say that Trump represents, in many cases, the opposite of that. He's a very hard line on immigration, very protectionist on trade, does not believe in spreading democracy abroad.

Do you think that you need to transform the Conservative Party to meet the challenge of the, you know, the further right populist parties, or are you going to try to stay true to the roots of the party, in which case, you know, how do you address the challenge from Farage?

BADENOCH: So, we have to stay true. We have to stay true. It was not staying true that was one of the reasons why we lost our way. So, I'm glad you mentioned Ronald Reagan. So, I certainly consider myself a conservative in the mold of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

But we can't just copy and paste what they did in the 1980s. The world has changed. We need to apply the principles that worked then to the situation that we're in now.

I want us to bring us back to a world of realism. And that world of realism is that we believe in free trade, but we need to stop being naive.

I was the U.K.'s trade secretary between 2022 and 2024. A lot of countries are breaking the rules and we keep applying those rules as if everybody is playing fair. And when people aren't playing fair, you don't have free trade.

So, I understand why Donald Trump has taken some of these positions. They are not the positions I would take because as Reagan said, you look back to Smoot-Hawley, the Great Depression was prolonged because of tariffs. He used tariffs in very, you know, specific way.

[10:45:02]

They were very short, very specific. And it was always to try and get other countries to be, you know, to be genuine free traders not mercantilists and certainly not protectionist. So, that was one of the positive things that I think Reagan did.

There are principles that we need to abide by, but we can't just assume that it's 1980 or 1990. The world has changed, and a lot of conservatives need to get very realistic about the dangers of the new world we're in.

ZAKARIA: So, you say you're not a big fan of Donald Trump's trade policy. Fair to say, it sounds like you would not be a fan of the congressional big beautiful bill, which is likely to explode the American deficit.

Do you think the Republican Party is in any sense a Conservative Party anymore? Is it just a populist party?

BADENOCH: I think it still is a Conservative Party, but it has a president who has made promises about what it is he's going to do, which are different from many of the principles I know a lot of Republicans would rather see. But he is the president. But that's -- the big beautiful bill for me is a classic example of the sort of thing that I don't want to see us doing.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Kemi Badenoch, who grew up in Nigeria, tells me why she thinks Nigerians should only come to the United Kingdom if they plan to assimilate.

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[10:51:03]

ZAKARIA: Across the western world, restricting immigration has become a rallying point for conservatives. In the U.S. aggressive ICE raids across the country have become regular occurrences to fulfill President Trump's pledge of mass deportations. In Germany, the million or so Syrian refugees living there have become a red-hot issue.

I'm back now with British Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, who grew up in Nigeria, to talk about immigration and identity politics in the U.K.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: You've spoken a lot about the importance of culture as sustaining a country. And when you look at immigration, you say it's not just numbers that matter. It's where people come from. It's what they do.

BADENOCH: That's right.

ZAKARIA: And you've -- you've had some criticism because people look at you and say, well, wait a minute, she's from Nigeria. So, explain what you mean.

BADENOCH: So, I often say that numbers matter. How many people are coming into a country. You have to make sure that when immigration is sustainable. But culture matters more.

Certainly, in the U.K. there is something that people from around the world are coming there to get. It is that system, you know, enlightenment values, equality under the law, freedom of speech, you know, freedom of association, women having equal rights, the rule of law or legal system. So, much of that is what draws people from around the world. It is what has made us a successful country.

But if you have large numbers of people who don't believe in those things, eventually your country will change. And not all cultures are equal. Some people may not like to hear that, but cultures where there's child marriage, where homosexuals, gay people are treated, you know, criminally, killed. Those are not equal cultures. I will not accept that.

Cultures where women are lesser citizens, those aren't equal cultures. But when we have large numbers of people coming in to a country that does change things. I mean, just today I had a press conference about this grooming gang scandal, which made worldwide news. And it wasn't about Asian men or even just Pakistani men. It was men from a particular region of Pakistan that was very, very detached, even from most Pakistanis itself.

They weren't, you know, people from -- you know, very little in common with people from Kashmir, very sort of peasant farming background, isolated in the mountains. And we discovered that the prevalence of them harming children, raping and sexually abusing children was very high. That's a classic example of a culture that's isolationist, not integrating with the rest of the country. And everybody leaves them alone and acts as if it doesn't matter. Just leave them to be themselves with whatever activities they're carrying on. And the people who were harmed were women and children.

ZAKARIA: Is it religion or culture?

BADENOCH: It's culture. It's very, very much culture. And you can see it in many other countries that are Muslim. They don't tolerate this sort of stuff. They don't tolerate this sort of stuff. And I talk about how we are allowing our tolerance to be exploited. We have people pretending, for instance, to be homosexual so that they can claim asylum, and then they go on to get married and have children. They're abusing the laws that we have.

We have people who go through false conversions. They come and, you know, the parish priest, they're very excited, oh, these Muslims want to convert to Christianity. They convert so that they can claim asylum and say, if I went back to my country, I'd be persecuted.

This is exploitation of a system that was not designed for this sort of thing. You have to be honest about that.

ZAKARIA: So, you say to somebody who's coming from Nigeria and wants to create a little -- mini Nigeria in Britain.

BADENOCH: No, no. That is not -- that is not right. And it wouldn't -- it wouldn't -- Nigerians would not tolerate that. That's not something that many countries would accept. There are many people who come to our country, to the U.K., who do things that would not be acceptable in their countries. It's virtually impossible, for example, to get Nigerian citizenship.

[10:55:00]

I had that citizenship by virtue of my parents. I can't give it to my children because I'm a woman. Yet loads of Nigerians come to the U.K., stay for, you know, a relatively brief period of time, acquire British citizenship. We need to stop being naive. And that's why under my leadership, we now have policies to make it a lot harder to just get British citizenship. It's been too easy. It's basically a conveyor belt.

We want people who have -- who want to come to our country to be net contributors, not people who will emigrate and then need welfare, need social housing. That's not right because they haven't paid into the system. So, there is a lot that I'm changing on policy that is suitable for the times we live in.

We could get away with these things before the era of mass travel, before mobile phones, before small boat crossings. There's just the global mass migration, which we're seeing as very destabilizing. They didn't have that in the 80s and the 70s and the 90s. We need rules that work for today.

ZAKARIA: Kemi Badenoch, pleasure to have you on.

BADENOCH: Thank you, Fareed.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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