Sonia Shah

I think the most striking thing about the present moment is that migrants are being scapegoated for a lot of our social problems, economic problems in a way that does feel quite new.

But what isn't new is the migration that's been happening kind of all along.

I don't know that we really track migration that well.

There's a lot of different flows of migration and we only really look

carefully at a very few of those.

So I don't feel confident in the way we assess global migration.

I don't think we have a very good idea of how much people are moving around the planet.

But from what we can tell through history, we're looking from the very beginning when humans first walked out of Africa, we have been moving all along.

in complex ways to and fro movements across mountains, across oceans, across deserts.

And we've been doing it since, you know, with Stone Age technology, people walked up into the heights of the Himalayan mountains where there wasn't enough oxygen during, you know, thousands of years ago, people paddled out of Asia into the featureless expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

multiple times using Stone Age navigation technology.

And that's how, you know, that's kind of been the human experience from the beginning.

So what's happening now is we are moving in somewhat new ways because of climate change and other factors.

But I don't think there's any really good evidence that we're moving a lot more in a way that's commensurate with the backlash we are seeing to migration today.

I think the media and political leaders that are really highlighting migration as sort of the cause of a lot of our problems, you know, in a way that that's easier for them to do than to actually address some of those underlying problems.

Yeah, well, I want to respond to something Zeke just said, actually, which is, I think it's true that there is often resistance to migration, especially if you make migrants conspicuous.

But if you don't make migration conspicuous, then people assimilate very quickly.

And we can see this in our biological genetic structure, that whenever human groups have

you know, dispersed, isolated, become separate, culturally distinct, but then they come together again.

If they overlap, if their territories overlap, they mix, they meld, they make families together.