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.

That is why all of our genes are mixed up the way they are.

So geneticists know this.

They can see this in our population structure.

And what social science has found is that

the sentiment of xenophobia isn't automatic.

It doesn't happen everywhere where new people come in.

If new people come in and there's no actual barriers to their entry and their assimilation, and those new people are not made conspicuous by, say, policies that say, you have to wear this kind of ankle bracelet, or you have to line up in this line here and we can see you, or something like that.

If there's not those kind of exclusionary policies that make migrants

conspicuous and migrants assimilate into the local culture extremely quickly.

And that is why, you know, yes, migration is, it's only 3.5% of the global population, but we are all touched by it.

Very, very, very few humans today are more than a few generations removed from an act of long distance migration.

For me, it's my parents.

For Donald Trump, it's his parents.

For Steve Bannon, it is just a few generations ago.

So we all have been touched by this in some way.

So the xenophobic backlash, the potential is there.

but we also have an even greater potential for assimilation.

And that I think is in the broader picture, that is actually what happens with most migration is most migrants, we don't notice them.

They are like the blood pulsing through our veins where it's beneath our notice.

It just happens.

And it's part of the way society's function is part of how we have evolved to respond to living on a dynamic earth that has changing conditions all the time.

Yeah, I mean, I actually got into studying migration from the perspective of public health risks.

But my book previous to The Next Great Migration was a book about pandemics.

And after I finished that book, there was a big movement of people across the Mediterranean, people from North Africa and the Middle East trying to get into Europe.

This was around 2015.

And I went there to do some reporting because I thought, well, this is a public health risk, right?

This is like a health security issue with huge movements of people into new places.

That's how you can spark epidemics.

So I went there to do this reporting project.

And what I found was, it was exactly the opposite, that in fact, the people on the move were healthier than the host populations in which they were entering.

They had less communicable diseases, less non communicable diseases, they smoked less, they had less obesity, they had all these great health practices.

And if they get sick, they get

better faster if they get, say, even cancers, they won't die as quickly.

There's all this amazing medical phenomenon that's very well defined, very well documented, and it's called the healthy migrant effect.

And it sort of is what took me on this journey of like, well, why did I immediately think, oh, people are moving.

it's a crisis, right?

It's a migrant crisis.

These two words just go together, right?

They just roll off your tongue.

It's in all the headlines.

If there's migrants, there's a crisis.

Well, it turns out it was exactly wrong.

And so I wanted to kind of investigate why is it that we automatically think of migration as a crisis?

And I think the idea of the healthy migrant effect really goes to the point Zeke was just making about innovation and diversity.

It takes a certain kind of person to make migration work effectively.

Migrants are not people who are kind of the richest of the rich, who have a lot of assets, who have titles, who have this kind of capital that they can't really take with them to new places.

They're also not the poorest of the poor.

They're people who have what's, you know, mobile capital.

They have things they can take with them.

They have skills, education, good health.

You know, these are the things that are portable that you can take with you and what make it possible.

for people to move because, of course, migration is disruptive.

It is very risky to actually accomplish it.

So the people who actually can do it have all of these qualities that contribute to the kinds of economic benefits that Zeke was just talking about.

And that really goes to how you get diversity and innovation in a society.

People move into new places.

They adapt to those places.

They maybe come up with ways of using the local food, new cuisines, new ways of thinking, new ways of housing themselves, new ways of doing technology, all these ways you adapt to a new place.

And then when they move, they bring some of that with them.

And that is kind of the insertion of diversity and innovation into new societies is the dispersal of this innovation that evolves as we adapt to new places.

Migration and innovation, it's all kind of wrapped up in this dynamic tension.

So if we want those benefits, we need to capitalize on all that, minimize the risks, minimize the costs, and capitalize on those benefits.

We're really seeing a backlash to that whole equation right now, which is why we're having this conversation, to be frank, right now.

Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to how we think of our kind of place in nature.

You know, Zeke just pointed out the idea of the caring capacity.

And I think a lot of our anti-immigrant rhetoric does trace back to these biological ideas, these ideas about nature

and which are actually outdated in biology itself.

So ecosystems are not these, they don't have settled carrying capacities either.

Other species are moving around just as much as we are, we're finding.

And they also do create technologies.

If you can, you know, if you think about the web of a spider or the nest of a bird being a kind of technology for those species.

So

We are not exceptional in moving around the planet either.

And this has been happening all along.

So and the reason we can say that is, you know, why are we doing that?

Well, in evolution, we know things that last over time that get dispersed throughout all these different species.

It's because the benefits outweigh the risks.

over time.

And so migration is sort of our adaptive solution to life on a dynamic planet.

And that's not just true for us.

That's true for all these other species.

And we're learning that now because we have things like solar powered GPS tags that we can put on animals and actually see where do they go?

You know, actually study that prospectively.

This is something new.

This is a lot of new knowledge we're getting now.

And what scientists are finding is that

all these other species are moving farther, faster, and in more complex ways than anyone ever thought was possible before.

So, you know, the story of migration is just, it's expensive, and it's not just in humanity.

And so I think we need to rethink

what is our place in nature?

There's this very old idea that goes back to Linnaeus that there is some kind of, you know, a settled order in nature that everything belongs in a certain place, right?

We name things that way.

We say, you know, there's the Japanese maple or the Canadian goose.

You know, we associate the place and the animal as if they're the same thing.

Well, now we know these animals are moving all over the place.

They don't sit in certain fixed places on the planet at all.

And that's true for us, too.

We've all been moving all along.

So we need to kind of rethink our ideas about nature, I think, and our place in nature as well.

Yeah, there's no doubt about it.

Migration is disruptive.

It's a change and all change is difficult.

You have to adapt to it.

You have to make allowances for it.

I think if we accepted migration is a part of nature, it's part of the human experience, it's part of innovation and resilience, it's how we secure that for our future generations.

then we could look at migration as an investment and we could say, well, let's try to minimize the disruptions so we can maximize the benefits because this is part of what is happening.

This is part of our society.

It's part of our future.

And I think there's ways to do that.

And, you know, I think a lot can be done with pace.

the pace of migration, the direction of migration.

These are even the potential large scale if you, you know, meter the pace.

So if you create more avenues for legal migration right now, for example, people are moving because the climate's changing, you know, desertification.

If your fields are drying up and your kids are not going to be able to make money farming anymore, then it's likely that they're going to start looking for

looking to move first to a city and then maybe to another country.

That is how migration unfolds.

Well, if we know that's coming, we know that's happening, but there is literally nowhere on earth where it is legal to move because of climate change.

We don't have that infrastructure at all.

So that means that what happens instead is that you have people kind of trapped in places where

conditions are changing too fast for them to adapt to and they need to leave to secure their futures and that of their children, but they have no pathway for that.

So what happens?

Well, they wait for a disaster, right?

A big storm comes or a dust storm, dust bowl happens or something like that happens and then everyone has to move all at once.

And you have these mass movements that are the most disruptive of all.

So by not creating those avenues beforehand, we actually are making migration more disruptive.

And I think, in fact, what we're seeing right now is that there are enough political regimes that find disruptive migration to be a good problem to have because this is something they can crack down on.

They can make it look like they're really doing something.

And it takes everyone's attention away from the actual underlying problems, which are really quite difficult to solve.

I think we might see some broad, like right now we're seeing about 80% of other species are on the move.

They're moving into new places and that's in sync with the changing climate.

They're moving into higher latitudes or moving higher up into higher altitudes.

And that is so that they can stay within the climates that they are adapted to.

So, you know, that's not how humans are moving yet.

But I think it takes time.

And I think right now we have a lot of barriers, political barriers that say, well, you can't move for this reason and you can't move here and you can't move there.

But if we were to sort of start to overcome some of that, and I think policy works to some extent to deter migration.

We have more walls on international borders today than at any time.

It has more of a deflecting effect than a deterrent effect.

People still want to move and they still will move.

It's like throwing a boulder in a stream, right?

Like people find a way to go around.

And a lot of times people will take more dangerous routes.

So like Zeke was saying, we don't have a system.

We really don't have a system for moving people around the planet in a safe, orderly and dignified fashion.

We could create that if we wanted to and things would be quite different, but.

That's not what we have.

So we you know, the system we have now is about, well, let's make sure people don't move or don't move too much or don't not these people that these people don't move.

Right.

So all of these barriers we erect actually can make migration far more dangerous.

But I think what we'll see in the longer picture is, you know, in the past, we've seen big movements that are going east to west.

Generally, human populations have been flowing that way.

But if we were to sync up with climate change, we would start seeing more South to North movements.

That is what we're seeing in other species.

Humans are animals like other species.

So, you know, I expect over time that that's what's going to be happening in the kind of bigger picture for human migration too.

I mean, I think we all are migrants in some way, except for very, very few of us who are still in parts of Africa and have stayed there since the dawn of humanity.

Even when we first walked out of Africa, actually, we walked into Europe and Asia and North America.

There already were other humans there, other human species that are now extinct.

So even that was a migration.

That wasn't just we populated the empty earth.

No, there were already other humans there, Neanderthals, others.

And we intermingled with them, too.

A lot of people today still have Neanderthal genes because that's what we do as humans.

We mix.

So migration has been complicated from the very beginning.

We now know from paleogenetics that...

You know, people walked out of Africa, came into North America, and then they didn't just stay there.

They went back to Asia.

They went back to Europe.

They went back to Africa.

They came out again.

You know, it's been this complex story from the very beginning.

And so I think what we're seeing is just it's going to continue because that's just how it has been.

We have new drivers today because of climate change.

So like I said, I think that's going to change directionality to some extent.

But

I think the idea that, well, there was this idea we all grew up with in my generation that we kind of walked out of Africa and then we populated the planet and then we just stayed still for thousands and thousands of years until sort of modern travel made it easy to move around like airplanes and ships and stuff.

But what we now know is that we didn't need any of that.

We were moving all along and we have evidence of that in our bodies, in our DNA.

We all carry that around with us.

So, yes, migration is at any one moment in time.

It's a small number of us that are moving around, but we are all really touched by migration in a very profound way.

And I think the reason why is because it's been so critical to how you have innovation, how you have resilience, how you have diversity.

This is why so many conservationists are actually trying to build bridges for other species so that they can move into new places.

Because we know that if they can move into new places, we can secure biodiversity in the future and we want that.

We should want that same thing for us.

Human diversity, that's what gives us resilience too.

So, you know, again, I mean, this is, I don't know if this is the specific answer to your question, but it kind of gets back to the same sort of overall theme, which is that migration is not the crisis.

Migration is the solution.

And for, you know, if you go back to, well, what is the crisis?

It's not a migration crisis.

It's a crisis of welcome.

It's a crisis of,

the fact that we don't have any system to actually get people around into places where we can take advantage of all the benefits that they bring.

You know, I always think about I think it was the 1980s and the Republican primary debates.

And I think it was it was Reagan and maybe it was Bush also.

Anyway, they were they were arguing with each other over who was more whose policy was more welcoming to immigrants.

And this was in living memory.

I was alive then.

And so things can change quite rapidly politically, I think.

And I think what's quite interesting about the current moment is a lot of people who thought that they wanted to get rid of immigrants because they thought they were these villains that we've been told that they are by these political leaders.

And then they see, well, masked men have come into my community and they have abducted this woman who I was part of my everyday life, who I actually really enjoyed and was my neighbor.

This person who ran the donut shop or this person who was my kid's teacher or this person who used to, you know,

be my coworker.

And these are members of the community.

And now suddenly they are kind of outed as, oh, you're a migrant?

We didn't know.

We thought you were just one of us, right?

But there's a lesson in there.

And it's a very, very cruel way to make this lesson.

It's a brutal policy that we're seeing unfold here in the United States.

But what is happening in a lot of these communities is people are realizing, well, Mike, these migrants, these immigrants, they're everywhere.

They are part of our neighborhood, they're part of our community, they're part of our culture.

And I would, I would hope that that that is that that profound experience to know that migration is not something that happens elsewhere.

It's not these others, these aliens, these

You know, people who look different from us, who we can keep it or that would never assimilate into our communities.

No, that's not who they are.

And we are now seeing that because our communities are actually being torn apart by these, you know, by this deportation secret police kind of regime that we're seeing here, at least here in the United States, is coming up.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot we can do to kind of think about absorptive capacity.

Where are there places where we need more people?

Where are there places where there's enough housing to accommodate people quickly, enough jobs, enough schools, enough, you know, all of those things.

We can kind of evaluate places in that way, and we can encourage our migrants to go to those places.

I mean, some of it happens naturally, like Zeke says.

because it's in migrants' interests themselves to go to those places.

But sometimes it doesn't.

And, you know, policymakers could address that.

We could make migration safe, humane and dignified by giving people papers, by giving people legal channels.

If they had more legal channels to move, then they wouldn't move in disaster circumstances.

They wouldn't move all at once in the most disruptive way possible to the closest place that they can get to.

as opposed to maybe somewhere else which would make more sense and would have more absorptive capacity.

These are all things that could be evaluated by policymakers and incentives could be put into place to move migration in ways that we will capitalize on the benefits and minimize the disruptions.

I think, you know, the UN has come up with a lot of great ideas on how to do this.

There's a global compact on migration that several countries have signed.

This is not rocket science.

This is like basic policymaking.

But like Zeke said, we have to change the way we think about migration.

And I think, you know, economically, yeah, we can think about it instrumentally.

Like, do we need migrants?

Yes, we do.

Let's turn the faucet on.

But I think we can even go deeper than that and just say migration is...

part of how we are resilient.

It is part of how we have diversity and innovation.

And it is a deep human impulse and it's not going anywhere.

So let's just adapt to it.

Let's just, you know, the same way we have children and adapt to that, even though it is hugely disruptive to have children.

It's an investment in the future.

We do it anyway.

Yeah, I mean, I think we need to turn the whole conversation around, which is don't talk about migration at all.

Talk about the problem of people being trapped.

When people are trapped in places, we are all suffering in a lot of different ways.

We're not getting the innovation, we're making people more vulnerable to climate catastrophes, we're not getting the diversity, we're not getting the new workers we need, all those things, right?

So let's talk about, let's report on

all the terrible things that happen when people are trapped, when people cannot move.

So that's a new way to get at this question.

Instead of focusing on, let's look at the migrants.

Are they good?

Are they bad?

Are they gang members?

Or are they going to take our jobs?

Or are they actually nice people?

Let's judge them.

No, forget about that.

Let's look at a whole different problem, which is what happens when people cannot migrate?

Go to those places where people are trapped, where people want to move and see what is happening there.

That is a completely underreported story.

And that really gets to the heart of what Zeke and I are both talking about, that people being trapped in a place is much worse than letting them move around.

Thank you.

This was really fun.

Food waste has about five times the greenhouse gas footprint of the entire aviation industry.