Sonia Shah

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.