Sonia Shah

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.