Zeke Hernandez

Hi, yeah, great to be here.

Yeah, I think I want to start by re-emphasizing something Sonia mentioned, that people have always moved.

And really, as a fraction of the world population, migration, there's no indication it's any bigger than it has been, at least in our modern era.

For example, most people don't realize that immigrants are only about 3%, 3.5% of the world population.

Another way to say that is about 97% of people never move.

across countries.

And so we're talking really about something that in the grand scheme of things is not that large.

It's just that there are waves of time under which, for political reasons, migrants are, whether it's scapegoated or resisted or not.

And so this moment to me is very similar than about 100 years ago in the early 1900s with the pseudoscience of eugenics

and other supposed national security concerns, there was kind of a wave of resistance to immigrants.

To give an example from the United States, in 1924, the US passed its most restrictive immigration law in history as a conclusion to a moment that's very, very similar politically to the moment that we're living right now.

And then in 1965, sort of the borders were opened again and we went through a wave of sort of modern mass migration.

That has been true in many, many other countries.

To me, what feels a little bit different historically this time is that there seems to be more of a wave of many, many countries migrating.

wanting to be more restrictive about immigration under the argument that immigrants are creating sort of economic and social problems, even though the evidence doesn't hold that up.

So there's a big discrepancy between what politicians are claiming and what the facts say that seems to be more coordinated globally than right now.

And what's ironic about that, which is unlike any other moment in recent history, is that our populations are shrinking.

Birth rates have gone below replacement in most immigrant receiving countries, whereas in the past we were receiving immigrants as the natural population was also increasing.

So ironically, countries need immigrants more than ever, but they're resisting them in a uniform way more than in the recent decades.

Yeah, honestly, no, I don't think so.