We are all migrants: author Sonia Shah on our ancient instinct to move and survive
'Migration itself is not the crisis. It's part of the solution. It's how we adapt to change,' says journalist
*Originally published on September 10, 2020.
Leaving one's homeland — for health, safety, or a better future — is a part of most family histories.
Yet we live in an era that sees migration as exceptional and troubling. We equate it with crisis: sometimes for the migrants, themselves, sometimes for their destination countries. Stricter immigration policies and toughened borders have been one result.
Science writer and investigative journalist Sonia Shah acknowledges migration can bring risks and disruptions: "Those exist. That's true. But over our entire evolutionary past, what we also know is that the benefits have outweighed those risks. Because we kept doing it again and again and again."
Her book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, examines the contentious science and deep history of human movement: a past that she says we need to acknowledge.
Until recently, we assumed that Homo sapiens walked out of Africa into uninhabited continents. But the discovery of ancient DNA has revealed a more complex genetic past. Those vacant continents were actually inhabited by other branches of the human family, with whom we fought and mated.
"People walked out of Africa into the Americas, and then...walked back into Europe, back into Asia. We walked into very remote, forbidding landscapes like the Tibetan Plateau, paddled out into the featureless ocean, and to reach remote islands in Polynesia," marvels Shah.
In short, our migratory past is as old as humanity itself. So how has migration come to be cast as exceptional and disruptive?
Deeply-rooted influence
Shah examines the influential theories of 18th century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, known as the father of modern taxonomy.
As a Christian, he saw God's hand at work, placing plant and animal species exactly where they belonged. Linnaeus believed humans were also static. Without evidence, he named white Europeans as the top of a racial and moral global hierarchy.
Linnaeus, Shah writes, believed "people who lived on different continents were biologically foreign to one another, a claim that would fuel centuries of xenophobia and centuries of racial violence."
Even though "race is not encoded in our biology — it's a social construct," Shah says this hierarchical belief gained further with the deplorable Eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Its adherents included public figures and scientists. They warned of "biological catastrophe" around racial and ethnic mixing.
In the 1920s, Eugenicists "formed a committee that drafted (U.S.) immigration policy...and that became our central racial quote immigration law...for four decades," says Shah, an American.
'Migration is not the crisis'
As the child of Indian immigrants, she found delving into this history during the Trump era, marked by nativist immigration policies, to be "very difficult. What I found pretty clearly is that these are deep-rooted ideas, and values, and social movements."
From her research, Shah concludes that migration is neither rare, nor inherently good or bad. Instead, she says it is a "shared reality" to be acknowledged. If we accept migration is normal, she believes host societies can better manage its pace, safety, and direction.
In fact, the real threat around migration comes from climate change. It's bringing consequences ranging from global pathogens like COVID-19, to widespread hunger and drought. It is spurring on species migration, including our own.
"Migration itself is not the crisis. It's part of the solution. It's how we adapt to change," says Sonia Shah.
"This is how we survive on a dynamic, changing planet. It's how we've done it for all these years."
*This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey.
