The Next Great Migration: The Story of Movement on a Changing Planet

by Sonia Shah

In 2015 over 15 million people were forced to flee their countries, more than at any time since the Second World War. For every person who crossed an international border, there were more than twenty-five others whose peregrinations had yet to impinge on one of those invisible lines.

By 2045 the spread of deserts in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to compel 60 million inhabitants to pick up and leave. By 2100 rising sea levels could add another 180 million to their ranks.

By describing peoples and species as “from” certain places, we invoke a specific idea about the past. It traces back to the eighteenth century, when European naturalists first started cataloging the natural world. Assuming that peoples and wild creatures had stayed mostly fixed in their places throughout history, they named creatures and peoples based on those places, conflating one with the other as if they’d been joined since time immemorial.

This stillness at the center of our ideas about the past necessarily casts migrants and migrations as anomalous and disruptive.

The idea of migrants as a national security threat,3 rushing over the land like a tsunami, captured the imagination.

In fact, as any migration expert could have shown, migration was just the opposite: an unexceptional ongoing reality. And while environmental changes shaped its dynamics,

The possibility that Europe, with its total population of over 500 million, could absorb another million people went mostly unexplored.

The idea that certain people and species belong in certain fixed places has had a long history in Western culture.

Skin color back then was more like hair color is today, a noticeable but socially meaningless detail.

But with publishers and exhibitors lining their pockets with the most salacious and sensational depictions of foreign peoples, European perceptions of the oddity of foreigners steadily grew.

Most eighteenth-century explorers—despite having made the journey across oceans and continents themselves—could not imagine that anyone else might have done the same.

In Linnaean taxonomy, nature existed in discrete units, defined by biological borders. Each creature and people survived in its own place, separate and isolated from the others.

Many of the billions of birds that migrate21 across seas and continents every year fly under cover of darkness.

The lemmings hadn’t committed suicide. They’d been murdered.

“Let them call you racists,”62 Bannon said in a speech to an antimigrant party in France. “Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor … History is on our side.”

Still, confronted with the new genetic evidence,31 many scientists felt compelled to hang on to the myth of Linnaean borders between us.

People who decide to migrate are not a random cross-section of the population, like those found perusing the aisles of a grocery store or wandering around a train station. Whether it’s money, skills, connections, or stamina, migration requires capital. Those with no capital, such as the very poor, cannot easily afford to undertake it. Nor can those whose capital derives from land ownership, aristocratic lineage, or titles. They have wealth and status, but they can’t take it with them. Instead, social scientists have found, migrants tend to be the kind of people who don’t have big bank accounts or landholdings or titles but are rich in good health, skills, education, and social connections with people in other places. Their capital is portable. Demographically, in other words, they’re the kind of people who are “the bedrock of successful communities,” McLeman notes. They’re working people from the middle classes, younger and better educated than their nonmigrant peers, and more likely to hail from societies on the middle rungs of economic development. They’re healthier, too.