The Nation, March 8, 2021
We All Move
The science and politics of migration.
By Daniel Immerwahr
“To the memory of Christopher Columbus,” reads the inscription to the
large Columbus Fountain in Washington, D.C., “whose high faith and
indomitable courage gave to mankind a New World.” The monument was
erected in 1912, and one cringes reading those words now. Columbus did
not give mankind a New World. As the statue of the Native American man
kneeling by Columbus’s side suggests, that world was already fully
possessed by humanity.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
THE NEXT GREAT MIGRATION: THE BEAUTY AND TERROR OF LIFE ON THE MOVE
By Sonia Shah
Nearly everywhere European “discoverers” sailed, in fact, they met
people who had discovered those lands long before them. The Americas had
already been discovered; so had Australia and New Zealand and the Arctic
North. Even seemingly remote Pacific islands were inhabited by the time
Europeans arrived. It’s bracing to realize just how few truly empty
places European sailors found—“islands and ice, mostly,” according to
the Yale cartographer Bill Rankin. Not counting the frozen continental
land at the poles, Rankin calculates that the uninhabited areas
discovered by seafaring Europeans amounted to only 0.14 percent of the
world’s land.
How did humans get to all those places? This question tormented European
thinkers for centuries. For Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who
established the system we use today to classify species, God must have
done the work. After creating the Garden of Eden, God then dispersed
humans across the planet, and there they stayed, awaiting European
discovery.
Linnaeus’s theory offered a neat solution but not a durable one. Later
scientists leaned toward the theory that humans must have wandered
aimlessly to all these far-flung locales. How they managed this in the
case of Polynesia was hard to imagine, given the distance of some of its
islands from any large landmass. The prominent 20th-century
anthropologist Ralph Linton insisted that the first Polynesians must
have arrived “as a result of accidental drifts”—seafarers from the east,
blown far off course, who had somehow fortuitously hit land. The
Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl offered a weirder variant on this
theory: A “race of white gods” originally from Eurasia had drifted west
to Polynesia from the Americas. In 1947, to show this could be done, he
built a balsa raft named Kon-Tiki, equipped it with a radio, and allowed
the wind and current to carry him 4,300 miles from Peru until he ran
aground on a coral reef in French Polynesia.
What Linton and Heyerdahl couldn’t believe was the story that the people
of the Pacific themselves told: that they had sailed the wide ocean on
purpose. To prove it, in 1976 a Micronesian navigator named Mau Piailug
set out in an 18th-century-style vessel from Hawaii. He took neither
charts nor modern instruments. Instead, he used wayfinding, a
traditional form of navigation relying on the position of the stars, the
feel of ocean swells, other natural observations, and prodigious feats
of memory. Piailug reached Tahiti in 34 days. In the next three decades
or so, his ship completed nine more voyages, hitting far-off targets
with pinpoint accuracy.
The mystery of Polynesian origins no longer baffles anthropologists. We
have ample evidence to confirm that Piailug was right: Polynesians came
first from Asia, and not by accident. Yet the mindset that obscured this
truth for so long persists. We find it easy to imagine migrations as
one-off accidents: canoes set adrift, Siberian hunters taking a
drastically wrong turn at the Bering Strait. We find it far harder to
imagine people moving intentionally, regularly, and as part of the
natural course of things.
This prejudice against motion is the subject of The Next Great
Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, by the science
journalist Sonia Shah, and it’s one she has had occasion to contemplate
for decades. As a New York–born Australian citizen descended from
Gujaratis, Shah has lived with “an acute feeling of being somehow out of
place.” Perhaps that’s why she has made a career studying insects,
parasites, and bacteria crossing borders, including in her prescient
2016 book Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Ebola and
Beyond. Now, in The Next Great Migration, Shah scales up. It’s not just
microbes that move, she notes, it’s everything: birds, rodents, trees,
continents, and, importantly, humans. Accepting that means learning to
see motion as normal rather than exceptional. And it prepares us to meet
the future that climate change will bring—in which people will have to
migrate as never before—with equanimity and humanity.
The book’s title points toward this future, but Shah is mainly concerned
with showing how common human and animal motion were in the past.
Looking backward is important because, in her view, we have yet to fully
dispel what she calls “the myth of a sedentary world.” Again and again,
scientists have taken fixity as normal and have been surprised to
discover that, in fact, things move. Undergirding this bias toward
stability, Shah argues, is a widely felt sense that plants, animals, and
people have proper places to which they belong. That’s what we’re
feeling when we say things are “out of place.” According to Shah, that
sense of belonging often leads us awry.
Take lemmings. If you know one thing about them, it’s that they are
suicidal, marching maniacally over cliffs into the unforgiving sea. It
is, on the face of it, curious behavior, but in 1924 the British Journal
of Experimental Biology explained it as a population-culling mechanism.
Lemmings reproduce, overgraze, and then, facing starvation, choose death
before dishonor, “ecstatically throwing themselves over the ends of
railway bridges.” The 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness seared
the notion of mass suicide into many tender minds with its footage of
dozens of lemmings tumbling into the Arctic, with only a “small handful”
of their more cautious compatriots surviving.
But White Wilderness was staged, as Shah points out. Those lemmings
didn’t jump; they were pushed. And the reason is that lemmings are not
suicidal. What they are is exuberantly migratory, capable of
adventurously seeking out new locales—even crossing small bodies of
water—in response to population pressures. It is typical of a
“nonmigratory, closed-border world,” Shah writes, that most people
assume lemmings on the move are seeking death when they are actually
seeking new lives.
To be fair, there are many reasons scientists have had such difficulty
comprehending migration. It’s hard to track, say, a monarch butterfly
from Ontario to Michoacán—borders intercede. Before the 19th century, it
was anyone’s guess where birds went in the off-season. The first
English-language treatise on the topic, written by a leading
17th-century physicist, concluded that they went to the moon. It wasn’t
until 1822, when a stork turned up in a German village with a Central
African spear sticking through its neck, that ornithologists truly
grasped the nature and range of these migratory routes. And throughout
the 20th century and into the 21st, the precise routes of many species
remained elusive.
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But Shah sees more than just ignorance afoot. Darker motives peek out
from under respectable scientific theories. Because Linnaeus believed in
a stable biological world, he found it easier to imagine that birds
hibernated in the winter—vanishing to unknown hiding spots—than that
they crossed ecological zones. He also found it easier to believe,
therefore, that humanity was divided into five racial subspecies, each
with its own proper climate and continent.
Racism goes hand in hand, Shah shows, with belief in a sedentary world.
In the 20th century, Madison Grant, a founder of the Bronx Zoo, believed
animals to be hemmed in by their habitats. The alarming exception, for
Grant, was the human, the “most cosmopolitan of animals.” Human mobility
wasn’t a good thing, in his view. As he warned in his best-selling
treatise of 1916, The Passing of the Great Race, the migration of
peoples away from their customary climates would lead to intermarriage
and the enfeeblement of the white race.
Grant’s theories resonated in the United States of the early 20th
century, heavily invested in both racial segregation and empire. Former
president Theodore Roosevelt counted Grant as a close friend, traded
notes with him about various racial groups’ skull shapes, and told him
that “all Americans should be sincerely grateful to you” for writing The
Passing of the Great Race. Grant’s work eventually helped inspire a US
immigration law in 1924 to heavily restrict migration from countries
outside Western and Northern Europe.
Grant also met with the acclaim of the Nazis, who published The Passing
of the Great Race in German. Adolf Hitler read it with enthusiasm,
calling it his “bible” in a letter to Grant. The Nazis obsessed over
biological stability in all realms. They sought, Shah writes, to “banish
‘foreign’ plants from their gardens,” such as the seemingly innocuous
small balsam, which they deemed a “Mongolian invader.” Meanwhile, they
protected “native” species and made killing an eagle punishable by death.
Ultimately, Shah argues, how you view plants and animals relates to how
you view people, and for her this reveals the larger political and
ethical quandaries created by the myth of a sedentary world. You see the
small balsam as an invader, and maybe you feel the same way about the
Poles. You see migrating lemmings as senseless hordes that don’t value
their own lives, and you’re all the more ready to say the same of Syrian
refugees crossing the Mediterranean.
Luckily, there’s never been a better time for lemming revisionism. Two
technologies in particular, Shah notes, have recently transformed our
understanding of migration. The first is the Global Positioning System
tracker. The second is the extraction of DNA from the human petrous
bone, found near the ear. Taking their lessons together, she argues,
should explode the myth of a sedentary world and show how ill-conceived
today’s closed border politics are.
The US Department of Defense began launching GPS satellites in the 1970s
and had a full complement of them in orbit by 1993. Yet civilian
scientists using the system could only calculate position roughly,
because the Pentagon intentionally degraded its publicly available
signal to confound America’s adversaries. Shortly after midnight on May
1, 2000, it stopped doing that, essentially upgrading every GPS user in
the world to a premium account. The subsequent boom in GPS technologies
yielded lightweight, solar-powered tags that scientists could affix to
migrating animals.
Nineteenth-century scientists depended on freak events like storks
impaled with African spears to glimpse migration’s mysteries. Now they
can spear any stork they wish and get spear-cam updates every five
seconds. The results have been “stunning,” Shah writes. The Arctic tern,
despite its name, flies annually from the northern reaches of the planet
to Antarctica, a nearly 60,000-mile journey. Those “native” German
eagles the Nazis were so intent on protecting? You can find some in
Zambia in the winter. Migratory animals move a lot, it turns out, often
in clever, complex, and profoundly weird ways.
Humans do, too. The old idea was that ancient humans had wandered out of
Africa across land bridges and stumbled onto unlikely habitats, spinning
off from the rest of humanity and founding new populations. But that was
before 2015, when the anthropologist Ron Pinhasi and his colleagues
showed that the unusually dense petrous bone could yield a trove of DNA
from archaeological specimens. With improved extraction and DNA
sequencing techniques, the petrous bone has allowed a much clearer view
into the distant past. We no longer think ancient migrants accidentally
reached new locales on onetime, one-way journeys. Rather, it now
appears, they crossed back and forth, migrating in multiple and
many-directional streams. The image of humanity as a tree with diverging
branches, Shah writes, makes sense only if we imagine those branches
frequently curling back and fusing with one another.
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“Populations today almost never descend directly from the populations
that existed in the same place even 10,000 years ago,” the
paleogeneticist David Reich explained. That’s because people mix and
move relentlessly. “I think that’s a very profound insight,” he added.
“It should change the way we see our world.”
It should, but will it? Shah points out a painful irony: Just as Reich’s
fellow scientists were getting the hang of grinding up petrous bones to
reveal how often humans moved in the past, politicians started
frantically erecting fences and walls with the hopes of getting them to
stop doing it today. The year 2015—the same year as the Pinhasi group’s
paper—saw “an unprecedented surge in construction of new border walls,”
Shah writes. Barriers shot up on the European side of the Mediterranean
to block refugees from the Middle East. The new barricades have cut down
on border crossings, though at the cost of making the already hazardous
journey far more so. In 2015, one migrant in 270 died trying to reach
Europe by sea; by 2018, it was one in 52.
Impermeable borders kill, and they also impoverish. Consider Haiti, once
one of the most profitable patches of land on the planet but now one of
the world’s poorest countries. It has suffered tremendously at the hands
of such powerful nations as France and the United States, to the point
where economic fixes are hard to come by.
Yet there is one strategy that has helped: letting people leave. The New
York University economist Bill Easterly pointed out that 82 percent of
Haitian escapes from poverty can be credited to migration to the United
States. Unfortunately, the United States has grown less hospitable to
this and has recently aggressively deported Haitians, in effect throwing
them off the economic ladder. “Why do we need more Haitians?” Donald
Trump reportedly once asked legislators. “Take them out.”
The typical response to nativists like Trump by pro-migration advocates
is to plead exigency. Haitians have good reason to claim status as
political or economic refugees, essentially arguing that they need a new
country because theirs is broken. Shah sympathizes, but her book makes a
different argument. The Next Great Migration softly rejects the idea
that anyone “belongs” anywhere—that anyone has a country in the first
place. By its terms, Haitians should not have to plead that “their”
country is unviable to enter another. To do so would be to give too much
credence to the myth of a sedentary world, where migration is an
exceptional act born of desperation.
For Shah, migration has always been the rule rather than the exception,
but it will become even more common as the planet warms. The low-lying
country of Bangladesh has a population of more than 150 million. If the
seas rise three feet—quite likely to happen this century—a fifth of its
land, on which some 30 million people live, will be submerged. Those 30
million will be forced to move, and when they do, it will matter how
they’re regarded. As “Bangladeshis” perpetually out of place, they will
likely struggle to find safe berth. It would be better, Shah suggests,
to drop the labels, recognize human beings as a migratory species, and
build institutions around that fact.
This is a far-reaching argument, yet when it comes to specifying what
those institutions might look like, Shah has disappointingly little to
say. The sole policy she endorses in her book is the UN Global Compact
for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, a nonbinding pact that the vast
majority of countries voted for in 2018. (The United States voted no.)
The compact enjoins governments to ease migrants’ lives by doing things
like providing them with identity documents and vocational training. But
it does not abolish borders or establish anyone’s right to cross them.
To the contrary, it affirms “the sovereign right of States” to “govern
migration within their jurisdiction,” including “preventing irregular
migration.” It’s hard to see how such an approach could suffice in an
age of climate change or how it could free us from the myth of the
sedentary world.
There are also deeper questions raised by the history Shah explores that
go unaddressed. Racism doesn’t manifest only in border controls, which
Shah discusses at length, but also in colonial conquest, removal,
gentrification, and dispossession, which she says much less about. In
these cases, the forces of racism combine with those of mobility,
feeding off the people-don’t-belong-to-places view that Shah defends. If
there is no connection between societies and land, then what can be said
about English travelers founding a new society on Indigenous land in the
Chesapeake Bay? Or Jewish settlers from the Soviet Union seeking a home
in Palestine? Shah defends her view with gentle metaphors drawn from
nature: Butterflies cross borders, so people should be allowed to do so
as well. But she says less about the tendency of animals, including
humans, to violently dislodge rivals upon entering new areas.
If The Next Great Migration does not resolve such issues, that is
because its aim is more to trigger a conceptual shift. The world isn’t
fixed in place, Shah rightly argues. People, plants, and animals move,
and they do so regularly. The coming years will see more migrants than
ever, and we should not see that in itself as a crisis. Migration is
normal. The lemmings are all right.
Daniel ImmerwahrDaniel Immerwahr is an associate professor of history at
Northwestern University. He is the author of Thinking Small: The United
States and the Lure of Community Development and How to Hide an Empire.
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