What’s in it for me? Learn how migration is integral to life on Earth.
All along the US border with Mexico, American security patrols scour the desert for unauthorized border crossings.
Every year, thousands of people are arrested for trying to cross this man-made divide.
Some have crossed oceans, only to brave months trekking through the jungles of South and Central America.
They take this risk for a chance at a new, better life free of war, famine, and poverty.
And yet, the author argues, these resourceful, determined, and desperate human beings are called “criminals” and “rapists” by those in power.
This isn’t new.
Throughout modern history, politicians, scientists, and naturalists have tried to paint the migrant as different, lowly, and dangerous – someone, or something, to be kept out with borders and walls.
These blinks reveal how this perspective came about, and the benefit of building a future with safer migration – safer for both human beings and other migratory species that share our planet.
In these blinks, you’ll learn how the botanist Linnaeus planted the seeds of modern racism; why two American eugenicists made the US hostile for migrants; and how wildlife “corridors” can help animals move great distances in developed countries.
It took a long time for people to understand that nature is always on the move.
We know that animals go on great migratory journeys.
In fact, every autumn, eels from European ponds swim across the Atlantic all the way to the Sargasso Sea to breed.
Millions of monarch butterflies famously migrate three thousand miles from Canada to overwinter in Mexico.
But for centuries, people didn’t believe in migration, or even understand the concept.
They assumed that animals were sedentary and remained in the region where they had been discovered.
The key message here is: It took a long time for people to understand that nature is always on the move.
The idea of a sedentary natural world stems from the eighteenth century, when European naturalists began to catalog animal and plant species.
Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, dubbed “The Father of Modern Taxonomy,” is mostly responsible for this misunderstanding.
Linnaeus believed that there had only been one initial migration throughout history – when all creatures from the Garden of Eden ventured out into an empty, virgin world.
There, they settled into permanent habitats where they remained for thousands of years, waiting to be discovered.
This belief in nature’s sedentariness lasted well into the twentieth century.
Even when evidence of migration was discovered, it was viewed as abnormal and destructive behavior.
Here’s an example.
The English zoologist Charles Elton helped popularize the myth that lemmings “commit suicide” by leaping into the sea.
In his 1924 paper in The British Journal of Experimental Biology, he claimed they did this as a form of population control.
But in actuality, the lemmings were migrating to find new habitat – something that often involves swimming across bodies of water.
It was during World War II that proof of animal migration finally started to make its mark.
This was thanks to a new technology of the time, radar, which was used to detect enemy planes and ships.
One night in March 1941, British radar operators picked up a huge formation of flying objects across the English Channel.
Investigating fighter pilots found nothing but the silent skies.
So, dumbfounded, military officials decided that these spooky signals were the ghosts of fallen soldiers, which they called “radar angels.
” But British ornithologist David Lack had a more plausible theory: he claimed that, rather than angels, these signals came from migrating birds – to be precise, starlings.
And, of course, David Lack would be proven right.
Along with this discovery, Lack had hit on a much broader truth: Nature is a great traveler.
Carl Linnaeus helped cement racist ideas about human origins.
Born in 1707 to a poor family in southern Sweden, Carl Linnaeus wanted to understand the order of all things that God had created.
He thus established a two-name classification system for every living species.
This system, which we still use today, sorts animals and plants into their respective categories.
Take our own Latin name as an example – homo sapiens.
The first word denotes the species’ general category – in this case, homo, which is Latin for “man.
” The second word denotes the species’ specific characteristic – in this case, sapiens, which is Latin for “wise.
” Though he is remembered for his achievements in natural science, Linnaeus also contributed some deeply harmful ideas to eighteenth-century Europe.
The key message here is: Carl Linnaeus helped cement racist ideas about human origins.
Linnaeus had always been comfortable sorting animals and plants into their different families.
But when it came to the specific question of human origins and race, he was reluctant to do this – at first.
Eighteenth-century Europe was a time of imperial expansion.
This expansion brought Europeans face-to-face with newly colonized people across Africa, Asia, and the New World.
As they pushed into new territory, the imperialists characterized indigenous people as primitive, savage, and strange.
This put Linnaeus in a bind.
Arguing that indigenous people had different origins from Europeans would go against the biblical story of Adam and Eve, something Linnaeus considered sacrilege.
Alternatively, how could he admit that these same people shared a common ancestor when Europeans considered them to be primitive?
He finally wrote in the tenth edition of his book on taxonomy, Systema Naturae, that human beings were composed of different subspecies.
He classified the people of Asia as homo sapiens asiaticus, those of the Americas homo sapiens americanus, and those of Europe homo sapiens europaeus.
He considered the people of Africa, homo sapiens afer, the most distinct.
Linnaeus formalized a whole belief system that gave European colonists authority to proceed with their endeavors.
After all, they now had proof that they were a separate and superior race.
By casting colonized peoples as fundamentally different, the imperial powers could argue that they should be considered subhuman – undeserving of the same moral and legal treatment as white Europeans.
Rather than being part of a common story linked by migration, these different human subspecies, Linnaeus argued, had developed in isolation, just like all animals and plants.
He would never know how wrong he was.
In the US, two eugenicists spread a racist, anti-immigration ideology.
Imagine New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Immigrants and natives blended into what was called “the melting pot” of cultures.
In fact, a poem by Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” was cast on a plaque to welcome immigrants to the United States.
It sits at the Statue of Liberty’s feet and its most memorable line is, “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free .
.
.
”.
Not everyone, however, shared this sentiment.
The key message here is: In the US, two eugenicists spread a racist, anti-immigration ideology.
Two prominent aristocrats from New York City, conservationist Madison Grant and the philanthropist Henry Fairfield Osborn, opposed this “melting pot.
” Both men resented how waves of immigration had transformed New York City and eroded their own cultural dominance in society.
Each man would take his own path to popularizing eugenics, which had been steadily growing since the late nineteenth century.
Eugenicists like Grant and Osborn believed that specific qualities, like mental quickness and moral fortitude, were inherited based on a person’s race.
They argued that these positive qualities established in white European families would be watered down by genes from other, inferior races.
Both Grant and Osborn tried to illustrate the differences they believed existed between white European settlers and people from elsewhere.
First, Osborn, who was the president of the American Museum of Natural History, arranged an exhibit called “Races of Man.
” This exhibit highlighted the supposed distinctions among the different “races.
” Then, Madison Grant published an influential book called The Passing of the Great Race.
In it, he set out a racial hierarchy, with Nordic Europeans at the top.
It received praise from Adolf Hitler himself, who wrote to Grant saying, “The book is my bible.
” Grant and Osborn would go on to successfully lobby the American government to implement stricter immigration laws.
Calvin Coolidge, the president at the time, and who was quoted saying, “America must be kept American,” signed a bill they helped design.
Eventually, the eugenicists’ racist views were revealed as unsubstantiated.
They were unable to produce any scientific proof that “racial mixing” had any negative effects.
No matter how hard they looked for mental and physical degeneration among migrant communities, they found only normal, healthy human beings, no better or worse than anyone else.
Anti-immigration sentiment extended to nature.
The early twentieth century saw US borders begin to close to immigrants and minorities that were being persecuted in Europe and Russia.
At the same time, “alien” animal and plant species found themselves the target of the same scrutiny.
The key message here is: Anti-immigration sentiment extended to nature.
During the early twentieth century, a widespread belief among scientists was that newly introduced species disrupted established ecosystems.
This mostly stemmed from an experiment conducted in 1932 by a Russian biologist, Georgii Frantsevich Gause.
In his experiment, Gause introduced two different species of yeast into the same sugary solution – Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces kefir.
At first, both species flourished.
But then, one species started to take over.
The declining yeast was poisoned by the other species’ by-product, ethyl alcohol.
This phenomenon, called Gause’s Law, illustrated for naturalists that there was no such thing as “sharing” between similar species.
Instead, they believed that non-native species were aliens that would cause great harm to similar indigenous flora and fauna.
In line with these assumptions, zoologists began to worry about “invasive” species taking over ecosystems around the world.
In Europe, the arrival of the American grey squirrel troubled naturalists.
And across the ocean, English starlings caused concern.
In fact American government officials considered the starlings, “bad citizens” and “undesirable aliens.
” More dramatically, the Nazis began eliminating non-native plant species from German gardens.
They believed the plants were a threat to German culture.
The innocuous flowering herb Impatiens parviflora provides a great example.
Dubbing it the “Mongolian invader,” the Nazis ordered this herb to be exterminated from all German gardens.
This attitude toward “invasive” species is still with us today.
In Hawaii, centuries of human and animal migration have introduced many new plant species to the island.
In 2010, botanists attempted to destroy “immigrant” species in carefully marked plots, hacking away at trees, shrubs, and ferns.
Eventually, they gave up.
Not only was it impossible to rid the jungle of all new plant species, it was unnecessary, too.
Unlike the two yeast species in the sugary test tube, Hawaii’s new plant species had found an equilibrium with the established flora.
Finally, botanists accepted that they were there for good.
And they allowed the jungle to rebuild with a mixture of native and “alien” plants living in harmony.
Malthusian fears about overpopulation encouraged anti-immigration sentiment and human rights abuses.
In eighteenth-century England, the cleric Thomas Robert Malthus made an extraordinary claim.
He suggested that, rather than helping the poor, the government should allow disease and poverty to take their toll on them.
Otherwise, he believed, they would cause overpopulation that would lead to more poverty and famine for everyone else.
For centuries, Malthus would influence political thinkers with this pronouncement, with lasting and harmful consequences.
Here’s the key message: Malthusian fears about overpopulation encouraged anti-immigration sentiment and human rights abuses.
In the twentieth century, there was an especially grisly event that turned many biologists into modern-day Malthusians.
But rather than human overpopulation, it affected animals.
During World War II, soldiers were briefly stationed on St.
Matthew Island, a high, rocky slab in the Bering Strait.
To provide a backup food source for these soldiers, the American Coast Guard captured twenty-nine reindeer from hundreds of miles away and transported them to the island.
After the war, the remaining reindeer were left behind on an island with no natural predators and an abundance of lichen to eat.
Researchers came back to the island in 1963 and found that the initial twenty-nine reindeer had become six thousand.
But, when they returned a few years later, the researchers found only bleached skeletons.
The thousands of reindeer had trampled and eaten the lichen until there was nothing left to sustain them.
The incident at St.
Matthew Island influenced biologists, who began to wonder if human overpopulation would lead to the same fate.
One biologist, Stanford professor Paul R.
Ehrlich, wrote an apocalyptic book called The Population Bomb.
In it, he stoked fears about an impending population explosion and recommended drastic measures to stop it from happening.
For the United States, he suggested strict immigration control.
For India, he pushed for men with three or more children to be sterilized.
And for the rest of the world, he believed some poor countries should be left to starve – similar to Malthus’s view.
In 1975, the Indian government adopted Ehrlich’s recommendation.
Men with more than three living children would be sterilized, and pregnant women with more than three children would have to undergo abortions.
This policy led to over two hundred deaths from botched vasectomies and other human rights abuses.
To compound the tragedy, neither Ehrlich nor Malthus was remotely correct in their fears.
In fact, allowing the poor to attain prosperity has led to a proven decline in birth rates.
DNA proves human beings are closely related, and have always been migrants.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton celebrated the success of the Human Genome Project in a ceremony at the White House.
By mapping the roughly twenty thousand genes in the human genome, the complete set of human DNA, researchers found that there was barely any genetic difference among members of our species.
In fact, they discovered that only 0.
1 percent of our DNA differs from any one person to the next.
The key message here is: DNA proves human beings are closely related, and have always been migrants.
At the ceremony, President Clinton announced that human beings were 99.
9 percent the same, regardless of their ethnicity.
This provided definitive proof that we all share a common ancestor from East Africa, and that very little separates any of us from this ancestor.
But even after this discovery, the idea that human beings evolved into separate races persisted.
Though we share 99.
9 percent of our DNA, the 0.
1 percent is still significant, certain scientists claimed.
In a New York Times op-ed, the biologist Armand Marie Leroi wrote that “genetic data show that races clearly do exist.
” And at a conference featuring the race scholar Dorothy Roberts, one attendee argued that, while dogs and wolves are nearly identical at the genetic level, the difference between a dog and a wolf is huge.
This 0.
1 percent difference was enough to keep the old Linnaean belief of separate races alive.
In fact, for white supremacists, it was proof that the “races” developed in isolation after an initial migration out of Africa.
Finally, an ancient discovery shattered this illusion around race.
The discovery?
The DNA inside an ancient petrous bone.
This is the part of the skull that covers the inner ear’s tissue and tunnels.
Since it’s the hardest and most durable bone in the human body, scientists were able to find viable ancient DNA for the first time.
This DNA revealed that ancient peoples migrated everywhere and never stopped.
After they’d traveled from Africa to Eurasia and the Americas, some returned to Africa, leaving their descendants with Eurasian genes.
The story contained in the ancient petrous bone is one of continuous movement – ancient people around the world mixing and merging.
Physical differences, like skin color or height, are simply the shifting modifications of the human body reacting to different environments.
Rather than homo sapiens, a more fitting name for us would be homo migratio.
The refugee crisis provoked a reactionary response based on lies and exaggeration.
In September 2015, there was an image that caused grief around the world: a little Syrian boy, drowned, on a beach in Turkey.
It also alerted the world to the scale of a new refugee migration, from war-torn and climate-ravaged countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
It didn’t take long for this moment of empathy to wear off, however.
This is the key message: The refugee crisis provoked a reactionary response based on lies and exaggeration.
Escaping the Syrian civil war or climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, refugees have fled to Europe in droves.
By 2015, over a million people had found their way to Europe – mostly to Germany, but to other countries, too.
As they arrived, a reactionary backlash arose.
Nationalist sentiment drove political decisions across the West.
Populist leaders promised harsh anti-migrant measures.
The UK voted to leave the European Union, partly due to the perception of the EU’s, “open borders.
” In the US, Donald Trump was elected on a wave of similar nativist sentiment.
Then, during the first few days of January 2016, women in Germany reported assaults by newly-arrived migrants from the Middle East and Africa that took place on New Year’s Eve.
Media across the EU targeted these migrants, suggesting that they were especially inclined to assault women.
In Poland, one magazine cover read “The Islamic Rape of Europe,” with an image of black and brown hands ripping an EU-print dress off the body of a blond, white woman.
Soon after, media outlets aired a video of migrants who were alleged to be celebrating that one of Germany’s oldest churches was going up in flames.
By this point, anti-immigrant feeling was raging.
But not everyone bought into these stories.
One National Public Radio journalist examined the reports from New Year’s Eve.
He found that while the attacks had occurred, they weren’t necessarily exceptional for New Year's Eve in Germany.
In fact, they were part of an ongoing sexual violence crisis at a global level.
The difference in 2016 was that the attackers weren’t the usual type of sexual predators who roamed the country.
This same NPR reporter discovered something else, too.
The German church hadn’t been gleefully, and purposefully set ablaze by migrants.
Rather, Syrian refugees had been celebrating a ceasefire in Syria’s civil war when a firework accidentally landed on the church’s scaffolding.
There had been no “migrant crime wave,” nor an “Islamic Rape of Europe” – simply a determination to find perpetrators among newly-arrived migrants.
In short, just plain old racism and xenophobia.
Migration, for both nature and humanity, can and should be facilitated safely.
In February 2018, Russian cosmonauts attached an antenna to the International Space Station.
The antenna’s purpose was to scan the Earth’s surface.
It would pick up movement from tags fitted onto hundreds of species on Earth.
This data revealed an intricate network of migration pathways wrapped around the planet – by land, sea, and air.
It also revealed a more cardinal truth: migration plays a fundamental role in life on Earth.
The author thus argues that we need to make it easier for humans and animals to migrate.
The key message here is: Migration, for both nature and humanity, can and should be facilitated safely.
When it comes to animals, human habitation and roads sometimes act as obstacles to migrating species.
One way to make the landscape more hospitable for them is to connect fractured habitats with safe, wide “corridors” that support movement.
Some already exist, like the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Initiative in North America.
Hundreds of conservation groups have banded together to create a wildlife corridor from northern Canada to Yellowstone Park.
That’s five hundred miles of safe passage for migrating animals.
In Canada, special wildlife “bridges” allow grizzly bears, wolverines, and elk safe passage over busy highways.
The Netherlands and the US state of Montana have adopted similar structures.
As with nature, so with human beings.
The author believes in the possibility of a world where people can move safely across international borders.
Having permeable borders would allow those fleeing dangers to avoid drowning at sea or being hunted down by armed border patrol agents.
Rather than checkpoints, with their nests of barbed wire, international borders could soften, like those between countries in the European Union, or states in the US.
This doesn’t seem possible, right?
Well, initiatives that offer a potential framework for a world like this already exist.
For instance, the UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration advises countries on creating more legal pathways for migrants looking for new livelihoods.
The truth is that human beings are natural migrants.
In the end, not even the highest wall or the deepest sea can hold us back.
It’s only right, then, that we envision a world where migration can be made safe and dignified for all.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: Humans have always been migrants, just like the animals with which we share the planet.
Despite what eighteenth-century taxonomists and twentieth-century eugenicists have claimed, DNA shows that humans are all intimately related and connected by a common history of migration.
Looking to the future, we must build a world in which moving among countries, across continents, and over oceans is safe, dignified, and humane.
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What to read next: Pandemic, by Sonia Shah You’ve just learned how human history has been characterized by migration.
With our continuous movement across oceans and continents, we’ve transported new species, foods, languages, and customs all around the world.
Another thing we’ve brought with us is disease.
In another of Sonia Shah’s books, Pandemic, she considers the origins of epidemics.
Here, she looks at how deadly cholera outbreaks in the past relate to the diseases that trouble us today, like coronaviruses, ebola, and drug-resistant superbugs.
If you’re looking for more of Sonia Shah’s unique interweaving of past and present, then dig into the blinks to Pandemic.