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Sonia Shah

The Next Great Migration

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'A dazzlingly original picture of our relentlessly mobile species' NAOMI KLEIN
'Fascinating … Likely to prove prophetic in the coming months and years' OBSERVER

'A dazzling tour through 300 years of scientific history' PROSPECT

'A hugely entertaining, life-affirming and hopeful hymn to the glorious adaptability of life on earth' SCOTSMAN

We are surrounded by stories of people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands in a mass exodus. Politicians and the media present this upheaval of migration patterns as unprecedented, blaming it for the spread of disease and conflict, and spreading anxiety across the world as a result.
But the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans tell a different story. Far from being a disruptive behaviour, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by borders, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, into the highest reaches of the Himalayan Mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, disseminating the biological, cultural and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon.
In other words, migration is not the crisis — it is the solution.
Tracking the history of misinformation from the 18th century through to today's anti-immigration policies, The Next Great Migration makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of fear, but of hope.
This book is currently unavailable
445 printed pages
Publication year
2020
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
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Impressions

  • Mario Alberto Castelán Floresshared an impression4 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🚀Unputdownable

    It leaves me with so many new ideas about which is one's place in the world. And oh so angry with scientist who let themselves be guided by his bias and how many politicians took those ideas to heart.
    I see, more and more how the real constant is change

Quotes

  • Mario Alberto Castelán Floreshas quoted4 years ago
    If the fever of xenophobia evolved as a kind of immune defense, perhaps it once helped protect us. It is no longer useful for that purpose. Modern medicine provides us with the insights and technology we need to protect ourselves from pathogens, whether we shun strangers or not. Still, the vestigial impulse to suspect outsiders lingers, lodged deep in our psyches. Politicians can harness its heat simply by pointing to a border between “us” and “them.”
  • Mario Alberto Castelán Floreshas quoted4 years ago
    In Ohio, immigration officials scooped up a businessman and deported him to Jordan. He had been living in the United States for nearly forty years and had raised four daughters. He left the country with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a few hundred dollars in his pocket. In Connecticut, they picked up a couple and deported them to China. They’d lived in the United States for nearly two decades and had been running a local nail salon. They had to leave their five-year-old and fifteen-year-old sons behind. In Iowa, a teenager who’d lived there since the age of three was deported to Mexico. He was murdered shortly after arriving.

    While previous administrations had captured and deported migrants living in the interior of the country before, they’d primarily targeted those who’d been convicted of crimes. In a single year, the number of migrants living in the interior who’d been arrested shot up by 40 percent. The majority had no criminal convictions at all. Their sole violation consisted of a lack of valid immigration documents
  • Mario Alberto Castelán Floreshas quoted4 years ago
    of the world’s migrants move from one developing country to another, that is, between countries where the range of available public services varies little.
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