Human rights has appeared in your times the wall street journal and Foreign Affairs also featured on a radio ad and three reasons why we still havent gotten rid of malaria an author of several those books went off in the negative responses that provokes and politicians may claim that is a Destructive Force she says migration is a lifesaving response hello everyone thank you for joining us tonight i wish i could see the person saute about the background of how he came to write this book my last book was called pandemic before i had written other books about malaria and other aspects of Global Health focusing on contagion. Right around the time of the migrant crisis on the mediterranean were all these people were leaving syria and afghanistan running away from bombings and beheadings and trying to get into europe and many of them are getting stuck in the mediterranean there were drownings and refugee camps and Detention Centers closing one at a time like a domino effect. Having written a lot how populations on the move and how people moving around can be disruptive to Public Health , i went to greece to report on the migrant crisis thats what they called it. Because i thought there could be risk of disease outbreak they were places where vaccination campaigns had failed or collapsed and then moving to parts of the world with different diseases in different populations so i thought with all this Mass Movement of people will surely trigger a disease outbreak so i went to greece to do reporting on that which has supported a lot of my work and was doing an interview with a physician from Doctors Without Borders and said something along the lines of what are the worst effects of the migrant crisis. He stopped and said there is no migrant crisis. I was quite puzzled and said there is all this to mold and people are dying and drowning and stuck it in refugee camps and everyone is upset so then whats happening . What is it . He said is not a crisis of migration because there are plenty of jobs there is capacity to house them there is accommodation its probably better for them it might contribute to the resilience of the society they left behind they could contribute to our society. The crisis isnt of migration but welcome of reception and then i realized i hadnt really asked those questions he was talking about i have reflexively decided it is my great on migration of must be a crisis and thats what i learned about the disease status there were no disease outbreaks except for the ones caused by the conditions they were kept in. They were detained in unsanitary camps, makeshift squads of abandoned schools and stadiums and just by virtue of those conditions there were some outbreaks of scabies or chickenpox but but no other outbreaks that spread so what i learned allied of migrants are healthier than the host populations thats called a healthy migrant effect so then i was thinking of migration in a new way i wanted to understand why did i immediately conflate migration with crisis . That was reflexive for me and very personal issue. I am not a xenophobe and i am daughter of an immigrant myself my parents are immigrants from india and they settled here before i was born but i had very much internalize the idea of migration as disruptive and that came out in my work as a journalist ive been writing for a long time about people on the move in the form of contagion of various kind but even for myself with my identity i had internalize that idea my own body on the north American Continent with this act of longdistance migration was somehow problematic in that expressed itself in the way that was born in new york city and lived here all my life except for a few years in australia. I never called myself an american it was always some kind of america south Asian American so throughout my childhood i was told by people around me i didnt quite belong in this is a very common experience for people of color in this country we are asked where you from and i was having from new york. And then they say where are you really from . You cant really be from new york obviously you are an outsider because you dont look right i got that same response in india and similarly they would make it very clear that i did not talk right or where the close rate or eat the food right and i was alien in some way so i internalize this idea i did not belong with the international longdistance migration and that really colored how i looked at migration. So i wanted to in terry great on interrogate that idea and thats what resulted in this book. Ia trace it back to the idea of things belonging in certain places that certain people belong in certain places and thats where they are from thats what they have adapted to those places but also in terms of animals with a camel stands for the middle east the kangaroo for australia the bear in north america because the underlying idea those animals belong in those places to such an extent they are almost one in the same they are specific ideas about migration but whos to say if they camel is from the middle east it has always been there and now we know that is not true. So i trace the idea everything belonging in a certain place back to the sweetest naturalist and that is what i anchor the book around and there is a very interesting character he saw nature as an expression of gods perfection so this is a time in 18th century europe europeans are traveling, discovering the new world, polynesia and parts of africa with the whole world opening up to europeans through transoceanic travel for the first time so there is a wealth of biodiversity and human diversity confounding to European Society at the time theres a big effort to figure out what all the species of animals where do they come from and where do they belong . What are their origins . And he tried to answer that question to say wherever we found them thats where they belong because for him thats an expression of gods perfection everything is in its place where god put it so just by the logic of that it is impossible anything would go extinct or had moved in the past or would in the future so he picked nature and the Natural World in an order very stable and still and he looked at thousands of animals of the system to name them to this day that is from the basis for all modern creation to nature and biology that the essential fundamentals are the same. He did with humans so in 18th century European Society how did africans become so dark . They were certain these people from asia and africa and the americas were savages and not fully human or as human as they were that was very problematic intellectually because they come out of the christian tradition and all humans in the bible defended from the garden of eden so how do they have such strange practice is considered to be strange and savage . He didnt tackle that head on but what he said was he wont go into where they came from and how they got there but very clearly he said those other people are not the same as us they are biologically distinct and came up with their system to classify humans with four subspecies a subspecies of humans that were european and then a separate subspecies of yellow people who were asian black people who are african. And that africans were not even and as human to speculate in those private papers and a cost its nothing thats real to david he decided there is a whole other category of human speech on human species of albinos and all kinds of genetic conditions that he would categorize those as one category of monsters and that was a cross because its so interesting for the basis of how they put this together he hardly left sweden was very provincial it like to hear any of their languages other than swedish from anyone that spoke to them in french he hated it and didnt like to travel or go anywhere. This plan is uncommon at the time a lot of early biological investigations were based on thats and collections and specimens. It was a common thing and capture people and bring them back to europe to put them on display as specimens of subspecies they would have African Women on display on these traveling exhibits they would poke and prod these women as if they were not human like themselves. I discuss one of the most famous examples in the book but the idea of people being separated and belonging to different places such a degree we are alien from each other really erased any notion we could have migrated so the more differentiated we are , the less possible it becomes to imagine a history of migration where we all started in one place and moved around so that set the stage and then that was passed down to all future inquiries of biodiversity and in the 19 twenties scientist were racking their brains to figure out how exactly the human subspecies was different so what exactly makes africans so different . What is the biological criteria to define us differently because we are not. We are all the same of one human family but they put themselves maybe if you measure the school circumference and then divide it to your back when you are sitting, they had all these different measurements of bodily dimensions and tried to pinpoint this is the way they are different. None of it worked for that was in active inquiry at the time in a huge worry from leading scientific figures like medicine grand founder of the bronx zoo a curator of the American Museum of natural history, they organized Huge International conferences scientist from all over the world try to figure out exactly how these racial groups are different than what would be the impact if we would allow them to migrate together. So they were very worried with the era of mass migration started and people were coming from Eastern Europe and southern europe. And president Calvin Coolidge said there are biological laws that were mixing with each other the director of it and the Health Association in the 19 twenties said the United States was to allow immigrants in with these other racial groups that would being absolute ruin and there is a conference in new york and eugenics and how migration is dangerous and after that and they put all the exhibits together and shipped them off to congress for every member to look at as they walk into their chambers and then they created a committee and drafted a policy based on cuttingedge science tracing those belong there and that it would be catastrophic and biologically hazardous for the nation and that was in the 1920 Immigration Law with very strict racial quotas so basically no information up to the 19 sixties to shape the face of the nation so there are all these fears about immigration and at the same time there is a lot of underestimation about what migration is and the scale of it so one fun example is about the conti keep draft. About polynesia nearly days of the exploration james ruppercaseletter were in the islands polynesia and it took a lot of navigation prowess to get there they had fancy compasses and devices and know how to navigate and is difficult to get to those places but he got there and then was amazed to find people were there already and polynesian people had gotten there and couldnt understand it but they have Stone Age Technology how could they have got here . He couldnt fathom the idea people had migrated to these remote islands. The people they are said we paddled on canoes from asia and got here and thats why were here. [laughter] cook and all the european explorers they were not buying it that cannot be true they have Stone Age Technology. They could never do it if you go from asia to polynesia it is against the prevailing wind and current there is no way they could have migrated here on their own. So what is a conundrum for many decades. In the 19 forties the norwegian explorer ended up in polynesia and came up with a novel explanation for how polynesian must of been settled and his idea was there was an ocean current that ran from peru to polynesia and he imagined that perhaps people were fishing off the coast of peru and they were sucked up in the storm and just by accident they drifted on this current all the way to polynesia and maybe thats what happened and it is in accident told migration of white gods that drifted over and then slowly populated the island that doesnt explain how they had all these ties theres a lot of things that did not explain. And then to about himself and he builds a raft in peru with a crew of three or four other norwegian scientists. They set off in a drifted for two or three weeks there were sharks whales were looking at them they had all these crazy adventures drifting and finally they did land on an outer island and polynesian they said we proved it that must be what happened. He wrote a book about it. He did a film documentary about it and that one a Academy Award for polynesian migration and it captured the worlds attention for several years. Only in recent years we have uncovered the true story through archaeological and genetic evidence that indeed yes they came over from asia and ancient times but what we now know they practice a traditional form of navigation that allows them to navigate with as much accuracy if not more than modern western Navigational Technology to understand how to plot a course by thousands of observations a day behavior of fish, birds, the stars sometimes they word lie down on the floor of their canoe to feel the ocean swells and from those they could detect where the hidden land masses were in the distance we you could not see them this is an amazing way of learning that took a lifetime to figure it out you have to learn it from your parents passed down as a sacred practice europeans so you could never do that sheet of how the great things that we do but they did but they couldnt tell the outsiders because it sacred knowledge another example is bird migration you think today we would understand they are migrating all the time but during world war ii and using radar installations. And then to go into red alert and looking for enemy planes and nothing would be there and then to come back with the radar and then they just dispersed into a circle and another circle and then they would disappear. It made no sense echoes of objects flying against the wind at night over the ocean. And ornithologist at the time said those may be birds migrating. And military officials said no. No bird cant do that. Birds cannot fly at night they crash into trees. Wasnt just the british you have the problem it was the whole phenomenon and then to come up with this idea that goes beyond the grave and call them angels. So then they followed the radar angels and trace them back to a tree covered in starlings as they were watching they all lifted up all at once as one together and then land on another circle of trees so they did prove it was birds migrating so we have minimized the amount of migration that is around us and then emphasize the legacy of that today in the recent pandemic with an outbreak of virus and the First Response of many policymakers with that vast amounts because even before wilpon shut down some of the people of the city. Thousands had a ready made it to europe and meanwhile saying we can recall this thing from china and then to overemphasize the negative impact. And 10 percent of all wild species have to establish themselves. Of those only 10 percent cause problems we dont like whether Economic Impact causing those negative impacts but it is that we should we tell them before they can cause any problems but basically we are saying for that 1 percent before anything even happens so it comes to the same idea of its a problem it will be disruptive. And neck inflation that we see to this day. The other half of the book is how science has completely undermined that story. With that idea of human migration. We walked out of africa and for millennia with planes and trains made traveling around much easier and so now with the past history of migration we recently understand you can get agency one of the hardest bones in the party on body is the cookie around the ear they are analyzing and it tells us in his story not rare and intermittent migrations that you tells a story of continuous migration but then they came back into europe and asia and africa and went to the most forbidden parts of the planet and with those multiple waves to the heights of the himalayan mountains and multiple waves of migration and to polynesia. People got into canoes and paddling out to find that tiny speck of land man to do it over and over again. So so then for a short time we mix and move again. Because of gps and Solar Technology that they can track animals movement and that is something very new. But they are moving way farther ever before imagined. And then to go back to the Bigger Picture and to see how myopic that was being. But there has to be huge benefits to outweigh the risk over the course of our history. Because we have evolved so entering into this. They inhabit ability of the planet animals have to move more we receive 80 percent of wild species on the move to move higher into the mountains and sink with a changing climate even with humans living in countries than ever before more than any time since the Second World War we see that with policymaking and then to become conspicuous with the rightwing populist leaders and then to pull up the fences and with all of these efforts to repel migration. And then to look at the crisis and then to close the doors on migration. And looking at the Bigger Picture that is part of the history and to think of it as a crisis that is not that catastrophe but migration itself was a response to that and the adaptive response so thats not the crisis at all but the solution so for me to put this together personally in a new light. But marginal but a migrant like everyone else to live on this dynamic planet together. And thats why try to bring the book to i hope you have some questions with q a. So we do have one question from bob so with the mission of american degeneracy in the 1h century times. And a french nationalist in the idea was totally different that there is so much diversity with those continuous changes with the dynamic grading of one species into another one population over the other which they saw and with different categories that could be equivalent. If there were any differences at all that was of the hierarchy. So the idea was then originating with the garden of eden and thats why they are so perfect. And those foreign climates and from the garden of eden so what happened the two hot climates that he that were negative everybody was degenerative why they didnt have any animals and he had a whole theory and jefferson said that cannot be true he actually wrote a whole chapter about the theory of degeneracy but in the end his theory which is much more accepting of the idea of change and dynamism and then to become the modern father. What about migration is a resilient response to catastrophe . We are ready have models for that that was conscious a way to make migration safe and orderly and dignified so instead of saying i live in this country hear my borders and if i dont want you people than no you cannot come. Migration is a fossett to turn off and on. That is how it is done now migration how they wanted to nothing that we can control but what is happening and there are so many benefits. But what we should do we only want this part but then say lets manage migration so it can be safer and minimize the disruptive impact and minimize the cost while maximizing the benefits. Sometimes that means managing the pace but if they come all at once or quickly or to certain places and then to say it is our capacity for me be we want to say lets see where they are more resilient there is a bunch of different ways we can do it to make it easier to have papers so we dont have this whole crisis we have right now and it spells the difference of lifeanddeath with a lot of different models out there one country or two adopted the Global Compact into national laws. Nora has a similar question how come a welcoming migration share the advantage are there positive examples . I think there are positive examples today but in the United States we have been very ambivalent and be very accepting that even doing that working out in the utilitarian way do we want migrants because we need this . Yes. But were still not looking at migration as the investment we all have to make that we all have to manage together i dont think we are doing that you and the whole idea of National Sovereignty is tricky. Not to say you cant have reporters or sovereignty of course you can. The other part of the issue we dont track migration very well we only track and that is problematic and to scrutinize more with a certain kind of migrants and then to track how many people when hardly any statistics and that help parents and that happens and not societal collapse and are unaware of it and to allow ecosystems to flourish with creatures moving around et cetera and that is the scaffolding for the planets of the models are out there but we have a way to go with a good faith effort. Had to account for Invasive Species . I have a whole chapter about this is very much tied to world war ii and scientific ideas around the onslaught so i mentioned this earlier that Invasive Species is an issue to come into a new place to cause problems absolutely. And to grow the agricultural plants. And then sometimes the problems are economic. On the net novel species would harm the honeybees and we need them to pollinate crops but they are also not native. They are from europe but we dont have to be moralistic about it to say we dont like them because they are alien. And those that is not because of where they are from. And then only 10 percent of those of human health or ecological. A 99 percent are not causing those problems. And then that word is is good or bad in anys scientists i talked to in do they want to call them all aliens when the wild creature tries to survive Climate Change . Was not about the function in the ecosystem so those ideas are really changing pretty quickly so to mentioned there is less no data on human migration but what about interviewing the other migrants of the larger picture . That is partially at we had better data nowadays and we are getting exciting new data and its on youtube it is a repository to have thousands of animals they are tracking around the globe wearing satellite tags into those beautiful visualizations moving all around the globe with refugees and asylum and its hypnotic and then pasting it all together so where do you go to report on migration . When that is happening everywhere thats the one place you can go to this is where migration is happening. It is happening everywhere. And the Human Experience moving around all the time . So putting that all together is definitely a challenge. And is there any credibility from it coming back . I think its similar to the early sars virus i havent heard of any credible scientist say anything other than the earlier sars virus and that came from bats and then went to katz and entered humans. And that facilitates whether wildlife trade or just casual contact so all of those new ways to interact with that not just the first sars of what we are experiencing right now that like ebola. If there is no other questions thank you for this fascinating presentation we have all learned a lot tonight and i would encourage everyone to purchase the book and go to politics and prose. Com. Thank you for coming out. Good night. What is on the reading list
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