Purchase sonias book, the next great migration and thats a way to support our author and pollic and prose. Now with that another of the way, it is my delight to welcome sonia shah, science journalist and prize winning author, he writing on science, politics and human rights appeared in the new york times, the wall street journal and Foreign Affairs among many others. Also been featured on radio ad, and ted. Com with he talk, three reasons why we still havent gotten rid of malaria and the off ore sever books including the fever and pandemic. Tonight she will be talk about will you new book, the next gravity migration, an overview of the migration and the often necktive responses. Many figures complaint the migration is destructive. She argues migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change. The back makes the case for future in which migration is nat source of fear but of hope. So, without any further adieu he is sonia. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight. I wish i could see you in person but im glad we can do this at least. Ill tell you about the bound how i came to write this book. My last book was calledpack. Tracking containologies from cholera to he ebola and beyond and i had written other books of malaria and other aspects of global health, focusing on contagions. Of in after lace mrs. Book that came out in 2015 this is around the time of the quote up quo migrant crisis in the mediterranean when there was just all these people leaving syria and afghanistan and trying to get running away from bomb examination behavent examination strife and poverty and they were trying to get up into europe, and many of them were getting stuck in mediterranean, drown examination people were getting stuck in refugee camps and Detention Centers and European Countries are closing borders, wanted a one at a time domino effect. Having written a about how populations on the move can cause disease and microbes and animal and people moving around can be quite disrun tonight public health, i went to greece to report on the i thought whats migrant crisis, becausei thought there might be a risk of disease outbreaks, and these are people who are fleeing places where there there are different disease environments and different kinded of populations and different immune stat tuesday and i thought thought all the Mass Movement of people is surely going to trigger disease outbreaks. So i went to greece to do reporting on that, thanks to the pull pull lit pulitzer cries center which has support it me work and doing a an interview with a physician and i said something along the lives what are the worst effect on the migrant crisis in your opinion, Something Like that. And he stopped and he said, there is no migrant crisis. And i was quite puzzled and i said theres all this tumult and people are dying and drowning dg and getting stuck in refugee camps and arch is upset. What is happening if its not a migrant crisis, what is it . He said its not a crisis of migration. Because there are plenty of jobs for these people if they wanted to take them. Theres plenty of room. Theyre got a house them. Accommodations. Its probably better for them if they move. It might be might contribute to resilience of to the societies they left behind that they moved. They might contribute to our societies if they move. So, the crisis is not of migration. The crisis is of welcome, of reception. And i realized then that i hadnt really asked any of those questions that he was talking about. I had reflectively decided that if theres migration it must be some kind of crisis, and in fact what i learned about the disease status is that there were no disease joust break outbrecks except foe ones caused by the conditions the people were being kept in detained in unsanitary camps, and makeshift squats that abandoned schools and stadiums and just by virtue of those conditions there were some outbreaks of things like scabies, chickenpox, but hadnt been any other outbreaks that spread, and what i learned is that a lot of migrants actually are healthier than the host populations they enter and that is a welldocumentedphone called the healthy migrant effect. And this started me thinking but migration in a new way. I wanted to understand why did i immediately conflate migration with crisis. That was very reflexive for me. And i thing this really is a very personal issue for me, too. Im not a xenophobe. Im a duke of immigranted misfamily lived in australia for few year, my parents are immigrants from indiana who settled here in the United States before i was born. I had very much internalized the idea of migration as disruptive, and that kind of came out in my work as a journalist, as a science journalist and writing people and animals on me move in at the forms of contagion and for myself, like my identity, i have internalized the idea of my own body in place, my own body on the north american continent. The proctof this active Long Distance migration my parents undertook was somehow problematic, weird exceptional anomaly, and i thing that expressed nit the with a i would never really consider i was a full american if was born in new york city clifford ear all my life except for the few years in australia, so, i never called myself an american , just a straight american. Always some kind of american, a south asia american, asian american, permutation of an american. I think throughout my childhood id been told by people around me i didnt quite belong and this is a commoner and phones for people of color in this country that were asked, where are you from . And i would say, im from new york. Thats where i was born and i grew up there when i was little and they said no, where you really from. Because you cant really be from new york. Youre obviously an outsider. A foreigner of some kind because you dont look right, and i got the same response when i was in india with my when i visited india to see my relatives and things and they similarly would make it very clear i didnt talk right, didnt wear the clothes right, didnt eat the food right, that i was alien in some way. So i had internalized this idea i didnt belong and traced it back to that act of international Long Distance migration my parents undertook and i think that really colored how i looked at migration. So, i wanted to interrogate that idea and what is what was that was the spark that became the process that results in this book. And i traysedded back to this idea of things belonging in certain places. This idea that certain people belong in certain places. Thats where theyre from. Thats where the belong. Theyve evolved there theyve adapted to those places. And we think of that in terms of people butanals terms of animals. But also in terms of animals we have animal maps we give to kids where the camel is the middle east, and the kangaroo is australia, and the bear is north america because the underlying idea there is, those animals belong no those places. To such an extent that theyre actually almost one in the same. So, these arent specific ideas about migration but they very much embrace the history of migration because to say if the camel is from the middle east its never moved, always been there and never will move. In fact what we now know is that none of that is true. So i traced this idea of everything belonging in a certain place back to the 18th e swedish naturalist and thats historical moment, the anchor this book around and he was a very interesting character. Like a lot of naturalists at the time he was very religious, and so he saw nature as an expression of gods perfection. And so what he took this is a time in 18th century in europe where europeans were traveling as never before. They were discovering the new world, discovering polynesia, africa, the whole world was kind of opening up to europeans through transoceanic travel for the first time. There was a wealth of ofbiodivertsty that was confounding to European Society and there was a big effort to figure out what are always these things, all these different species and animals and people that look different. Where do they come from and where do the belong. Holiday did they get to these places . And lineas was tried to answer that question. The way he aned the question is to say, well, wherever we found them thats where they belong because for him of course under a is an expression of gods perfection. Everything is in it place, where god put it; so, just by the logic of that it was impossible that anything would go extinct or has moved in the past or that anything was moved in the would move in the future. He pictureed nature and a narl world and an order in nature that was very stable and very still. And he created a transportation he namedded thousands of species and came up with a system of classifying and naming creatures that we have retaped to this day. So its the basis for all of our modern incursion into nature and biology but the essentials are the same. He also categorized humans. This is a big open question in 18th century European Society. How did africans become so dark . They were very certain that people from asia and agriculture themers were savages and not fully human, not as human and evolved also they were. But that was very problematic intellectually because they were coming out of christian tradition and automatic humans in bible descended from adam and eve in the garden of eden. It that was true how did they become what were so strange looking, such strange practices they considered very up civilized and savage. So lineas didnt tackle that question head on. But he did in part. What he said is, well, he is not going to go gunpoint go into where they came from, how they got there. But he says they very clearly and came up with a very clearly that those other people are not the same as us. They are biologically distinct and he came up with a system of classifying human stanford four subspecies, subspews o humanned that were europeans and then there was a separate subspecies of yellow people who were asians, of red people who are americans, and of black people, who are africans. And he gave these long latin names. For each of these what he called subspecies and he actually said that africans were maybe not even as human also the others species. He speculated in some of his private papers that africans might be a cross between this monsterrous kind of humanoid that he called them troglodytes. Theres this whole other category of human like species that were albinos, people who genetic conditions, that he categorized he those all at one category of monsters, human monsters he called toking diets and the thought the african subspeaks was a cross between troglodytes and real humans. It was interesting back into ago into the basis of this and he actually was not somebody who traveled very much. He hardly left sweden. He didnt like to hear any other languages other than swedish and would frown if somebody spoke to him in french or wrote in french or any other language. He hated it and didnt like to travel. Didnt like to go anywhere so what he would do this is wasnt uncommon. A lot of early biological investigations were really based on specimens and dead things and collections. So he would get collections and examine them and there was at that time the common thing that european explorers would go to different places and capture people and bring them back to europe to put them on display as specimens of these other subspecies so they would have African Women on display in museums and traveling exhibits and scientists would go to exhibits and poke and prod these women as if they were not human. Like themselves. And the venus is one of most famous example is discuss in the book. This idea of people being separated, being belonging to different places to such a degree that were actually biological alien from each other really erased any motion that we any notion we could have migranted the more differentiated we are the less possible it becomes to imagine a history of migration in which we all started . One place and moved around and mixed and all of that. And so linen tax yeonmi set the station and that was passed down into our future inquiries into various questions and biodiversity and human diversity. In the 192s. Scientists were wracking their brains to figure out how exactly the human subspecies were different. Theres a lot of activity, a lot of scientific inquiry into what exactly makes africans so different from us . What are the biological criteria so we can define us different from them and it was very difficult because of course were not different. Of course we are all the same, were all of one human family but they put themselves into not trying to organize out if you measure the skull, the circumference of the skull and divide by the height from the top the skull to your back when youre sitting, they had all these different measurements they would do of your bodily dimensions and try to pin point, this is the way theyre different; and number of it really worked. But that was a very active area of inquiry at that time. And there was huge worries among the leading scientific figures in the early 20th century, the found ore bronx zoo, the American Museum of natural history, they organized huge conferences, i International Conferences where they would get scientists from all over the world together to try to figure out how exactly are all these racial groups different. And what would be the impact if we were to allow them to migrant and mix around together and they were very, very worried when the era of mass migration started in the out, when people started coming over from eastern europe, Southern Europe and all these different parts of the worked started coming into the americas, in the 19th century and a lot of scientist thought that was biologically dangerous. President Calvin Coolidge said there was biological laws that prevented people who were born in different continents from making or melding with each other. The director of the the president of the American PublicHealth Association in the 192s says if the United States was to allow immigrants in who came from these other racial groups, these other subspecies, that would bring absolute ruin to society. There was a big conference in new york identity race science and eugenics and immigration would we dangerous and ebiologial hard of immigration and after that conference organized by mad sis down grant and Henry Fairfield as been as worship to the put the exhibited together and shipped them off to congress and exhibited in the halls of congress for every member of congress to look at. The leading describeties who created that conference, including madison grant, created a committee and they drafted a policy that was based on the cutting e. Science of the traced the heritage back to lineas how different people belonged on different continents and were biological alien from each other and if they mixed it would be catastrophic, a biology include hazardous for the nation. And they drafted laws and that is actually what became those brought into congress, and passed and that was our 1920s immigration laws based on racial quotas and had very strict racial quotas, basically said no information can come, no one from africa can come and they were in place until the 1960s so really shaped the face of the nation. There was all this fears out immigration and underestimation but what migration is, and so the scale of it. One story i tell in the book is but the kon tiki raft. This is about polynesia and how in the early days of european exploration, james cook, captain james cook, made is way to the island in the pacific of polynesia, and it took a lot of navigational prowess to get there for him. You had big ships and had these fancy compasses and all the latest sort of devices and no how to try to navigate to very Distant Island inside the middle of the oceans, very difficult to get there. He figured out out and got there and then he was amazed to find theres people there already. Tons of people, all the islanded were already populated with polynesian people and huh couldnt understand it. He said the only have stone age technology. Hough could they have possibly gotten here, and couldnt fathom the idea that people had actually migranted to these very remote islands. And the people there of course were like, well, no, we have paddled on couldnt news, from asia and they got here and that is why were here. And cook and all of the european explorers who followed him to the polynesia said they did not buy it. That cannot be true. These people have stonage technology. Those canoes could never do it. If you travel from asia to polynesia youll be going against the prevailing winds, against the prevailing current. So theres no way they could have migranted here on their own. So there was this huge conundrum. Hough did they get sneer this is like a huge mystery, scientific midfor many decades. In 1940s a norwegian explorer end enup in polynesia and came up with a novel explanation how polynesia must have been saidded and his idea was he figured out theirs an ocean current from the coast of peru into polynesia and he imagined that perhaps if theres some people fishing or Something Like that off the coast of peru, and they got swept up a storm, and then just by accident they drifted on this current all the way to poll near should, and maybe that is what happened, and he called them this accidental migration of white gods, thats what called them. That these white gods maybe accidentally drifted over polynesia and slowly populated the island depend explain why the people of poll near should had long with sticky Asian Companies and all had similar languages. Theres a lot of things this their river did not explain. Nevertheless, it became hugely popular in part because he actually decided to try this out himself and he built a balsawood raft in peru and got a crew of three or four other young norwegian scientists and they set up from the coast of peru and drift for i think two or three weeks, i think there were sharks coming up around them and they whaled would look at them and had this had all these crazy at adventures delivering and they finally did land on some outer island in polynesia and thought we proved it. Thats what happened. That must have been what happened. And he wrote a book about it. He did a film about it. A documentary that won the academy award. The name of his raft was kon tiki and this captured the worlds attention. For many years. So only later, in recent years we uncovered