Just the other day, New York mayor Eric Adams declared that migrants, which the city has struggled to house and provide for, could "destroy the city forever." His words were roundly praised by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and run-of-the-mill Republicans rushed to wag their fingers: even progressives are starting to realize that immigrants are a destructive force, invading our homes and mutilating our way of life. The rhetoric is shocking, but it's also tedious, because people have been saying exactly the same kind of thing for centuries, before New York was New Amsterdam. We are so familiar of this language of "invasion," as if people who want to live among us are actually conquerors, or perhaps viruses, but according to Sonia Shah's The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, such language is rooted in the mistaken assumption that our borders mark static places that contain natural populations which "belong there."
Much of The Next Great Migration is devoted to an intellectual history of migration, both human and animal, starting with Carl Linnaeus, whose system of binomial nomenclature reflected a belief that animals are rooted to the specific environments in which he found them. It's impossible to read these chapters without marveling at just how stupid we've been for so long. We used to think that birds spent the winter underground, until a stork showed up in Germany with an African arrow through its neck--in the spring of 1822. What Shah does really well is trace an intellectual history that shows how anti-immigration ideology is inextricable from scientific racism. The conviction of Linnaeus and others that animals don't move, when applied to human beings, long enabled the belief that migration is an unnatural act undertaken by the malicious or the desperate, and would result racial hybridization and the loss of genetic white superiority. These ideas show up again in later maniacs, like eugenicist Madison Grant and overpopulation hawks like Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, and Shah shows pretty convincingly that they represent an ideological chain that goes all the way to modern-day goblins like Stephen Miller.
What archaeological and genetic evidence really shows, Shah explains, is that migration is a fundamental part of being human. The longstanding belief that modern populations are the descendants of ancient populations that did not move, or moved in brief spurts and never again, is totally backward: the world populations that exist today are the result of millennia spent moving in every direction and by any means. Ancient humans moved over long distances and across difficult barriers, across mountain ranges and immense seas, peopling, for instance, the islands of the Pacific long before mainstream thinkers thought such intentional seafaring was even possible. (And evidence keeps accumulating even since the publication of The Next Great Migration in 2020: a set of footprints at White Sands National Park strongly suggests that humans arrived in North America long before the opening of the Bering Land Bridge.)
What is so remarkable about The Next Great Migration, I think, is that it addresses the scientific racists--who are still quite numerous and influential--on their own terms. It would be easy enough to reject Linnaean claims that human beings make up discrete populations whose survival is threatened by easy migration by saying that human beings are not like other animals, but Shah situates the human capacity for migration specifically in the context of plant and animal movement. The implications of this rebound against not only immigration restrictionists but invasion biologists: movement is a crucial part of the ecological history of plants and animals as much as it is human beings, and our ideologies about "invasive species" may do no better representing the truth about ecosystems than ideologies about invasive human beings.
For Shah's presumably leftish audience, this has to be the most difficult part of the book to accept. But Shah is really persuasive in saying that what you accept about humans you have to accept about plants and animals as well. Just as immigration restrictionists--and Eric Adams--exaggerate the potential harms of migration and minimize the potential benefits, so we ignore that movement replenishes biodiversity. Even some of the most maligned invasives, like zebra mussels, turn out to be excellent at filtering and cleaning the water of the Great Lakes. All of that is not to say that we should ignore the risks of introduced species--especially in more self-contained ecosystems like Pacific islands--but that a smarter approach might be more discerning about what the risks really are, and from which species. It might be one that understands that plants and animals have always moved around the globe, even without the help of human beings, and it might jettison the creepy language and assumptions of the GOP.
It's hard to ignore the silent term in the title: The Next Great [Climate Change] Migration. The next century promises to be one in which the world changes, ecologically and politically, faster than ever before. To face it, Shah suggests, we'll need to let go of stale ideas. We will have to decide what it means for a plant to be "native" in an ecosystem that has gone from having a continental climate to a subtropical one. We will also have to figure out how accommodate the millions of people who will be on the move, doing what humans have always done, but perhaps in even greater numbers and a faster pace. Will we welcome them with a place to sleep, or razor wire? Will we fear them as destroyers or welcome them as neighbors?
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