Exceptional people, sheds the truth on a subject fueling hate, rage and xenophobic feelings in a growing number of people. This was sadly the case of Anders Behring Breivnik whose Islamophobia and hatred of multiculturalism led him to perpetrate the twin terror attack in Oslo. Furthermore, the riots, fires and mass looting that took place in London and other British cities in August, might only accentuate Britons’ growing skepticism of migration.
This in-depth analysis comes at an auspicious time. The authors, Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan, analyze the concept of migration in perspective by bringing to light its past, present and future. In fact, the overview of the history of migration is the highlight of the book.
Early in human history, some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa, the cradle of humanity, our ancestors created a pattern of cross-community migration, moving to new regions with new ideas and technologies.
These dynamic patterns of growth first took place across Africa. Then, 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, migrants left the continent to populate the world. “As populations of hunter-gatherer groups grew to their geographical limits, members moved to settle new groups, and the process of expansion across the world continued,” explain the authors.
The creation of agricultural and sedentary communities prompted the second stage in migration as populations moved out of Africa into Asia and beyond. Around 60,000 years ago, men and women moved from Africa’s Nile Valley across the Strait of Bab el Mandeb into the Arabian Peninsula and then onto the Indian subcontinent and beyond. Migrant brides and other young people brought with them knowledge of weaving, hunting, fishing technique, raft and boat construction. Archeological excavations have revealed the presence of seashell jewelry far from coastal regions, proving that humans were already trading over great distances some 40,000 years ago.
During the next 10,000 to 20,000 years, people gradually occupied all of Eurasia. The passage from northern Eurasia into America is particularly dramatic. Research shows that several thousand people survived the last ice age on the former Bering Land Bridge (a grassland steppe that linked Russia to Alaska), protected from glacial expansion thanks to Pacific currents. When the glaciers melted, these migrants established themselves in North, Central and South America. We know them now as the Inuit and Innu of Canada, the Arawaks of the Caribbean basin and the indigenous peoples of Central and South America.
Subsequently, remote islands in the Pacific Ocean were gradually inhabited by humans sailing from Southeast Asia. Fiji was populated about 3,600 years ago, Hawaii about 2,000 years later and New Zealand 1,000 years ago.
“Less than 50,000 years after humans departed from Africa, they had settled on all the world’s continents (aside from Antarctica). By 10,000 years ago, humans had adapted to live in vastly different ecologies across the earth: From West Africa to Siberia, and from Australia to Tierra del Fuego. The culmination of this vast enterprise to occupy the planet in all of its diverse climes and ecologies represents humanity’s great migratory feat,” write the authors.
The Sumerian seafarers established the earliest known civilization along the Tigris-Euphrates valley around 4,000 BCE. This first civilization supported trade diasporas, which benefitted from the domestication of the horse around 3,200 BCE, followed several hundred years later by the domestication of the camel.
By 500 CE, major routes boosted commerce and migration. The Silk Road linked the Mediterranean and Black Sea to the Huang He Valley in northern China. The south Asia route connected southern China with Bengal, and the cross-Sahara routes link up the Niger Basin with the Mediterranean.
The multicultural attitude of the Mongols helped them conquer most of East Asia, half of the Islamic world and practically all of the Eurasian steppes. They fought along with Turkish soldiers and adapted Chinese military techniques. Some scholars even believe that the birth of the Renaissance in Europe was due to inventions such as the printing press, gunpowder, paper money, systems of government, musical instruments and astronomy, imported by the Mongols and then introduced to the West.
The opening up of the Atlantic route to America in 1492 was a turning point for Europe and signalized a new era of economic growth. Incidentally, one often ignores that a Chinese Muslim admiral, Zheng He, sailed from China to Eastern Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope almost a century before Bartolomeu Dias did.
However, the Chinese put an end to those ambitious sailing expeditions by closing their frontiers. As a result, the balance of economic power shifted toward Europe, setting the pace for the development of a global economy.
Transatlantic migration, which began in 1700, reached a peak between 1840 and 1914. The US, in particular, has drawn long term benefits from its immigrants who have made up more than three times as many Nobel Laureates and Academy Award film directors. Also, more than a quarter of all global patent applications from the US are made by migrants.
In the best-seller, “The Post-American World,” Fareed Zakaria writes: “America has found a way to keep itself constantly revitalized by streams of people who are looking to make a new life in a new world…America has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers and move ahead economically.”
While it is impossible to foresee the future, facts tell us that the first half of the 21st century will be marked by more migration as lower transport costs, growing transnational social and economic networks and better connectivity encourage people to travel for better working opportunities. On the other hand, low fertility rates in developed countries and rapidly growing China trigger a continuous shortage of low-skilled as well as high-skilled labor. In other words, this has resulted in an increasing need for migrant workers, especially nursing aids, medical assistants, maids and housekeepers. China has in fact already begun employing Africans from Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon, Liberia and Mali.
According to the authors, by the middle of the 21st century, our societies will be more diverse than ever before, and the world will be connected in a manner not experienced since our origin in Africa. They make a strong case for the need to establish global institutions in order to regulate labor and migration:
“Migratory flows are the orphan of the international system, with powerful countries arguing against a global migration organization and a rule-based system. Fair rules protect the weakest against the strongest players, and the absence of such rules means that the richest and most powerful nations are able to make up their own rules regarding migration.”
Migration remains intrinsically tied up with globalization, and preventing it would create anemic economies due to a social and cultural isolation. A review of our planet’s history clearly shows the vital and essential role played by cross-cultural contact in the building of our societies.
The authors rightly think that embracing more migration is in our collective interest. However, waiting for an effective global organization to be established would amount to an indefinite delay. Regulations for international migration should be first negotiated bilaterally and regionally, and governments should combat xenophobia by implementing measures that shield against inflaming social tensions. The authors finally advocate the idea of freer movement and acknowledge that “the need for a global institution to promote and protect it will end up like the other big ideas of history, democracy, free-trade and global peace, which emerged from the margins of impossibility into the realm of the self-evident.”
“Exceptional People” is an absorbing study albeit academic. It strongly advocates the need to establish a global migration agenda and clearly shows that the advantages of migration far outweigh the disadvantages: Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future.