Can do via a link in the chat which i just posted. We support our authors. With that out of the way, i welcome sonia shah the science of journalists and prizewinning author. Her writing on science, politics and human rights has appeared in the new york times, wall street journal and Foreign Affairs among many others and has been featured on a radio lab fresh air and ted. Com. With her talk, three reasons why we have not gotten rid of malaria. Also author of the 70 several books including pandemic. Today we will talk about her new book, the next great migration which provides an overview of migration and often the negative responses it provokes. Some may claim its a Destructive Force that she argues migration is an ancient lifesaving response to environmental change in the book makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of a fear. Without further ado, here is sonia. Hello and thank you for joining us tonight. I wish i could see you in person , but im tired we can do at least. I will tell you about the background of how i came to write the book. My last book was called pandemic tracking contingents from colorado to ebola and beyond. Ive written other aspects of Global Health specifically focusing on contagions. After my last book was finished around 2015. It came out in 2016 but i finished in 2015 and it was around the time of the migrant crisis in the mediterranean when there was all these people leaving syria and afghanistan and they were trying to run away from bombings and beheadings and strife in poverty and they were trying to get to europe took many of them were stuck in the mediterranean with the drownings and people getting stuck in refugee camps and Detention Centers in European Countries were closing their borders. It was a domino effects and having written a lot about how populations on the move can cause disease and microbes and animals and people moving around can be quite disruptive to public health, i went to to greece to report on what i thought was the migrant crisis as everyone claimed it was the migrant crisis because i claimed there made afraid there was maybe outbreaks. They are under stress moving into new parts of the world where there are different disease environments in different populations with different immunity status, so i thought all this Mass Movement of people will it trigger disease outbreaks. I went to to greece to do reporting on that. Was doing an interview with a physician about i said something along the lines of you know what are some of the worst effects of the migrant crisis in your opinion, Something Like that and he stopped and said there is no migrant crisis. I was quite puzzled and i said well, theres all of this email people are dying and drowning in getting stuck in refugee camps and everyone is upset so whats happening then if there isnt a migrant crisis what is it and he said its not a crisis of migration because there are plenty of jobs for these people if they want to take them. Theres plenty of room, capacity to house them. There are accommodations. Its probably better for them if they move. It might contribute to the resilience of the society that they left behind. They may contribute to our society if they move, so the crisis isnt of migration. He said the crisis is a reception and i realized then that i had a truly asked those questions he was talking about. I had reflectively decided that if there is migration it must be some kind of crisis and in fact what i learned throughout the disease of status is that there were no disease outbreaks accept for the ones caused by the conditions that these people were kept in. They were being detained in unsanitary camps and a makeshift squats, abandoned schools and stadiums and things like that, and just by virtue of those conditions there were some outbreaks of things like scabies and chickenpox. There hadnt been any other outbreaks that spread, and what i learned is that a lot of migrants are actually healthier than the host populations they enter and thats welldocumented called a healthy migrant affect. This started me thinking about migration in a new way. I wanted to understand why did i obediently complete migration with crisis. That was very reflective for me. I think this really is a very personal issue for me also although, im not a xena phobic by any stretch and i am the daughter of immigrants. Im an immigrant myself. My family lived in australia for a few years of my parents are immigrants from india who settled in the us before i was born, but i think i had very much internalized the idea of migration as disruptive. That kind of came out in my work as a journalist and science journalists. I had been writing for a long time about the disruptive effects of people on the move and microbes on the move and animals on the move in the form of a contingents of various kinds, but even for myself like my identity i had internalized an idea of my own body in place, my own body on the north American Continent you know the product of this active longdistance migration that my parents undertook. Somehow it was problematic, somehow weird exceptional anomalous, and i think that expressed itself in the way i never really call myself a full american. Although, i was born in new york city. I have lived here all my life except for those few years in australia. I never called myself an american you know just a straight american. It was always some kind of american, salvation american, Asian American you know some kind of permutation of an american. All throughout my childhood, i was told by people around me that i didnt quite belong. And this is a common experience. I think for a lot of people of color in this country that we are asked where are you from and i would say im from new york because thats where i was born and i grew up there when i was little. They would say no, where are you really from because you cant really be from new york. You are obviously an outsider, foreigner because you dont look right. I got that same response when i was in india with when i visited india to see my relatives. Of a similarly would make it clear that i didnt talk right, didnt wear the close right, didnt eat the food rights you know that i was alien in some way. I had very much internalized this idea that i didnt belong and i traced it back to that active international longdistance migration my parents undertook. I think that colored how i looked at migration. I wanted to in interrogated idea and that is you know that was the spark that became the process that resulted in this about. I traced it back to this idea of things belong in certain pace places. The idea that certain people belong in certain places. Thats where they are from. Thats where they belong. They have evolved their. We think of that in terms of people, but also in terms of animals. Its why we have animal maps we give to our kids where the camel stands for the middle east and the calgary kangaroo for oesterle and the bear for north america because the underlying idea there is those animals belong in those places. To such an extent that they are almost one in the same. These arent specific ideas about migration, but they very much embrace the history of migration because its to say if the camel is from the middle east its never moved and never will move. In fact, what we know its none of that is true. Anyway, i traced this idea of everything belonging in a certain place back to the 18th century swedish nostril naturalists. That was historical moment that i anchored the book around and he was a very interesting character like a lot of naturalists at the time he was very religious. He saw nature as to the expression got protection. This is a time in 18th century in europe where europeans were traveling as never before discovering the new world, discovering polynesia, parts of africa, the whole world is kind of opening up to europeans through transoceanic travel for the first time so theres this wealth of diversity and human diversity that was confounding to European Society at the time. There is this big effort to figure out, what are these things always different species and animals and people that look different from us, where do they come from and where do they belong, what is their origins, how did they get to these places , and he is among many naturalists at that time who try to answer that question. The way he answered the question is to say, well, wherever we found them is where they belong because for him of course, nature is an expression of gods perfection. Everything is in its place where god put it, so just by the logic of that it was impossible that anything would go extinct or anything had mood in the past or anything would move in the future. He pictured nature and a Natural World and an ordering nature that was very stable and very still. He created a taxonomy naming thousands and thousands of species and he came up with a system of naming creatures that we have retained to this day. Linne and taxonomy is one of the bases for our modern increase into nature and biology. Of course its changed in many ways, but so many essential fundamentals are the same. He also categorized humans, so this is a big open question in 18th century European Society. Well, how did africans become so dark. They were very certain these people from asia and africa and the americas were savages. You know, not fully human, not as human mouth evolved as they were. That was very problematic intellectually because they were coming out of the christian tradition and all humans in the bible descended from adam and eve in the garden of eden. If that was true, how did they become what europeans felt was so strange looking at why did they have the they considered uncivilized and savage, so he didnt tackle that question headon, but he did in part so what he said is well, he wont shes not going to go into where they came from and how i got there but he said clearly and he came up the human taxonomy and said 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 humans which there were four sub species of humans. There was a sub species of humans that were european and then there was a separate sub species of yellow people who were asian, red people who were americans and black people who were africans and he gave these long latin names for each of these what he called sub species and in he actually says africans were maybe not even as human as the other species. He speculated in some of his private papers that africans might be a cross between this monstrous kind of humanoid that he called you know not something thats real that we understand today is real but he decided there was this whole other category of humanlike species that were you know how my nose, albinos, gigantism, different kind of genetic conditions that we would say today and he categorized those as one category of kind of monsters, human monsters. It was interesting looking into the basis for how we put this together because he actually was not someone that traveled much. He hardly left sweden and was very provincial and didnt like to hear any other languages other than swedish and he would frown if someone spoke to him in french or wrote something in french or any other language he hated it. He didnt like to travel, so what he would do and this was not uncommon at the time with a lot of early biological investigations that things and collections so he would get collections and examine them and at that time was a common thing that european exporters would go to different places and capture people and bring them back to europe and put them on display as specimens of these other sub species and they would have African Women on display in museums and traveling exhibits and scientists would go to these exhibits and poke and prod of these women as if they were not human like themselves. You know, one of the most famous examples i discussed the book. So, this idea of people being separated, belonging to different state places to such a degree that we were biologically alien from each other really erased any notion that we could have migrated, so the more differentiated we are the less possible it becomes to imagine a history of migration in which we all started in one place and moved around and mixed and all of that. So, linnaeus set the stage and that was passed down into all of our future inquiries into various questions and biodiversity and human diversity. In the 1920s, scientists were really racking their brains to try to figure out how exactly the human sub species were different. Theres a lot of activity in and scientific inquiry into what exactly makes africans so different from us, what are the biological criteria so that we can define as different from them it was very difficult because we are to different. Of course, we are all the same of one human family, but they put themselves into not trying to figure out well, mangy maybe if you measure the circumference of the scope and divide it from the type of the top of the school you know to your back when youre sitting and they had all of these different measurements they would do at your bodily dimensions to try to pinpoint, okay, this is how they are different and none of it really worked. That was a very active area of inquiry at the time, and there was huge worries among some of the leading scientific figures in the earliest 20th century in the us like Madison Grant was the founder of the bronx zoo. Henry osborn who is the creator of the American Museum of natural history. They organized huge conferences where they would get scientists from all of 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 migrate and mix around the other, so they were very worried when the era of mass migration started in the us and people started coming over from eastern europe, Southern Europe in these different parts of the world started to come into the americas in the 19th 19th century. A lot of the scientists felt it was biologically dangerous. President Calvin Coolidge actually said there was biological laws that prevented people who were born in different continents from mixing or melding with each other. The director of the president of the American PublicHealth Association in the 1920s said if the us was to allow immigrants in who came from these other racial groups, these other sub species that it would bring absolutely went to society. There was a big conference in new york all about this race science and gen x and how immigration would be really dangerous in the biological hazard of immigration and after that conference organized by Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield osborn, they put the events together and shipped them off to congress and they were exhibited in the halls of congress for members to look at as they walked into their chambers. The leading scientists that created the conference that on a created a committee and drafted a policy that was based on the cutting edge of science tracing the heritage back to linnaeus and taxonomy about how people that live on different continents belong there and were biologically alien from each other and if they mixed it would be catastrophic. It would be biologically hazardous for the nation and they drafted those laws and thats actually what became it was brought into congress and passed and that was our 1920s Immigration Law with very strict racial quotas basically say no one from asia or africa could command. Of those laws were in place up until the 1960s, so really shaped the base of the nation. There were these fears about immigration and at the same time i think there was a lot of just underestimation about that migration is and sort of the scale of it. One fun example a story i tell in the book is about the conti key wrath, its about polynesia and how in the early days of the european exploration captain james cook made his way to a rare Remote Island in the pacific of polynesia and it took a lot of navigational skill to get there. He had big ships and fancy compasses and the latest devices and knowhow to try to navigate to these very distant islands in the middle of the ocean that were difficult to get to. He figured it out and got there and then he was amazed to find there were people there already, tons of people per the islands were populated with these polynesian people. He couldnt understand it so he said they only have stone age technology. How did they get here. He couldnt fathom the idea that people had actually migrated to these very Remote Islands and the people there of course were like no, we paddled on canoes from asia and they got here and thats why we are here. Cook and all of the european explorers who followed him to polynesia said no, that cannot be true. These people have stone age technology. Those canoes can never do it. If you travel from asia to polynesia you will be going against the prevailing wind, against the prevailing currents, so there is no way they could have migrated here on their own. So, there was this huge conundrum like how did they get here. This was like a huge scientific mystery for many decades. In the 1940s, the norwegian explorer ended up in polynesia and he came up with a novel explanation for how polynesia must have been settled. His idea was he figured out there with a current and notion current that ran from the coast of peru into polynesia and he imagined that perhaps if there is some people fishing or Something Like that off the coast of peru and the cost swept up in the storm and then just by accident they drifted on this current all the way to polynesia and maybe thats what happened and he called them this accidental migration of white gods. That these white gods may be accidentally drifted to polynesia and then they slowly populated island. Of course, this didnt explain why the people polynesia had all these linguistic ties to Asian Countries and why they all seem to be related to each other with similar languages you know lots of things this theory didnt explain. Nevertheless, it became hugely popular in part because he actually decided to try to set himself and he built a raft in peru and got a crew of other young norwegian scientists and they set off from the coast of peru and they drifted for two or three weeks with sharks coming up around t