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I'm your host, Elise Hugh. As natural disasters and war force more and more people from their homes, immigration has become a divisive, politicized issue around the world.
In this conversation, hosted by TED's Whitney Pennington Rogers, journalist Sonia Shah and Professor Zeke Hernandez discuss the truth behind human migration. the pitfalls of restrictive immigration policies, and how to actually promote a more resilient, safe, and economically flourishing society.
Hello and thank you for watching TEDxplains, where we take the biggest headlines of the moment and offer clarity around what it all means and context on why it matters.
I'm Whitney Pennington Rogers, and I'm your host for this conversation.
These days, it's virtually impossible to watch the news and not see stories about migration.
It is and has always been the defining force of humanity. around the world, people are on the move for an array of reasons from climate change to conflict to economic shifts and of course, the enduring human pursuit of opportunity and safety.
And yet the headlines often reduce migration to crisis and controversy. leaving out the bigger picture.
That movement is a natural, even necessary part of who we are.
As borders tighten and debates intensify, it's more important than ever to understand what's really driving migration today, how it's shaping our global future, and what it means for all of us.
To help us make sense of this moment, I'm thrilled to be joined today by two big thinkers in the space of human migration.
Journalist Sonia Shah, who is a past TED speaker and an author whose most recently released book, The Next Great Migration, unravels our historical understanding of migration and its impact on the present moment.
And Zeke Hernandez, who is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the author of The Truth About Immigration, which examines immigration's impact on the economy. and beyond.
Hello to you both. Hi, thanks for having us.
Yeah, great to be here. Thank you both so much for being here.
Well, we have so much to get into so I'm just going to dive right in.
And I think one of the bigger questions around this issue when we think about migration is looking around to understand whether or not this moment feels different and actually whether it is different from others we've seen in history.
So that will actually be my first question.
I'd love to maybe start with you, Sonia. in the work that you've done, you've sort of looked at the history of how we've migrated.
How does this moment compare to others in history?
I think the most striking thing about the present moment is that migrants are being scapegoated for a lot of our social problems, economic problems. in a way that does feel quite new.
But what isn't new is the migration that's been happening kind of all along. know that we really track migration that well.
There's a lot of different flows of migration and we only really look carefully at a very few of those.
So I'm not, I don't feel confident in are the way we assess global migration.
I don't think we have a very good idea of how much people are moving around the planet, but from what we can tell, through history, we're looking from the very beginning when humans first walked out of Africa, we have been moving all along. in complex ways to and fro movements across mountains, across oceans, across deserts,
We've been doing it with Stone Age technology.
People walked up into the heights of the Himalayan mountains where there wasn't enough oxygen. thousands of years ago, people paddled out of Asia into the featureless expanse of the Pacific Ocean. multiple times using Stone Age navigation technology.
And that's kind of been the human experience from the beginning.
So what's happening now is we are moving in somewhat new ways because of climate change and other factors.
But I don't think there's any really good evidence that we're moving a lot more in a way that's commensurate with the backlash we are seeing to migration today.
So you're suggesting then, Sonia, that we're not actually seeing people migrate more than in the past.
It just feels like it based on the way the media is covering it.
I think the media and political leaders that are really highlighting migration as sort of the cause of a lot of our problems, in a way that that's easier for them to do than to actually address some of those underlying problems.
Well, I think that actually leads to another point here, which is that migration has been a really huge political topic these days.
And I think One thing I find really interesting is that you both sort of make a point to tackle this topic from a place that largely leaves politics out of it and is sort of just looking at the what you find to be the facts and the things that you've studied.
How do you think politicization of migration has impacted the way people think about migration?
And I'll ask you this because I know that's a huge part of your work and thinking about migration and how it sort of intersects with economics.
Yeah, I think I wanna start by reemphasizing something Sonia mentioned that people have always moved and really as a fraction of the world population, Migration, there's no indication it's any bigger than it has been, at least in our modern era.
For example, most people don't realize that immigrants are only about 3%, 3.5% of the world population.
Another way to say that is about 97% of people never move. across countries.
And so we're talking really about something that in the grand scheme of things is not that large.
It's just that there are waves of time under which um for political reasons uh migrants are whether it's scapegoated or resisted or not And so this moment to me is very similar than about 100 years ago in the early 1900s with the pseudoscience of eugenics. and other supposed national security concerns, there was kind of a wave of resistance to immigrants.
To give an example from the United States, in 1924, the US passed its most restrictive immigration law in history, as a conclusion to a moment that's very, very similar politically to the moment that we're living right now.
Then in 1965, the borders were opened again and we went through a wave of modern mass migration.
That has been true in many, many other countries.
To me, what feels a little bit different historically this time is is that there seems to be more of a wave of many, many countries wanting to be more restrictive about immigration. under the argument that immigrants are creating sort of economic and social problems, even though the evidence doesn't hold that up So there's a big discrepancy between what politicians are claiming and what the facts say that seems to be more coordinated globally than right now.
And what's ironic about that, which is unlike any other moment in recent history, is that our populations are shrinking.
Birth rates have gone below replacement in most immigrant receiving countries.
Whereas in the past, we were receiving immigrants as the natural population was also increasing.
So ironically, countries need immigrants more than ever. but they're resisting them in a uniform way more than in the recent decades.
You touched on this a little bit, Zeke, when you think about the sentiment then around immigration, that feels like that is something then that as we're looking at how Things are changing as far as the politics and culturally, the way we think about it.
Do you feel that there is a sentiment that is more anti-immigrant these days than we've seen in the past.
I'd love both of your takes on this, but Zeke, why don't you start since you touched on this a little bit?
Yeah, honestly, no, I don't think so. I think there has always been resistance to immigrants in just about every country.
I think the fear of the unknown literally creates fear concern about people.
The two common concerns are that immigrants are going to sort of fundamentally change the culture, of a society and the other one is that immigrants compete economically with locals.
And I'm sure we'll get into that. I won't address all the evidence suggesting that those fears are unfounded.
I think just what changes are the political moments.
There are politicians who always have taken advantage of that.
And there are waves in which that goes up and down, but there has always been resistance.
What I do want to emphasize though, is that the average person, the majority of people tend to like immigrants.
So it's usually a minority that is against immigrants and What changes is there are moments when that minority controls the conversation, and we're in one of those moments right now.
And Sonia, sort of turning to you, I think to even add to this, I love your thoughts on what you think are the fundamental differences we're seeing in our world that might contribute to the way we think about migration as you've looked at it over history.
Yeah, well, I want to respond to something Zeke just said, actually, which is I think it's It's true that there is often resistance to migration, especially if you make migrants conspicuous.
But if you don't make migration conspicuous, then people assimilate very quickly.
And we can see this in our biological genetic structure that whenever human groups have dispersed, isolated, become separate, culturally distinct, but then they come together again if they overlap, if their territories overlap, they mix.
They meld. They make families together. That is why all of our genes are mixed up the way they are.
So geneticists know this. They can see this in our population structure.
And what social science has found is that the sentiment of xenophobia isn't isn't automatic.
Like it doesn't happen everywhere where new people come in.
If new people come in and there's no actual barriers to their entry and their assimilation.
And those new people are not made conspicuous by say policies that say, you have to wear this kind of, you know, ankle bracelet or you have to line up in this line here and we can see you or, you know, something like that.
If there's not those kind of exclusionary policies that make migrants conspicuous and migrants assimilate into the local culture extremely quickly.
And that is why, you know, yes, migration is, it's only 3.5% of the global population, but we are all touched by it.
Very, very, very few humans today are more than a few generations removed from an act of long distance migration.
For me, it's my parents. For Donald Trump, it's his parents.
For Steve Bannon, it is just a few generations ago.
So we all have been touched by this in some way.
So the xenophobic backlash, the potential is there, but we also have an even greater potential for assimilation.
And that I think is in the broader picture, that is actually what happens with most migration is most migrants, we don't notice them, They are like the blood pulsing through our veins where it's beneath our notice.
It just happens and it's part of the way societies function.
It's part of how we have evolved to respond to living on a dynamic earth that has changing conditions all the time.
And I think I'd love to get into that more too, just sort of thinking about how migration really affects the way we live our lives and affects our world.
And of course we know that there are a lot of reasons why people migrate and we're using migration as sort of this umbrella term to talk about people who are immigrating by choice, people who are refugees and fleeing something.
And the media, regardless of what type of migration is happening, often painting human migration as either good or bad, but it seems the truth is a bit more gray as is the case with most things, right?
So I'd love to break that down and maybe in specific areas.
So maybe we could first start with the economy, which, of course, as you can know, this is your real specialty in thinking about migration and the economy.
How do you see migration impacting the economy, both within the local national level and then thinking globally.
Look, we have very good evidence on this.
I think when it comes to immigration and the economy, the story is overwhelmingly positive.
And I think it's scientifically dishonest to say anything else.
If you talk to anyone who studies the data, immigrants are net positive economic contributors.
The simplest way I can put it is to use the five fingers of my hand Right.
And the immigrants bring five key economic inputs that everybody wants.
And they're the following. First, they increase the amount of investment in your community.
Second, they bring talent, right? They fill jobs and they bring skills.
Third, they bring innovation. A lot of the new technologies, products, foods that you consume and make your life better were introduced by immigrants.
Fourth, they're consumers, so they buy the goods and services that are produced that businesses desperately want to sell.
And five, they pay taxes. Now, I don't know anybody.
I don't know any mayor, president, governor, average citizen, business person that says, no, I do not want those five things.
Okay, and of course the numbers attached to those five things vary a little bit by country. but you can sort of put it in the bank that immigrants will bring those five things.
And those five things are what creates jobs, what causes the economy to grow, Again, to use an example from the United States, because it's a country that I study the most, We know that immigrants are nearly one in five workers in the U.S., but more than one in five in key sectors that we depend on, both high and low skill.
Immigrants are responsible for over a third of all patents in the United States.
That is a staggering amount of innovation.
Immigrants have well over a trillion dollars in spending power, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And we can kind of quantify the same for different countries.
And so we need those things desperately.
And when you make the case that way, then it's much easier to think of why we want legal and regular pathways for immigrants to come, because we all need that.
And again, remember, We're in an environment where populations are otherwise shrinking.
So we have no source of economic growth other than immigrants.
There is no other way that economic growth will happen other than with immigration, at least in countries that tend to be sort of the rich countries that receive immigrants around the world.
And Sonia, I know historically you've sort of seen what the conversation around migration has looked like as it relates to things like safety and security and that's often in the media and when we talk about the politics around migration is a big point of conversation around whether spaces become less safe because there are migrants there?
Are you making spaces safer by removing people from a space?
How do you see that migration actually does affect safety and security.
Yeah, I mean I actually got into studying migration from the perspective of public health risks.
But my book previous to The Next Great Migration was a book about pandemics.
And after I finished that book, there was a big movement of people across the Mediterranean, people from North Africa. the Middle East trying to get into Europe this around 2015.
And I went there because I thought to do some reporting because I thought, well, this is a public health risk.
This is like a health security issue with huge movements of people into new places.
That's how you can spark epidemics. so i went there to do this reporting project and what i found was it was exactly the opposite that in fact the people on the move were healthier than the host populations in which they were entering.
They had less communicable diseases, less non-communicable diseases.
They smoked less. They had less obesity.
They had all these great health practices.
And if they get sick, they get better faster.
If they get, say, even cancers, they won't die as quickly.
There's all this amazing... medical phenomenon that's very well defined, very well documented, and it's called the healthy migrant effect. um and you know it it sort of is what took me on this journey of like well why did i immediately think oh people are moving It's a crisis, right?
It's a migrant crisis. These two words just go together, right?
They just roll off your tongue. It's in all the headlines.
If there's migrants, there's a crisis. Well, it turns out it was exactly wrong.
And so I wanted to kind of investigate why is it that we automatically think of migration as a crisis?
And I think the idea of the healthy migrant effect really goes to the point Zeke was just making about innovation and diversity. it takes a certain kind of person to make migration work effectively, right?
Migrants are not people who are kind of the richest of the rich, who have a lot of assets, who have titles, this kind of capital that they can't really take with them to new places.
They're also not the poorest of the poor.
They're people who have what's you know mobile capital they have things they can take with them they have skills education good health you know these are the things that are portable that you can take with you and what make it possible for people to move.
Because of course, migration is disruptive.
It is very risky to actually accomplish it.
The people who actually can do it have all of these qualities that contribute to the kinds of economic benefits that Zeke was just talking about.
And that really goes to how you get diversity and innovation in a society, right?
Like people move into new places, They adapt to those places.
They maybe come up with ways of using the local food, new cuisines, new ways of thinking, new ways of housing themselves, new ways of doing technology, all these ways you adapt to a new place.
And then when they move, they bring some of that with them.
And that is kind of the insertion of diversity and innovation into new societies is the dispersal of this innovation that evolves as we adapt to new places.
Migration and innovation, it's all kind of wrapped up in this dynamic tension.
So if we want those benefits, We need to capitalize on all that.
Minimize the risks, minimize the costs, and capitalize on those benefits.
It's, you know, we're really seeing a backlash to that whole equation right now, which is why, you know, I mean, why we're having this conversation, to be frank, right?
Yeah. Could I respond to that for a second?
Of course. Yeah. I mean, I just want to expand on it, really.
I agree with what Sonia is saying. But I think it's very important for us to understand where a lot of the concerns about immigrants come from.
Strangely, they come from sort of importing ideas about sort of natural ecological systems with limited resources to human systems and human populations, right?
And the The core idea that has really been at the root of a lot of the anti-immigrant movements is the idea of carrying capacity, right?
That a natural ecosystem reaches its limit and cannot sustain anymore. because resources run out and then you just have competition for resources.
But the fundamental misunderstanding of that is that human and economic systems are not that way.
Right. Because because because of innovation, humans can increase the so-called carrying capacity of a system.
Right. For example, humans are unlike animals in that they can invent solutions to their problems and work their way through them.
They can produce more. Often the fallacy is that we think of new people just as consumers, but not as producers, and that's producers of new ideas, producers of a lot of different things.
And so once you understand that and you kind of detach yourself from that fallacy of human systems being identical to like, uh you know your backyard right which is a kind of this closed sandbox with limited carrying capacity you start to realize that more people actually is often the solution and new people in particular, not just more, but also new people. because they bring this variety right whether it's a variety of uh of of you know uh human physical health systems or a variety of ideas or other assets as an economist would say it.
That's so important because if you look at actually you trace the lineage of our current anti-immigrant movements and think tanks in many parts of the world, they started with this idea of carrying capacity being limited.
Well, you know, and I think obviously it feels like the biggest marker of how immigration is impacting things or changing things will have to do with actually our own identities and our sense of self and how migration is changing the way we think about even our own humanity when you see folks entering a space and this is how we define what it is to be human and figure out who we are.
So I'm curious what you both think as far as how immigration has affected our identities and the way we think about who we are.
And maybe Sonya, we can start with you. Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to how we think of our place in nature.
You know, Zeke just pointed out the idea of the carrying capacity.
And I think a lot of our anti-immigrant rhetoric does trace back to these biological ideas, these ideas about nature and which are actually outdated in biology itself.
So ecosystems are not They don't have settled carrying capacities either.
Other species are moving around just as much as we are, we're finding.
And they also do create technologies. If you think about the web of a spider or the nest of a bird being a kind of technology for those species.
We are not exceptional in moving around the planet either.
And this has been happening all along. The reason we can say that is, why are we doing that?
In evolution, we know things that last over time, that get dispersed throughout all these different species, it's because the benefits outweigh the risks. over time.
And so migration is sort of our adaptive solution to life on a dynamic planet.
And that's not just true for us. That's true for all these other species.
And we're learning that now because we have things like solar powered GPS tags that we can put on animals and actually see where do they go?
You know, actually study that prospectively.
This is something new. This is a lot of new knowledge we're getting now.
And what scientists are finding is that all these other species are moving farther, faster and in more complex ways than anyone ever thought was possible. before.
So, you know, the story of migration is just it's expensive and it's not just in humanity.
And so I think we need to rethink what is our place in nature?
There's this very old idea that goes back to Linnaeus, that there is some kind of a settled order in nature, that everything belongs in a certain place.
We name things that way. We say there's the Japanese maple or the Canadian goose. associate the place and the animal as if they're the same thing.
Well, now we know. These animals are moving all over the place.
They don't sit in certain fixed places on the planet at all.
And that's true for us too. We've all been moving all along.
So we need to kind of rethink our ideas about nature, I think, and our place in nature as well.
And Zeke, what have you found in this space?
How is this changing our sense of self? Yeah, yeah, obviously on a shorter timescale than what Sonia spoke about, the evidence on this is also pretty good in that, you know, Immigrants assimilate successfully to society, to the values and the economy and the language of the receiving society.
Now, the way that we stop that, we can... slow down the process if we threaten immigrants or if we put in place policies that are dysfunctional and slow down the process, right?
We can do that. Usually the way we do that is that we We tend to also have another fallacy, similar to the fallacy of carrying capacity, the fallacy that cultures are competing entities right so that so that cultures exist on a continuum and if you and if you move towards one you have to move away from the other and and therefore We insist that immigrants assimilate, but the mental model we have is that assimilation means abandon your previous identity, right?
Abandon your previous language, abandon your previous cultural values, abandon what you used to eat.
But we know from cultural psychology that cultures can coexist.
They're not competing ends of the same continuum, but they exist kind of orthogonally, right?
And so you can a person can be highly attached to two different cultures, or they can be detached to both, or they can be more attached to one or the other.
The most successful immigrants and the most successful societies that receive immigrants allow people to be who they were and also add something new to their identity.
As it turns out, I'm an immigrant from Uruguay and South America.
I feel very American, but I also feel Uruguayan.
I am both. You can't tell me that I'm not both.
And so once we accept that that model of cultures as not competing but complementary things, then immigrants can kind of overcome that paradox of being from another place but also fully being from the new place.
And all the evidence suggests that when allowed to do so, immigrants will successfully assimilate.
They will not when we tell them that they have to give up their previous identity.
And so Once our policies are designed around that principle, things work out just fine.
And if I'll be allowed to just say just one more thing about this, the other thing is that Any changes that immigrants bring to society, you think of Italy as a good example, right?
A place with iconic food. Italy wouldn't have Italian food had it not been for immigration.
A lot of the innovations in Italian cuisine came because Italians left Italians returned, Italians sent back ingredients and ideas from the places they settled.
And so a lot of the modern Italian foods that we associate with being like always Italian didn't even exist 100 years ago, right?
They existed because of a process of migration.
And so immigrants will change things, but they change them very slowly, right?
To the point where like the next generation doesn't see what immigrants bring as exotic so we also have to take a long-term view right it's not like immigrants will change and disrupt society so quickly that we cannot adapt So yeah, that's what the social science tells us.
Now, I think to this point, we've largely talked about the effects of migration from what feels like a positive lens, maybe some of the benefits that are not often highlighted in the media.
But I'd love to hear from both of you because I know you both acknowledge in your work that there are some negative social effects of migration.
And beyond just these positive implications.
And so what are some of these major negative effects and how do you think we can work to reduce them?
So maybe Sonia, let's start with you. Yeah, there's no doubt about it.
Migration is disruptive. It's a change and all change is difficult.
You have to adapt to it. You have to make allowances for it.
I think if we accepted migration is a part of nature, it's part of the human experience, part of innovation and resilience, it's how we secure that for our future generations, then we could look at migration as an investment.
We could say, well, let's try to minimize the disruptions so we can maximize the benefits because this is part of what is happening.
This is part of our society. It's part of our future.
And I think there's ways to do that. And I think a lot can be done with pace, the pace of migration, the direction of migration, even the potential large scale if you, you know, meter the pace.
If you create more avenues for legal migration, right now, for example, people are moving because the climate's changing you know desertification if your fields are drying up and your kids are not going to be able to make money farming anymore then it's likely that they're gonna start looking for looking to move first to a city and then maybe to another country.
That is how migration unfolds. Well, If we know that's coming, we know that's happening, but there is literally nowhere on earth where it is legal to move because of climate change.
We don't have that infrastructure at all.
So that means that what happens instead is that you have people kind of trapped in places where conditions are changing too fast for them to adapt to and they need to leave to secure their futures and that of their children.
But they have no pathway for that. So what happens?
Well, they wait for a disaster. A big storm comes or a dust storm, a dust bowl happens or something like that happens and then everyone has to move all at once.
And you have these mass movements that are the most disruptive of all. by not creating those avenues beforehand, we actually are making migration more disruptive.
In fact, what we're seeing right now is that there are enough political regimes that find disruptive migration to be a good problem to have because this is something they can crack down on.
They can make it look like they're really doing something.
And it takes everyone's attention away from the actual underlying problems, which are really quite difficult to solve.
And what about you Zeke? What have you seen as some of the negatives?
I think it's really important to separate two things, right?
It's immigrants and what they do and the immigration systems we have in place to manage the flow.
Right. Empirically speaking, there's very little that's wrong with the first right when immigrants arrive.
Like I said, they bring those five economic things.
They're highly adaptable. They're law abiding.
Something we haven't talked about is that the myth of immigrants increasing crime is just a myth.
It's exactly the opposite. So what immigrants do is overwhelmingly positive.
There are not too many negatives there. The systems we use to manage their flow though, there's a lot of negatives.
And so in as much as we see negatives, whether it's social backlash, or concern or disorder or chaos, it's like Sonia was saying, it's because we don't have proper systems.
And so I think what's wrong is just that we, if you look at most countries with very, very few exceptions, the way countries have designed their immigration systems has been under the principle of keeping people out, blocking them, right?
We don't want these people as opposed to the premise immigrants bring these positive things and let's design a system around harnessing those benefits in a way that is orderly.
That is certainly true of the US system.
That is certainly true of most systems in Europe. and in large immigrant receiving countries.
So when you change the default from blockage to flow, you get a very different system.
The problem is that we don't think about it that way.
And it comes down to, like Sonia was saying, a flashpoint where Too many people arrive in one single location in a short period of time.
And so I think that a lot of it comes down to not so much managing immigration, but managing infrastructure.
For example, if too many people settle in one place at the same time, you are gonna get something like a housing shortage or the roads will be crowded or schools will be a little bit crowded.
But that tells us more about our inability to be thoughtful and build infrastructure effectively than about what immigrants do themselves.
Does that make sense? So a lot of it is about we don't have good systems to manage flows of people.
And I think it probably would be worth spending a few minutes on that, but maybe I'll stop there for now.
That's great, and I definitely do want us to, at the end, sort of get to a place of talking about how do we redesign some of this and rethink But before we even get there, I know that there's so much that you've already sort of touched on in thinking about where things are headed and how the future might unfold.
Taking into account things like Sonia, you touched on, climate change and I know that your work in many ways is thinking about migration as a result of climate change as it's affected by climate change.
But then, of course, other things like conflict and you look at declining birth rates, which you touched on, Zeke, and what that booms in other places.
How do you predict migration will change in the coming decade or even century if you're looking out further?
And Sonia, I'd love you to start, since you have such a great historical sense of how migration has played out over the course of humanity.
I think we might see some broad, like right now we're seeing about 80% of other species are on the move.
They're moving into new places. And that's in sync with the changing climate.
They're moving into higher latitudes or moving higher up into higher altitudes.
And that is so that they can stay within the climates that they are adapted to.
So that's not how humans are moving yet. but I think it takes time.
And I think right now we have a lot of barriers, political barriers that say, well, you can't move for this reason and you can't move here and you can't move there.
But if we were to sort of start to overcome some of that, and I think policy works to some extent to deter migration.
We have more walls on international borders today than at any time.
It has more of a deflecting effect than a deterrent effect.
People still want to move and they still will move.
It's like throwing a boulder in a stream, right?
Like people... Find a way to go around.
And a lot of times people will take more dangerous routes.
Like Zeke was saying, we really don't have a system for moving people around the planet in a safe way. orderly and dignified fashion.
We could create that if we wanted to, and things would be quite different, but That's not what we have.
So the system we have now is about, well, let's make sure people don't move or don't move too much or not these people, but these people don't move, right?
So all of these barriers we erect actually can make migration far more dangerous.
But I think what we'll see in the longer picture is in the past we've seen big movements that are going east to west.
Generally, human populations have been flowing that way.
But if we were to sync up with climate change, we would start seeing more South to North movements.
That is what we're seeing in other species.
Humans are animals like other species. you know i expect over time that that's what's going to be happening in the kind of bigger picture for human migration too And Zeke, you also touched on this idea of policy.
And so maybe that's something we could also bring in to this conversation.
When you think about what migration might look like in the years to come, what might policy look like to help for what sounds like what you're suggesting, Sonia, and also your take on this, that will be sort of inevitable that people will continue to migrate?
Let me perhaps say it even more strongly and more provocatively.
We're in a moment right now where it seems like immigration is unpopular.
It's not on average, but it is for many governments.
But I think we're going to see a future very soon where countries are going to go from immigration choosers that is kind of choosing their pick of the litter to immigration beggars.
Countries will be desperate for people. And it's simple math.
You need 2.1 you need a fertility rate of 2.1 on average to just maintain the population.
In most countries, we're well, well below two.
And there is no other source of economic growth of of fiscal security.
There's no other source of just maintaining our resources than people.
And so For a long time, the world population has been growing.
That is going to plateau. And so... there's gonna be a lot of competition for talent and for people.
And so I think we're gonna look back at this moment and kind of scoff I'm not saying maybe in five years, but definitely by the time my kids are adults, I think we're going to be scoffing at this moment because countries are going to be –
Putting in programs, excuse me, out of sheer demographic desperation to attract more people, at least wealthier countries will.
So I think we're going to see a lot more immigration openness.
And then if you couple that with climate change and kind of these these push factors like war, there's going to be I think more movement and probably, you know, ironically, perhaps more orderly than now, just because the need on the receiving side is going to be much, much bigger.
That's my sense of where we're going. I don't know if I answered the full question you asked.
No, that's great. And I'd love for you, Sonia, to sort of even respond to some of this, like this idea of migration becoming inevitable because of the push factors and also, as Zeke mentioned, these choosers who have to choose to immigrate for the flourishing of a nation.
Do you see this? Do you think this is going to be an inevitability that all of us should begin to think of ourselves as? migrants in some way.
I mean, I think we all are migrants in some way, except for a very, very few of us who are still in parts of Africa and have stayed there since the dawn of humanity.
Even when we first walked out of Africa, actually, we walked into Europe and Asia In North America, there already were other humans there, other human species that are now extinct.
So even that was a migration that wasn't just we populated the empty earth.
No, there were already other humans there, Neanderthals, others.
And we intermingled with them too. A lot of people today still have Neanderthal genes. because that's what we do as humans, we mix.
So migration has been complicated from the very beginning.
We now know from paleogenetics that people walked out of Africa, came into North America, and then they didn't just stay there.
They went back to Asia. They went back to Europe, they went back to Africa, they came out again.
It's been this complex story from the very beginning And so I think what we're seeing is just, it's gonna continue because that's just how it has been.
We have new drivers today. because of climate change.
So like I said, I think that's going to change directionality to some extent, but I think the idea that, well, there was this idea we all grew up with in my generation that we kind of walked out of Africa and then we populated the planet and then we just stayed still for thousands and thousands of years until modern travel made it easy to move around. airplanes and ships and stuff.
But what we now know is that we didn't need any of that.
We were moving all along. And we have evidence of that in our bodies, in our DNA.
We all carry that around with us. Yes, migration is at any one moment in time, it's a small number of us that are moving around, but we are all really touched by migration in a very profound way.
And I think the reason why is because because it's been so critical to how you have innovation, how you have resilience, how you have diversity.
This is why so many conservationists are actually trying to build bridges for other species so that they can move into new places because we know that if they can move into new places, we can secure biodiversity in the future, and we want that.
We should want that same thing for us. Human diversity, that's what gives us resilience too.
So, you know, again, I mean, this is – I don't know if this is the – specific answer to your question, but kind of gets back to the same sort of overall theme, which is that Migration is not the crisis.
Migration is the solution. And if you go back to, well, what is the crisis? it's not a migration crisis.
It's a crisis of welcome. It's a crisis of, the fact that we don't have any system to actually get people around into places where we can take advantage of all the benefits that they bring. that really does then get to this point around the sentiment of it.
And you've seen nations that have had at one point very migration-friendly policies have become more populist and nativist in recent, years, decades, a lot of spaces in Europe, for instance, and The question I guess then is if migration is the answer, how do we, change the sentiment?
How do we avoid people swinging to the other side here in ways that we can almost predict as we're seeing people pushing push out of certain spaces and into other spaces more.
Zeke, maybe you could take that to start.
Yeah, I think that we've made a huge mistake in the narratives that we tell ourselves about immigrants, which deeply affect the sentiment.
The way I often put it is that basically there are two stories that we have told ourselves and people believe sort of one of the two.
The first is the immigrants as villains, the villain story, right?
That immigrants are here to take your job and, you know, steal your house and your car, right, to commit crimes. that they're here to change the cultural heritage that you love so much.
Meaning that immigrants are here to take stuff and they're villains, right?
If a villain is at your door, you should kind of block them and build walls to keep them out.
What's interesting to me is not that there's always been an anti-immigrant message or the villain message.
What is fascinating to me is that in some ways the more pro-immigrant message is what it is, and it's what I call the immigrants as victims. right?
The needy outsiders who are just desperate and we have to extend a hand of of kindness and charity to them, even if it costs us a lot.
Right. And so then we, you know, we have kind of the bleeding heart type message that is perhaps more open to immigrants.
But what's interesting is that villain and victim can be perfectly consistent with each other.
Because even if you have a bleeding, welcoming heart, it still leaves open that possibility that, well, maybe this is very costly for our society, both economically and culturally.
And the reality is that immigrants are neither villains nor victims.
But as long as we keep kind of telling ourselves these stories and public opinion and our policies keep swinging, and the pendulum goes from villain to victim and back and forth, we end up with really dysfunctional policies.
I would say that the way we start is very simple.
We start with a very different premise. Immigrants are good for us.
That is, immigration is good for us, not just for the movers.
It's good for the receivers. And it's good for us for the economic reasons and social and other reasons we've been talking about for the health. reasons that Sonia mentioned.
Once you start with that premise that immigration is good for us, then you have a third possibility that's neither villain nor victim.
It's that immigrants are essential for our health and prosperity in every possible way.
Once that message is taken along, then we can design the systems and we can change mindsets.
What I find remarkable is that there's almost no political parties in the world that have that positive premise in their immigration platform.
Certainly it's not true of Democrats or Republicans in the US, and it's not true of almost any party that I know of in Europe or Australia or anywhere.
And so I think that's the opportunity. The good news is, though, that the empirical evidence is very much in favor of that third that third message that immigrants are good for us.
So it's not just rhetoric, it's really fact.
If we start there, I think the rest will follow.
And I'm not naive in that, of course, there's a lot of politicking and hard work involved in changing public opinion.
But but that's the start. We need a better message.
And Sonia, as we think about the future and sort of where things could head, it feels like it's always important to kind of think back to the past and what we have seen And what are some lessons that we could take from the past when it comes to migration to help us shape a future here around how we move?
You know, I always think about, I think it was in the 1980s and the Republican primary debates And I think it was Reagan and maybe it was Bush also.
Anyway, they were arguing with each other over whose policy was more welcoming to immigrants.
And this was in living memory. I was alive then.
And so things can change. quite rapidly politically, I think.
And I think what's quite interesting about the current moment is a lot of people who thought that they wanted to get rid of immigrants because they thought they were these villains that they we've been told that they are in, you know, by these political leaders.
Um, And then they see, well, masked men have come into my community and they have abducted this woman who was part of my community. you know, everyday life who I actually really enjoyed and was my neighbor.
This person who ran the donut shop or this person who was my kid's teacher or this person who used to be my coworker.
And these are members of the community. And now suddenly they are kind of outed. as oh you're a migrant we didn't know we thought you were just one of us right so but there's a lesson in there and it's a very very cruel way to make this lesson.
It's a brutal policy that we're seeing unfold here in the United States. what is happening in a lot of these communities is people are realizing, well, Mike, these migrants, these immigrants, they're everywhere.
They are part of our neighborhood. They're part of our community.
They're part of our culture. And I would hope that that profound experience to know that migration is not something that happens elsewhere.
It's not these others, these aliens, these You know, people who look different from us, who we can keep it that would never assimilate into our communities.
No, that's not who they are. And we are now seeing that because our communities are actually being torn apart by these, you know, by this deportation secret police kind of regime that we're seeing here, at least here in the United States, is coming up.
And so it almost begs the question of then what does humane migration policy look like?
What does it look like for someone to... for nations to implement this in a way that is actually is not cruel and is thoughtful about what it means for the individual and how it benefits the community.
And how could we usefully do this at scale?
Zeke, what do you think? Yeah, I think that the good news here is that we can have our moral cake and eat it too.
That is, we can do what's morally right and humane and do what's good for us, right?
In this case, morality and self-interest are aligned.
And so because of that, I would say that we want to build policies around our self-interest.
Think about what you want for a successful community, for a successful country.
You want a vibrant labor market, you want a lot of innovation, you want people that bring in healthy bodies. like Sonia was saying earlier.
And so I think that we have to start with the reality that we need more immigrants, at least most countries do.
And so we could double or triple the number of immigrants that we allow.
And we would be fine. In fact, we would increase economic prosperity and job creation because of that. increasing the flows.
It turns out we don't need to do too much in terms of spending our public coffers on providing benefits.
A lot of European countries have the fallacy that the only humane or proper way to welcome immigrants is to spend a lot of money on housing and language lessons and put them all in the same neighborhood.
And actually that kind of backfires because immigrants become kind of coddled and isolated instead of just naturally interacting with their neighbors.
And so in an interesting way, we have to sort of get out of the way.
The one thing we do have to do deliberately though, is build infrastructure.
So building housing, building roads, building up in big cities rather than having very restrictive zoning laws.
So I would say actually that housing and infrastructure development are like the policies I would focus on rather than immigration policy per se, if that makes sense.
If you let people flow, and we need to increase the quota as compared to what we have now, focus on infrastructure policy.
That's the one kind of active area that I would focus on.
But we don't need to do too much in terms of to manipulate what people do, because people will do what they do, which is in their quest for survival and a good life, they will bring good stuff for their neighbors.
The other thing is that we also want to give responsibility for immigration to agencies that frame immigration positively.
And with apologies to our non-US listeners and viewers here, Just to give an example from the US, just because it's a country I live in, isn't it so telling that in the United States we have put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of our immigration apparatus, the agency that is tasked with protecting you from external threats,
So that itself tells you that we have framed immigration all wrong.
Imagine if we gave responsibility to Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, right?
These are entities that are tasked with developing policies and rules that are about human prosperity rather than just sort of safety and barriers.
That would be a very different framing than what we have right now.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too, Sonia.
And also if there are examples you can share of spaces where you have seen implementing sort of these humane migration policies similar to what Zeke has suggested or proposed for the United States.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot we can do to kind of think about absorptive capacity.
Where are there places where we need more people?
Where are there places where there's enough housing to accommodate people quickly, enough jobs, enough schools, you know, all of those things we can kind of evaluate. places in that way, and we can encourage our migrants to go to those places.
I mean, some of it happens naturally, like Zeke says. because it's in migrants' interests themselves to go to those places.
But sometimes it doesn't. And, you know, policymakers could address that.
We could make migration safe, humane, and dignified by giving people papers, by giving people legal channels.
If they had more legal channels to move, then they wouldn't move in disaster circumstances.
They wouldn't move all at once. in the most disruptive way possible to the closest place that they can get to, as opposed to maybe somewhere else, which would make more sense and would have more absorptive capacity.
These are all things that could be evaluated by policymakers and incentives could be put into place to move migration in ways that we will capitalize on the benefits and minimize the disruptions.
I think the UN has come up with a lot of great ideas on how to do this.
There's a global compact on migration that several Countries have signed.
This is not rocket science. This is like basic policymaking.
But like Zeke said, we have to change the way we think about migration.
Economically, yeah, we can think about it.
Instrumentally, do we need migrants? Yes, we do.
Let's turn the faucet on. I think we can even go deeper than that and just say migration is part of how we are resilient.
It is part of how we have diversity and innovation, and it is a... it is a deep human impulse and it's not going anywhere so let's just just adapt to it let's just you know The same way we have children and adapt to that, even though it is hugely disruptive to have children.
It's an investment in the future. We do it anyway.
Yeah, and if I may add just a quick thought to that, I mean, I know I talk economics a lot, but there's another aspect Think of security, national security, right?
Everyone wants national security. Immigration is a great source of national security for a variety of reasons.
One of them is that it creates bilateral relationships and goodwill across countries.
And so countries that share a lot of immigrants and movement of people are much less likely to go to war with each other because they understand each other better because from the grassroots, you get just more natural relationships and linkages across places.
The other way in which immigrants make us safer is that they have relatively low crime rates, and so they make individual local communities safer.
And the other thing is that immigrants because of the innovations they bring are often the sources of technological improvements that increase security for countries. as well.
And so it's not just economics, it's not just ecology, it's also just safety, right?
Which is turning the message completely on its head because So much of the villain message is that immigrants are a safety threat when they're exactly the opposite.
Well, I feel like the big goal with this conversation was to really understand how we can thrive in a world where people are on the move, where it is happening, whether you support the ways it's happening or you don't or support the idea of immigration or don't.
And I guess as we're winding down the conversation, I'd love to hear from both of you, just what you feel like is the big thing that we're not saying or not seeing in the media and the way migration is being portrayed or talked about that you think we're missing in this moment?
What is the thing that we should be talking about that we're not saying enough.
So Sonia, maybe we'll start with you. Yeah, I mean, I think we need to turn the whole conversation around, which is don't talk about migration at all talk about the problem of people being trapped.
When people are trapped in places, we are all suffering in a lot of different ways.
We're not getting the innovation. We're making people more vulnerable to climate catastrophes.
We're not getting the diversity. We're not getting the new workers.
We need all those things. Let's report on all the terrible things that happen when people are trapped, when people cannot move.
So that's a new way to get at this question.
Instead of focusing on, let's look at the migrants.
Are they good? Are they bad? gang members or are they going to take our jobs or are they actually nice people?
Let's judge them. No. Forget about that.
Let's look at a whole different problem, which is what happens when people cannot migrate?
Go to those places where people are trapped, where people want to move and see what is happening there. completely underreported story.
And that really gets to the heart of what Zeke and I are both talking about, that people being trapped in a place is much worse. than letting them move around.
Yeah, I mean, that's really, really well said.
I hope I can add to that. But related to that, I think that, look, I spend a reasonable amount of time speaking to journalists and to the media.
I think they're doing the job the best they can.
But unfortunately, we as consumers of media love sensational stories, right?
And so the story of some disorder at some border will get eyeballs but the story of hey regular everyday migrant goes to work pays taxes, contributes to their community, is a good person, helps a little lady across the street, that doesn't make the headlines.
But in reality, the vast majority of immigration is just that, everyday people doing the right thing.
And also the vast majority of immigration is orderly and regular and not chaotic.
And so I think that unfortunately, because of the incentives that the media has because of what we consume, there's this very distorted reporting of the kinds of immigration that happens and what it does.
So that would be number one is just, Find a way to report the average everyday normal things that migrants do just like normal people do.
Second is that we're too obsessed with how people arrive at our borders and not obsessed enough with what they do once they're inside.
And once you understand what they do when they're inside, which is overwhelmingly good, it's much easier to have conversations about how to manage the arrival process.
The problem is we get it exactly backwards.
We obsess so much about how they arrive, we never talk about what they do.
And then the third is stop with the villain and victim dichotomy.
Focus on how immigrants are good for us.
And again, then the conversation is much easier to have.
I think if we do those three things. we can, I think, pretty quickly come to an agreement and we'll be much more sane about how we deal with this issue.
Well, I want to thank you both so much for sharing all of your insight and thoughts on this.
I definitely learned a lot during this conversation and have taken in so much about how I think about this topic.
And I hope that everyone watching has also gained something from this.
So thank you. Thank you both. Thank you.
Thank you. This was really fun. It was a pleasure to be here.
That was a TEDxplains conversation with Sonia Shah, Zeke Hernandez and Whitney Pennington-Rogers.
It was recorded August 5th, 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced and edited by our team, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Samarnivon.
It was mixed by Christopher Fazey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
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