The migratory human

Sedentary people living in nation-states was never the inevitable outcome of human evolution, argues Sam Miller in his new book

MIGRANTS: The Story of Us All

Author: Sam Miller

Publisher: Hachette India

Pages: 439

Price: Rs 899

In Migrants Sam Miller questions the notion that humans are naturally sedentary. His aim is to “restore migration to the heart of the human story”, and view important periods in the history of humankind “through the prism of migration, of people on the move, of societies in flux -- rather than of stasis, of settled communities”.

Miller himself has lived most of his adult life outside the UK, the country of his birth. But unlike most migrants -- who seek to escape poverty, natural disasters, or persecution -- he has chosen a life that involves being on the move. And, as a white man with a British passport who holds down a well-paid job with the BBC, he has had it relatively easy.

The book is well-timed. Increasingly, war, sectarian strife and climate change have created a steady stream of migrants into Europe from Africa and West Asia -- as has Russia’s Ukraine war. Ageing populations in rich countries mean that many more migrants are needed to overcome labour shortages. Migration is set to increase dramatically as climate change begins to upend the world as we have known it.

Miller describes how deeply disruptive and destructive migration has often been. In the Americas, early European settlers brought disease and death, wiping out indigenous populations -- the Inca, the Maya, the Aztecs, and the native tribes of the United States. The most destructive and disruptive migration was the shipment of enslaved Africans to almost every part of the Americas. More than 12 million were carried across the Atlantic over a period of about 350 years, of whom three million perished before reaching. As for those who survived these voyages, “their names, their languages, their histories, their gods, their food, their music were all taken from them.” That loss remains.

And ever since Europeans and Africans, under dramatically different circumstances, first settled in North America, there has been an obsession with racial categories and hierarchies. Witness the debate about Barack Obama’s identity. Most Native Americans, too, became unwilling migrants, often driven from their ancestral homelands into reservations. By the 1850s, “the word American signified white migrants and their descendants. A hundred years earlier it was used to describe Native Americans,” writes Miller.

In the US, anti-immigrant feelings were whipped up a century before Donald Trump made it part of his “make America great again” platform. By the early 1920s, the US began closing its doors to most migrants, especially if they were non-white or Jewish. “Old Stock” Americans, citizens whose northern European ancestors had arrived before independence, had by now developed a distaste for the notion of America as a “melting pot” of people of different origins and cultures. Their racist view of the world put the British and Nordics at a premium. A Congressional report in 1920 recommended a suspension of almost all migration except for the British and Nordics. And so, in 1921, the US government for the first time set a limit to the number of migrants who could enter the country each year. In 1924, new tighter rules halved these quotas, which were now even more biased in favour of northern Europeans.

The new quota system helped to ensure the continued economic and political domination of the US by people of northern European heritage. It also led to the growth of unauthorised migration, with Europeans entering the US illegally through Canada and Mexico. Their numbers were boosted in the 1920s by 450,000 Mexicans who crossed the international border to work on fruit farms in Texas, New Mexico and California. Legal at first, it was followed by a continuing flow of illegal immigrants. When fences did not deter the migrants, US officials sought to discredit them by portraying them as criminals -- a narrative later echoed by Trump. 

Meanwhile, there were even larger population movements within the US, partly triggered by labour shortages caused by the crackdown on immigration. Significantly, several million Blacks left the old slave-owning regions of the South for the cities of the north. This self-chosen migration, Miller writes, was “a flight from discrimination and lynching and poverty, and more widely, the unresolved legacies of slavery and the Civil War.”

That flight began in 1916 during a brief wartime collapse of European migration to the US. Northern factories needed workers, and sent recruiters to the South, and thus began the flow of young Black men and women northward. By 1930, more than 70 per cent of Chicago’s Black population were migrants from the South, including such stars as Louis Armstrong and Joseph “King” Oliver, and they brought their music with them. If jazz originated in New Orleans, it blossomed in Chicago. It was in Chicago, too, that the blues found its voice, through Blacks who arrived from the South. New York saw a cultural renaissance too -- Harlem, previously the home of new European migrants, had by the 1920s become predominantly Black and was gaining an international reputation as a place of culture and entertainment, including jazz and the blues.

Miller’s argument that humans migrate not merely because of adverse circumstances, but are also motivated by boredom, a sense of adventure, or because they wish to pursue a dream, is unexceptionable. Yet, it is possible to disagree with his contention that “sedentary people living in nation-states was never the inevitable outcome of human evolution, nor is it an accurate description of the modern world.” Migrants makes compelling reading, but it is logical to argue that only extraordinary circumstances can persuade humans to abandon home and hearth, and start afresh farther afield.

Miller concedes that Migrants is not a comprehensive history of migration, and is selective. But it could have been enriched by a brief analysis of the two-way migration that followed India’s partition (although he does devote a couple of pages each to the Aryan migration to India from Central Asia, and the arrival of Zoroastrians from Iran a millennium ago) or the impact of white European settlement of southern Africa, both of which were deeply disruptive.