The week before the day of the interview with US essayist Sonia Shah, a report revealed that migration flows jumped 22% in 2021 to member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including is part of Canada. The annual total of migrant inflows is now approaching five million. And seven out of ten emigrants quickly find work: moreover, they most often change countries for this precise reason.
At the same time, The duty was about a family of Colombian refugees who became Granby entrepreneurs. Radio-Canada reported that the famous Roxham Road is also used to transport migrants in the opposite direction, from Canada to the United States. And the false declarations of the ex-minister Jean Boulet in the electoral campaign on the immigrants in Quebec not speaking French and not working continued to make waves.
We pass, and still very telling. One in three Montrealers was not born in Canada.
The anthology suffices to remind us that the essay Migrations (translated by Écosociété) by Sonia Shah is perfectly fitting. The work crosses socio-cultural history and natural history at a brisk pace to illuminate in a masterful way the fundamental role of displacements which have shaped the world, which will transform it again and again in our century of great stupefaction, where intertwine the effects of globalization, climate change and wars. The war in Ukraine has already created millions of refugees. Germany alone received almost a million between February and August this year.
Journalist Sonia Shah patiently produces large, well-informed summaries of difficult subjects that allow us to step back and shed light on the great progress of the world. His latest book, Pandemic, translated by the same Quebec publisher, was both prescient and frightening, which incidentally explains that.
“I was finishing the book on pandemics in 2015 when the opportunity arose to go to Greece, on the island of Lesbos, to write about the crisis of migrants who were arriving there en masse, she explains in interview at To have to. I had to write about the health effects of this population movement. I remember asking health care workers what risk this migration crisis would pose for residents of the island and for the migrants themselves. One of them replied that there was no migration crisis. It shook me. »
The media around the world, however, spoke only of this crisis, while Greece was already sinking into another crisis around the public debt. So the aid worker refined his explanation. He added that it was not migration that created the crisis, that there was a significant surplus of housing in the country, on the other hand struggling with a shortage of manpower. Absorptive capacities of migrants therefore existed. What caused the crisis was ultimately the reaction of the inhabitants, who did not want the new arrivals arriving en masse.
The crisis shifted sides, so to speak, from the migrants to the host society. “From that moment, I changed my way of thinking, explains M.me Shah. Until then I told myself that if these people move from one place to another, it’s a crisis and it must be a disaster. From there, I understood that we must ask ourselves what is the absorption capacity of the places where they end up. »
life is migration
The basic questions have swirled around. Are there enough accommodations? Can the economy integrate them? Are utilities available? And what is the impact of migration on the country of departure? And what are the consequences of the exodus on the migrants themselves?
The search for answers occupied her for years. The result fills 350 tight pages. She talks about her own family of very modest origins who emigrated from India, having consequently benefited from strong social promotion. One of the quotes in the foreground takes up a Latin proverb saying that with time, invaders become natives. What Quebecer wouldn’t make it his motto while agreeing to talk about unceded territories?
The thesis of the book is based on a very simple idea: life is migration. “We incorporated the idea of sedentary life into our perspectives on our species and on other species. We believe that we move little and that, when we do, something is necessarily wrong. In fact, science teaches us the opposite”, summarizes Mme Shah.
The interview also came as the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine was handed over to Svante Pääbo, a pioneer in evolutionary genetics, who redrew the map of the very complex comings and goings ofHomo sapiens on the planet. The book presents these formidable discoveries while deconstructing “false science”, the ideological foundations of a host of more or less smoky theories, such as that of the fixist naturalist Carl von Linné.
“I try to go back to the roots of the idea that species like humans have to anchor in one place because they are biologically different. Linnaeus based his ideas on hearsay and religious prejudice because he wanted to portray the immutable and perfect beauty of divine creation. »
Animals like any other
Mme Shah incorporates many references to the importance of movement for animals and plants. The book opens with butterflies Euphydryas edita (Edith’s Checkers), which adapted to climate change by flying northwest from the North American continent.
“I wanted to include stories of non-human migrations that biologists document,” explains the science journalist. Species move to survive and succeed. They tell other stories of resilience and adaptation. They are often admired, while the exodus of humans is often seen as a disaster. We hear that it would be terrible to let people from Afghanistan, Syria or North Africa go to Europe or Guatemalans to Mexico or the United States. Personally, I find it interesting to watch the movement of all species at the same time. We are animals too. »
Isn’t it a bit short and even a bit sociobiological? If Sweden is reviewing its generous immigration policy, it is because social problems are piling up. This “socio-political crisis” seems to rest on the migrants. In 2020, 32 of the country’s most wanted criminal network leaders were of first or second generation immigration.
“The problems we see there or elsewhere are the result of failures in migration management,” replies Mme Shah. There are more border walls now than at any time in history. These walls do not prevent migrants from crossing borders. We must rather learn to better manage flows. »
The scientific essay thus leads to an assumed political work. “Obviously yes, I deliver a political message, says Mme Shah returning to his original idea. The book was conceived when Donald Trump was coming to the presidency. I want to repeat that migration is not a crisis, quite the contrary. Let us think of these populations whose territories will be engulfed by the rise of the oceans. For them, migration will be the only way to survive. We can facilitate this exodus if we see migration as a positive reality that ensures the sustainability of the cultural diversity of humanity. »