The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Could Humans Have Survived Without Migration?

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

While headlines about migration might make it seem like a relatively new phenomenon, the movement of people spans hundreds of thousands of years, and according to our guest, has been essential to the survival of the human species. Ian Goldin is professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford, and author of "The Shortest History of Migration: When, Why, and How Humans Move-From the Prehistoric Peopling of the Planet to Today and Tomorrow's Migrants". See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

He was like a father figure to me. Unfortunately, found myself in a very vulnerable position. This is a story about a psychiatrist in Toronto accused of abusing two of his patients, which he denies. It's also a story about a system that is supposed to protect patients. From TVO Podcasts, I'm Krisha Collier, and this is The Oath. Subscribe today wherever you listen. While headlines about migration might make it seem

like a relatively new phenomenon, the movement of people spans hundreds of thousands of years, and according to our next guest, has been essential to the survival of the human species. Ian Golden is Professor of Globalization and Development at the survival of the human species. Ian Golden is professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford and author of The Shortest History of Migration, When, Why, and How Humans Move

from the Prehistoric Peopling of the Planet to Today and Tomorrow's Migrants. And he joins us on the line from Oxford, UK. That has got to be the longest subtitle in Christendom. Anyway, welcome to our program and it's great to have you. How you doing tonight? Great, thanks so much for having me, Steve. A pleasure.

Let's just read an excerpt from your book to get us started here. You write, even if you are not a migrant, your ancestors were. If they had not migrated, you would not be alive. It is through migration in the distant past that humans evolved into who we are and what we are capable of today.

Yet migration has become a source of growing anxiety and polarization. While some see migration as a solution to our problems, others consider them a threat that will overwhelm society. Okay, lots to unpack here. Do you want to just define for us what you believe a migrant to be? A migrant is someone who is in a place that's not their home. They're from a foreign country and of course that has evolved over time.

So countries are relatively new invention and so in ancient history I think of migrants of people that moved away from their home ranges or their home communities to very different places. So it is fair to say once upon a time, all of us, or our ancestors, maybe with the exception of the indigenous people of this country, are migrants or were migrants. Yes, absolutely everyone, including the indigenous people of Canada. They came to Canada perhaps 25,000 years ago, but their ancestors were not from Canada.

You know, there's a lot of discussion about where they came from, but most views are that they came across the Beringa Strait from Siberia. Indeed, some people speak rather similar languages in Siberia to some of the people that are in the northwest corners of the Americas. And they came in turn from further east and from the Fertile Crescent and they came in turn from Africa. So we all, as far as we know, from DNA and other sequencing,

we all go back to Africa. And how many hundreds of thousands of years ago would that be? Well, the first movement out of Africa was about 90,000 years ago, but most of us came out of Africa 60 to 50,000 years ago. And went to where in the main? Well, it was quite extraordinary spreading, first to the Fertile Crescent, to the places in the Middle East and the Gulf that are near Africa, the Horn of Africa, and then from there, East and West.

Quite extraordinarily, people had already reached Australia by about 45,000 years ago. We keep rediscovering older and older DNA sequences and evidence about the peopling of the planet. We used to think that people only got to South America maybe 15,000 years ago, but now things are being found that are traced back to 20,000 years ago or more and so by about 25,000 years ago most places on earth most habitable places on earth had been inhabited of course very sparsely so not always permanently and some great mysteries like how did people get to Australia 45,000 years ago, although it was the ice age and so land was much more exposed, a lot more of the ocean was on the

land in ice. But still you couldn't walk to Australia, you'd still have to traverse the ocean to get there. And these are great mysteries about this. It's like a detective story as we keep uncovering more and more evidence. But there's a lot of mystery still to it. How they got there is a great question, but why they decided to leave in the first place I think is another good question. Do you know the answer? Well, we can pick at the clues and we can see some of the evidence. I think it's pretty clear that people basically moved mainly to escape danger. So like refugees today, famine, drought, flood, fire, those sorts of things force people to

move. Conflict later. But also I think people move for curiosity. What's over that mountain range? Where do the birds go to when they migrate and then come back? And also for personal reasons. You know I don't like my mother-in-law and that family and I'm gonna move. So I think it's rather similar things that motivated people then as today. A curiosity, an exploratory spirit, and also some wanting to, and a lot of escaping peril.

And that's why I believe, and I think most ancient historians and archeologists believe, that humanity would not have survived if we had not left these perilous places. They were telling mother-in-law jokes 50,000 years ago? Quite possibly. Why not? Well, OK. And now, let me follow up on the last thing you said there,

which is to say that had we not migrated from dangerous places tens of thousands of years ago, it's possible. Do I have this right? It's possible we would not, as a species, have survived to today, is that right? Yes, I think there's a lot of evidence that there were various pinch points where homo sapiens came down to very small numbers,

like tens of thousands of people that were in particular places that were affected by famine and by other disasters, and if there hadn't been parts of the group that had moved away we might have died out. But it's also the case that there were other species on earth. So there were Neanderthals, there were Denisovans. It's thought that Neanderthals might have been more intelligent than us. They certainly had bigger brains.

But they didn't migrate and they were largely in Western Europe and we interbred with them. We all have Neanderthal in us. I used to think it was an insult to call someone a Neanderthal, but it might be a compliment. And we all have some, particularly Asians have Denisovan and other species in them, which allows them to adapt to high altitude. But for example, our lactose tolerance comes from Denisovan and interestingly enough the people the least mixed up homo sapiens that have the smallest fragments of other species in them are the original homo sapiens which are the people living in southwest Africa the Khoisan and other people

indigenous peoples of there who have only the smallest fragment of other species because they didn't migrate away from some of the original homelands of homo sapiens. Now one of the reasons of course we wanted to have you on our program tonight is that this has become a very hot issue of late in particular your Prime Minister has spoken about it. Our Prime Minister is pretty new and it wasn't a huge focus of the election campaign just passed, but of course his predecessor made it a big deal as well. And I guess I want to know, when did the notion of migrants coming to, as you point out, countries, a fairly recent phenomenon in the scope of history, when did that become a thing? Well, until really the First World War,

most of the extent of control of governments, to the extent that they did control things, and of course, countries were much bigger then. They hadn't fragmented as much as they have today. But most of the control was on people leaving. So you had to, you know, it was both to keep people at home to serve in military and other services for government to ensure they paid tax and things.

So entry control, as we know it now, keeping people out is about 120 years old. You know, the history of Canada for one, but very typical of many places, was a fierce competition for people. Indigenous people had been there for a very long time. They were dispossessed from their lands. But in the book, I have an image of a Canadian advertising van

that was going around in Britain, asking people to move to Canada. And it was a fierce competition between Canada, parts of the US and other countries for people in the second half of the 19th century. Passports as we know them today and the rigorous controls really became implemented during the First World War and I have some stories in the book of people that encounter a passport officer for the first time and literally don't know what the person is asking for when the person asks for a passport.

So a relatively new invention. So if the idea once upon a time was to keep people from leaving, now it's clearly the opposite. It's more concern about having people come in. What are the factors that have precipitated this new border control against bringing people in? Well, I think it's no accident that it largely arose during the First World War So a fear of foreigners then it was you know, you didn't want for example Germans to come into the Allied country So it was a sort of fear of

people subverting you Economies, I think that was part of it. Then we went into the Great Depression and we had high levels of unemployment. And then it became competition for work idea. And that's grown. It's also been, I think, increasingly seen as a political tool. All the evidence, and I must have this in the book, points to the benefits that immigration

brings, but increasingly it's been seen as a threat by many people, by many countries. Even those countries, which have benefited most from this, you can't imagine the US today or Canada today, or many, many places without these successive waves of immigrants that have made them what they are. But it is the case that the last one in wants to pull up the drawbridge. Well let's do something somewhat heretical here and that is introduce some empirically provable facts to our discussion. And to that end I'm going to go back to your book and here's an excerpt from it as we look

at the stats. The number of migrants, you tell us, the number of migrants worldwide has been rising steadily in recent decades, nearly doubling from 153 million in 1990 to 281 million in the year 2020. As a share of the total population, however, there are not many more migrants today than in the past. The world's population has increased by almost 3 billion in the past 30 years, meaning that the proportion of people migrating has in fact remained relatively constant. In 2020, about 3.6% of all recorded citizens were born in a different country. 30 years earlier, it was 2.6% of all recorded citizens were born in a different country. 30 years earlier, it was 2.9%.

Okay, that is certainly not the impression one gets today. So why do you think the percentage, let's start with this, why do you think the percentage of change has barely changed at all in those intervening three decades? Yeah. Well, we really only have data from about the First World War, so we don't know how many people migrated before that in great accuracy, but it seems like in the second half of the 19th century, so from about 1850 to the First World War in 1940,

much higher shares of people migrated. So, for example, well over 20% of the US population and Canadian population was foreign born in that period. And a third of Scandinavia migrated. The Irish population today, including Northern Ireland, is still only just over 6 million. It was 8 million in 1850. So, you know, half the Irish population left Ireland, half of southern Italy left southern Italy. So we had in the past much as a share of the population, much greater movements of people. Since we have the records from about the First World War, it's been about 3% of population, 97% of people don't go why is it so low

i think because it's tough i think exceptional people migrates uh... you leaving your community leaving your family and friends uh... you often going to unknown places uh... you outside of their so it's exceptional people that might raise and they also exceptional in the places

they go to. They stand out and don't have the networks, the family, etc. an offer. So most people don't want to do that and the evidence seems to suggest on average around the world about 3% of people leave their home country to live elsewhere. If the numbers have barely changed over the last three decades in terms of the percentage of the world's population, and I think I'm on solid ground in saying this,

why is there the perception anyway that we are being inundated by migrants 24 seven? Yeah, I mean the other thing that's happened, just to finish on the previous point, there's a hundred more countries than there were a hundred years ago. So if you migrated from one part of your country to another, like one part of the Soviet Union to another, or across various African boundaries and so on, you were in your own country. Now suddenly in a different country, and that of course means that we should expect the

share to have gone up, but actually it's gone, it's stayed constant. Why is there this hostility? I think that it's firstly that it's the hostilities largely grown since the cutbacks in expenditure on housing and public services. So there's real pressure on affordability of housing and we need to empathize with people. Let's say I can't afford a house with too many people bidding for these houses, not enough houses being constructed, people feel pressure on public transport, people feel pressure in

waiting lines for health services and other services. So I think there's a sense of we have a fixed set of resources and there's just more and more people competing for them. Let's keep them out to have more ourselves. Of course, it's a fallacious argument for two reasons. One is the immigrants are going to help solve the problem. I don't know the data for Canada, but in the UK we have massive shortages of people, nurses, doctors, and others, and also construction

workers. So we need immigrants to solve the problems, but also because they generate jobs and economic growth. So the answer is not to be found in let's keep the immigrants out, but in let's address the real issues, which let's create affordable housing. Let's create transport services, which are improved where we have enough space. Let's deal with our waiting lists in the health services and other things rather than the solution is to keep immigrants out.

That will not solve the problems. What role do you think social media has played in the perception of this issue? I think social media is a very divisive force in general. People amplify. It's not evidence-based. Unlike when you say things, it needs to be fact-checked. This is not the case with social media. So I think it's a divisive force that amplifies a lot of myths.

And it reinforces the echo chambers. One of the challenges, of course, with immigration is assimilation, is understanding different cultures, and social media is not good at that because it's very much within a community rather than across communities that I think it operates. If we clamp down on migration, as we are certainly seeing on the southern border of the United States of America with Mexico at the moment, what do you think the long-term consequences of that are? Well, in the US, the consequences will be extremely negative in the short term and in

the long term. In the short term, what we're going to see is shortages of people in key services. And we've seen this in previous clampdowns, shortages of agricultural workers, of construction workers, leading to higher prices, leading to even some things not being on the supermarket shelves possibly. The other short term impact is a lot of undocumented workers, particularly migrants, work in home care, in child care, elderly care, and other home services. And that's allowed particularly women to get back into the workforce. So one of the things we see happening pretty quickly is female labor force participation

in the workforce goes down when you cut out migrant workers because they have to go back home to do the tasks that migrants are often doing. So your labor force participation goes down. What we also then see in the medium term is the dynamism of the economy slows down. You know, migrants are far overrepresented in the things we need to improve productivity growth

and innovation. So they're something like three times as likely to start a small business than a native person. They double the representation in Nobel prizes, Academy Award winners, and across the board. If you look at the patent and innovation data, you see similar sorts of statistics. So the source of dynamism in your economy gets undermined. So the short-term impact is negative inflationary interest rates stay up for longer. The long-term impact is that you create less jobs

and you have a less dynamic economy. In our last minute here, then, let's bring it home and talk about the migration bargain that you think we need to make. What's the migration bargain? Well I think we need to recognize that people have legitimate concerns regarding the number of migrants. I think we as a society, particularly democratic societies, we have the right to choose how many people are in our societies. I think more is better. So we should admit more, more foreign students, more immigrants with

skill and some unskilled immigrants as well. But we need to ensure there's a bargain, that they need to abide by the laws of our land. They need to pay taxes. They need to be documented. They need to abide by criminal codes. And in return, I think they have rights that go with citizens. So they must receive minimum wages, health and safety, and other rights, and safe passage. I think it's also vital as part of this bargain that we distinguish very clearly between economic migrants and students that we have the choice on,

and refugees who are in legitimate fear of their lives. And there I think the bargain needs to be between all countries in the world and particularly between countries that think they're civilized. And I would certainly rank the UK and Canada amongst them to have a burden sharing. We cannot allow people to die as happened in the Second World War and in previous periods in history because there's nowhere safe to go and that's a question of fairly sharing amongst countries the right of safe passage and asylum processes for people. You know I'm going to beg the control room for an extra minute here because I do want to end with a personal question as it relates to the dedication of your book which is quote to my grandparents

who gave up everything to flee. What's their story? Yeah, I think, you know, we all owe our background to migration, none of us would be here, but I feel that particularly personally. On my father's side, they fled from what is now the Baltics, Lithuania, because of the pogroms. Everyone that remained was killed. They fled to South Africa.

And on my mother's side, my mother born in Vienna, they fled from the Nazi invasion, first to England and then to South Africa, where I was born. And none of the people that remained behind in Austria survived. So both on my grandparents, my father and mother's side, that was absolutely essential. They left everything. They were relatively well-off, well-networked. My grandfather was on the Viennese opera. It didn't help him or protect him in that time.

And of course, then I repeated the story because I, as a South African, I got involved in the anti-apartheid struggle and then left South Africa and had the great privilege and honor of going back to serve in the government of President Nelson Mandela when the country became democratic. So I sort of repeated this refugee cycle which is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about this subject. So when you say in your book, migration has helped keep our species alive, as they say in the States, you're not just Whistlin Dixie.

This is a very personal story for you, yes. It certainly is. It is. Ian Golden is a professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford. His book, The Shortest History of Migration, is well worth your time, and we are delighted you could join us from Oxford, UK. Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Steve.