When Tucker Carlson told viewers of Fox that immigration would ‘dilute’ the political power of Americans, when Trump told Americans immigrants were sending their worst, they had a well of unscientific history to draw from.
It’s a history that attempts to pin people down, categorise and classify them, hold them in place, bar and banish them, despite what science is increasingly showing us: migration is the norm. Immobility is abnormal.
Liberalism – the assumptions of which many of us live under – prioritises individual freedom, of thought, of expression, of movement.
But at the same time we think of migration – which is free movement – as abnormal.
We even mythologise a sedentary past – of villages, farmers, peasants, ‘tied to the land’, living and dying in the place where they’re from.
Yet in the 17th century, around 65% left their home parish at some point in their lives.
We have what philosopher Alex Sager calls a ‘sedentary bias’.
The migrant is presented as a problem, alien, outsider, yet we move around our own countries – commuting, deciding to live elsewhere, holidaying, visiting relatives, making work trips – without thinking it’s in any way strange.
We are, as a species, mobile, nomadic, built to move.
In 2020, you could count 280 million migrants and each year around a billion tourists. And the numbers are increasing.
But so are the objects, ideas, and phenomenon – borders, passports, guards, barbed wire, nationalist rhetoric – that attempt to pin us in our place.
Can we find a genealogy of our attitudes? A history of our present problem? To do so, we might start with the 18th century biologist Carl Linnaeus.
Linnaeus was born in Sweden in 1707 during a period when Europeans had been exploring the globe and returning with stories of strange places, peoples, and creatures. Some – like Arnoldus Montanus – wrote and illustrated books about these bizarre alien lands without ever leaving the comfort of home. Zoos, museums, galleries, and menageries exhibited these incredible new foreign curiosities.
Linnaeus – always fascinated by the natural world – wanted to contribute to scientific understanding of the planet’s great biodiversity.
He came up with a system of simple categorisation – a taxonomy.
He’d give each species two names in Latin. The first a general category, the second a specific one.
Linnaeus divided species into classes, genus, species, depending on a number of characteristics including where they were found.
He published his revolutionary book Systema Naturae in 1735.
But when it came to humans, Linnaeus faced a problem. How would the different races of humans fit into his taxonomy?
The Bible told us that all humans were created by God and descended from Adam and Eve. They must be the same.
But the prevailing consensus at the time was that non-European peoples were primitive, savage, and biologically different.
Voltaire had written that, ‘the Negro race is a species of men as different to ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds’.
Linnaeus had a rival.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was also a naturalist.
In opposition to Linnaeus, though, De Buffon believed that instead of adhering to strict categories, nature was dynamic, changing, in flux.
He thought humans had migrated and adapted to local conditions as they moved around the planet.
Like almost everyone at the time, De Buffon still believed in a hierarchy. The farther from the Garden of Eden humans had moved, he thought, the more their biology degenerated.
He published his own book Histoire Naturelle in 1749. It was a Europe-wide success.
But Linnaeus’ celebrity grew.
Species couldn’t degenerate that much, he retorted to de Buffon. It was blasphemy. Species – including humans – were born, lived, existed, precisely where god had intended them to.
‘It is impossible’, Linnaeus wrote, ‘that anything which has ever been established by the all-wise Creator can ever disappear’.
By the 10th edition of Systema Naturae Linnaeus would classify 8000 plants and 4000 animals, including several races of humans:
Homo troglodytes, from the Antartic, can eat raw flesh.
Homo caudatus, of Borneo and Nicobar, had tails.
Homo monstrosus, from lapland, included giants and dwarfs.
Homo sapiens europaeus were ‘white, serious, and strong’, ‘active, very smart, inventive’.
Homo apeins asiaticus were ‘yellow, melancholy, greedy’.
Homo sapiens americanus were ‘ill-tempered’ and ‘obstinate’.
And homo sapiens afer, from Africa, were impassive, lazy, crafty. Slow, foolish, and ruled by caprice.
The idea of these biological distinctions between races dominated European science, developing across the 19th century into a new field: race science.
This 10th edition of Systema Naturae was a triumph and became accepted over de Buffon’s interpretation of nature. Louis XV ordered it official.
Rousseau said he knew of no greater man on earth.
After Darwin published On the Origin of Species, he argued that environmental differences had resulted in adaptions seen in humans.
But race scientists argued that there were clear fundamental biological difference. Darwin quickly became side-lined and descended into despair. He had episodes of hysterical crying. As he lost his influence many scientists who adopted the subspecies view believed him to be crazy and ignorant.
How could single species travel so far around the planet? How could ancient Israelites have reached the Pacific Islands?
These were clearly separate biological races.
Darwin performed experiments submerging seeds in water to see if they could survive long journeys, and getting fish and birds to eat them, retrieving them from their droppings, and seeing if they still germinated.
But the human subspecies view won the day. The Natural History Museum in London displayed models of different human species. The Bronx Zoo had a similar display on the ‘Races of Man’. They kept a man from Congo – Ota Benga – in the monkey house where visitors watched him play. He was only released in 1906.
It was clear to all that god and science had intended a separate, distinct, biological hierarchy of man.
The separation of humans into a hierarchy of species almost logically and naturally led to a global – or at least Western – concern: degeneration, the mixing of genes, the dilution of hereditary superiority.
Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, led a new movement: eugenics. Policy makers, he argued, should focus not on education or investment but on breeding good, pure citizens.
Through the Galton Society, scientists warned of the impact of mass-migration, of racial contamination.
Many US states banned interracial sex and marriage in the late nineteenth century.
Biologist Charles Davenport warned that Americans could ‘rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art’, and ‘more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality’, if races mixed.
President Coolidge wrote about the ‘biological laws’ that ‘tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend’. America, he declared after signing a bill to restrict immigration, must be kept American.
University courses on eugenics skyrocketed. Passports and identification documents became more common.
The US closed its borders to migrants for the first time in its history. Immigrants had to take intelligence tests at Ellis Island.
Immigration into the States declined from around 800,000 a year in 1921 to 100,000 after 1929. Ellis Island closed in 1954.
Even ships of refugees fleeing from the Nazis were turned back. One ship – the St Louis – reached Florida and was sent back to Europe. 254 of its passengers died in the Holocaust.
Nazis, most obsessed with purity, even advocated for the destruction of foreign plants in Germans’ gardens. Himmler issued landscaping rules that banned any non-native species.
A popular BBC series and 1958 book The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants warned about protecting domestic species against invading alien ones.
The foundation of all of this – the belief in biological distinction – would persist for centuries. When, after the Holocaust, the UN released a statement that condemned racial distinctions, leading scientists protested.
Leading British scientist, W.C. Osman Hill wrote, ‘I need but mention the well-known musical attributes of the Negroids and the mathematical ability of some Indian races’.
Evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley also pointed to the ‘rhythm-loving Negro temperament’.
83 of 106 anthropologists refused to sign the UN statement.
In 2018 the US Citizenship and Immigration Services changed its mission statement from ‘Fulfilling America’s promise as a nation of immigrants’ to ‘securing the homeland’.
The twentieth century might be looked back on as the century we rediscovered movement. Advances in technology led to an almost unbelievable expansion of railways, roads, airports, and even space travel.
In art, the impressionists like van Gogh had already tried to bring back movement into still images.
Film and radio developed.
Philosophers like Deleuze brought the idea of change, movement, dynamism back into a field he thought had become too static, too representational.
But Linnaeus’ belief that species were native to specific locations continued throughout the twentieth century. No-one believed that humans – let alone many animals – could have dispersed so far and wide across the globe. Creatures couldn’t migrate from Africa to the Pacific Islands. They couldn’t swim thousands of miles. Species had to have evolved separately.
It took technology only invented in the late twentieth century – GPS and modern DNA analysis in particular – to discover a fact that shocked scientists: around half of all species aren’t sedentary, they’re on the move.
And it’s only in the last couple of decades that the real extent of this discovery is becoming clearer.
Animals migrations are incredibly difficult to study. Even harder to understand is our prehistoric past. Tracking technology was heavy, expensive, and unable to be used at long distances. Solar-powered GPS tags changed this.
Suddenly, researchers have been tracking migrations on a scale no one ever suspected. 70,000 km migrations of terns. Zebras walking over 500km, crocodiles swimming 200 miles out to sea, dragonflies flying hundreds of kilometres a day. Everything from sharks to wolves migrating thousands of miles.
A new field of study – movement ecology – rapidly developed.
This video from Movebank logs the movement of 8000 animals fitted with GPS tags: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUKh0fr1Od8&ab_channel=Movebank
Linnaeus’s ideas about using the geographic location in a species’ name has become, for the first time, unreliable. The natural world is much more fluid than we ever realised.
Only in the 1980s did modern DNA analysis finally prove that homo sapiens were one species with a common ancestor. In 2000, the Human Genome Project found that differences between us accounted for about 0.1% of our gene sequence.
As journalist Sonia Shah points out, migration is so common that it’s pointless asking why people migrate, but rather, we should ask why anyone stays in the same place.
She writes ‘migration is encoded in our bodies, just as it is in wild species’. It’s a force of nature, a fact of life, built into biology itself.
Yet despite this, we’re increasingly trying to stop it, thinking of humans as naturally sedentary rather than biologically dynamic.
In 1945 there were just five border walls in the world.
By 1991, there were still only 19.
In 2016 there were 70.
North Korea encages its people. India fences itself off from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Tunisia has built trenches filled with water along its border with Libya. In Hungary, prisoners were used to build a fence along its border with Croatia. Israel uses razor wire, sensors, and infrared cameras. Britain and France have increased the fencing at the channel tunnel. And Trump’s border wall lengthened the US-Mexico barrier by almost 500 miles.
However, walls, as Wendy Brown has argued, are more effective as political theatre and rhetoric than preventing the flow of migration. Instead, they just send migrants through different routes, they create an underground smuggler economy which increases crime, and ultimately make migrant routes more dangerous.
And, of course, they impose an artificial order on what – as we’ve seen – is a natural global phenomenon found in every species.
Our nationalist bias, our sedentary bias, makes these things appear natural, the way the world is, the way it has to be, while often obscuring the complexity of borders as a phenomenon.
They separate families, cut off jobs, and always imply the violence needed to defend them.
For a rich person, borders often signify excitement, adventure, holiday, vacation. For poor countries a border means something entirely different: a prison, a limit, an obstacle.
Jonathan Moses has argued that we could even draw an analogy between international borders and apartheid. Moses asks, ‘Why is the Dane’s advantage over the Somalian legitimate (and protected by international law), while the Afrikaner’s advantage over the Xosi was not?’
For millennia, migration was a part of human life, all life. Slow but steady. Science and technology have had a strange effect on that history. Inductive science – the careful study of the world – has tended, historically, to collect evidence in a snapshot, at a specific point in time, and then announces that it has found a universal truth. It finds people where they are, and presumes that’s where they belong. And just as scientific racism pinned everyone down, technology sped everyone up, leading to a contradiction that both builds walls and encourages more movement.
And this contradiction is only going to become more pronounced.
Between 2008 and 2014, floods, storms, earthquakes, and other disasters displaced 26 million people around the world. In 2015 alone, 15 million people were forced to flee wars. In that year, a million of them migrated across the Mediterranean.
When we look at these people, we tend to take the ‘states’ that they are moving between, moving through, as the natural unit of analysis. That those people are misfits or aliens, in or out of a container.
We tend to take the state as the natural unit of analysis.
But as Ulrich Beck has noted, as we become more global, as the world becomes quicker and more connected, ‘the unity of national state and national society comes unstuck; new relations of power and competition, conflict and intersection, take shape between, on the one hand, national states and actors, and on the other hand, transnational actors, identities, social spaces, situations and processes’.
Scientific racism, human taxonomy, the state, border walls, guards, passports, global inequality, all hide the fact that not only are we all migrants in our bones, but that increasingly, we are globalised ones, with many more options and desires than ever before. It’s not only the possibility of more global displacement from disasters, wars, poverty, or climate change, but more as we all become more mobile, dynamic, international.
We should focus on ways not just to facilitate this, but to encourage it, to make it more efficient, easier, more dynamic.
The UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, for example, encourages international support to do just this.
We all know that we want to move around the world as we wish – for work, for vacation, to see family – but we rarely reflect on the contradiction and injustice that makes this possible for many of us but impossible for many others.
As centuries of naïve and crude pseudoscience get refuted, as we rediscover movement, mobility, and our migrant impulse, should we not be trying not to build walls, but to realise that we’re all on the move.
Sources
Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration
Alex Sager, Towards a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/dec/18/tucker-carlson-immigrants-poorer-dirtier-advertisers-pull-out
