The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

If you want to know what Sonia Shah has to say in her new book, all you need really do is have a glance at the back cover. “Politicians and the media,” says the blurb, “present the (current) upheaval of migration patterns as unprecedented, blaming it for the spread of disease and conflict. But the science and history of migration in plants, animals and humans tell a different story… in other words, migration is not the crisis, it is the solution.”

Shah’s book is written in praise of mobility and movement, both in nature and among humankind, and consists of a sequence of illustrative examples and heartfelt polemics, designed to demolish the arguments of those joyless and controlling types who, throughout history, have in Shah’s view elevated their prejudice against the lively and sometimes messy dynamics of the natural and human world into a series of scientific theories often presented as fact, and designed to project a much more fixed and rigid picture of how nature and humanity “should” be.

Shah is a Baltimore-based science journalist best known, by coincidence, for books on pandemics and disease control; she is also the daughter of migrants, whose Indian parents arrived in New York during the 1960s. Her contempt for those who assume that migration is a bad and threatening phenomenon, and then repeatedly bend the facts to fit that largely false conclusion, is palpable; and as a result, her book probably stands little chance of persuading those who do not already share her views.

For those of us who grasp the central truth that human beings are all part of one family – born to travel, to meet, to get to know one another and to intermingle – her book is a hugely entertaining, life-affirming and hopeful