“We called for workers and human beings came instead,” said Swiss playwright Max Frisch famously. This is a sentence that fittingly humanises migrants who travel for work; whose voices are often silenced or worse, they’re portrayed as parasites. Such language and exhaustive research is the persuasive power of “migrants – the story of us all” by Sam Miller.
Here are five #Bookstrapping insights –
1. The book serves as a reminder of the shared struggles and resilience that define our common humanity. Beyond borders, passports, quotas, visas and walls, we are all connected deeply.
2. Humans migrate for a wide range of reasons: not just because of civil war, or poverty or climate change but also out of curiosity and a sense of adventure. Some also migrate because they don’t want to become like their parents! Ha ha!
3. There are cultures who do not want to accumulate wealth or build permanent homes. They want to have a good time and tell stories. And they want the right to live where they want to! That’s a good enough reason to migrate.
4. The author posits that humans are inherently a migratory species, and our migratory rather than sedentary nature forms the basis of our society. He illustrates this point by explaining key events in human evolution and history such as the first migration out of Africa, the creation of western civilization, and the impacts of colonialism and slavery.
5. The idea of “investment migration’ is explored well. For less than half a million dollars you can buy a passport of a Caribbean country! In the UK, if you have more than 10 million pounds to invest, you can be fast-tracked into citizenship. Nice!
Those who are not rich, obviously have lesser options. Perhaps the socioeconomic scale itself has made the definition and purpose of migrants very wide and vast.
The question I asked myself at the end of the book wasn’t about why people migrate; but about why they choose to stay still at all! Think about it.
Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta is a columnist and bestselling biographer. She is credited with the internationally acclaimed Red Dot Experiment, a decadal six-nation study on how ‘culture impacts communication.’ On instagram @officialReetaGupta