THE GREAT NEXT MIGRATION

Life on the planet is on the move – the plant kingdom, wild animal species and people. But far from being a disruptive behaviour, as popular media would have us believe, migration is, in fact, an ancient and lifesaving response. In this excerpt from her new book, The Next Great Migration, award-winning writer Sonia Shah talks about why the world needs to reimagine such movement as a solution, rather than a problem.

- Sonia Shah

I met Sophia and Mariam a couple years ago in a cramped second-floor apartment in a run-down neighbourhood in East Baltimore, where a local NGO had placed the two women together with their children. As a newly christened volunteer for the local refugee agency, I’d been handed a pile of folders about each refugee family in need of help. Instructed to pick one, I’d chosen them. We talked through a local translator, patched in through a cell phone. Mariam, who had fled Eritrea on foot, made it to a refugee camp just over the border in Ethiopia. Freed from the persecution of Eritrea’s military regime, she spent most of her time hanging around, somewhat aimlessly. She is lithe, playful, and quick to smile. But living in a refugee camp had excluded her from the productive activities of society. She did not go to school. She did not have a job. Her main memory of her time in the camp, when I ask her, is of playing pickup games of soccer.

Sophia’s track out of Eritrea curled toward the north. From Sudan she made her way to Cairo, where she scraped by along the margins. The small cross she wore dangling on a chain around her neck marked her as an outsider, excluding her from mainstream Egyptian society. She took a job cleaning hotel rooms. But the heavy lifting damaged her back, and the botched surgery that followed left her incapacitated and unable to work. In yet another stroke of bad luck, doctors diagnosed her little boy, fathered by a fellow Eritrean on the run whom she’d met in Cairo, with a cancerous tumor in his left kidney.