1: EXODUS
A low fluttering cloud of butterflies Spring Strahm, interview by author, November 5, 2018.
“My goodness!” Camille Parmesan, interview by author, January 7, 2018; “Full Interview with Camille Parmesan,” University of Queensland and edX, UQx Denial 101x, YouTube, July 3, 2017; “Why I Became a Biologist: Camille Parmesan,” University of Texas at Austin Environmental Science Institute, YouTube, March 6, 2007.
results from her butterfly survey Camille Parmesan, “Climate and Species’ Range,” Nature 382, no. 6594 (1996): 765.
Scientists who studied everything Camille Parmesan, “A Global Overview of Species Range Changes: Trends and Complexities; Resilience and Vulnerability,” plenary speech to Species on the Move, Hobart, Tasmania, February 2016; Camille Parmesan and Mick E. Hanley, “Plants and Climate Change: Complexities and Surprises,” Annals of Botany 116, no. 6 (2015): 849–64; Elvira S. Poloczanska et al., “Global Imprint of Climate Change on Marine Life,” Nature Climate Change 3, no. 10 (2013): 919; I-Ching Chen et al., “Rapid Range Shifts of Species Associated with High Levels of Climate Warming,” Science 333, no. 6045 (2011): 1024–26; Camille Parmesan, “Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 37 (2006): 637–69; Tracie A. Seimon et al., “Upward Range Extension of Andean Anurans and Chytridiomycosis to Extreme Elevations in Response to Tropical Deglaciation,” Global Change Biology 13, no. 1 (2007): 288–99; Craig Welch, “Half of All Species Are on the Move—And We’re Feeling It,” National Geographic, April 17, 2017.
Acropora hyacinthus and Acropora muricata Hiroya Yamano, Kaoru Sugihara, and Keiichi Nomura, “Rapid Poleward Range Expansion of Tropical Reef Corals in Response to Rising Sea Surface Temperatures,” Geophysical Research Letters 38, no. 4 (2011).
In Unalakeet, on the northwest coast Ecological Society of America, “In a Rapidly Changing North, New Diseases Travel on the Wings of Birds,” Science Daily, December 2, 2014; Warren Richey, “Up to Cape Cod, Where No Manatee Has Gone Before,” Christian Science Monitor, August 23, 2006.
A wild exodus has begun The terms that biologists use to refer to wild movements distinguish between types of movements depending on their perceived intent or outcome. Range shifts are movements that change the places where animals are generally found; dispersals are movements undertaken during adulthood that transfer creatures from their places birth to elsewhere, and that may or may not affect the population’s distribution or range; migrations are purposeful to-and-fro movements, excluding those of the more circuitous and haphazard kind. In this book, I call all movements, regardless of intent or outcome, migrations.
Every year the young saplings Bhasha Dubey et al., “Upward Shift of Himalayan Pine in Western Himalaya, India,” Current Science, October 2003; “Climate Change and Human Health in Tibet,” Voice of America, September 12, 2015.
People are on the move here Seonaigh MacPherson et al., “Global Nomads: The Emergence of the Tibetan Diaspora (Part I),” Migration Policy Institute, September 2, 2008.
Between 2008 and 2014 “Global Estimates 2015: People Displaced by Disasters,” Norwegian Refugee Council and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, July 2015; “Global Migration Trends Factsheet,” International Organization for Migration, accessed May 10, 2018; Mavroudi and Nagel, Global Migration; Edith M. Lederer, “UN Report: By 2030 Two-Thirds of World Will Live in Cities,” Associated Press, May 18, 2016; “Over 110 Countries Join the Global Campaign to Save Productive Land,” UN Convention to Combat Desertification; Robert J. Nicholls et al., “Sea-level Rise and Its Possible Impacts Given a ‘Beyond 4 C World’ in the Twenty-First Century,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1934 (2011): 161–81.
Government officials may try to estimate Migration Policy Institute, “Mapping Fast-Changing Trends in Immigration Enforcement and Detention,” Fourteenth Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference, Georgetown University Law Center, September 25, 2017.
warning of “disastrous results” Chew, “Ending with Elton.”
one wrote, would not “starve gracefully” Ehrlich, Population Bomb, 133.
Wild species on the move E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
less than 1 percent of the population Census Organization of India, “Jain Religion Census 2011,” Population Census 2011.
U.S. borders had been closed See, e.g., David Wright, Nathan Flis, and Mona Gupta, “The ‘Brain Drain’ of Physicians: Historical Antecedents to an Ethical Debate, c.1960–79,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 3, no. 1 (2008): 24; Steve Raymer, “Indian Doctors Help Fill US Health Care Needs,” YaleGlobal Online, February 16, 2004; “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965,” Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.
four thousand Indian migrants to the United States Roli Varma, “Changing Borders and Realities: Emigration of Indian Scientists and Engineers to the United States,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 6, no. 4 (2007): 539–56.
They glowed like beacons Priyanka Boghani, “For Those Crossing the Mediterranean, a Higher Risk of Death,” Frontline, October 27, 2016; Ismail Küpeli, “We Spoke to the Photographer Behind the Picture of the Drowned Syrian Boy,” Vice, September 4, 2015; Ghulam Haqyar, interview by author, June 12, 2016.
For decades the country’s cruel, autocratic leaders “Amnesty International Report 2017/18: the state of the world’s human rights,” Amnesty International, 2018; Patrick Kingsley, “It’s Not at War, But Up to 3% of Its People Have Fled. What Is Going on in Eritrea?” Guardian, July 22, 2015.
Mariam has a watchful way “Mariam” and “Sophia,” interviews by author, 2017. Mariam and Sophia are not their real names.
Those first border crossers transformed ecosystems Steven M. Stanley, Earth System History, 4th ed. (New York, Macmillan: 2015), 505–6.
One of the first attempts, in 1959 Amado Araúz, “Trans-Darién Expedition 1960,” Intraterra.com, archived October 27, 2009, web.archive.org/web/20091027124759/http://
“Whenever my son thinks about it …” “Jean-Pierre” and “Mackenson,” interviews by author, October 26, 201. Jean-Pierre and Mackenson are not their real names. See also Simon Nakonechny, “Pierre Recounts His Odyssey to Canada,” CBC, September 26, 2017; Kate Linthicum, “Crossing the Darién Gap,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2016; Lindsay Fendt, “With Olympics Over, Haitian Workers Are Leaving Brazil for the US in Big Numbers,” PRI, October 4, 2016.
Over 150 checkpoints, situated miles beyond “The U.S.-Mexico Border,” Migration Policy Institute, June 1, 2006, https://
Young, strong Cesar Cuevas told me Cesar Cuevas, interview by author, March 6, 2018; Don White, interview by author, January 8, 2018; “Bodies Found on the Border,” KVUE.com, November 7, 2016, https://
a robotics professor plotted fifteen years Adele Peters, “Watch the Movements of Every Refugee on Earth Since the Year 2000,” Fast Company, May 31, 2017.
Over the last few years “Global Animal Movements Based on Movebank Data (Map),” Movebank, YouTube, August 16, 2017, https://
2: PANIC
In late 1989 Soviet-aligned officials “Revellers Rush on Hated Gates,” Guardian, November 10, 1989; “February 11, 1990: Freedom for Nelson Mandela,” On This Day 1950–2005, BBC News, http://
But soon a new global bogeyman Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic, February 1994.
The idea of migrants as a national security threat McLeman, Climate and Human Migration
due to sea-level rise McLeman, Climate and Human Migration, 212.
One billion! McLeman, Climate and Human Migration,
“one of the foremost human crises …” Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees,” Population and Environment 19, no. 2 (1997):167.
They’d found that dissipating water supplies “Water Is ‘Catalyst’ for Cooperation, Not Conflict, UN Chief Tells Security Council,” UN News, June 6, 2017; T. Mitchell Aide and H. Ricardo Grau, “Globalization, Migration, and Latin American Ecosystems,” Science 305, no. 5692 (2004): 1915–16.
as a “simple stimulus-response process” McLeman, Climate and Human Migration, 160.
Nearly 4 million viewers tuned in Betsy Hartmann, “Rethinking Climate Refugees and Climate Conflict: Rhetoric, Reality, and the Politics of Policy Discourse,” Journal of International Development 22 (2010): 233–46.
in the cavernous halls of the UN Security Council McLeman, Climate and Human Migration, 212; “Climate Change Recognized as ‘Threat Multiplier,’ UN Security Council Debates Its Impact on Peace,” UN News, January 25, 2019.
One day in early March 2011 Avi Asher-Schapiro, “The Young Men Who Started Syria’s Revolution Speak About Daraa, Where It All Began,” Vice, March 15, 2016; Michael Gunning, “Background to a Revolution,” n + 1, August 26, 2011.
The war in Syria unleashed a mass exodus Zack Beauchamp, “The Syrian Refugee Crisis, Explained in One Map,” Vox, September 27, 2015.
The flow of migrants from Syria into Europe Anna Triandafyllidou and Thanos Maroukis, Migrant Smuggling: Irregular Migration from Asia and Africa to Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); “Mixed Migration Trends in Libya: Changing Dynamics and Protection Challenges,” UNHCR, 2017.
another 180,000 from the coast of Libya “Mixed Migration Trends in Libya: Changing Dynamics and Protection Challenges,” UNHCR, 2017.
Filmmakers, artists, and celebrities of all ilk Lauren Said-Moorhouse, “9 Celebrities Doing Their Part for the Refugee Crisis,” CNN, December 28, 2015; Helena Smith, “Lesbos Hopes Pope’s Visit Will Shine Light on Island’s Refugee Role,” Guardian, April 9, 2016; Tessa Berenson, “Susan Sarandon Is Welcoming Refugees in Greece,” Time, December 18, 2015.
Press reports immediately dubbed Myria Georgiou and Rafal Zaborowski, “Media Coverage of the ‘Refugee Crisis’: A Cross-European Perspective,” Council of Europe report, March 2017.
Greece and Hungary had plenty Yiannis Baboulias, “A Greek Tragedy Unfolds in Athens,” Architectural Review, July 3, 2015; “Labour Shortages Approach Critical Level in Hungary,” Daily News Hungary, August 15, 2016.
primarily Germany but also Sweden and elsewhere “Two Million: Germany Records Largest Influx of Immigrants in 2015,” DW, March 21, 2016; Annabelle Timsit, “ ‘Things Could Get Very Ugly’ Following Europe’s Refugee Crisis,” Atlantic, October 27, 2017; Remi Adekoya, “Why Poland’s Law and Justice Party Remains So Popular,” Foreign Affairs, November 3, 2017; “German Election: Merkel Vows to Win Back Right-Wing Voters,” BBC News, September 25, 2017; “Austrian Far-Right FPÖ Draws Ire Over Refugee Internment Plan,” DW, January 5, 2018; William A. Galston, “The Rise of European Populism and the Collapse of the Center-Left,” Brookings Institution, March 8, 2018; “Grillo Calls for Mass Deportations (2),” Ansa en Politics, December 23, 2016
Government agencies once dedicated to welcoming Richard Gonzales, “America No Longer a ‘Nation of Immigrants,’ USCIS Says,” NPR, February 22, 2018; Jennifer Rankin, “ ‘Do Not Come to Europe,’ Donald Tusk Warns Economic Migrants,” Guardian, March 3, 2016.
scores of women showed up at police stations Eve Hartley, “Cologne Attacks: Our Response Must Be Against Sexual Violence, Not Race, Say Feminists,” HuffPost, January 13, 2016; Lalami, “Who Is to Blame”; Reed, “Fear and Loathing in Homer.”
Media outlets featured stories suggesting Lalami, “Who Is to Blame.”
the German Interior Ministry released a report Reed, “Fear and Loathing in Homer.”
News of the migrant-driven crime wave Reed, “Fear and Loathing in Homer”; Eileen Sullivan, “Trump Attacks Germany’s Refugee Policy, Saying US Must Avoid Europe’s Immigration Problems,” New York Times, June 18, 2018.
News from Sweden a few months later Vikas Bajaj, “Are Immigrants Causing a Swedish Crime Wave?” New York Times, March 2, 2017.
visited Sweden to report on the situation Ritz and Bergdahl, “People in Sweden’s Alleged ‘No-Go Zones.’ ”
They called it a “no-go” zone Ritz and Bergdahl, “People in Sweden’s Alleged ‘No-Go Zones”; Ami Horowitz, “Stockholm Syndrome,” YouTube, December 12, 2016, https://
documentary on the migrant crisis in Sweden Lindkvist, “Swedish Police Featured”; Dan Merica, “Trump Gets What He Wants in Florida: Campaign-Level Adulation,” CNN, February 18, 2017; Rick Noack, “Trump Asked People to ‘Look at What’s Happening … in Sweden.’ Here’s What’s Happening There,” Washington Post, February 20, 2017.
Within days, right-wing media outlets broadcast Taylor, “Who Is Nils Bildt?”
the perpetrators weren’t the familiar Marina Koren, “The Growing Fallout from the Cologne Attacks,” Atlantic, January 11, 2016.
crime in Germany reached its lowest rate “Lowest Number of Criminal Offences Since 1992,” Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building, and Community, May 8, 2018
The video clip of the flames “German Police Quash Breitbart Story of Mob Setting Fire to Dortmund Church,” Agence France-Presse, January 7, 2017; Reed, “Fear and Loathing in Homer.”
There hadn’t been any crime wave in Sweden Taylor, “Who Is Nils Bildt?”
Stockholm was no “rape capital” Ritz and Bergdahl, “People in Sweden’s Alleged ‘No-go Zones.’ ”
Two of the police officers Lindkvist, “Swedish Police Featured.”
Important context had been left out “Police Close Investigation into Australian TV Crew ‘Attack,’ ” Radio Sweden, March 1, 2016
Although the number of unauthorized immigrants Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “US Unauthorized Immigrant Total Dips to Lowest Level in a Decade,” Pew Research Center, November 27, 2018; Nathan, “How the Border Patrol Faked”; U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan and Deputy Chief Carla Provost, testimony to Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, C-SPAN, November 30, 2016.
bloodied bodies of two Border Patrol agents Lam, “Border Patrol Agent”; Moore, Bever, and Miroff, “Border Patrol Agent Is Dead”; Smith, “Bannon: Killing”; “In Memoriam to Those Who Died in the Line of Duty,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, https://
purported to reveal the security threat Aaronson, “Trump Administration Skews”; Michael Balsamo and Colleen Long, “Trump Immigrant Crime Hotline Still Faces Hurdles, Pushback,” Associated Press, February 5, 2019.
Politicians and right-wing news media highlighted “Inside ICE’s Controversial Crackdown on MS-13,” CBS News, November 16, 2017; “Statement from Wade on Horrific Rape in Montgomery County School,” WadeKach.com, March 23, 2017, http://
started to conflate migrants with criminals Meagan Flynn, “ICE Spokesman Resigns, Citing Fabrications by Agency Chief, Sessions, About Calif. Immigrant Arrests,” Washington Post, March 13, 2018; Mark Joseph Stern, “Trump Doesn’t Need to Explain Which Immigrants He Thinks Are ‘Animals,’ ” Slate, May 17, 2018; “Inside ICE’s Controversial Crackdown on MS-13,” CBS News, November 16, 2017.
hadn’t been ambushed by migrants Between 2003 and 2017, forty of the nation’s 21,000 Border Patrol agents had perished while on duty. Most died of accidents and natural causes, not by being attacked by migrants. In thirty-four of the forty deaths, the cause was either a car accident, a heart attack, or heat stress, “Border Patrol Overview,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, at https://
the Department of Justice report Aaronson, “Trump Administration Skews.”
The most gruesome and widely commented Dan Morse, “The ‘Rockville Rape Case’ Erupted as National News. It Quietly Ended Friday,” Washington Post, October 21, 2017
Public health researchers in Europe Kai Kupferschmidt, “Refugee Crisis Brings New Health Challenges,” Science, April 22, 2016; Kirkbride, “What Are the Public Health Benefits?”; Silvia Angeletti et al., “Unusual Microorganisms and Antimicrobial Resistances in a Group of Syrian Migrants: Sentinel Surveillance Data from an Asylum Seekers Centre in Italy,” Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease 14, no. 2 (2016): 115–22; Rein Jan Piso et al., “A Cross-Sectional Study of Colonization Rates With Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Extended-Spectrum Beta-Lactamase (ESBL) and Carbapenemase-Producing Enterobacteriaceae in Four Swiss Refugee Centres,” PLoS One 12, no. 1 (2017): e0170251.
Fears of a migrant-driven epidemic flared Matthew Brunwasser, “Bulgaria’s Vigilante Migrant ‘Hunter,’ ” BBC News, March 30, 2016; Kirkbride, “What Are the Public Health Benefits?”; “Thug Politics,” produced by SBS (Australia), May 21, 2013. See also Helena Smith, “Golden Dawn Threatens Hospital Raids Against Immigrants in Greece,” Guardian, June 12, 2012; Osman Dar, “Cholera in Syria: Is Europe at Risk?” Independent, November 2, 2015.
“Tremendous infectious disease” Philip Bump, “Donald Trump’s Lengthy and Curious Defense of His Immigrant Comments, Annotated,” Washington Post, July 6, 2015.
among the most rigorously health-screened Martin Cetron, “Refugee Crisis: Healthy Resettlement and Health Security,” European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, Amsterdam, April 12, 2016; Kirkbride, “What Are the Public Health Benefits?”
“If you did that to people in the UK …” Aula Abbara, interview by author, May 16, 2016.
Borjas claimed to uncover David Frum, “The Great Immigration-Data Debate,” Atlantic, January 19, 2016.
he had “nuked” Ann Coulter, Facebook post, September 17, 2015.
“the world’s perhaps most effective …” “Confirmation hearing on the nomination of Hon. Jeff Sessions to be Attorney General of the United States,” Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, January 10–11, 2017 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office); “How Sessions and Miller Inflamed Anti-Immigrant Passions from the Fringe,” New York Times, June 19, 2018; Philip Bump, “A Reporter Pressed the White House for Data. That’s When Things Got Tense,” Washington Post, August 2, 2017.
left out a potentially confounding factor Michael Clemens, “What the Mariel Boatlift of Cuban Refugees Can Teach Us About the Economics of Immigration,” Center for Global Development, May 22, 2017.
cost the United States “billions” “Fact Check: Trump’s First Address to Congress,” New York Times, February 28, 2017.
the economic benefits contributed Julie Hirschfield Davis and Somini Sengupta, “Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees,” New York Times, September 18, 2017; “Fact Check: Trump’s First Address to Congress,” New York Times, February 28, 2017.
overrepresented in federal crime statistics Salvador Rizzo, “Questions Raised About Study That Links Undocumented Immigrants to Higher Crime,” Washington Post, March 21, 2018; Alex Nowrasteh, “The Fatal Flaw in John R. Lott Jr.’s Study of Illegal Immigrant Crime in Arizona,” Cato Institute, February 5, 2018; John R. Lott, “Undocumented Immigrants, US Citizens, and Convicted Criminals in Arizona,” 2018; Jonathan Hanen, Greater Towson Republican Club, Towson, Md., January 16, 2018. Biographical details from Jonathan Hanen’s public profile are on LinkedIn at https://
infiltrated the cultural conversation Reed, “Fear and Loathing in Homer.”
a picture of migrants as a global threat Eduardo Porter and Karl Russell, “Immigration Myths and Global Realities,” New York Times, June 20, 2018; Richard Wike, Bruce Stokes, and Katie Simmons, “Europeans Fear Wave of Refugees Will Mean More Terrorism, Fewer Jobs,” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2016; Salvador Rizzo, “Questions Raised About Study That Links Undocumented Immigrants to Higher Crime,” Washington Post, March 21, 2018.
The president described a 2018 caravan Jeremy W. Peters, “How Trump-fed Conspiracy Theories About Migrant Caravan Intersect with Deadly Hatred,” New York Times, October 29, 2018.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries …” The White House later denied the comments, but the New York Times stood by its reporting. Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Stoking Fears, Trump Defied Bureaucracy to Advance Immigration Agenda,” New York Times, December 23, 2017; Josh Dawsey, “Trump Derides Protections for Immigrants from ‘Shithole’ Countries,” Washington Post, January 12, 2018.
Then the Brazilian economy tanked Emily Gogolak, “Haitian Migrants Turn Toward Brazil,” New Yorker, August 20, 2014; Olivier Laurent, “These Haitian Refugees Are Stranded at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Time, February 20, 2017.
he’d found that Haiti had “made significant progress” Rivas, “DHS Ignored Its Own.”
who’d established homes and businesses Rhina Guidos, “Study Says Doing Away With Immigration Program Would Harm Economy,” National Catholic Reporter, July 27, 2017.
Emmanuel Louis, a lawyer from Port-au-Prince “Emmanuel Louis,” interview by author, October 24, 2017. Emmanuel Louis is not his real name.
Community workers across the country Gabeau interview.
Jean-Pierre’s family barely escaped summary deportation “Jean-Pierre” interview.
to build its argument for Haitians’ eviction Alicia A. Caldwell, “Haitians Under the Microscope,” Associated Press, May 9, 2017.
According to a State Department travel advisory Haiti Travel Warning, September 12, 2017, U.S. Passports and International Travel, U.S. Department of State.
ignored the findings Rivas, “DHS Ignored Its Own.”
“If we don’t do something about the border …” Samuel Granados et al., “Raising Barriers: A New Age of Walls: Episode 1,” Washington Post, October 12, 2016.
3: LINNAEUS’S LOATHSOME HARLOTRY
As a boy, Linnaeus spent his days Blunt, Linnaeus, 14.
Prince of Flowers Koerner, Linnaeus, 84.
overflowing with breathless tales Broberg, “Homo sapiens,” 185–86, 191; Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 106–9, 144.
eighteenth-century travel writers underlined Bendyshe, “History of Anthropology”; Schiebinger, “Taxonomy for Human Beings”; Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation.”
these tales were mostly cobbled together Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 55.
Voltaire’s description of cave-dwelling peoples Cat Bohannon, “The Curious Case of the London Troglodyte,” Lapham’s Quarterly, June 15, 2013.
Kioping’s description of his encounter Christina Skott, “Linnaeus and the Troglodyte: Early European Encounters with the Malay World and the Natural History of Man,” Indonesia and the Malay World 42, no. 123 (2014): 141–69; Maya Wei-Haas, “The Hunt for the Ancient ‘Hobbit’s’ Modern Relatives,” National Geographic, August 2, 2018; Brian Handwerk, “Saint Nicholas to Santa: The Surprising Origins of Mr. Claus,” National Geographic, November 29, 2017.
certain aspects of foreign people Jablonski, Living Color; Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation”; Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 1–33.
a distinctly different experience of human diversity Sussman, Myth of Race.
Depictions of and stories about these strange foreign others Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 1–33; Blunt, Linnaeus; Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation.”
Debate swirled among intellectuals and elites Sloan, “Gaze of Natural History.”
Linnaeus had little direct knowledge Blunt, Linnaeus; Koerner, Linnaeus, 57.
His benefactors were impressed Blunt, Linnaeus, 96–99; Koerner, Linnaeus, 16.
Linnaeus started writing his groundbreaking taxonomy Jonathan Marks, “Long Shadow of Linnaeus’s Human Taxonomy,” Nature, May 3, 2007.
When it came to describing humans Bendyshe, “History of Anthropology.”
He described botanical marriages Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 21.
“Every animal feels the sexual urge …” Blunt, Linnaeus, 33.
Critics decried it Blunt, Linnaeus, 121.
Linnaeus’s rival Richard Conniff, “Buffon: Forgotten, Yes. But Happy Birthday Anyway,” New York Times, January 2, 2008.
Buffon saw it as mutable and dynamic Paul L. Farber, “Buffon and the Concept of Species,” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 2 (1972): 259–84, www
For Buffon, albinism among Africans Marks, Human Biodiversity, 120; Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 88, 106.
Perhaps, he speculated, sometime in our deep past Sloan, “Gaze of Natural History.”
The idea that weather patterns Frederick Foster and Mark Collard, “A Reassessment of Bergmann’s Rule in Modern Humans,” PLOS One 8, no. 8 (2013): e72269; Ann Gibbons, “How Europeans Evolved White Skin,” Science, April 2, 2015; Angela M. Hancock et al., “Adaptations to Climate in Candidate Genes for Common Metabolic Disorders,” PLOS Genetics 4, no. 2 (2008): e32; Maria A. Serrat, Donna King, and C. Owen Lovejoy, “Temperature Regulates Limb Length in Homeotherms by Directly Modulating Cartilage Growth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 49 (2008): 19348–53.
The degenerative effects of migration Sloan, “Gaze of Natural History.”
Top scientific societies Jablonski, Living Color; Lee Alan Dugatkin, “Thomas Jefferson Defends America with a Moose,” Slate, September 12, 2012; Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 330; “Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De,” Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2008), https://
Linnaeus was not impressed Koerner, Linnaeus, 28.
made the naming of living things uniform and universal Broberg, “Anthropomorpha,” 95; Bendyshe, “History of Anthropology.”
“Take a bird or a lizard or a flower …” Anne Fadiman, At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 19; Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Knopf, 2009), 49.
Luminaries and royal patrons Smethurst, Travel Writing and Natural World; Blunt, Linnaeus, 153–58.
Linnaeus discounted even the most obvious Nancy J. Jacobs, “Africa, Europe, and the Birds Between Them,” in James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman, Eco-cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
In the sixteenth century See, e.g., Andrew J. Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
the alternative idea that birds annually traveled thousands of miles Dingle, Migration; Ron Cherry, “Insects and Divine Intervention,” American Entomologist 61, no. 2 (2015): 81–84, https://
For Linnaeus, there’d been only a single dispersal Jorge Crisci et al., Historical Biogeography: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 30; Bendyshe, “History of Anthropology.”
“As he is rather eloquent …” Lisbet Koerner, “Purposes of Linnaean Travel: A Preliminary Research Report,” in David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 119.
He named a plant after the comte Koerner, Linnaeus, 28; Richard Conniff, “Forgotten, Yes. But Happy Birthday Anyway,” New York Times, December 30, 2007.
With his tenth and most authoritative edition Smethurst, Travel Writing and Natural World.
van Leeuwenhoek’s inquiries led him to believe Curran, Anatomy of Blackness.
Sexual anatomy fascinated Linnaeus Jonathan Marks, interview by author, September 5, 2017; Blunt, Linnaeus.
It was known as the “Hottentot apron” Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 170.
At first, European travelers speculated Rachel Holmes, African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus (New York: Random House, 2009); Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 109; Switek, “Tragedy of Baartman.”
Certain humans, he said, were a separate species altogether Koerner, Linnaeus, 57; Bendyshe, “History of Anthropology.”
Linnaeus speculated, privately “A flying thought,” Linnaeus wrote, “could give the idea that some woman had mixed with the troglodytes and that [it is from this that] the Hottentot take their origin,” Broberg, “Anthropomorpha,” 95; Marks, Human Biodiversity, 50.
Linnaeus proclaimed natural history’s independence Gould, Flamingo’s Smile.
Linnaeus’s “rapid historical triumph” over Buffon Phillip R. Sloan, “The Buffon-Linnaeus Controversy,” Isis 67, no. 3 (1976): 356–75; Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 169.
In 1774 Louis XV ordered Blunt, Linnaeus.
The most explosive claim in Linnaean taxonomy Blunt, Linnaeus; Broberg, “Homo sapiens,” 178.
First he tried to buy the girl Broberg, “Homo sapiens,” 185–86.
European scientists continued to be foiled Gould, Flamingo’s Smile; Schiebinger, “Taxonomy for Human Beings.”
Europe’s most famous scientists flocked to view Switek, “Tragedy of Baartman.”
Cuvier arranged for a commission Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 170; Schiebinger, “Taxonomy for Human Beings.”
He didn’t find anything like Gould, Flamingo’s Smile.
Still, absence of evidence Gould, Flamingo’s Smile; Schiebinger, “Taxonomy for Human Beings”; Clifton C. Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Linnaean taxonomy formed the basis Koerner, Linnaeus; Broberg, “Anthropomorpha,” 95.
The eighteenth-century naturalist Pierre-Louis Moreau William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 86.
4: THE DEADLY HYBRID
At the same time, people from Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives.
The newcomers took jobs peddling Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Plume, 2001), 43.
The lifestyle of the old New York elites Sussman, Myth of Race.
Osborn and Grant belonged Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 25.
“Viewed zoologically …” James Lander, Lincoln and Darwin: Shared Visions of Race, Science, and Religion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 81.
“pure racial types” Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 39–61.
Naturalists had become so convinced Marks, Human Biodiversity, 125; Davenport et al., Eugenics in Race and State.
The political and economic value Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer.”
Charles Darwin had purposely omitted E. J. Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York: Knopf, 2002), 42; Edward Lurie, “Louis Agassiz and the Idea of Evolution,” Victorian Studies 3, no. 1 (1959): 87–108.
For Darwin, differences between peoples Darwin, Descent of Man, 202–3.
But as the race scientists grew more confident Darwin, Descent of Man, xxxviii.
By the time he published The Descent of Man Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer”; Darwin, Descent of Man, xxxiv; Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 224–25.
“Darwin’s greatest unread book” Darwin, Descent of Man, lv.
And so science populizers such as Osborn and Grant Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 46; Mitch Keller, “The Scandal at the Zoo,” New York Times, August 6, 2006; Pierpont, “Measure of America.”
Weismann’s experiments did not Sussman, Myth of Race; Herbert Eugene Walter, Genetics: An Introduction to the Study of Heredity (New York: Macmillan, 1913); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985); Davenport, Heredity in Relation, 24; Nathaniel Comfort, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 44; Mukherjee, Gene, 64.
“the most stable form of matter …” Osborn, “Poor Nordic!”
Scientific concerns about sexual relations Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 92–94; Provine, “Geneticists and the Biology”; Nancy Stepan, “Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places,” in Chamberlin and Gilman, Degeneration.
The precise outcome of racial hybridization Charles B. Davenport, “The Effects of Race Intermingling,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 56, no. 4 (1917): 364–68; Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 95.
“rapidly become darker in pigmentation …” Davenport, Heredity in Relation, 219.
“absolute ruin” Black, War Against the Weak.
“Miscegenation,” Grant wrote Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 152.
Congress had closed U.S. borders Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, 113; Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 46; Sussman, Myth of Race, 61.
While scientific elites detailed the biological menace Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society,” Milbank Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2002): 757–88; Harvey Levenstein, “The American Response to Italian Food, 1880–1930,” Food and Foodways 1, nos. 1–2 (1985): 1–23.
President Roosevelt attended on opening night Charles Hirschman, “America’s Melting Pot Reconsidered,” Annual Review of Sociology 9, no. 1 (1983): 397–423; “President Sees New Play,” New York Times, October 6, 1908; “Roosevelt Criticises Play,” New York Times, October 10, 1908.
“the more the merrier” Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, 35.
Boas’s study found that Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem; Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, 71–78, 100.
Grant privately scoffed Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 199.
“keep out a great mass of worthless Jews …” Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, 125.
“study it” Tamsen Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (New York: Palgrave, 2009)
“a hybrid race of people as worthless …” Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 174.
At universities across the country Sussman, Myth of Race; Black, War Against the Weak.
Anti-German propaganda and anxieties Zenderland, Measuring Minds, 276; Harry H. Laughlin, “Nativity of Institutional Inmates,” in Davenport et al., Eugenics in Race and State; “Says Insane Aliens Stream in Steadily,” New York Times, June 5, 1924; Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller, The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Leon Kamin, The Science and Politics of IQ (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Psychology Press, 1974), 15–32.
Methodological biases accounted for the findings Zenderland, Measuring Minds, 286.
At Ellis Island, officials administered Allan V. Horwitz and Gerald N. Grob, “The Checkered History of American Psychiatric Epidemiology,” Milbank Quarterly, December 2011.
Subspecies theory predicted that hybrids Franz Boas, “The Half-Blood Indian: An Anthropometric Study,” Popular Science Monthly, October 1894; Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer”; Herman Lundborg, “Hybrid Types of the Human Race,” Journal of Heredity (June 1921).
innuendo and speculation Charles B. Davenport, “The Effects of Race Intermingling,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 56, no. 4 (1917): 364–68; Nancy Stepan, “Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places,” in Chamberlin and Gilman, Degeneration; Black, War Against the Weak.
Osborn was in the midst of organizing Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology”; Anderson, “Hybridity, Race, and Science”; Frederick Hoffman, “Race Amalgamation in Hawaii,” in Davenport et al., Eugenics in Race and State, 90–108; “Museum History: A Timeline,” American Museum of Natural History, https://
“We are engaged in a serious struggle …” Osborn, “Poor Nordic!”; “Tracing Parentage by Eugenic Tests,” New York Times, September 23, 1921.
The Census Bureau provided several diagrams Gelb, Allen, Futterman, and Mehler, “Rewriting Mental Testing”; Spiro, Defending the Master Race.
For a week, the gathered attendees Leonard Darwin, “The Field of Eugenic Reform,” in Davenport et al., Eugenics in Race and State; “Tracing Parentage by Eugenic Tests,” New York Times, September 23, 1921
“I’m head over heels in the Polynesian problem” Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology”; Laughlin, Second International Exhibition of Eugenics.
A colleague appeared at the conference L. C. Dunn, “Some Results of Race Mixture in Hawaii,” and Maurice Fishberg, “Intermarriage Between Jews and Christians,” both in Davenport et al., Eugenics in Race and State, 109–24.
“nourish and develop a strong and healthy race instinct” Jon Alfred Mjøen, “Harmonic and Disharmonic Racecrossings,” in Scientific Papers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics Held at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, September 22–28, 1921 (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1923), vol. 2.
When the week came to a close Gelb et al., “Rewriting Mental Testing History.”
Laws that temporarily and partially restricted immigration Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 216, 221, 225; Gelb et al., “Rewriting Mental Testing History”; “1890 Census Urged as Immigrant Base,” New York Times, January 7, 1924; Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
And yet as his research progressed Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology”; Anderson, “Hybridity, Race, and Science.”
bad teeth Shapiro, Pitcairn Islanders; “Dr. Harry L. Shapiro, Anthropologist, Dies at 87,” New York Times, January 9, 1990.
“Physically there is little to choose …” Provine, “Geneticists and the Biology.”
“Man emerges as a dynamic organism” Jonathan Marks, interview by author, September 5, 2017; Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology.”
“an integral factor in the history of human civilization” Frank Spencer, “Harry Lionel Shapiro: March 19, 1902–January 7, 1990,” in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 1996), vol. 70, https://
The flow of immigrants into the United States Mavroudi and Nagel, Global Migration; Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem; Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, 146.
“The book is my bible” Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 357.
“We must ignore the tears of sobbing sentimentalists …” Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 370.
A few months later an ocean liner Dara Lind, “How America’s Rejection of Jews Fleeing Nazi Germany Haunts Our Refugee Policy Today,” Vox, January 27, 2017; Ishaan Tharoor, “What Americans Thought of Jewish Refugees on the Eve of World War II,” Washington Post, November 17, 2015.
5: THE SUICIDAL ZOMBIE MIGRANT
The expedition provided a valuable opportunity Crowcroft, Elton’s Ecologists, 4.
Elton did not happen upon his chance Anker, Imperial Ecology; Nils Christian Stenseth, “On Evolutionary Ecology and the Red Queen,” YouTube, January 12, 2017, https://
The mysterious cycling of populations Mark A. Hixon et al., “Population Regulation: Historical Context and Contemporary Challenges of Open vs. Closed Systems,” Ecology 83, no. 6 (2002): 1490–508; Chitty, Do Lemmings Commit Suicide?; Anker, Imperial Ecology.
reports of lemmings gathering together Duppa Crotch, “The Migration of the Lemming,” Nature 45, no. 1157 (1891); Crotch, “Further Remarks on the Lemming.”
In 1888 a mass of lemmings formed Stenseth and Ims, Biology of Lemmings; Chitty, Do Lemmings Commit Suicide?; Anker, Imperial Ecology; Crotch, “Further Remarks on the Lemming.”
Collett’s stories struck Elton differently Crowcroft, Elton’s Ecologists, 4; Bashford, Global Population.
Elton wrote up his novel spin on Collett’s findings Lindström, “From Arctic Lemmings”; Peder Anker, interview by author, February 7, 2018; Elton, “Periodic Fluctuations.”
“The phenomenon,” he explained Elton, “Periodic Fluctuations.”
Elton had discovered the mysterious factor X Lindström, “From Arctic Lemmings.”
Biologists discovered manifestations of this secret drive Marston Bates, The Nature of Natural History, vol. 1138 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Ramsden and Wilson, “Suicidal Animal.”
For Elton, as for Linnaeus, the conviction Chew, “Ending with Elton”; Charles S. Elton, Animal Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
This conception of the past conformed Chew, “Ending with Elton.”
According to Gause’s Law Georgii Frantsevich Gause, “Experimental Studies on the Struggle for Existence: I. Mixed Population of Two Species of Yeast,” Journal of Experimental Biology 9, no. 4 (1932): 389–402.
Years of experimentation and mathematical modeling Garrett Hardin, “The Competitive Exclusion Principle,” Science 131, no. 3409 (1960): 1292–97.
In the belief that nature was in essence “filled up” Chew, “Ending with Elton”; Peter Coates, American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
In Germany, people purged plants deemed foreign Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Groening, “The Ideology of the Nature Garden: Nationalistic Trends in Garden Design in Germany During the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Garden History 12, no. 1 (1992): 73–78; Daniel Simberloff, “Confronting Introduced Species: A Form of Xenophobia?” Biological Invasions 5 (2003): 179–92; Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 379.
Elton did not explicitly extend the implications Thomas Robertson, “Total War and the Total Environment: Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt, and the Birth of Global Ecology,” Environmental History 17, no. 2 (April 2012): 336–64; Ramsden and Wilson, “Suicidal Animal”; Anker, Imperial Ecology.
Elton’s ideas shed “considerable light …” Chew, “Ending with Elton.”
By the 1930s, the popularity of eugenics Pierpont, “Measure of America.”
But scientists did not abandon their suspicions Chew, “Ending with Elton.”
Many of the billions of birds that migrate Dingle, Migration, 48; Kessler, “Most Extreme Migration?”; L. R. Taylor, “The Four Kinds of Migration,” in W. Danthanarayana, ed., Insect Flight: Proceedings in Life Sciences (Berlin: Springer, 1986): 265–80.
The ornithologist David Lack had a theory Ted R. Anderson, The Life of David Lack: Father of Evolutionary Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); “Radar ‘Bugs’ Found to Be—Just Bugs,” New York Times, April 4, 1949; Chew, “Ending with Elton”; David Lack and G. C. Varley, “Detection of Birds by Radar,” Nature, October 13, 1945; “Messerschmitt Bf 109,” MilitaryFactory.com, https://
“practically in league with the Nazis” Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong?, 39.
the arrival of Asian chestnut trees Mark A. Davis, Ken Thompson, and J. Philip Grime, “Charles S. Elton and the Dissociation of Invasion Ecology from the Rest of Ecology,” Diversity and Distributions 7 (2001): 97–102; Gintarė Skyrienė and Algimantas Paulauskas, “Distribution of Invasive Muskrats (Ondatra zibethicus) and Impact on Ecosystem,” Ekologija 58, no. 3 (2012); Elton, Ecology of Invasions, 21–27; Harold A. Mooney and Elsa E. Cleland, “The Evolutionary Impact of Invasive Species,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, no. 10 (2001): 5446–51.
In his postwar books, radio addresses, and papers Chew, “Ending with Elton”; Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong? 39.
Even if newly arrived species seem benign Daniel Simberloff, foreword to Elton, Ecology of Invasions, xiii; Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong? 39.
To depict species on the move as “invaders” Mark A. Davis et al., “Don’t Judge Species on Their Origins,” Nature 474, no. 7350 (2011): 153–54; Matthew K. Chew, “Indigene Versus Alien in the Arab Spring: A View Through the Lens of Invasion Biology,” in Uzi Rabi and Abdelilah Bouasria, eds., Lost in Translation: New Paradigms for the Arab Spring (Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2017).
Elton delivered his warnings about invasive species Matthew K. Chew, “A Picture Worth Forty-One Words: Charles Elton, Introduced Species and the 1936 Admiralty Map of British Empire Shipping,” Journal of Transport History 35, no. 2 (2014): 225–35.
“one of the central scientific books of our century” David Quammen, back cover blurb to Elton, Ecology of Invasions.
Produced by Walt Disney studios Jack Jungmeyer, “Filming a ‘Wilderness,’ ” New York Times, August 3, 1958; Cruel Camera: Animals in Movies, documentary film, Fifth Estate program, CBC Television, May 5, 1982.
Elton is remembered today as the “founding father” Richard Southwood and J. R. Clarke, “Charles Sutherland Elton: 29 March 1900–1 May,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellow of the Royal Society, November 1, 1999; Chitty, Do Lemmings Commit Suicide?
The truth about lemmings emerged Tim Coulson and Aurelio Malo, “Case of the Absent Lemmings,” Nature, November 2008; Chitty, Do Lemmings Commit Suicide?; Nils Christian Stenseth, interview by author, February 9, 2018.
During snowy years, unknown to anyone Nicholls, “Truth About Norwegian Lemmings.
“cock-and-bull stories from Norwegian sailors” Anker, Imperial Ecology.
The lemming suicide march had been staged Cruel Camera: Animals in Movies, documentary film, Fifth Estate program, CBC Television May 5, 1982; Nicholls, “Truth About Norwegian Lemmings.”
White Wilderness infiltrated the public mind for decades Jim Korkis, “Walt and the True-Life Adventures,” Walt Disney Family Museum, February 9, 2012.
The lemmings’ macabre migration captivated the nation Stenseth and Ims, Biology of Lemmings; Columbia Anthology of British Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 808.
During the war, millions had marched to their deaths Ramsden and Wilson, “Suicidal Animal”; Robertson, Malthusian Moment.
6: MALTHUS’S HIDEOUS BLASPHEMY
The cull transformed the plateau Frederick Andrew Ford, Modeling the Environment, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2009), 267–72; D. R. Klein, “The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island,” Journal of Wildlife Management 32 (1968): 3S0367; Ned Rozell, “When Reindeer Paradise Turned to Purgatory,” University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, August 9, 2012.
the “demographic transition” Jeremy Greenwood and Ananth Seshadri, “The US Demographic Transition,” American Economic Review 92, no. 2 (2002): 153–59; Friedrich Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher 1 (1844).
“remarkable lack of wanderlust” Paul R. Ehrlich and Ilkka Hanski, On the Wings of Checkerspots: A Model System for Population Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
“The streets seemed alive with people …” Ehrlich, Population Bomb.
For Ehrlich Robertson, Malthusian Moment.
In fact, the crowds and environmental damage Mann, “Book That Incited”; Robertson, Malthusian Moment; Jennifer Crook, “War in Kashmir and Its Effect on the Environment,” Inventory of Conflict and Environment, April 16, 1998, http://
Ehrlich’s crusade to arrest the growth Turner, “Vindication”; Ramsden, “Confronting the Stigma”; Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters; “History,” California Air Resources Board, https://
In his influential study Ramsden and Adams, “Escaping the Laboratory.”
Ehrlich cited what he considered their foregone conclusions Ramsden and Adams, “Escaping the Laboratory”; Ramsden, “Confronting the Stigma.”
Scientists started to refer to human population growth Desrochers and Hoffbauer, “Postwar Intellectual Roots.”
Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 Gabriel Chin and Rose Cuison Villazor, eds., The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965: Legislating a New America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
The population bomb would not be contained Josh Zeitz, “The 1965 Law That Gave the Republican Party Its Race Problem,” Politico, August 20, 2016; Paul R. Ehrlich and John P. Holdren, “Impact of Population Growth,” Science, March 26, 1971.
Population growth was a problem that implicated everyone “The Population Bomb?” New York Times, May 31, 2015; Turner, “Vindication”; Ehrlich, Population Bomb, 130, 151–52.
Ehrlich was not an overt racist Ramsden, “Confronting the Stigma”; Edward B. Fiske, “Argument by Overkill,” New York Times, October 1, 1977.
a theory called “r/K selection” consumed population biologists David Reznick, Michael J. Bryant, and Farrah Bashey, “r-and K-selection Revisited: The Role of Population Regulation in Life-History Evolution,” Ecology 83, no. 6 (2002): 1509–20.
Rushton would explicitly apply r/K selection theory to human racial groups J. Philippe Rushton, “Race, Evolution, Behavior (abridged version),” Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000.
Ehrlich’s bias was not overt, but Ehrlich, Population Bomb, 80–84; Ehrlich, interview by WOI-TV.
“Countries are divided rather neatly into two groups …” Ehrlich, Population Bomb, 7.
Ehrlich’s fellow neo-Malthusian scientists Kingsley Davis, “The Migrations of Human Populations,” Scientific American, September 1974; Ehrlich, Population Bomb; Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence.
“I know this all sounds very callous …” Ehrlich, Population Bomb, 151–52.
Then in early 1970, Johnny Carson called MediaVillage, “History’s Moment in Media: Johnny Carson Became NBC’s Late-Night Star,” A+E Networks, May 22, 2018, https://
Maynard remembers the “rush of dread” she felt Joyce Maynard quoted in Hartmann, America Syndrome.
Ehrlich became a celebrity with the stature The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, June 7, 1977; Ehrlich, interview by WOI-TV.
Prestigious institutions showered Ehrlich with honors Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence; Hartmann, America Syndrome.
Top Hollywood directors and actors signed on Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists.”
“teeming urban areas” where “a dangerous crisis …” Robertson, Malthusian Moment, 181.
critiques did not slow the population control movement’s momentum “The Population Bomb?” New York Times, May 31, 2015.
Ehrlich announced the founding of a new organization Wade Green, “The Militant Malthusians,” Saturday Review, March 11, 1972; Robertson, Malthusian Moment.
which shipped 1 million IUDs to India Matthew Connelly, “Population Control in India: Prologue to the Emergency Period,” Population and Development Review 32, no. 4 (2006): 629–67.
population control movement scored a major victory Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters; Charles Panati and Mary Lord, “Population Implosion,” Newsweek, December 6, 1976; Henry Kamm, “India State Is Leader in Forced Sterilization,” New York Times, August 13, 1976.
Tanton, an unassuming man Robertson, Malthusian Moment; “Dr. John Tanton—Founder of the Modern Immigration Network,” John Tanton.org; Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists”; Rohe, Mary Lou and John Tanton.
parallels between the beehive and human population Robert W. Currie, “The Biology and Behaviour of Drones,” Bee World 68, no. 3 (1987): 129–43, https://
Hardin had used a similarly misleading metaphor Garrett Hardin, “Commentary: Living on a Lifeboat,” BioScience 24, no. 10 (1974): 561–68; Constance Holden, “ ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ Author Dies,” Science, September 26, 2003; Ehrlich and Holdren, “Impact of Population Growth.”
Tanton prided himself on his emotional detachment Social Contract, “Tribute to Tanton”; Rohe, Mary Lou and John Tanton.
He characterized them as separate species Robertson, Malthusian Moment; Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists”; Miriam King and Steven Ruggles, “American Immigration, Fertility, and Race Suicide at the Turn of the Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Winter 1990); Southern Poverty Law Center, “John Tanton,” https://
“How could homo contraceptivus compete …” Social Contract, “Tribute to Tanton.”
Environmentalists in the population control movement Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Ronald Bailey, “Real Environmental Racism,” Reason.com, March 5, 2003.
Tanton quickly ascended Robertson, Malthusian Moment.
“role of international migration in perpetuating …” Tanton, “International Migration.”
exposé of India’s population control program Lewis M. Simons, “Compulsory Sterilization Provokes Fear, Contempt,” Washington Post, July 4, 1977; Henry Kamm, “India State Is Leader in Forced Sterilization,” New York Times, August 13, 1976; C. Brian Smith, “In 1976, More Than 6 Million Men in India Were Coerced into Sterilization,” Mel, undated, https://
a dozen states considered passing laws Dennis Hodgson, “Orthodoxy and Revisionism in American Demography,” Population and Development Review 14, no. 4 (1988): 541–69.
Outraged feminists attacked Ehrlich as the mastermind Robertson, Malthusian Moment.
“I was trying to get something done” Mark Malkoff, The Carson Podcast with Guest Dr. Paul Ehrlich, April 12, 2018.
By the time the population control movement crashed Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters; Mikko Myrskylä, Hans-Peter Kohler, and Francesco C. Billari, “Advances in Development Reverse Fertility Declines,” Nature 460, no. 7256 (2009): 741.
Activists concerned about the state of the environment Anne Hendrixson, “Population Control in the Troubled Present: The ‘120 by 20’ Target and Implant Access Program,” Development and Change 50, no. 3 (2019): 786–804; Betsy Hartmann to author, July 26, 2019; Robertson, Malthusian Moment, 178.
Allee, who had documented the positive effects of population density Warder Clyde Allee, The Social Life of Animals (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938).
what would later be hailed as “unambiguous” experiments Franck Courchamp, Ludek Berec, and Joanna Gascoigne, Allee Effects in Ecology and Conservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Andrew T. Domondon, “A History of Altruism Focusing on Darwin, Allee and E. O. Wilson,” Endeavor, June 2013.
Bringing individuals together, in other words Daniel Simberloff and Leah Gibbons, “Now You See Them, Now You Don’t!—Population Crashes of Established Introduced Species,” Biological Invasions 6, no. 2 (2004): 161–72; Desrochers and Hoffbauer, “Postwar Intellectual Roots.”
The innovative capacity of groups of people Ehrlich and Holdren, “Impact of Population Growth”; Ramsden and Adams, “Escaping the Laboratory.”
Tanton spun off ZPG’s immigration committee Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists”; DeParle, “Anti-Immigration Crusader”; “Anne H. Ehrlich,” Wikipedia, https://
Tanton gently helped his supporters disregard Tanton, “International Migration”; Social Contract, “Tribute to Tanton.”
It worked, for a while Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists”; DeParle, “Anti-Immigration Crusader.”
Brower and a faction of anti-immigration activists Leon Kolankiewicz, “Homage to Iconic Conservationist David Brower Omits Population,” Californians for Population Stabilization, March 25, 2014, https://
The Camp of the Saints Cécile Alduy, “What a 1973 French Novel Tells Us About Marine Le Pen, Steve Bannon, and the Rise of the Populist Right,” Politico, April 23, 2017; Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists”; K. C. McAlpin, “ ‘The Camp of the Saints’ Revisited—Modern Critics Have Justified the Message of a 1973 Novel on Mass Immigration,” Social Contract Journal, Summer 2017.
Tanton’s organizations reconstructed the Fortress America DeParle, “Anti-Immigration Crusader”; Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists.”
a new social panic about migrants erupted Allegra Kirkland, “Meet the Anti-Immigrant Crusader Trump Admin Tapped to Assist Immigrants,” Talking Points Memo, May 1, 2017; Niraj Warikoo, “University of Michigan Blocks Release of Hot-Button Records of Anti-Immigrant Leader,” Detroit Free Press, October 17, 2017; Eric Hananoki, “An Anti-Immigrant Hate Group Lobbying Director Is Now a Senior Adviser at US Citizenship and Immigration Services,” Media Matters for America, March 7, 2018.
In 2018 thirty-two of the thirty-four representatives “NumbersUSA endorses Sen. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General,” NumbersUSA, January 3, 2017, https://
“You have to have the right genes …” D’Antonio, “Trump’s Move.”
“I don’t believe in this doctrine of racial equality” Liam Stack, “Holocaust Denier Is Likely GOP Nominee in Illinois,” New York Times, February 8, 2018.
They implied that mixing biologically distinct peoples Gavin Evans, “The Unwelcome Revival of ‘Race Science,’ ” Guardian, March 2, 2018; Nicole Hemmer, “ ‘Scientific Racism’ Is on the Rise on the Right. But It’s Been Lurking There for Years,” Vox, March 28, 2017; D’Antonio, “Trump’s Move.”
allegedly claimed that “if we can get rid of enough people …” Alexander C. Kaufman, “El Paso Terrorism Suspect’s Alleged Manifesto Highlights Eco-Fascism’s Revival,” HuffPost, August 4, 2019.
“Let them call you racists …” Adam Nossiter, “ ‘Let Them Call You Racists’: Bannon’s Pep Talk to National Front,” New York Times, March 10, 2018.
7: HOMO MIGRATIO
According to his “Aryan Polynesian” theory Doug Herman, “How the Voyage of the Kon-Tiki Misled the World About Navigating the Pacific,” Smithsonian, September 4, 2014; Finney, “Myth, Experiment.”
Peoples in Polynesia had an alternative theory Lewis, We, the Navigators.
Other canoe-traveling migrations had followed S. H. Riesenberg, foreword to Lewis, We, the Navigators.
did not accept the Great Fleet theory Holton, “Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki Theory”; Ben Finney, “Founding the Polynesian Voyaging Society,” From Sea to Space (Palmerston North, NZ: Massey University, 1992).
Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki theory presupposed an improbable journey “About Thor Heyerdahl,” Kon-Tiki Museum, https://
into the brisk waters off the Peruvian coast “Scientists Meet Storm,” New York Times, July 8, 1947; Thor Heyerdahl, “Kon-tiki Men Feel Safe, 6 Weeks Out,” New York Times, July 7, 1947; “Parrot Vanishes as Gale Whips Kon-Tiki Raft,” New York Times, July 9, 1947.
Heyerdahl wrote a book about the Kon-Tiki journey Holton, “Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki Theory.”
The most salient objection to Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki theory Finney, “Myth, Experiment.”
He claimed that there’d been no prehistoric migrations at all Montagu, “What Is Remarkable.”
Scientific belief in biologically distinct racial groups Marcos Chor Maio and Ricardo Ventura Santos, “Antiracism and the Uses of Science in the Post-World War II: An Analysis of UNESCO’s First Statements on Race (1950 and 1951),” Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 12, no. 2 (2015): 1–26; Provine, “Geneticists and the Biology”; Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1386–413, www
the still-powerful fantasy of a racial order Montagu, “What Is Remarkable.”
“bold and imaginative” and of “major scientific importance” Ernst Mayr, “Origin of the Human Races by Carleton Coon” (review), Science (October 19, 1962): 420–22.
Because the idea of a racial order in nature Dobzhansky, “Possibility that Homo sapiens.”
Plus, Coon’s theory conflicted Montagu, “What Is Remarkable.”
“practiced racial segregation during their wanderings” Dobzhansky, “Possibility that Homo sapiens.”
Civil rights activists condemned Coon’s theory John P. Jackson, “ ‘In Ways Unacademical’: The Reception of Carleton S. Coon’s The Origin of Races,” Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2001): 247–85; Dobzhansky, “Possibility that Homo sapiens.”
Decades would pass before scientists recovered Vincent M. Sarich and Allan C. Wilson, “Immunological Time Scale for Hominid Evolution,” Science 158, no. 3805 (1967): 1200–1203.
for a study of their mitochondrial DNA John Tierney and Lynda Wright, “The Search for Adam and Eve,” Newsweek, January 11, 1988.
Much more variation existed between individuals Richard Lewontin, “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972): 381–98.
commentators viewed the notion of a mass migration out of Africa with suspicion Alan G. Thorne and Milford H. Wolpoff, “The Multiregional Evolution of Humans,” Scientific American, April 1992; Marek Kohn, “All About Eve and Evolution,” Independent, May 3, 1993.
incorporated the new DNA evidence Jun Z. Li et al., “Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation,” Science 319, no. 5866 (2008): 1100–1104; Brenna M. Henn, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and Marcus W. Feldman, “The Great Human Expansion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 44 (2012): 17758–64.
He pieced together the story of their ancestors’ movements Roberts, “How to Sample.”
Local communities targeted by his team Sribala Subramanian, “The Story in Our Genes,” Time, January 16, 1995; Amade M’charek, The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
“I am very troubled …” Roberts, “How to Sample”; Marks, Human Biodiversity, 124.
a century and a half after Darwin had first proposed Darwin, Descent of Man.
Ever since the days of Weismannism Marks, Human Biodiversity, 174; Roberts, Fatal Invention.
about the same number as the lowly worm Steven Rose, “How to Get Another Thorax,” London Review of Books, September 8, 2016.
“No one could have imagined” Jyoti Madhusoodanan, “Human Gene Set Shrinks Again,” Scientist, July 8, 2014.
Studies of the genetics of our fellow primates Roberts, Fatal Invention.
Chimpanzees, primatologists had found Wolfgang Enard and Svante Pääbo, “Comparative Primate Genomics,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 5 (2004): 351–78.
Still, confronted with the new genetic evidence exposing the myth Jonathan Marks, “Ten Facts about Human Variation,” in M. Muehlenbein, ed., Human Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Nicholas Wade, “Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations, Linking Them to Geography,” New York Times, December 20, 2002.
“genetic data show that races clearly do exist” Armand Marie Leroi, “A Family Tree in Every Gene,” New York Times, March 14, 2005; Reich, Who We Are, xii; David Reich, “How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race,’ ” New York Times, March 23, 2018.
Myths about Linnaean-style biological difference Kelly M. Hoffman et al., “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs About Biological Differences Between Blacks and Whites,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 16 (2016): 4296–301; Alexandria Wilkins, Victoria Efetevbia, and Esther Gross, “Reducing Implicit Bias, Raising Quality of Care May Reduce High Maternal Mortality Rates for Black Women,” Child Trends, April 25, 2019.
maps depicting human genetic variation David López Herráez et al., “Genetic Variation and Recent Positive Selection in Worldwide Human Populations: Evidence from Nearly 1 Million SNPs,” PLOS One 4, no. 11 (2009): e7888.
“dogs and wolves are nearly identical at the genetic level …” Roberts, Fatal Invention, 51.
maps had anti-immigrant and white supremacist commentators crowing Steve Sailer, “Cavalli-Sforza’s Ink Cloud,” Vdare.com, May 24, 2000; Samuel Francis, “The Truth About a Forbidden Subject,” San Diego Union-Tribune, June 8, 2000.
Policies that failed to recognize racial biology Harmon, “Why White Supremacists”; Will Sommer, “GOP Congressmen Meet with Accused Holocaust Denier Chuck Johnson,” Daily Beast, January 16, 2019.
The petrous bone is named after Morten Rasmussen et al., “The Genome of a Late Pleistocene Human from a Clovis Burial Site in Western Montana,” Nature 506, no. 7487 (2014): 225; Ron Pinhasi et al., “Optimal Ancient DNA Yields from the Inner Ear Part of the Human Petrous Bone,” PLOS One 10, no. 6 (2015): e0129102.
the “mother lode” of ancient DNA Reich, Who We Are.
Ancient peoples, after their arrival Joseph K. Pickrell and David Reich, “Toward a New History and Geography of Human Genes Informed by Ancient DNA,” Trends in Genetics 30, no. 9 (2014): 377–89.
According to new DNA analyses Jane Qui, “The Surprisingly Early Settlement of the Tibetan Plateau,” Scientific American, March 1, 2017.
No freak accident deposited unsuspecting people Reich, Who We Are, 201–3.
We’ve been migrants all along Henry Nicholls, “Ancient Swedish Farmer Came from the Mediterranean,” Nature, April 26, 2012; Reich, Who We Are, xiv–xxii, 96.
Botanists call the process “inosculation” Peter C. Simms, “The Only Love Honored by the Gods—Inosculation,” Garden of Gods and Monsters, September 12, 2014, https://
Linguistic, archaeological, and ancient DNA evidence Ann Gibbons, “ ‘Game-changing’ Study Suggests First Polynesians Voyaged All the Way from East Asia,” Science, October 3, 2016.
Experts now widely recognize their migration Finney, “Myth, Experiment”; Álvaro Montenegro, Richard T. Callaghan, and Scott M. Fitzpatrick, “Using Seafaring Simulations and Shortest-Hop Trajectories to Model the Prehistoric Colonization of Remote Oceania,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 45 (2016): 12685–90.
During one attempted crossing in 2017 “Two Women Sailing from Hawaii to Tahiti Are Rescued After Five Months Lost in the Pacific,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2017.
completed nine voyages using traditional wayfinding Lewis, We, the Navigators.
The potato had made it across the Pacific on its own Carl Zimmer, “All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World,” New York Times, April 12, 2018.
8: THE WILD ALIEN
“better served by something native” Cape May Fall Festival, Cape May, NJ, October 21, 2017; Kristin Saltonstall, “Cryptic Invasion by a Non-Native Genotype of the Common Reed, Phragmites australis, into North America,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 4 (2002): 2445–49.
There was no “reasonable geological evidence” Queiroz, Monkey’s Voyage, 26, 42, 112.
the dilemma of how species had spread Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong? 28; Queiroz, Monkey’s Voyage, 41.
Biogeographers started finding clues Florian Maderspacher, “Evolution: Flight of the Ratites,” Current Biology 27, no. 3 (2017): R110–R113; Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong? 12.
Vicariance restored a “biological version of inertia” Queiroz, Monkey’s Voyage, 65, 86, 234.
The few biogeographers who believed Paul P. A. Mazza, “Pushing Your Luck,” review of Monkey’s Voyage, BioScience, May 2014; Robert H. Cowie and Brenden S. Holland, “Dispersal Is Fundamental to Biogeography and the Evolution of Biodiversity on Oceanic Islands,” Journal of Biogeography 33 (2006): 193–98.
No jackrabbit ever had John H. Prescott, “Rafting of Jack Rabbit on Kelp,” Journal of Mammalogy 40, no. 3 (1959): 443–44.
national parks as oases Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 179.
The government extended those protections “Executive Order 13112–1. Definitions,” US Department of Agriculture National Invasive Species Information Center, https://
Three new subdisciplines emerged Mark Davis, “Defining Nature. Competing Perspectives: Between Nativism and Ecological Novelty,” Mètode Science Studies Journal—Annual Review 9 (2019).
The pace of the onslaught was “unprecedented” Mooney and Cleland, “Evolutionary Impact”; Chew, “Ending with Elton.”
the case against wildlife on the move Warren, “Perspectives on ‘Alien.’ ”
native inhabitants would be ravaged by an onslaught “Invasive Species,” Hawaii Invasive Species Council, http://
The interbreeding was “massive” Mooney and Cleland, “Evolutionary Impact.”
pushing checkerspots to the edge of extinction Rudi Mattoni et al., “The Endangered Quino Checkerspot Butterfly, Euphydryas editha quino (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae),” Journal of Research on the Lepidoptera 34 (1997): 99–118, 1995.
second-largest threat to biodiversity Mooney and Cleland, “Evolutionary Impact”; Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong? 46, 108, 195–96; Warren, “Perspectives on ‘Alien.’ ”
suggested moving some threatened checkerspot colonies “G2: Animal Rescue: How Can We Save Some of Our Most Charismatic Animals from Extinction Due to Climate Change? One US Biologist, Camille Parmesan, Has a Radical Suggestion: Just Pick Them Up and Move Them,” Guardian, February 12, 2010.
The intruders had to be eradicated Stanley A. Temple, “The Nasty Necessity: Eradicating Exotics,” Conservation Biology 4, no. 2 (1990): 113–15.
ancient biogeographical borders had been transgressed Rebecca Ostertag, interview by author, February 20, 2018; Rebecca Ostertag et al., “Ecosystem and Restoration Consequences of Invasive Woody Species Removal in Hawaiian Lowland Wet Forest,” Ecosystems 12, no. 3 (2009): 503–15; “Two New Species of Fungi that Kill ‘Ōō Trees Get Hawaiian Names,” University of Hawai’i News, April 16, 2018, https://
relegated to the “margins of ecological research” Roland Kays et al., “Terrestrial Animal Tracking as an Eye on Life and Planet,” Science 348, no. 6240 (2015): aaa2478.
many dramatic and long-distance movements “The Worldwide Migration Pattern Of White Storks: Differences and Consequences,” Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, https://
The now-famous migration of monarch butterflies Bernd Heinrich, The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration (Boston: Mariner Books, 2015), 45.
checkerspots had a “remarkable lack of wanderlust” Paul R. Ehrlich, “Intrinsic Barriers to Dispersal in Checkerspot Butterfly,” Science, July 14, 1961.
“It cost 3,500 dollars” Martin Wikelski, interview by author, September 7, 2017.
“We’d have to physically go near the elephant” Cheshire and Uberti, Where the Animals Go, 36.
The U.S. military had a much better system Mark Sullivan, “A Brief History of GPS,” TechHive, August 9, 2012, https://
The long, curving trunk of the highland tamarind tree Jean-Jacques Segalen, “Acacia heterophylla,” Dave’s Garden, February 15, 2016, https://
The likeness between the two species puzzled botanists Johannes J. Le Roux et al., “Relatedness Defies Biogeography: The Tale of Two Island Endemics (Acacia heterophylla and A. koa),” New Phytologist 204, no. 1 (2014): 230–42; “Botanists Solve Tree Mystery,” IOL.co.za, June 27, 2014, https://
Botanists settled on two equally unsatisfying explanations Marris, “Tree Hitched a Ride.”
Vicariance theory attributed the separation of monkey species Queiroz, Monkey’s Voyage, 166–67, 212–13, 293.
“Giant flukes happen” Marris, “Tree Hitched a ride.”
Defense Department stopped adding a jitter to its GPS “Frequently Asked Questions About Selective Availability: Updated October 2001,” GPS.gov, https://
allowed people to track the once-undetectable movements Cheshire and Uberti, Where the Animals Go.
“we find totally amazing new information …” Wikelski interview.
Wild species regularly roam beyond the borders Cheshire and Uberti, Where the Animals Go; Queiroz, Monkey’s Voyage, 148; Wikelski interview; Roland Kays et al., “Terrestrial Animal Tracking as an Eye on Life and Planet,” Science 348, no. 6240 (2015): aaa2478; Kessler, “Most Extreme Migration?”
Even the spiders Dingle, Migration, 62.
“Humans trying to achieve this …” Iain Couzin, interview by author, August 25, 2017.
They called the new field “movement ecology” Cheshire and Uberti, Where the Animals Go.
a new phase in human understanding “Ears for Icarus: Russian Rocket Delivers Antenna for Animal Tracking System to the International Space Station,” Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, February 13, 2018, https://
“We see the whole network of animals …” Wikelski interview.
ecologists have started to reevaluate their theories Warren, “Perspectives on ‘Alien.’ ”
zero extinctions among the locals Mooney and Cleland, “Evolutionary Impact.”
arrival of newcomers increases biodiversity Mark Vellend et al., “Global Meta-Analysis Reveals No Net Change in Local-Scale Plant Biodiversity Over Time,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 48 (2013): 19456–59; Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong? 108.
compared the impact Mooney and Cleland, “Evolutionary Impact”; Jessica Gurevitch and Dianna K. Padilla, “Are Invasive Species a Major Cause of Extinctions?” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 19, no. 9 (2004): 470–74; Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong? 78, 119.
neither reduced diversity nor displaced native species Claude Lavoie, “Should We Care About Purple Loosestrife? The History of an Invasive Plant in North America,” Biological Invasions 12, no. 7 (2010): 1967–99.
Natives do, too Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong? 46, 195–96.
“is completely unrealistic” Ostertag interview.
Ostertag and Cordell devised a new experiment Ostertag interview.
folly of splitting wild creatures into natives and aliens Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong? 2.
“long and dynamic process of almost continuous reorganization” Vladimir Torres et al., “Astronomical Tuning of Long Pollen Records Reveals the Dynamic History of Montane Biomes and Lake Levels in the Tropical High Andes During the Quaternary,” Quaternary Science Reviews 63 (2013): 59–72.
9: THE MIGRANT FORMULA
The tracks of the animals moving across the land Jeff Parsons, interview by author, October 25, 2017; Scott A. Sherrill-Mix, Michael C. James, and Ransom A. Myers, “Migration Cues and Timing in Leatherback Sea Turtles,” Behavioral Ecology 19, no. 2 (2007): 231–36; R. T. Holmes et al., “Black-throated Blue Warbler (Setophaga caerulescens),” in P. G. Rodewald, ed., The Birds of North America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2017), https://
What drives creatures to move? Dingle, Migration, 252, 420.
individuals that live in habitats exposed to change Allison K. Shaw and Iain D. Couzin, “Migration or Residency? The Evolution of Movement Behavior and Information Usage in Seasonal Environments,” American Naturalist 181, no. 1 (2012): 114–24.
migration is likely to emerge Dingle, Migration, 22.
And so as the northern hemisphere tilts Dingle, Migration, 157; Christopher G. Guglielmo, “Obese Super Athletes: Fat-Fueled Migration in Birds and Bats,” Journal of Experimental Biology 221, suppl. 1 (2018): jeb165753.
a restlessness sets in Dingle, Migration, 138–39.
Wild animals’ sensitivity to environmental perturbances Elke Maier, “A Four-Legged Early-Warning System,” ICARUS: Global Monitoring with Animals, https://
“probably responsible for much of the diversity …” Martin Wikelski, interview by author, September 7, 2017; Richard A. Holland, et al., “The Secret Life of Oilbirds: New Insights into the Movement Ecology of a Unique Avian Frugivore,” PLOS One 4, no. 12 (2009): e8264.
Ecologists saw the dramatic effects in a population of wolves Christine Mlot, “Are Isle Royale’s Wolves Chasing Extinction?” Science, May 24, 2013.
those that facilitate animal movements flourish Joshua J. Tewksbury et al., “Corridors Affect Plants, Animals, and Their Interactions in Fragmented Landscapes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 20 (2002): 12923–26.
when conditions are good, they can sharpen their genetic adaptations Stu Weiss, interview by author, March 7, 2018.
Just what might have triggered their movements Marjo Saastamoinen et al., “Predictive Adaptive Responses: Condition-Dependent Impact of Adult Nutrition and Flight in the Tropical Butterfly Bicyclus anynana,” American Naturalist 176, no. 6 (2010): 686–98; Dingle, Migration, 61.
Somehow butterfly pioneers had emerged Camille Parmesan, interview by author, January 7, 2018; GrrlScientist, “The Evolutionary Trap That Wiped Out Thousands of Butterflies,” Forbes, May 9, 2018; J. S. Kennedy, “Migration, Behavioral and Ecological,” in Mary Ann Rankin and Donald E. Wohlschlag, eds., Contributions in Marine Science, vol. 27 Supplement (1985); Paul R. Ehrlich et al., “Extinction, Reduction, Stability and Increase: The Responses of Checkerspot Butterfly (Euphydryas) Populations to the California Drought,” Oecologia 46, no. 1 (1980): 101–5; Susan Harrison, “Long-Distance Dispersal and Colonization in the Bay Checkerspot Butterfly, Euphydryas editha bayensis,” Ecology 70, no. 5 (1989): 1236–43, www
motives and impact of human migration remain shadowy Jablonski, Living Color, 42.
We moved in sync with the animals Timothy P. Foran, “Economic Activities: Fur Trade,” Virtual Museum of New France, Canadian Museum of History, https://
Most every migrant could accurately describe Mavroudi and Nagel, Global Migration, 99; “Remittances,” Migration Data Portal, International Organization on Migration Global Migration Data Analysis Centre, https://
And it doesn’t actually work Douglas S. Massey et al., “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal,” Population and Development Review 19, no. 3 (1993): 431–66.
Other popular theories See, e.g., Crawford and Campbell, Causes and Consequences; Mukherjee, Gene, 339.
a last-ditch one, forced by catastrophe McLeman, Climate and Human Migration; Etienne Piguet, “From ‘Primitive Migration’ to ‘Climate Refugees’: The Curious Fate of the Natural Environment in Migration Studies,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 (2013): 148–62; Issie Lapowsky, “How Climate Change Became a National Security Problem,” Wired, October 20, 2015; Peter B. DeMenocal, “Cultural Responses to Climate Change During the Late Holocene,” Science 292, no. 5517 (2001): 667–73.
during periods of opportunity, not crisis Axel Timmermann and Tobias Friedrich, “Late Pleistocene Climate Drivers of Early Human Migration,” Nature 538, no. 7623 (2016): 92.
only New Zealand has considered the idea Charlotte Edmond, “5 Places Relocating People Because of Climate Change,” World Economic Forum, June 29, 2017; Charles Anderson, “New Zealand Considers Creating Climate Change Refugee Visas,” Guardian, October 31, 2017.
do not qualify Karen Musalo, “Systematic Plan to Narrow Humanitarian Protection: A New Era of US Asylum Policy,” 15th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., October 1, 2018.
They’d be sent back Lauren Carasik, “Trump’s Safe Third Country Agreement with Guatemala Is a Lie,” Foreign Policy, July 30, 2019.
“rooted in a sedentarist notion” Richard Black et al., “The Effect of Environmental Change on Human Migration,” Global Environmental Change, December 2011.
telling evidence suggests that migration is encoded Jonathan K. Pritchard, “How We Are Evolving,” Scientific American, December 7, 2012; Carl Zimmer, “Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say,” New York Times, October 12, 2017.
The frequency of genes D. Peter Snustad and Michael J. Simmons, Principles of Genetics, 6th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012); I. Lobo, “Environmental Influences on Gene Expression,” Nature Education 1, no. 1 (2008): 39; Patrick Bateson et al., “Developmental Plasticity and Human Health,” Nature 430, no. 6998 (2004): 419.
etching on our hands Michael Kücken and Alan C. Newell, “Fingerprint Formation,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 235, no. 1 (2005): 71–83.
Their bodies absorbed signals of famine Carl Zimmer, “The Famine Ended 70 Years Ago, But Dutch Genes Still Bear Scars,” New York Times, January 31, 2018; Peter Ekamper et al., “Independent and Additive Association of Prenatal Famine Exposure and Intermediary Life Conditions with Adult Mortality Between Age 18–63 Years,” Social Science and Medicine 119 (2014): 232–39.
environmental conditions shape the development of our bodies David J. P. Barker, “The Origins of the Developmental Origins Theory,” Journal of Internal Medicine 261, no. 5 (2007): 412–17.
People who lived around the Ganges J. B. Harris et al. “Susceptibility to Vibrio cholerae Infection in a Cohort of Household Contacts of Patients with Cholera in Bangladesh,” PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 2 (2008): e221.
When the weak sunlight of northern climes A. W. C. Yuen and N. G. Jablonski, “Vitamin D: In the Evolution of Human Skin Colour,” Medical Hypotheses 74, no. 1 (2010): 39–44.
Those who moved into cold regions William R. Leonard et al., “Climatic Influences on Basal Metabolic Rates Among Circumpolar Populations,” American Journal of Human Biology 14, no. 5 (2002): 609–20; Caleb E. Finch and Craig B. Stanford, “Meat-adaptive Genes and the Evolution of Slower Aging in Humans,” Quarterly Review of Biology 79, no. 1 (2004): 3–50; Kumar S. D. Kothapalli et al., “Positive Selection on a Regulatory Insertion–Deletion Polymorphism in FADS2 Influences Apparent Endogenous Synthesis of Arachidonic Acid,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 33, no. 7 (2016): 1726–39; Harmon, “Why White Supremacists”; Pascale Gerbault et al., “Evolution of Lactase Persistence: An Example of Human Niche Construction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1566 (2011): 863–77.
People from Tibet to this day Mark Aldenderfer, “Peopling the Tibetan Plateau: Migrants, Genes and Genetic Adaptations,” in Crawford and Campbell, Causes and Consequences.
Our bodies’ adaptations Aneri Pattani, “They Were Shorter and at Risk for Arthritis, But They Survived an Ice Age,” New York Times, July 6, 2017; Jacob J. E. Koopman et al., “An Emerging Epidemic of Noncommunicable Diseases in Developing Populations Due to a Triple Evolutionary Mismatch,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (2016): 1189-92; Isabelle C. Withrock et al., “Genetic Diseases Conferring Resistance to Infectious Diseases,” Genes and Diseases 2, no. 3 (2015): 247–54; G. Genovese et al., “Association of Trypanolytic ApoL1 Variants with Kidney Disease in African Americans,” Science 329 (2010): 841–45.
one potential candidate has been found Benjamin C. Campbell and Lindsay Barone, “Evolutionary Basis of Human Migration,” in Crawford and Campbell, Causes and Consequences.
our bodies are fluid Jonathon C. K. Wells and Jay T. Stock, “The Biology of Human Migration: The Ape that Won’t Commit?” in Crawford and Campbell, Causes and Consequences.
human migrants change the ecosystems they enter McLeman, Climate and Human Migration; Nagel, Global Migration, 95; David P. Lindstrom and Adriana López Ramírez, “Pioneers and Followers: Migrant Selectivity and the Development of US Migration Streams in Latin America,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 630, no. 1 (2010): 53–77; Alexander Domnich et al., “The ‘Healthy Immigrant’ Effect: Does It Exist in Europe Today?,” Italian Journal of Public Health 9, no. 3 (2012); Steven Kennedy et al., “The Healthy Immigrant Effect: Patterns and Evidence from Four Countries,” Journal of International Migration and Integration 16, no. 2 (2015): 317–32.
In one study of immigrants in the United States See, e.g., National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and Committee on Population, The Integration of Immigrants Into American Society (National Academies Press, 2016); Francine D. Blau et al., “The Transmission of Women’s Fertility, Human Capital, and Work Orientation Across Immigrant Generations,” Journal of Population Economics 26, no. 2 (2013): 405–35.
will undoubtedly be disruptive to communities Sohini Ramachandran and Noah A. Rosenberg, “A Test of the Influence of Continental Axes of Orientation on Patterns of Human Gene Flow,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 146, no. 4 (2011): 515–29.
There is no straightforward equation McLeman, Climate and Human Migration.
One kind of environmental change Richard Black et al., “The Effect of Environmental Change on Human Migration,” Global Environmental Change, December 2011; Etienne Piguet, Antoine Pécoud, and Paul de Guchteneire, “Introduction: Migration and Climate Change,” in Etienne Piguet et al., eds., Migration and Climate Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9; McLeman, Climate and Human Migration; Dina Ionesco, Daria Mokhnacheva, and François Gemenne, The Atlas of Environmental Migration (London: Routledge, 2016); Anastasia Moloney, “Two Million Risk Hunger After Drought in Central America,” Reuters, September 7, 2018; Lauren Markham, “The Caravan Is a Climate Change Story,” Sierra, November 9, 2018.
The mass exodus out of Syria Colin P. Kelley et al., “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 11 (2015): 3241–46.
But the drought alone did not cause Helene Bie Lilleor and Kathleen Van den Broeck, “Economic Drivers of Migration and Climate Change in LDCs,” Global Environmental Change 21S (2011), s70–81.
picking up and leaving isn’t the sole option “Water Is ‘Catalyst’ for Cooperation, Not Conflict, UN Chief Tells Security Council,” UN News, June 6, 2017; Philipp Blom, Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017); John Lanchester, “How the Little Ice Age Changed History,” New Yorker, April 1, 2019; United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, “The Great Green Wall Initiative,” https://
10: THE WALL
He’d received many such bodies by then Christos Mavrakidis, interview by author, June 2016.
The remains of migrants who die in the desert Gocha, Spradley, and Strand, “Bodies in Limbo”; Manny Fernandez, “A Path to America, Marked by More and More Bodies,” New York Times, May 4, 2017.
Against the odds, someone found Kate Spradley and Eddie Canales, interview by author, January 8, 2018; Mark Reagan and Lorenzo Zazueta-Castro, “Death of a Dream: Hundreds of Migrants Have Died Crossing Into Valley,” Monitor (McAllen, Tex.), July 28, 2019.
The first thing they’d do was try to identify Gocha, Spradley, and Strand, “Bodies in Limbo.”
geographic barriers prevent wild species from migrating as effectively Michael T. Burrows et al., “Geographical Limits to Species-Range Shifts Are Suggested by Climate Velocity,” Nature 507, no. 7493 (2014): 492; John R. Platt, “Climate Change Claims Its First Mammal Extinction,” Scientific American, March 21, 2019.
Our massive footprint Michael Miller, “New UC Map Shows Why People Flee,” UC News, November 15, 2018; Stuart L. Pimm et al., “The Biodiversity of Species and Their Rates of Extinction, Distribution, and Protection,” Science 344, no. 6187 (2014): 1246752.
Species that have not lost their habitats Ken Wells, “Wildlife Crossings Get a Whole New Look,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2017; “World’s Largest Wildlife Corridor to Be Built in California,” Ecowatch, September 27, 2015; Gabe Bullard, “Animals Like Green Space in Cities—And That’s a Problem,” National Geographic, April 20, 2016; Eliza Barclay and Sarah Frostenson, “The Ecological Disaster That Is Trump’s Border Wall: A Visual Guide,” Vox, February 5, 2019.
the more constrained animal movements became Marlee A. Tucker et al., “Moving in the Anthropocene: Global Reductions in Terrestrial Mammalian Movements,” Science 359, no. 6374 (2018): 466–69.
Animals, winds, currents, and waves could freely travel Elisabeth Vallet, “Border Walls and the Illusion of Deterrence,” in Jones, Open Borders; see also Samuel Granados et al., “Raising Barriers: A New Age of Walls: Episode 1,” Washington Post, October 12, 2016; David Frye, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick (New York: Scribner, 2018), 238.
Walls don’t necessarily function Noah Greenwald et al., “A Wall in the Wild: The Disastrous Impacts of Trump’s Border Wall on Wildlife,” Center for Biological Diversity, May 2017; Jamie W. McCallum, J. Marcus Rowcliffe, and Innes C. Cuthill, “Conservation on International Boundaries: The Impact of Security Barriers on Selected Terrestrial Mammals in Four Protected Areas in Arizona, USA,” Plos one 9, no. 4 (2014): e93679.
“is very much like squeezing a balloon …” McAllister and Prentice, “African Migrants Turn to Deadly Ocean Route.”
Migration continues, but in a deadlier form See Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (London: Verso, 2016).
one migrant died for every fifty-one who arrived UNHCR, “Desperate Journeys: Refugees and Migrants Arriving in Europe and at Europe’s Borders,” January-December 2018.
But the flow of people had simply shifted Joe Penney, “Why More Migrants Are Dying in the Sahara,” New York Times, August 22, 2017; McAllister and Prentice, “African Migrants Turn to Deadly Ocean Route.”
over 33,000 people died trying to migrate Alan Cowell, “German Newspaper Catalogs 33,293 Who Died Trying to Enter Europe,” New York Times, November 13, 2017.
22,000 may have died trying to cross The official number of deaths counted by U.S. Border Patrol between 1998 and 2018 is 7,505. See U.S. Border Patrol, “Southwest Border Sectors: Southwest Border Deaths by Fiscal Year,” at https://
The true figures are probably much higher Manny Fernandez, “A Path to America, Marked by More and More Bodies,” New York Times, May 4, 2017.
the governments of Europe changed their minds “Schengen: Controversial EU Free Movement Deal Explained,” BBC, April 24, 2016; Piro Rexhepi, “Europe Wrote the Book on Demonising Refugees, Long Before Trump Read It,” Guardian, February 21, 2017.
Others hung themselves Lizzie Dearden, “Syrian Asylum Seeker ‘Hangs Himself’ in Greece Amid Warnings Over Suicide Attempts by Trapped Refugees,” Independent, March 28, 2017.
Volunteer doctors watched as suicide rates Doctors Without Borders members, interview by author, June 12, 2016.
across mountains and seas in hopes of a different future Ghulam Haqyar, interview by author, June 12, 2016.
ruled in 2011 that they amounted to torture Court of Justice of the European Union, “According to Advocate General Trstenjak, Asylum Seekers May Not Be Transferred to Other Member States If They Could There Face a Serious Breach of the Fundamental Rights Which They Are Guaranteed Under the Charter of Fundamental Rights,” Press Release, September 22, 2011
Their crude logic “The Truth About Migration,” New Scientist, April 6, 2016.
exclude people without official documents from services Sarah Spencer and Vanessa Hughes, “Outside and In: Legal Entitlements to Health Care and Education for Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe,” COMPAS: Centre on Migration, Policy & Society, University of Oxford, July 2015; Michele LeVoy and Alyna C. Smith, “PICUM: A Platform for Advancing Undocumented Migrants’ Rights, Including Equal Access to Health Services,” Public Health Aspects of Migration in Europe, WHO Newsletters, no. 8, March 2016; Marianne Mollmann, “A New Low: Stealing Family Heirlooms in Exchange for Protection,” Physicians for Human Rights, December 16, 2015.
steadily erodes Cornelis J. Laban et al., “The Impact of a Long Asylum Procedure on Quality of Life, Disability and Physical Health in Iraqi Asylum Seekers in the Netherlands,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 43, no. 7 (2008): 507–15.
beyond deprivation to the purposeful infliction of trauma Laura C. N. Wood, “Impact of Punitive Immigration Policies, Parent-Child Separation and Child Detention on the Mental Health and Development of Children,” BMJ Paediatrics Open 2, no. 1 (2018); Dara Lind, “A New York Courtroom Gave Every Detained Immigrant a Lawyer. The Results Were Staggering,” Vox, November 9, 2017; Michelle Brané and Margo Schlanger, “This Is What’s Really Happening to Kids at the Border,” Washington Post, May 30, 2018; Jacob Soboroff, “Emails Show Trump Admin Had ‘No Way to Link’ Separated Migrant Children to Parents,” NBC News, May 1, 2019.
Critics, noting the unsanitary and overcrowded conditions David Shepardson, “Trump Says Family Separations Deter Illegal Immigration,” Reuters, October 13, 2018; Dara Lind, “Trump’s DHS Is Using an Extremely Dubious Statistic to Justify Splitting Up Families at the Border,” Vox, May 8, 2018.
Thanks to a backlog Brittany Shoot, “Federal Government Shutdown Could More Than Double Wait Time for Immigration Cases,” Fortune, January 11, 2019; Brett Samuels, “Trump Rejects Calls for More Immigration Judges: ‘We Have to Have a Real Border, Not Judges,’ ” Hill, June 19, 2018.
policies to stymie migrants’ right to claim asylum American Immigration Council, “A Primer on Expedited Removal,” July 22, 2019; Caitlin Dickerson et al., “Migrants at the Border: Here’s Why There’s No Clear End to Chaos,” New York Times, November 26, 2018; Andrea Pitzer, “Trump’s ‘Migrant Protection Protocols’ Hurt the People They’re Supposed to Help,” Washington Post, July 18, 2019; Migration Policy Institute, “Top 10 Migration Issues of 2019.”
Other policies targeted immigrants already settled Jomana Karadsheh and Kareem Khadder, “ ‘Pillar of the Community’ Deported from US After 39 Years to a Land He Barely Knows,” CNN, February 9, 2018; Jenna DeAngelis, “Simsbury Business Owners Who Are Facing Deportation to China, Speak Out,” FOX 61, February 6, 2018; Michelle Goldberg, “First They Came for the Migrants,” New York Times, June 11, 2018.
Citizens would be subject to denaturalization Aaron Rupar, “Why the Trump Administration Is Going After Low-Income Immigrants, Explained by an Expert,” Vox, August 12, 2019; Seth Freed Wessler, “Is Denaturalization the Next Front in the Trump Administration’s War on Immigration?” New York Times Magazine, December 19, 2018.
Officials in the White House watched approvingly Zach Hindin and Mario Ariza, “When Nativism Becomes Normal,” Atlantic, May 23, 2016; Jonathan M. Katz, “What Happened When a Nation Erased Birth-Right Citizenship,” Atlantic, November 12, 2018.
Haitian neighborhoods emptied Geralde Gabeau, interview by author, October 24, 2017; Cindy Carcamo, “In San Diego, Haitians Watch Community Countrymen Leave for Canada,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2017.
The migrants streamed north Michelle Ouellette, interview by author, October 5, 2017; Catherine Tunney, “How the Safe Third Country Agreement Is Changing Both Sides of the Border,” CBC News, April 1, 2017.
“I’m screaming and no one is around for my rescue” Eric Taillefer, interview by author, October 2, 2017; Jonathan Montpetit, “Mamadou’s Nightmare: One Man’s Brush with Crossing U.S.-Quebec Border,” CBC News, March 13, 2017.
with nothing except the clothes on their backs Catherine Solyom, “Canadian Government, Others Discouraging Haitians in U.S. from Seeking Asylum Here,” Montreal Gazette, August 14, 2017; Taillefer interview; Katherine Wilton, “Montreal Schools Preparing for Hundreds of Asylum Seekers,” Montreal Gazette, August 22, 2017.
Jean-Pierre and his family were among them “Jean-Pierre,” interview by author, October 26, 2017.
As the myth of a sedentary past evaporates Lim, Metzler, and Bar-Yam, “Global Pattern Formation”; David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley, “The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?” Critical Sociology 44, no. 2 (2018): 195–212.
One study suggests that xenophobic outbursts Wesley Hiers, Thomas Soehl, and Andreas Wimmer, “National Trauma and the Fear of Foreigners: How Past Geopolitical Threat Heightens Anti-Immigration Sentiment Today,” Social Forces 96, no. 1 (2017): 361–88; Lim, Metzler, and Bar-Yam, “Global Pattern Formation”; Margaret E. Peters, “Why Did Republicans Become So Opposed to Immigration? Hint: It’s Not Because There’s More Nativism,” Washington Post, January 30, 2018.
One telling study analyzed the counties and states Thomas Edsall, “How Immigration Foiled Hillary,” New York Times, October 5, 2017.
the burden exacted by novel influx of newcomers Adam Ozimek, Kenan Fikri, and John Lettieri, “From Managing Decline to Building the Future: Could a Heartland Visa Help Struggling Regions?” Economic Innovation Group, April 2019.
Another possible explanation has to do with the optics Jablonski, Living Color; Charles Stagnor, Rajiv Jhangiani, and Hammond Tarry, “Ingroup Favoritism and Prejudice,” Principles of Social Psychology, 1st international ed., 2019, https://
the border between natives and migrants can be nebulous Jie Zong, Jeanne Batalova, and Micayla Burrows, “Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, March 14, 2019; Michael B. Sauter, “Population Migration: These Are the Cities Americans Are Abandoning the Most,” USA Today, September 18, 2018.
this tendency may have evolved as an immune response Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1976): 289–99; Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 65.
ethnocentrist and xenophobic tendencies do seem to correlate C. L. Fincher and R. Thornhill, “Parasite-stress Promotes In-Group Assortative Sociality: The Cases of Strong Family Ties and Heightened Religiosity,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35, no. 2 (2012): 61–79; Sunasir Dutta and Hayagreeva Rao, “Infectious Diseases, Contamination Rumors and Ethnic Violence: Regimental Mutinies in the Bengal Native Army in 1857 India,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 129 (2015): 36–47.
Fever is an ancient Elspeth V. Best and Mark D. Schwartz, “Fever,” Evolution, Medicine and Public Health 2014, no. 1 (2014): 92; Peter Nalin, “What Causes a Fever?” Scientific American, November 21, 2005.
overestimated the proportion of immigrants in their countries Directorate General for Communication, “Special Barometer 469: Integration of Immigrants in the European Union,” European Commission, April 2018.
They continue regardless of facts Daniel J. Hopkins, John Sides, and Jack Citrin, “The Muted Consequences of Correct Information About Immigration,” Journal of Politics 81, no. 1 (2019): 315–20; Eduardo Porter and Karl Russell, “Migrants Are on the Rise Around the World, and Myths About Them Are Shaping Attitudes,” New York Times, June 20, 2018.
CODA: SAFE PASSAGE
a path to a more secure future “Refugee Resettlement Facts,” UNHCR, February 2019, https://
curtails life expectancy by three decades Andrea K. Walker, “Baltimoreans Are as Healthy as Their Neighborhoods,” Baltimore Sun, November 12, 2012.
new conservation efforts are seeking to stitch “Our Progress,” Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, n.d., https://
The ability to move is no panacea Ed Yong, “The Disturbing Walrus Scene in Our Planet,” Atlantic, April 8, 2019; Michael P. Marchetti and Tag Engstrom, “The Conservation Paradox of Endangered and Invasive Species,” Conservation Biology 30, no. 2 (2016): 434–37.
United Nations’ Global Compact Right-wing populist leaders and governments pulled out of the compact, despite the fact that it is nonbinding and voluntary, including the United States, Australia, Brazil, and a number of eastern European countries. Frey Lindsay, “Opposition to the Global Compact for Migration Is Just Sound and Fury,” Forbes, November 13, 2018; “Portugal Approves Plan to Implement Global Compact on Migration,” Famagusta Gazette, August 2, 2019; Lex Rieffel, “The Global Compact on Migration: Dead on Arrival?” Brookings Institution, December 12, 2018; Edith M. Lederer, “UN General Assembly Endorses Global Migration Accord,” Associated Press, December 19, 2018.
The militarized borders that bar human movement Jones, Open Borders; John Washington, “What Would an ‘Open Borders’ World Actually Look Like?” Nation, April 24, 2019.
The wall itself exudes death Matthew Suarez, interview by author, March 6, 2018.