Migration is central to the human experience. For as long as we’ve been around, people have been moving from one place to another. Though it’s never been easier to get from point A to point B, the inequality between those places could be as great as they’ve ever been. We’re now on the front edge of a climate crisis, launching the greatest period of human migration that will ever have happened on the planet.
I mean, we know from the fossil record and that humans started in one very specific place in this world, and after enough time they got everywhere. The way they got everywhere was moving around, migrating. Read the writings of the Roman era, and it is just wild to imagine how much movement and migration and mixing of cultures there are 2,000 years ago. There's no airplanes, there's no fossil fuels, it's not easy to get from place to place, but people move around. Jesus is born in Bethlehem because people move around.
So all around the world we're seeing huge amounts of people moving and huge disruption to politics around that migration. And in a lot of ways this is going to be the central challenge for us, in this century. I really, truly believe that. The central challenge is climate and making sure that we have a habitable planet and we don't cook the earth past a kind of disastrous tipping point.
And that's like, in some ways the project of this podcast, is to talk about that. But it's also the project of today's guest, who is an incredible guy, incredible author. His name is Suketu Mehta, and he wrote essentially a kind of manifesto about his vision of America, welcoming the stranger, what it means for America to appeal to the better angels of this nature, with respect to immigration.
SUKETU MEHTA: That's the question. Exactly. Where am I from? The planet Earth. The mother ship. Well, I was born in Calcutta. My mother's from Nairobi. I grew up in Bombay. And when I was 14, I came to Jackson Heights. So, I used to answer this question,"Where are you from?" growing up in Queens I'd say,"From Bombay." But increasingly now, when I go around the world, I say I'm from New York. I lived in Queens. I've lived in Brooklyn.
And we just had to transit through Germany from Frankfurt to Cologne, and then get on a flight from Cologne to JFK. But at the Frankfurt Airport, the German passport control officer looks at my father's Indian passport, and mine, and my sisters' Indian passports, and we're fine. But my mother's British passport, it was a passport given by Great Britain to citizens of the former Commonwealth, that basically had no value.
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