Sam Miller’s Migrants: The Story of Us All is a book that ‘sets out to question what might be called the “myth of sedentarism”, the popular modern notion that humans are naturally sedentary.’
Miller’s own perspective as someone who has been away from the country of his birth, the UK, for most of his adult years leads him to wonder if ‘people on the move’ or ‘societies in flux’ were not perhaps a better account of human history than what we normally get to read, ‘written by and for sedentary people.’
It is an interesting thought, as almost all of our families have migrated in the past, and many of us have also migrated at least once in our lifetime. Have we been seeing it all wrong, when, in truth, ‘motion, not stillness, is the universal norm?’
Migrants: The Story of Us All by Sam Miller (Abacus, February 2023)
‘Remember that being sedentary, having a permanent home is, in deep historical terms, a relatively modern phenomenon, and that just four hundred years ago about a third of the world’s population was nomadic.’
Miller admits that few migrants have it as good as he does. ‘I have had it easy. My passport, my job, my background, my colour and my gender all combine to make it uncomplicated for me to live almost anywhere I want, for long or short periods, in ways that most migrants never experience.’ At no time in the book is Miller ever insensitive to what those less fortunate than him face.
His instinct as a BBC journalist is to look for the story behind it all, and throughout the book he keeps calling out injustices and atrocities that powerful migrants have visited upon the little people in so many parts of the world. But even so he still holds to a romantic notion of the migrant adventurer, and even wonders whether this wanderlust could be genetic: ‘And, indeed, there are some people who think a curiosity gene exists. They’ve identified it, a string of markers in our genome known as DRD4-7R – an ancient genetic mutation present on a significant scale in all human populations, but particularly prevalent in the first inhabitants of the Americas.’
His appeal to deep history is where the book gets its ‘almost’ quality, because Migrants: The Story of Us All is not meant as a rigorous study of migration, despite all the energy and research he invests into it. ‘My project and purpose is different. I am arguing that migration, forced and unforced and everything in between, is at the heart of the human experience… If I were a philosopher I might go further at this point, and allow grand theories to take over from storytelling.’
I waited for him to take further his observations about most of the migrants in his stories being male, something that is at the heart of the migration issue. Because his eagerness to travel, and my reluctance to move, though I do end up travelling, are probably linked to the fact that ‘surplus’ men throughout history have migrated in search of lives, leaving behind womenfolk. Are young men routinely pushed out of the group the way young male gazelles are driven out of the herd by the alpha male, leaving them no option but to try their luck elsewhere? He was almost there…
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Early on in the book, when I was still making up my mind if I liked it, he declared, a propos of so many groups claiming to be the Lost Tribes of Israel, that ‘everyone who has roots outside sub-Saharan Africa does have Middle Eastern ancestry. We now know from genetic evidence that all of these failed non-African contenders as possible Lost Tribes of Israel are of solid Middle Eastern stock, for their ancestors passed through the Middle East after modern humans left Africa’.
How could he claim to have read Tony Joseph’s Early Indians and not know about the first successful migration out of Africa 70,000 years ago which went directly via the Horn of Africa to what is now Yemen, and onward to India and Australia, without going anywhere near the Middle East? I stopped to check the year of publication of Migrants: 2023. In a book about migration this was a serious lapse.
I also had problems with the way he conflates all people who move, willingly or unwillingly, nomadic or just making one major shift, into a single group: migrants. Can one really lump together people making just the one move (and staying put thereafter) and groups who live perpetually as hunter-gatherer nomads? Isn’t there something bigger going on, a politics that forces sedentary people away from dangerous homelands, or traffics them across the Atlantic as part of the slave trade?
These scenarios don’t square with the almost naïve ending of the book: ‘We also forget that we humans also migrate because we are bored, or curious, or adventurous, or enjoy a challenge, or because we wish to fulfil a dream.’
But when one gets past these theoretical hiccups one finds Miller, the journalist, sniffing out stories everywhere, things we had no idea of. The book is strewn with in-depth accounts: of the Vikings (and Viking Britain); the Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego; The Taino of the northern Caribbean, ruthlessly decimated by early Spanish settlers; Chinese migrants into the American West (and the stereotype of the ‘yellow peril incarnate, Dr. Fu Manchu’); the West African slave trade; Mexican braceros coming as migrant labour into California; Black Americans heading north (and even to Paris) leaving the American south; the Windrush story of Jamaican migrants to Britain (alongside the long and colourful prehistory of the ship, the Empire Windrush, which started out as a German ship ferrying Norwegian Jews to the death camps in Nazi Germany).
All these stories are told with insight and empathy. Miller cries out against what we have come to – a world of borders and passports and immigration quotas which conspire to keep out poor non-white migrants, while celebrating rich white migrants as ‘expats’.
Migrants: The Story of Us All is not the book I was expecting when I picked it up, but in the end I did like it, for the stories and insights in it that were new to me and Miller’s unfailing moral compass as he goes. With its 11 chapters, followed by short ‘Intermissions’, Migrants is a pleasure to read, thought-provoking and, in the end, a welcome addition to the literature on human migration.
