Human beings are a migrating species. We always have been.
Modern humans originated in Africa and, over tens of thousands of years, spread across the planet in search of food, water, safety and habitable land. Every society that exists today is the result of people moving when staying put was no longer possible. Migration was not a failure of order or belonging; it was a condition of survival.
That instinct has not changed. What has changed is the world it now collides with.
For most of human history, movement was not criminalised. People followed seasons, rivers, trade routes and opportunity. Ancient cities such as Rome, Baghdad, Istanbul and Alexandria were built by newcomers. They became powerful not despite migration, but because of it — because they absorbed labour, ideas, languages and belief systems from elsewhere.
It is only with the rise of the modern nation state that movement became tightly regulated and morally charged. Borders hardened. Passports replaced paths. Migration was recast as “immigration”, and belonging became something that could be granted or withheld.
Yet people continued to move.
The modern world was shaped by some of the largest migrations in human history: European expansion into the Americas, the forced displacement of millions of enslaved Africans, the redrawing of borders after world wars, the collapse of empires. These movements were often violent and unequal, but they were not aberrations. They were structural to how the world we now inhabit came into being.
Today, migration is frequently framed as a moral and political failure rather than a human response to pressure.
In the UK, debate has centred on small boats crossing the Channel — a phrase that has come to stand in for fear, loss of control and political frustration. People arriving this way are routinely described as “illegal”, despite the fact that seeking asylum is a legal right under international law.
Successive governments have focused on deterrence: restricting safe routes, narrowing definitions of vulnerability, and attempting to offshore responsibility. The now-abandoned Rwanda scheme was not just a policy proposal but a statement — that removal mattered more than refuge.
What is often missing from these debates is context. People do not risk their lives at sea because the journey is easy or because alternatives are unclear. They do so because legal routes are scarce, danger at home is immediate, and the future they are leaving behind has collapsed.
Migration is not judged equally.
A British citizen relocating for work is an “expat”. A family fleeing conflict or economic collapse is a “burden”. Some arrivals are welcomed as contributors; others are framed as threats. The difference is rarely about movement itself, and more often about race, wealth and geopolitical convenience.
This selective framing allows societies to forget a basic truth: most people alive today are descended from migrants who were once unwelcome somewhere else.
Climate change is already reshaping migration. Rising sea levels threaten coastal and island communities. Prolonged droughts undermine agriculture and food security. Extreme heat makes entire regions harder to live in year after year. This is not a future problem. It is a present one.
Climate-driven migration will not be a single event or wave. It will be uneven, ongoing and global — and it will test political systems that still treat migration as an exception rather than a constant feature of human life.
At the heart of the migration debate lies a fundamental misunderstanding.
People move because staying becomes impossible. They move not out of recklessness, but out of responsibility — to their children, their families, their own survival. Migration is not an invasion. It is an adaptation.
To understand migration is to understand ourselves. It is not a breakdown of order, nor a threat to civilisation, but one of the oldest human responses to change. People move when the land can no longer sustain them, when conflict or climate closes in, when the future demands adaptation.
Migration is about humanity trying to survive.
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