On his book Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future
Cover Interview of June 01, 2011
Lastly
Migrants are exceptional people because they make difficult choices and sacrifices in order to secure a better life for their communities, families and themselves. They play an exceptional role in the societies they enter. Too often they are regarded as “others,” not part of the host society.
Current policies are too often counterproductive. A more effective and humane migration regime is urgently needed. Such regime needs to recognize not only that we all can trace our heritage and achievements to migration, but also that migrants produce enormous benefits and are the source of our future prosperity.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
Lastly
Migrants are exceptional people because they make difficult choices and sacrifices in order to secure a better life for their communities, families and themselves. They play an exceptional role in the societies they enter. Too often they are regarded as “others,” not part of the host society.
Current policies are too often counterproductive. A more effective and humane migration regime is urgently needed. Such regime needs to recognize not only that we all can trace our heritage and achievements to migration, but also that migrants produce enormous benefits and are the source of our future prosperity.
© 2011 Ian Goldin