Migration is here to stay

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One for units on migration...

Gaia Vince's Opinion piece in The Guardian makes essential reading. I presume it will be in tomorrow's print edition.


The opening paragraph is a useful summary for students of any age on human nature and the artifice of the border.

The state is an invention. 
It’s a bureaucratic tool of governance for an arbitrarily defined landmass; an artifice made convincing through emotive storytelling. 
Although many countries have their “long, long ago” symbolic foundation story, in truth the vast majority of them have only existed as independent constitutions for a matter of decades. 
We, the nationals, are the result of millennia of migrations of ancestral hunter-gatherers, herders, farmers, merchants, students, industrialists; of colonists and colonisers; of people invading, fleeing, crusading, exploring, roaming, slave-trading; uprooted for war, work, fortune and love. 
The dense interconnectedness of the human family, our genetic similarity, means that in terms of our biology, there are no different races. 
We can all claim ancestry from across the world.

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