just that in an effort to reframe this migration debate in terms of the past and the future. is migration a drag or a driver of progress? ian goldin, welcome to hardtalk. it's a pleasure to be with you, stephen. it's great to have you here. now, in your book, the shortest history of migration, you have a pretty simple core message, which begins with the thought, we're

all of us migrants. now, i understand that in sort of evolutionary terms, but why does that matter to today's debate about migration? it matters because i think we need to appreciate that without migration, there would be no human civilisation, and that it continues to be as relevant as in the past, and will be even more so in the future. we need migrants. we need to appreciate them. of course, we need to manage migration more effectively, but we need to recognise not only that we all mixed up ourselves in our origins, but that our societies require migration in order to thrive. in your short history of migration, you go back 300,000 years to the beginnings of movement, of what we now know as the earliest humans across east africa into north africa. and you then catalogue all sorts of different movements right across the world, even as the shape of the world changed. it's all fascinating.

but is it really relevant, given that the world we live in today, with its what, eight billion people, is so very different from the world that you're describing in your deep history. i feel it's very relevant because unless we understand our past, we can't understand our present or future. and it's relevant because we need to understand how different places have managed migration in the past, why people have migrated, why they continue to migrate, and also get an understanding if things are worse now. in other words, are there many more migrants than there were in the past? and the answer, of course, which i show in the book by this historical analysis, is no. about 3% of the world's population have always migrated as far as we have the records, it's also... but in absolute terms... of course, 3% of eight billion is more than. billion is more than half a billion. yes. but as a share of our societies, it's not greater than it is in many places.

no. but isn't isn't the absolute astonishing rise of the number of humans on the planet relevant here? because when you talk about the pre—industrial movements of peoples over centuries and millennia, what in essence you're often talking about is people moving into empty lands or nearly empty lands. well, in this world of ours, there are very few empty lands left. so on the most crude and basic premise, migration going forward cannot be like the migrations of the past. well, i'd contest that people were moving after we'd peopled the planet, which was, you know, maybe ten, 20,000 years ago. people were no longer moving into empty lands when the colonists seemed perilous, went to the americas, and native americans were living there. they killed most of them, but they were certainly living there. and perhaps that's my other point about whether indeed, a history of migration is relevant to the discussion of migration today. because in the past, of course, migrations did involve mass violence, the genocidal extinction of peoples in many different places, things that in our contemporary society right across the world are,

i was going to say, unacceptable. but if they ever happen, raise the most enormous internationally. and one of the things i show is that migration is not always good. i mean, slavery is perhaps the most obvious example of that, but so to the mass movement of refugees. but to get back to your point about why it's relevant, when we look at the numbers today, uh, let's say 16% of the uk or the us economy are migrants, what we can see is that these aren't in the long sweep of history, exceptionally high in the 1850s to 1900s, a much greater share of the us was immigrant. it's also the case in terms of outmigration. irish population is still lower today than it was in the 1850s, 170 years ago. so we've seen these mass movements in the past in scale, in absolute numbers, as well as in relative shares.

and it places, i think, today's numbers in perspective. the other thing i try and highlight in the book is the role that migrants contribute in their economies. are they good, are they bad? how do we better manage it? and i think that also brings a relevance from the past into the present. and we'll discuss that in some detail. just a point about yourself, unlike many of the political leaders we see around the world today, you are intrinsically positive and optimistic about both what migration means and what it can mean in the future. is that partly, do you think, because of your personal story? because while you say all of us wouldn't exist without migration, you very literally, ian goldin would not exist had your grandparents not been migrants. yes, i think it is deeply personal, and i say that in the foreword to the book. you know, my father's family escaped the pogroms in the baltics in the late 1900s, everyone that remained was killed.

my mother's family escaped the auschwitz, the german occupation of vienna in 1938. everyone that remained was killed. and so it is deeply personal. and then i escaped apartheid south africa to be able to come to the uk and to be able to have a new life before i went back to work with, you know, fantastically with nelson mandela. that also made me realise how important it is and the fact that i did go back and was able to contribute after being out, also made me realise how circular this process can be, how one can leave and go back and contribute from the things one's learned abroad. your history suggests that you're a truly international thinker. now you're based in the uk

and you've just seen a uk general and for nigel farage and his reform party, it's been the topic upon which they based a really very

well, it's an important conversation to be very specific about. you say that there's clear evidence that the net impact of migration in the uk has been economically positive... yes. ..has helped growth. there are others, and i'm going to quote here, matthew goodwin, who i'm sure you've had debates with in the past, because he's a british academic who is now very sceptical about immigration. he says that immigration to the uk has been dominated over the past 20 years by low wage, low skill people. he says that there is a myth of, quote, "migration benefits." but he says the reality is that it has exacerbated flatlining growth and productivity. it's only served the interests of big business. well, there are maverick people like him that say that. but the big institutions that

have done the analysis in the uk, including the treasury and associated institutions, as well as institutions like the oecd and the imf, reputable institutions, show the opposite. and this is the case both with the uk and the us, where it's very clear. very recently, for example, the imf came out with a report talking about the benefits of migration. to increases in the cost of skilled labour across the board, both skilled and unskilled, we're seeing it. and of course, the numbers in the uk aren't only about labour, it's the hong kong people... just for a second, because you just raised a point which is very close to my home, literally, you talk about the importance of bringing in migrant workers to do fruit picking, agricultural work.

i'm from lincolnshire in the east of england. my nearest town to my home farm was boston. boston recently voted for a reform mp. thousands and thousands of mostly east european, low wage migrant workers live in boston. it has over years generated tension and alienation with the local population. you talk about the big picture net economic gain effect. many local people close to my home talk about cultural fragmentation, a lack of identity, not really recognising the town they used to know. do you get that? yes, i think i do. and i think, you know, it's right that people voice their concerns. if you ask the farmers and the farmers union, they'll say, we need workers. of course they need workers to pick their crops and so... as matthew goodwin says, it really serves big business doesn't necessarily serve the more poor and disadvantaged local people.

it serves all of us. when we go and want an operation in the nhs, a hip replacement or we want something done, it's going to be migrants that do it very often. it's also going to be migrants that are going to generate the jobs and the income for the economy over the medium term. but the reason people are feeling anxious is because there not enough

and in other areas. 0ne doesn't address the problem of migration by saying, keep all the migrants out, we're going to fix our problems. the problems will become worse. right. in the course of writing this book over recent months, you must have looked at, for example, what's been happening in sweden, where there's been very serious concern about law and order security with some recently immigrant communities essentially seeming to be centres of crime and anti—social behaviour, to the point where a former prime minister of sweden, magdalena andersson, has said segregation of immigrant communities from established local communities has created parallel societies with our resources for policing and social services too weak to cope. i mean, you're positive, but don't you look at what's happening? i mean, look at it all the time. and i talk about it in the book. i mean, what one has to look at the evidence and one has to get.

i mean, i myself am the victim of mass discrimination against people in the pogroms and in eastern europe and forced migration, i get it. but the way to address it, i believe, and sweden has been remarkable in the past by being so welcoming, perhaps it welcomed too many people. there needs to be burden sharing, and there also needs to be very, very rigorous enforcement of policies of assimilation, teaching people languages. i don't believe in segregating people into ghettos and and elsewhere. i believe in allowing refugees to work so they can contribute, they can pay rent and do other things. but i think we should also need to ensure that immigrants of all types abide by the laws of our country. if they break the laws, they shouldn't be allowed to be here, or they should be part of the part of the criminal process. so i think we need a very rigorous bargain in which we accept that we need migrants, but we accept that they abide by the laws of the land. they pay tax, their employers pay tax, they're subject to minimum wage, and they're subject to the rule of law. you're an academic and you're a think tanker, but you do want to impact public policy making. i just wonder how depressed you are that you appear to be swimming against a very powerful tide. i mean, one could talk about donald trump and his anti—immigrant,

violently, almost violently anti—immigrant rhetoric in the united states, where he talks about immigration being tied to criminality, even terrorism. one could look at viktor 0rban in hungary, one could look at the polish government, one could look at the rise of the far right in a whole host of european countries. you don't appear to be winning the argument. no, it's one of the reasons i wrote the book, of course. that's why we write books, is to try and win arguments. but i think the tide of history is going to change things. and the discussions we're having today and the strongly anti—immigrant rhetoric is going to give way to a different discussion. and that's because if you look at the demographics and the decline of the number of people in the workforce, the increase in elderly people and the needs of our economy, they are so dramatically in favour of having more migration. it's also the case that politicians are very good on rhetoric, but look what they actually do and one can get less depressed. you know, this government that we've just seen being voted out in the uk promised brexit on the basis it would bring very low immigration, but what we've seen is record immigration numbers instead. so i think politicians are very good at rhetoric, including donald trump. but when it comes to implementing, they often don't do the same thing. and i think that's increasingly

going to be the case, by the way, because we need the migrants. and i think that's increasingly going to be the case, by the way, well, it's very interesting that you pinpoint this demographic crisis which undoubtedly is afflicting many countries in the industrialised world with birth rates nowhere near so—called replacement rate, which means populations are declining. the number of elderly people and dependent people is clearly rising, and it is a huge structural problem. but the answer, which politicians like mr 0rban in hungary come up with could be encapsulated in that word natalist, he basically says, i want to solve this problem not by bringing in immigrants, but by having more hungarian babies. yes. and isn't that actually going to be a very powerful political argument? it is. but it's easier said than done. the attempts to change fertility rates, to increase the number of children that native women have, have been unsuccessful around the world. not entirely true. in poland they've given huge subsidies to mothers to... it can make a tiny difference. but the average cost — and there's a recent study on this.

for france, the average cost per baby is 1 euro million, you know, £800,000 per baby. so you can do what you do, give big incentives. you can create nursery schools and one should do these things, but it doesn't change the the basics. china's abolished its one—child policy. it's made no difference to fertility rates at all. we see it in other countries like south korea that have no policies with much lower rates. and we're seeing it across europe. basically, it's about women with the right to choose women having contraception, having jobs and making other choices. i spoke to a japanese ministerjust the other day here on hardtalk. and when i put to him the fact that japan is surely going to have to change its policy, pretty strict control of immigration and work visas because of this demographic problem, which japan suffers from particularly. absolutely. he said to me, look, there's an awful lot of other things happening, artificial intelligence, robots, you know, there are many different ways in which technology is going to make japan work,

even if our population is reduced from 125 million to, say, 80 million, we can still make it work. yes. i think it's no accident that japan's been at the frontier of technology for the last 50 years, because it's been at the frontier of the demographic transition, fertility decline. so they've been substituting technology for people for a long time. they are increasing their number of immigrants. it's just gone up quite dramatically doubled in recent years, the number of immigrants intojapan. so that's changing slowly. technology can substitute for a lot of things, and it will forjobs that are repetitive and rules based that don't require dexterity, empathy. but you will not give your elderly parent or your small child to a machine for the foreseeable future. you will not have a massage by a machine. there are many, many increasing number ofjobs that people want in the advanced economies that will not be done by machines. and the question is, who's going to do them?

so let's bring it back to migration, which your book is all about. migration in the future will surely have to be very different from in the past, where people essentially moved, uprooted for life. the assumption when they moved was that they were going to a new place to make a new life. maybe the future is going to be much more limited, controlled, job specific migration. perhaps we could take the model of the arabian gulf, where huge numbers of people are invited in on short term contracts, heavily monitored and surveilled, and in essence, their rights are extraordinarily limited. is that going to be the future of migration? i think it is, and it's already happening. we see in the gulf, as you've mentioned, 90% of the population are on the sort of contract in the united arab emirates and in other places. we're seeing it already with the visa systems, that's what visas are, that's what student visas are. a number of migrants or students, they come and they go and they maybe can work for a year or two afterwards.

but then they go, we're seeing it on skilled visas in the uk. we're seeing it on skilled visas in the us. so i think increasingly we will have and already do have contract workers and i think that's perfectly acceptable. we're making a bargain with people that they can come and work for a certain period, and they leave. their questions about dependence, their questions about family reunification and of course, refugees is a separate question as well. but i think that is the future. if it's the future, it's a pretty bleak future, isn't it? again, you're the great optimist, but what you're really painting is a picture of two tier societies where you have sort of privileged local people with full rights, and then you have a class of worker migrants on very strictly controlled terms whose rights are not the same as the the full time local population. as the full time local population. it might be depicted as a bleak picture, but it's also a very positive picture for people that are desperate for work from around the world. they're getting an opportunity to work,

they're getting an opportunity to raise a lot of money. 0ften they're sending it home in the form of remittances. it's the biggest, by far source of income for many families and countries in the world. and then they go home and have a pension and live with theirfamilies again, it's not ideal. it would be better for some of them, but many people don't want to go and live somewhere else. they want to earn an income and they want to return to their communities. so i think it's not ideal, but let's not allow the best to be the enemy of the good in terms of progress. and it all presupposes an element of sort of global management and control of future human population movement, which, frankly, we don't see right now. but surely there is one factor that may undermine all of your hopes for this managed future of migration. and that is the climate emergency, global heating. i'm just looking at figures here which say that up to, well, between one and three billion people could be displaced by the effects of global heating by the end

of our current century. the number of people displaced by natural disasters and extreme weather in the last year was around 100 million. yes, 90% of people that escaped natural disaster go to neighbouring countries. we already see that in the number of displaced people that are in, for example, iran, iraq,jordan and elsewhere from the conflicts in their region and natural disasters. so people will move, they'll move as near as possible. they can't afford to move long distances. and in africa, they'll particularly move to the coastal economies. i think the numbers of billions are wild exaggerations, but there will be tens of millions, or maybe even more people being forced by rising oceans, by droughts, by famines to move. and they'll mainly go to other countries. it raises a very big question is, do we or should we begin to classify climate refugees as refugees under the un convention. under the un convention? we don't yet, but that will be

an issue for the future. final question, as we've discussed in this conversation right now, the world is full of politicians pledging to build ever higher fences, stronger border fortifications, essentially believing that they can stop the inward flow of people. is your message to them that this notion, this belief that they can stop it is always going to be wrong? well, firstly, there's one counterexample to higher walls. and that's, of course, the 30 countries of the schengen agreement of europe, where people can move freely between the countries of europe within. but they're now with a strong higher walls. absolutely soft centre, strong outer wall. absolutely. but that shows what people do when they can move freely. and what we saw in the height of the financial crisis, the euro crisis and so on is that very few people moved from impoverished communities where there was 50, 60% unemployment to high employment places. so i think the fear of mass movement

is firstly exaggerated. secondly, i think that we should manage migration. we need a bargain where we give migrants a more decent life, where we give them, uh, an option of work, but that we insist that they abide by our rules. and i think that bargain where we allow more migrants and we manage them more effectively, is the way to go for the future. and i think it's what politicians should be talking about. ian goldin, thank you very much forjoining me on. it's been a great pleasure. thank you very much. hello there. the weather's looking quite mixed

for this upcoming new week. generally speaking, lower pressure will affect more northern parts of the country. and it is here where we'll see outbreaks of rain, whereas further south, closer to higher pressure, this is where we'll see the drier and warmer weather with some sunshine. now, this area of low pressure could bring some issues for the north—west of the uk with heavy rain. could see some local flooding in places, particularly argyll and the highlands. so a very wet, windy start to monday here. eventually, the rain begins to push south—eastwards through the day, brightening up behind it and the winds easing, but a blustery day further south and east. but much of england and wales will be dry, with variable clouds, some sunshine and feeling much warmerand humid again, up to the high 20s here, mid 20s further north. now, that band of rain, some of it heavy and thundery, will affect western england and wales through monday evening. during the night, it begins to fizzle as it pushes its way towards eastern england. but ahead of it, it will stay warm and muggy. behind it, in the clearer skies, it'll be cooler and fresher. plenty of sunshine in the north and the west to start tuesday,

that weather front weakening as it pushes towards east and south—east england. it eventually clears away, skies brighten up as well, so not a bad afternoon. just a few blustery showers for western scotland and northern ireland. those temperatures range from around 18 to 2a, 25 degrees in the south—east. now, that area of low pressure begins to move. on wednesday, it's sitting across the northern half of the country. that's going to bring a windy day to much of scotland, northern ireland, the far north of england, with showers or longer spells of rain. so those rainfall totals really beginning to mount up at this point across western scotland. but for much of england and wales, a dry day to come, quite a bit of sunshine around, variable cloud. yes, it will be breezy here, not as windy as it'll be further north. and these sorts of temperatures, pretty much what we expect this time of year — around the high teens in the north, low 20s further south. as we move out to wednesday into thursday, that area of low pressure pulls away, but another one hot on its heels starts to push in off the atlantic. and this one, i think, will bring a more widespread, cloudier, wetter, windier day, certainly across central, northern and western areas. once again, the rain will be heavy across the north—west.

but it could be perhaps the midlands, southern, south—east england could stay dry altogether. top temperatures 23 degrees, given some brightness, high teens further north. and for the end of the week, it looks like it stays unsettled across more northern areas, with the greater chance of seeing sunshine and warmth across the south and south—east.

welcome to newsday. reporting live from singapore, i'm arunoday mukharji.

let's get you the headlines. bottles and bricks hurled at uk police — and a second hotel believed to be housing asylum—seekers is targeted — as far—right rallies descend into violence in english cities. around 150 people have been arrested, and the warning from police — there will be more. the prime minister vows he'll do whatever it takes to end the violence. i want you to know that this violent mob does not represent our country and we will bring them to justice. in other news — in bangladesh, an indefinite nationwide curfew as more than 90 people are killed in another day of anti—government protests. and in an astonishingly close finish, noah lyles speeds to victory in the men's100 metre final — securing gold for team usa.