You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

It's a great pleasure to be in Melbourne, though it feels like a mixed blessing to address you on this daunting subject.

Migration and how far states can regulate it.

Let's get straight to the main point about human

movement. It's an incorrigible habit. Long before the existence of sovereign borders,

people moved over large land masses and crossed oceans to resettle far from their origins.

They still do. Nowadays, we make much of migration across frontiers. It's what's come to count. So maybe

for starters, we should have a rough idea of how many people alive on the planet today

began in one country and ended up in another. It's roughly 215 million, according to the

International Organization for Migration. And this is a lot of people by any standards,

nearly ten times the population of Australia.

As a proportion of the world's population, it's around 3%.

I was tempted to say only 3%.

And here's something worth noting.

There's a huge array of statistics about migration,

but the further you get from the demographers who generate them, the more you hear them being

used in the service of an argument or a point of view. Immigration is the subject of furious

argument. It winds us up no end. We have to be careful and try to stay calm. I'll be using more statistics today, even though I'm not a scholar, and you'll see soon enough that I have a point of view.

But for now, I'll leave you to decide whether 3% is only 3% or as many as 3%.

Perhaps imagine you're looking over 100 job applications and find three of those

from people who no longer live in the country where they were born. Or if you prefer, consider the

situation in Australia where the figure is higher and estimate whether 25 or 30 people in every

...