Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today is a successful migrant. Indeed, he is only alive because of migration.

And that goes a long way to explain why this South African-born economist Ian Golden

has devoted much of his career and a couple of books to the proposition that migration is a vital,

positive part of the human story. Golden's Jewish grandparents on both sides fled Eastern

Europe before World War II. Family members who remained were exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust. Golden was raised in South Africa,

though he emigrated from there in the 80s to be free of the apartheid regime. He's been a senior

official at the World Bank, an economic advisor to Nelson Mandela, and he's now Professor of Globalization

and Development at Oxford University.

His latest book, The Shortest History of Migration,

illustrates the centrality of movement to the evolution of humanity,

from the earliest human travellers leaving East Africa some 300,000 years ago,

to all of the people seeking sanctuary and prosperity across today's

national borders. Right now, migration is a hot, contentious topic. Will how we deal with it be the

defining issue of this century? Well, Professor Ian Golden joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

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 are 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 civilization,

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

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