Opinion: To understand how migrations affect human securities, look to the past.

Every day 37,000 people leave their homes and join the 258 million migrants who live in a different country from where they were born (1, 2). And experts believe that the number of migrants will continue to grow. Climate change alone is expected to force 200 million people to leave their homeland by the year 2050 (3), and some expect the number to reach 1 billion by the year 2100 (4, 5). Routinely, we hear that these numbers are unprecedented, that this level of migration is unsustainable, and that these migrants threaten our way of life. Are these claims right? Texts about the founding of early medieval monastic sites in Ireland, such as St. Colman’s Abbey on the island of Inishbofin (pictured here with a 12th-century church), portrayed the sites as interregional religious and cultural hubs. But recent archaeological research using chemical analyses on similar early medieval Irish monastic sites suggests that few nonlocals were buried at such places (2). Such a relatively low level of migration may have been attributable to laws that restricted individual’s rights outside of their natal territories. The truthful answer is, “we don’t know.” What is clear is that if we are to create migration policies that balance the human rights of migrants with the security concerns of host populations, we will need evidence-based answers to these questions and others like them. At least some of those answers will be found in our past, and the researchers best suited for this task are archaeologists. > What is clear is that if we are to create migration policies that balance the human rights of migrants with the security concerns of host populations, we will need evidence-based answers to these questions and others like them. Studies using the rich corpus of contemporary demographic, sociological, economic, and … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: jhaltschul{at}canelogroup.net. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1