Migration is as old as humanity itself. In today’s world, it ebbs and flows as nations change their border policies with the times. Paul Salopek is a National Geographic Explorer who has been retracing the global path of the earliest humans on foot for the past 13 years. In that time, he has witnessed significant migration in real time. He joins Host Marco Werman to share his observations on how migration’s role in the global zeitgeist has changed.
There’s been a lot of public discourse about migration in recent years. In the US and throughout Europe, many political candidates have made restricting immigration a key theme in their runs for office.
National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has seen human migration up close in many parts of the world.
“I am moving at boot level through these big streams of humanity in one little particle, a very privileged one, moving among masses of human beings who are often moving for very tragic reasons,” Salopek told The World. “They’re either going to a place where they hope life is going to be better, drawn by economic promise, stability, flame violence or climate crises back home.”
An elderly resident pushes his bicycle through the alleyways of Ping Yao, a well-preserved 14th-century town in Shanxi Province, China. It is surrounded, as most ancient cities are in China, by high defensive walls.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
For over a decade, on foot, Salopek has been tracing the paths of our earliest ancestors from East Africa to the southernmost tip of the Americas, documenting the journey in a project called Out of Eden Walk.
“Migration has been a huge part of my journey,” Salopek said. “My journey is based on ancient migrations. And I think, now, there just seems to be more of an awareness of it. Back when I started in 2013, people focused on it piecemeal, like African migrants going into Europe or Latin American migrants going to North America. But now, I think it’s becoming a little bit more of a global issue in the zeitgeist. And the question that I’m asking myself is … ‘Are walls going up because of it?’”
Marco Werman: So Paul, you’ve walked through about two dozen countries at this point. That’s a lot of stamps in your passport. How has crossing borders, like the actual passage from one country to another, changed in recent years?
Paul Salopek: I just get a sense, kind of a gut sense, Marco, that just crossing borders has become a little bit more fraught. When I started out, there were some big wars along my route, in Syria, of course, those borders were dicey, but it just seemed less of an issue to go over land borders. And now, I think there’s just a bit more scrutiny, and I’m not sure why. I have certain theories, but I don’t have any way to prove them.
I wonder if there was perhaps one moment that you can recall on your trek at one point, at one port of entry, when you were in contact with a wide range of people, with a wide range of reasons for migrating, and what that was like.
There have been a bunch. Landing in Turkey from a cargo ship, the ferry boats and the cargo boats were just offloading tons of people from the Middle East. And then, a little bit further along, people are literally breaking down border fences. The war was on in Syria, and an entire city called Kobani was stampeding over the border into Turkey. And it was astonishing to see. So, this notion of borders hardening and softening, I think they’re very fluid. I’ve made the metaphor before of them being like glaciers, right? Thousands of years ago, when the first hunters roamed the planet, glaciers stopped them, and then they stopped until they melted. I’ve had to do that on this journey, as well. I waited nine months in the country of Georgia to get an Iranian visa, and I never got one.
Khiva, an old Silk Road city in Uzbekistan, is one of many walled cities along Asia’s ancient trade route.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
Hospitality has always been a central part of your journey. We’ve spoken about that a lot. You often place a lot of trust in the kindness of strangers you meet, but I wonder what the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments in many parts of the world has done to shrink the kindness factor, or maybe even increase suspicion and mistrust.
I’m wondering that, too. So far, nobody has overtly mistreated me or shunned me any more than usual over the years. But I think what I’m seeing is, under my feet, there’s this tectonic shift happening in the world, where my identity, not just as a white guy, but even my political identity as an American, is different than it was more than a decade ago, right? Maybe more than a decade ago, my passport carried more weight and more privilege, earned or unearned, right? Now, I think we’re kind of moving into a multipolar world situation where I might just be one nationality among many. So, I think I’m feeling that more than kind of, you know, like a shutting the door in my face. It’s more like, “Oh, you’re American, so what?” I think we’re entering a new time, a new polarity in geopolitics right now.
Going back to the first Trump administration and his intense focus on a border wall, building it longer and higher, you encountered the Great Wall of China on your trek, and it was after walking along it that walls really began to take on a different meaning for you. Explain that.
Yeah, it’s true. Because something that has struck me, certain things, very different cultures, thousands of kilometers and miles apart, repeat over and over again. And one is the walls. I mean, some of the earliest structures that I came across in the Holy Land were walls built back in ancient times, and even the new wall, the separating wall in Jerusalem, which you probably know, you’ve probably seen. And then, beyond that, the next iconic set of walls is the walled cities along the Silk Road. And then beyond that, the Great Wall of China. I remember standing on a really amazing stretch of the Great Wall of China. One that wasn’t developed for tourism. It was kind of eroding into the mountainside, but still quite impressive. I was with a Chinese archeologist, and we’re talking about walls … “What do walls do to societies? Do they defend them or do they isolate them? And at what point does that change?” So, yeah, I think walls are a complicating factor. The fact that the United States, the richest economy in the history of humankind, is building a wall is pretty sobering. You know, I understand the impulse, but it also maybe suggests policy failures any time a wall goes up.
Walking the Great Wall of China in remote Shanxi province.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
I mean, Paul, the Out of Eden Walk has connected you to the ancient world when people were much more nomadic than today, a time when borders were not marked with signs and crossing them did not require officialdom or passports or stamps. Can you speak to some of the pros and cons of that old way of living, and are there lessons to be learned from that history today?
As somebody who makes his living by being a nomad, I see huge advantages to getting to know people who are different from you. I also, however, respect the kind of friction and the kind of ripples they send through settled communities. To have strangers come in can be a bit jarring if you don’t know who they are. They look different and speak different languages. I get that. It’s helpful for me if my readers come to me and say, “Paul, what lesson do you bring to us from walking across the world, looking at deep history?” I would say, keep a nomadic mindset somewhere within your toolkit for how you survive in the world. Being footloose can be an advantage, because, from day one, when we were running away from major droughts in Africa, back in the unwritten era of the Stone Age, to wars and other historic times, to whatever geopolitical change. … Movement is one of the go-to survival mechanisms of homo sapiens. And if you don’t move, you’re at a disadvantage. So, keep a psychic bag packed. Don’t always look at it as an emergency thing or a negative thing. It can also have huge positive connotations. That’s the lesson I’ve taken away from this project.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Writer and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000-mile storytelling trek across the world called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonders of our world, has funded Salopek and the project since 2013. Explore the project here. Follow the journey on X at @PaulSalopek, @outofedenwalk.
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