(gentle music) - Migration is just one example of the world on the move.

(water splashes) Plants move, birds move, (birds chirping) animals move, (hooves galloping) microbes move, and certainly, humans move.

Back in the early days of human history, where there was a lot of land and few people, it was easy to cross boundaries.

Now with nation states and growing population around the world, borders have hardened.

And so it can be much harder than before to legally move from one place to another if you're a human.

With the larger population in the world, and with climate change, we see more people on the move than we have in the past.

(gentle piano music) One researcher estimated that if you just consider rising waters over the next 50 years, we may have 150 million people on the move, because their country or their land has been overtaken by rising waters.

And there's a lot of relationship between human migration and other migration.

The Lab of Ornithology, for example, has estimated that one-third of all birds have been decimated over the last 50 years because of climate change.

That affects human migration, and vice versa.

So studying these kinds of migration activities, not just from a human perspective, but from a different kind of perspective, makes sense.

(upbeat electronic music) In my research at Cornell Law School, I focus on human migration, specifically, the extent to which migration can be a benefit to society, whether it's high-skilled immigration or low-skilled immigration.

For example, I did a research project on whether a point system for selecting immigrants could be a good idea for the United States, just as it's already proven its value in countries like Canada and Australia.

- [Announcer] This scene shows the well-known immigration station at Ellis island, New York.

In past years, thousands of aliens arrived at Ellis island daily.

- Immigration's always been somewhat controversial in America.

We've always welcomed our own relatives, but we are not so sure about people that we're not familiar with.

In the 1840s, for example, there was a political party called the Know Nothing Party that was explicitly anti-immigrant.

Immigration laws have waxed and waned in terms of their restrictions, and it wasn't until 1965 that we loosened a lot of immigration restrictions as part of the civil rights laws that were being enacted by Congress at that time.

So we became a much more diverse country.

Now in the United States, about 14 million people are immigrants, which that's not a historical high when you consider immigration in the past, but it has raised questions about whether immigrants are adequately assimilating into American society.

And so once again, immigration is controversial, and we need to decide what levels of immigration we want as a country, and what types of immigrants we want.

(upbeat music) Cornell decided that it wanted to really work on a Grand Challenge, something that needed the full resources of Cornell University and all its departments to tackle something monumental.

So they held a conference in November of 2018 to solicit ideas for what that Grand Challenge might be.

From that conference, Cornell decided that the first Grand Challenge would focus on migrations.

And we talked about the need for interdisciplinary, interspecies, international focus on the study of migrations.

And as part of the migrations initiative, we also applied for a grant from the Mellon Foundation, which was coming out with a proposal for just futures to have universities focus on how they could tackle racism and dispossession.

We thought that our migrations initiative would be a perfect project for the Mellon Foundation, because migrations does touch on racism and dispossession issues to a large degree.

(upbeat electronic music) We've got amazing researchers and various departments understanding and researching various aspects of migration, and by bringing them together so that they collaborate across departments and across species, we can learn a lot more than if we remain in our own individual departments.

For example, one of the principle on the Grand Challenge is Shannon Gleeson.

She studies immigration from a sociological perspective, particularly, researching how people who are in precarious immigration statuses can deal with society and education.

I've also gotten to know Eric Tagliacozzo, who is a professor of history, who focuses specifically on the history of migration in Southeast Asia.

Gunisha Kaur is Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medical School in New York City.

And because of the Migrations Grand Challenge, I've been able to get to know her and to work with her on this project that we're doing together on public benefits issues.

There's Natalie Bazarova, in the Department of Communications, who has a social media lab.

And by working with her and her students, we're figuring out what new digital tools might be appropriate for immigrants to use to understand their rights under immigration law.

Through this initiative, I've also been able to get to know Gerard Aching, who is doing a fascinating project on researching the Underground Railroad.

For example, he's leading an excavation at the St. James AME Zion Church here in Ithaca to determine if they can find anything in the ground that can help them understand better how the underground railroad operated here in Ithaca.

(gentle music) Figuring out how to break down the barriers within any institution, whether it's academic, or corporate, or educational, is a key obstacle in trying to tackle a large issue.

And so that's one of the reasons why we're doing this video series with WSKG is to make sure that other people learn about migration, both what Cornell is doing, and what some of the challenges are with migrations generally.

And by bringing together the talents of Cornell researchers to really focus on the interdisciplinary and multi-species aspects of migration, we can really advance the study of migrations, and be able to solve some of these large challenges that relate to migration, whether they relate to climate change, or migration of people, or migration of microbes, like the coronavirus.