Fiona Green’s painting of migrants

SAM Miller’s special subject speaks to me as one who followed – with family – criss-crossing the oceans over generations.

My history has Scottish engineers travelling to pioneer Australia and, paradoxically, also Irish transportees banished to Van Diemens Land (Tasmania).

My return to the UK by sea – the fourth generation born in India, a century after my great grandmother took the same arduous sea journey back, as a teenager with her father in 1854 in the paddle steamer “Golden Age” with Governor La Trobe.

My father also wanted our family back in his homeland and so – with our Viking DNA – we returned.

Since the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, when matter, time, energy and space came into being, and the first species crawled out of the ocean onto land, humans evolved and migrated around the Earth.

Those early forms of life were – as they are today – forced by climate to survive, by moving and using the land, eventually to grow crops and feed their livestock; but also to appropriate and exploit.

In my home town of Totnes, in Devon, I have a constant migrant reminder: a small stone set in a wall at the side of our main street, allegedly marks the spot where Brutus, the original exile and legendary founder of Britain, first landed and settled here; a town where today we welcome refugees from the Middle and Far East to live and settle.

The subject of migration is fraught with differing perspectives and prejudice. The thesis of “sedentarism” as opposed to the “natural need to migrate” is held by many Brits who are now embedded in and wedded to, the belief that to be truly “English” is to belong to a “nation state” of original peoples.

This perspective ironically, is defended forcefully at the present time by an Indian immigrant politician, Suella Braverman, using hate rhetoric to urge rejection of others who come to our shores desperately seeking refuge. With global warming, this need is accelerating, and so demands a compassionate, global response.

Sam argues for the need for taught knowledge in schools about migration to balance the current focus on classical Greek and Roman cultural origins.

He says: “We all need to talk about migration,urgently and openly. And not just the insular country by country stuff: not only borders and passports and quotas and walls and visas. But something much deeper, more fundamental, about who we are as human beings… Some of us are very vocal on the subject. Others shy away from talking about migration, because the subject has become so toxic.”

It is his contention that “migration has, in fact, become a modern proxy for a whole range of other issues that impinge on our lives and our thinking: identity, ethnicity, religion, ideas of home, patriotism, nostalgia, integration, multi-culturalism, safety, terrorism and racism … And it is part of the story of each us, whether or not we have been migrants ourselves”.

Since Adam was exiled from Eden.

• Migrants: The Story of Us All. By Sam Miller, Abacus Books, £25
• Fiona Green is an artist formerly long-time resident in Fitzrovia and now returned to Devon