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The Physics of Migration: Edition 5

Roger F. Malina – ORCID


Book: “Migration Theory: talking across disciplines”

4th edition, Caroline B Bretell and James F Holland. Routledge, New York, 2023 DOI 10.4324/9781003121015
by: Caroline B Bretell and James F Holland

So, I have just finished reading page 156 of this book, the chapter by Philip Martin. The Chapter title is Economic Aspects of Migration

The chapter, as the author admits, is USA centric which is fine. It feeds into my bias that migration to the USA is a good thing. I migrated for the first time to the US for college at MIT in 1968.

My Czech grandparents family migrated to Texas in 1882, then they hated it so much they migrated back to Bohemia in 1918 after the first creation of the Czech Republic. Then the great depressions chased them back to Texas in the 1920s. My father was a forced migrant back to Europe in 1954  and became a political refugee in France, where I was born.

My father accidentally became a millionaire at the same time and switched careers from engineering to arts then publishing. I left France to USA to become a university student.

This is much discussed in this chapter: the lack of convincing correlation between going to college and subsequent career success. Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs went to college.

About the Author:

Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded, and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology.

He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC, and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall 2013.