How Migration Is Reshaping Ethnic Diversity
Podcast · featuring Dan Hiebert on Demographic Change, Aging Populations, and the Future of Migration and Identity
How is migration transforming ethnic diversity — and what do demographic shifts mean for social categories? In this episode, geographer Dan Hiebert (University of British Columbia) joins Steven Vertovec and Georg Diez to explore the complex dynamics of migration in a changing world.
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📝 Full transcript: Read the complete conversation →
Key Takeaways:
Countries like Japan and Germany face an aging crisis that makes migration essential for economic survival
Media narratives often focus on negative migration stories, missing the larger picture of demographic diversity
Superdiversity offers a more nuanced framework than traditional multiculturalism for understanding contemporary migration
Government policies play a crucial role in managing migration — but cultural differences are often politicized
Africa will play a key role in future global migration flows
Social categories will evolve as demographic diversity reshapes societies
About the Guest:
Dan Hiebert is a geographer at the University of British Columbia whose research examines how migration reshapes cities, labor markets, and social structures across diverse societies.
I concur. Migration is often described here through policy, labour, and demographics.
But what interests me more is how quietly it settles elsewhere - in the kitchen, and this is precisely because the Jewish kitchen has taken so many forms in its diasporic history.
Long before narratives catch up, people are already adapting, translating, and recombining through food.
What you describe as “transnational connections,” I see in dishes:
fenugreek from Yemen becoming olba in Cochin, India.
Mahshi in Baghdad becomes mahasha in Calcutta, India.
Not as theory.
As adaptation while preserving tradition.
The world is already integrated - we just don’t always look in the right places.