DO WALLS WORK?

Growing up in Italy in the 1990s, Ilaria Giglioli remembers watching TV and seeing boatloads of people from North Africa crossing the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. “You’d see the refugees in shipwrecks,” she says. “That’s where you could trace the origins of my interest in migration.” Giglioli, a professor of human geography at New College of Florida, studies the movement of people throughout the world. “As a geographer, the essence of what we do is look at the natural and social landscape and wonder how they came to be,” she says. We asked Giglioli to help us understand the immigration crisis, how we got where we are today and what our future might look like.

What do you study?

I focus on three things: borders, nation-states and migration. What are the forces that create change? And how do things change?