People move. The history of humanity is a history of migration. Since the earliest movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia, humankind has had reason and the means to travel from one place to another. Sometimes that movement is orderly, planned and peaceful. But just as often it is harried and desperate, a violent expulsion of large numbers of people fleeing persecution, war, famine or other natural disasters.
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Throughout history, communities, polities and civilisations have been destroyed, supplanted or enriched by inflows of people from foreign cultures and ethnic groups. People have always moved, but today more people are being unwillingly displaced from their homes than at any time since the end of the second world war.