Video: A Personal Plea for Humanity at the US-Mexico Border

In this powerful, personal talk, author and academic Juan Enriquez shares stories from inside the immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border, bringing this often-abstract debate back down to earth — and showing what you can do every day to create a sense of belonging for immigrants. “This isn’t about kids and borders,” he says. “It’s about us. This is about who we are, who we the people are, as a nation and as individuals.”

Running time: 10 minutes

A broad thinker, Juan Enriquez bridges disciplines to build a coherent vision. He is the managing director of Excel Venture Management, a life sciences VC firm. He cofounded the company that made the world’s first synthetic life form and seed funded a company that may allow portable brain reading.

Enriquez’s book, RIGHT/WRONG: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics, shows why we should be a little less harsh in judging our peers and ancestors and more careful in being dead certain that what we do today will be regarded as ethical tomorrow. In 2015, he published Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation Are Shaping Life on Earth with Steve Gullans. The book describes a world where humans increasingly shape their environment, themselves and other species.