external drive won't be recognized by my Mac

I have a WD Elements 1 TB external drive that I have been using without problems on my early 2015 MacBook Air. However, I just bought a new MacBook Air M1 2020, but the computer won't recognize the external drive to transfer the data from my old computer to the new one. On the new Mac the external drive won't even appear in the disk utility app, nor in the terminal when I input diskutil list command.