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The global system of international migrations, 1900 and 2000: A comparative approach
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to compare international migrations in two different periods of history, both of them marked by a rapid increase in the trend: the first period runs from 1870 to 1914, and the second from 1965 to 2000. Historical and current migration system maps are compared, together with their different combinations of push and pull factors, and of coerced and free migrations. The various repercussions that international migrations have on demographic structure and on the economic systems of the sending and receiving countries are counterbalanced by a number of significant analogies that occur at the microlevel (individual and community) of the mechanisms governing the decision to migrate, and of migrants identities and behavioural patterns. The final section shows that migrants in both periods retain ties to both their old and new countries (as indicated by remittances and return migration), despite the major obstacles that stand in the way of the free circulation of international migrants today. This suggests that an analysis of migration systems, emphasizing ongoing interactions of various sorts between sending and receiving areas, is superior to either a model based on the presumption that assimilation will occur over time or one which presumes an irreducible multiculturalism .
Economics usually takes for granted a peaceful world with peaceful market transactions, where war and conflict are anomalies to the current state of business life. However, as History shows violence is a pervasive phenomenon. How is the current state of the art of research on war and defence in economic history journals? This paper provides an overview of research published on this topic by a selection of economic history journals since the fall of Berlin wall. By means of bibliometric and cluster analysis, and using visualising analytical tools, we show the production, main topics, authors, sources, etc. on this research area, and compare with the treatment received in economic journals. The main findings are that publications in economic history journals have increased in the last decades; cover a list of themes broader than that in economic journals; give an increasing importance to quantitative techniques; cite sources from the same area as well as from the top economic journals; and show a relative lack of appeal to neighbouring disciplines. Although economics and economic history influence each other, the direction of the scientific knowledge is going mostly from economics towards economic history rather than the opposite. Nadia Fernández-de-Pinedo is Senior Lecturer of Economic History at Universidad Autónoma of Madrid (Spain). Her work covers a wide range consumption and distribution networks including eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Spanish and Atlantic history. She participates in various cross-disciplinary projects on technology transfer processes, institutions, fabric distribution and material culture. Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the anonymous referees and the editors of SEHR for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.
In this article we plead for a less state-centered definition of migration that allows us to understand better the relationship between cross-cultural migrations and social change and social development in the long run. Therefore, we developed a method that enables us to systematically compare CCMRs (cross-cultural migrations per capita) through time and space. This CCMR method puts issues of state policies and citizenship in a much broader social context. We conclude that the presentist approach to migration in the social sciences is highly myopic, as it privileges migrations crossing state borders over internal moves, and favors migrants who have the intention to settle for good. In itself this is a legitimate choice, especially if the core explanandum is the way migrants’ long-term settlement process in another (modern) state evolves. In the more empirical parts of this article however we have concentrated on the effects of Eurasian societies since 1500 that have received migrants. Sending societies and individual migrants and nonmigrants in sending and receiving societies have been largely left out. Finally, and paradoxically, integration and assimilation in the long run leads to diminishing opportunities of social development by cross-cultural experiences, because one could argue that due to globalizing migrations cultures converge further and thus cultural boundaries (as is already the case in migration to cities within culturally homogenous nation-states in the twentieth century) become less salient or disappear entirely. Logically speaking, this is also an implication of the model, presently to be developed further.
Forty-three essays about modern world history is both too many and too few, and to begin c. 1750 is both too late and too early. We could not do everything, and have chosen to exhibit a wide variety of approaches to world history - focusing on regions, moments, commodities, large social processes, themes, and so on - rather than providing many examples of any one of these approaches. Sometimes our choice within categories was guided by the availability of a particular author, sometimes by a sense that one example was indeed more important than another, and sometimes by a concern for some other sort of balance. (If some topics seemed likely to yield essays in which, say, Latin America was much more prominent than the Middle East, we were that much more inclined to look for another in which the Middle East would figure prominently.) But ultimately, our offerings are much like those of chefs whose evening menus depend on what happened to be in the market this morning. We make no claim to telling the entire story, and many essays must stand not only for themselves, but also as illustrative of a certain thread in world history. We hope that readers will find that an essay on rubber or automobiles in modern world history suggests ideas about what global histories of coffee or railways might look like, or an essay on global 1956 what an essay on global 1968 might be. If so, we will be content with having perhaps whetted their appetites for more in this diverse and sprawling field. Our chronology is also, inevitably, somewhat arbitrary, and we have been happy to let authors violate it where they thought it made sense to do so. In fact, all the volumes of this set have a somewhat ragged and overlapping chronology - that is a feature of the program, not a bug.
Cross-border migration is a visible reflection of global inequalities. Much literature deals with the link between migration and inequalities indirectly, often through topics such as migration and development or the integration of migrants. Surprisingly, little research addresses directly the role of social inequalities. This gap raises at least two major questions: First, how do social inequalities affect opportunities for cross-border migration for different socioeconomic groups? Second, conversely, how do the outcomes of migration affect social inequalities in global patterns of distribution and in life chances in the countries of emigration and of immigration? Of ultimate interest is whether migration buttresses the dominant forms of social stratification or transforms the distribution of valued goods in a fundamental way. Overall, this review suggests that cross-border migration both constitutes a path to upward social mobility for migrants and tends to reinforce durable inequalities on a deeper level.
Adam MCKEOWN, World Migration in the Age of Industrial Globalization, 1840-1940 The first wave of mass migration from the 1840s to 1930s was a global phenomenon, embedded in a globalizing industrial economy. Except for the transatlantic migrations, however, much of that mobility has been forgotten. More attention to the global scope of mobility can help to understand the many forms of labor migration and diverse effects of industrial globalization. We can also better understand the genealogy of concepts that continue to erase certain forms of labor mobility and legitimize others.
Migration is a basic feature of the human species. Along with mutation and natural selection, it is one of the three basic mechanisms of human evolution. The movement of primates in central Africa gave birth to the first hominids some 5 million years ago. Movement made possible the appearance of every hominid species since then, including our own some 150,000 years ago, and the spread of Homo sapiens from our African cradle to every major area of the planet since 50,000 b.p.. These migratory currents have connected all the continents since 1500 C.E., helping create the Political, social, and ethnic landscapes of the world today.
In the discussion on the impact of global migration patterns two different definitions of globalization, with consequencesfor the periodization, are being used. The restricted one is applied by economic historians, like Jeffrey Williamson, who are interested in market integration and price convergence, and focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth century and the accompanying intercontinental mass migrations. World historians argue, both with economic, social and cultural arguments, that globalization started much earlier, at least with the 'Columbian exchange' at the end of the sixteenth century, when migrants (both traders, priests, soldiers and workers) established a world wide web of connections. By lack of quantification their broad definition of globalization, however, lends itself badly for a formal test, whereas the market oriented approach of economic historians is rather one-dimensional. The paper argnes that the dif ferentiated globalization approach of Held cum suis, distinguishing between intensity, extensity, impact and velocity, can help to bridge the gap between these two definitions and offers the basis for a fruitful discussion.
Immigration acts have long been analysed as instrumental to the working of the modern nation-state. A particular focus has been the racial exclusions and restrictions that were adopted by aspirationally white, new world nation-states: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This article looks again at the long modern history of immigration restriction in order to connect the history of these settler-colonial race-based exclusions (much studied) with immigration restriction in postcolonial nation-states (little studied). It argues for the need to expand the scope of immigration restriction histories geographically, temporally and substantively: beyond the settler nation, beyond the Second World War, and beyond ‘race’. The article focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, bringing into a single analytical frame the early immigration laws of New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada on the one hand and those of Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Fiji on the other.
History shows processes of convergence and divergence within which conflicts play
a prominent role. While the economic analysis of conflicts has always been present in the
economic literature, it has not occupied a central or. The urgency and complexity of the current
global challenges requires taking multidisciplinary approaches, in which the study of systemic
risks is included, as well as institutional responsiveness at international level. This involves
reviewing and overcoming current approaches and accommodate conflict within the analysis.
This short essay raises and revindicates such needs.
This paper broadens the analytical contours of Chinese migration by employing the paradigm of histoire croisée. By comparing three connected episodes within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: (1) British expansionism; (2) Kuomintang activities and British migratory legislation; and (3) the interconnection of the slump in China's silk industry, the anti-marriage movement, and the intertwinement of historiographies of China and Singapore – the entangled histories approach offers analytic purchase for which Chinese migration can be scrutinised with attention paid to the interpellations of historical contingencies and economic relations. The paper therefore analyses broader sociocultural and political patterns that inflect migratory flows, and considers the significance of how migratory historiography bears upon social memory of Chinese female migrants.
For a long time the early modern population of North Western Europe has been looked upon as fairly sedentary. Although since the 1980s new research has shown that people were much more mobile than was earlier acknowledged, in many historical works either the industrial revolution or the Napoleonic period continue to be regarded as a caesura in the migratory behaviour of people. In this dissertation the size, direction and the mechanisms behind the pre-industrial migrations from the countries bordering the North Sea for a period of over 250 years (ca. 1550-1800) were under scrutiny. The reconstruction of the size and direction of the migration flows showed that the migrations that took place within the North Sea area were larger than to other destination in the world, like for instance the America's. The main pole of attraction for most of the emigrants from the surrounding countries was the Dutch Republic; it was the centre of what can be labelled a North Sea migration system. With its booming economy in the seventeenth century and still plentiful job opportunities in the century that followed, it attracted the lion's share of emigrants from the surrounding countries. Apart from the opportunities to find employment, the high wages were an important incentive for people to move to the Dutch Republic. On the sending side, especially demographic pressure resulting in overcrowded labour markets and low wages stimulated out-migration; the Dutch Republic was the logical destination. Interestingly, a shift in the type of migrants took place from the end of the eighteenth century. While before migrants predominantly settled after moving to the Dutch Republic, during the eighteenth century increasingly people worked without actually settling abroad; especially the maritime labour market provided opportunities for this. Therefore, although the share of migrants living in the Netherlands dropped very quickly after c. 1650-1670, the number of migrant that actually worked there did not decline that much. On the other side of the English Channel another migration system existed, with London as its core existed. The two systems functioned almost without any contact; no large migration streams from the continent were directed to England, and Amsterdam did not attract many Englishmen. The two systems worked, however, in a relatively similar way, with a similarly structured hinterland, and also an identical correlation between economic performance and demographic development can be noticed. Finally, when the migrations in the North Sea area during the early modern period are compared to the better studied migrations to the New World, some interesting comparisons can be made. First of all, it is shown that not only the nineteenth century volume of migration had a wave like shape over time, the migrations in the pre-industrial period had followed a similar course, reaching apex halfway through the seventeenth century although the peak was somewhat lower. The origins of the rise and fall of the two waves of mass migration also showed similarities, especially in the demographic and economic framework that determined the migrations.
Historians of migration have increasingly criticized the idea of a , which assumed that pre-modern societies in Europe were geographically fairly immobile, and that people only started to move in unprecedented ways with the onset of modernization in the nineteenth century. In line with this critique, this article attempts to apply thorough quantitative tests to the available data. The focus is on , following Patrick Manning's argument that migrants moving over a cultural border are most likely to accelerate the rate of innovation. Six forms of migration are considered: emigration out of Europe, immigration from other continents, rural colonization of , movements to large cities, seasonal migration, and the movement of sailors and soldiers. To illustrate regional variations, the examples of the Netherlands and Russia are contrasted. The reconstruction presented here is partial and preliminary, but it unequivocally shows that early modern Europe was much more mobile than modernization scholars allowed for. There was indeed a sharp increase in the level of migration after 1850, but it was due to improvements in transport rather than to modernization in a more general sense. This model has been elaborated for Europe but it can also be applied to other parts of the world and can hopefully contribute to the debate on the between Europe and Asia.
Chinese emigration was part of the global wave of mass migration in the nineteenth century. After establishing the main quantities, sources, destinations, and timing of emigration, this article analyses trends in return and female migration, two quantifiable phenomena that are often said to distinguish Chinese from other migrations. These trends are compared between different flows of Chinese migration, both overseas and to Manchuria, and with non-Chinese migrations. The most interesting conclusions have methodological implications: first, comparisons should be situated as historical trends to better understand patterns of convergence or divergence between flows; second, some cycles and patterns may grow more similar across migration flows even as others diverge; third, the results of comparison will change along with the scale of units being compared; and finally, both extensive comparisons of specific flows and an awareness of the global context are necessary to understand the patterns and causes of mass migration.
Official estimates of migrants’ remittances are around US$100 billion annually, with some 60 per cent going to developing countries. Any policy making use of migrants as a development resource must understand the size and allocation of remittances, and the roles played by migrants and their communities in the remittance process. This paper examines the flows of remittances in relation to other financial flows to developing countries. The examination is based on data available from official statistics. As discussed in the paper, remittances by unofficial channels are significant by all accounts so the remittance amounts reported here are quite conservative.
What determines immigration policy? The literature here is not nearly as mature as that for trade policy, so this article must be viewed as an initial effort to establish the main empirical outlines. The authors construct an index of immigration policy for five countries of immigration-Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and the United States-for 1860-1930, that is, during and shortly after the age of mass migration. The exercise reveals that the doors to the New World did not suddenly slam shut on immigrants after World War I, as is typically illustrated by citing the passage of the Emergency Quota Act by the US Congress in 1921. Instead, there was a gradual closing of the doors, although the rate and timing of the closing varied across countries. The authors find that poor wage performance and the perceived threat from more, low-quality foreign workers were the main influences on shifts in immigration policy. They also offer some support for the idea that immigration policy was as much an interactive process as were the tariff policies of the time.
European migrations to the Americas and Australia have often been noted as an important part of world history, but movements to the frontiers, factories, and cities of Asia and Africa have largely been overlooked. This paper will show that migrations to northern and southeastern Asia were comparable in size and demographic impact to the transatlantic flows and followed similar cycles of growth and contraction. These migrations were all part of an expanding world economy, and a global perspective suggests ways in which that economy extended beyond direct European intervention. A global perspective also compels us to extend the traditional ending point for the era of mass migration from 1914 to 1930, and to be more aware of how political intervention has shaped the world into different migration systems and led scholars to wrongly assume that these systems reflect categorically different kinds of migration.
The first research into emigration from Scandinavia was undertaken as early as 1907–13 under the leadership of Gustav Sundbärg in Sweden and resulted in an official publication giving substantial quantitative information about the composition of Swedish emigration and a discussion of its underlying causes.1 More modest collections of statistical data on emigration were subsequently published in Norway and Finland.2
Neoclassical economics and the new economics of labour migration posit very different motivations for international migration. The former assumes that people move abroad permanently to maximize lifetime earnings whereas the latter assumes they leave temporarily to overcome market deficiencies at home. As a result, the two models yield very different conceptualizations of return migration. We draw upon each theoretical model to derive predictions about how different variables are likely to influence the probability of return migration. We use data from the German Socio–economic Panel to test specific hypotheses derived from each model. Finding some support for both perspectives, we suggest that migrants may be heterogeneous with respect to their migratory motivations. If so, then parameters associated with the determinants of return migration in any population of international migration will reflect a blending of parameters associated with two distinct economic rationales. Equations estimated separately for remitting and non–remitting migrants lend support to this interpretation, meaning there may not be one unitary process of return migration, but several.
As part of a larger inquiry into the consequences of international migration for those who remain in the country of origin, 234 adults in four Turkish provinces were interviewed concerning matters (mostly opinions) pertaining to the status of women. Three migrant-status categories were defined; (a) Returned migrants, (b) Non-migrant close kin or friends of migrants, and, as a control group, (c) All others. Controlling for age, sex, urban-rural residence, and schooling, group (a) was the most likely to express “non-traditional” views, and group (c) the least. Group (b) was in between.
Of the two possible explanations for such a pattern – recruitment and socialization – we found recruitment highly significant. The evidence for socialization, however, was decidedly mixed. Some of the considerable diversity of viewpoints pertaining to the status of women found in this inquiry are doubtless causally associated with the experience of migration, whether direct or indirect. But there is also evidence here of a society in the process of rapid change; and it is these more general social changes, not migration as such, that would appear to be more likely to affect the status of women.
There is little support for the contention that the type of international migration that has involved so many Turks these past three decades – migration that has for the most part been temporary and economically motivated and has consisted of movements from relatively poor agricultural or but slightly industrialized areas to rich, highly industrialized ones characterized by marked differences in language, religion, and overall culture – is going to result in moving the status of women from a more to a less “traditional” plane.
The paper analyses the impact of the Gulf crisis on the Indian economy as a whole, on the state of Kerala which was the origin of the majority of the Indian migrants in Kuwait and Iraq, and on the returning migrants them- selves. The scale of the disturbances is estimated both with respect to the labour market, as well as the flow of remittances. Alternative policy responses are discussed, especially in the context of the Kerala economy, and the problem is viewed separately from the vantage point of the returning migrants, as well as that of the State Government. The effects of the crisis become more acute as the focus shifts from the level of the macroeconomy, to the state of Kerala, to the migrants themselves.
This paper argues that the debates on transnationalism are gender implicit, and the discourse shaped by the emergence of Pacific Asian economies as key players in the global economy sees men as the dominant representative of these global forces. Belief in a real or imagined global bonding has become a dominant and problematic discourse that can empower some, while marginalizing others. It is important to examine how women of Chinese ancestry position themselves within their personal and global environments and to give agency to women in these narratives fashioned by tropes of global capitalism and world markets.
Women now outnumber male immigrants to the major immigration countries of Australia, the United States, and Canada, and this shift is due to the increased migration of women from Asian countries. Yet their position in transmigration and settlement patterns has largely been ignored. This paper argues that the global perspective of Chinese diasporic women has significant implications for both Western and non-Western global patterning. The site of the investigation is Australia in the post 1970s and the focus is on women of Chinese ancestry re-migrating from East and South-East Asia.
Most historical studies of immigration in nineteenth-century America have failed to distinguish among the labor-market experiences of different immigrant groups. Using a sample of some 4000 wage earners from turn-of-the-century Iowa, we examine the relative earnings of skilled and unskilled immigrants and suggest the factors which contributed to their very different post-immigration experiences. The results indicate that prior knowledge of a trade conferred upon immigrants an initial earnings advantage, but that unskilled immigrants managed subsequently to close some but not all of the gap by reaping greater returns to experience on the job.
If migrants return to their origin countries, two questions arise which are of immediate economic interest for both immigration and emigration country: what determines their optimal migration duration, and what are the activities migrants choose after a return. Little research has been devoted to these two issues. This paper utilises a unique survey data set which records activities of returned migrants. We first illustrate the activities of immigrants after returning. We show that more than half of the returning migrants are economically active after return, and most of them engage in entrepreneurial activities. We then develop a model where migrants decide simultaneously about the optimal migration duration, and their after-return activities. Guided by this model, we specify and estimate an empirical model, where the after-return activity, and the optimal migration duration are simultaneously chosen.
In the late nineteenth century, the United States population included a large number of first and second generation immigrants from European countries, often with relatively high fertility levels. This article investigates the degree to which fertility behavior changed as a result of social structural characteristics of the environment such as urbanization and children's role, the diffusion of fertility values and information from the native population, and the role of cultural vaclues or resistance to change. On the whole, little evidence is found that adaptation was culturally unique, although groups maintained distinctive fertility levels over generations. Substantial evidence suggests that immigrant women modified their fertility behavior as a consequence of social structural factors and contact with the native U.S. population.
This study proposes to measure ethnic identity among three generations of Greek Americans living in the New York metropolitan area. New York City has the largest Greek community in the United States. Although the evidence reveals variation from generation to generation, the majority of Greeks still have a relatively strong attachment to their ethnic culture, in spite of identification with American society.
This study uses data constructed from 1980 US census microdata files and other sources to estimate a structural model of native/foreign-born labor demand and labor supply that distinguishes the effects on real wages of each type of labor and on employment of natives. What especially sets the model apart from others is that it specifies, econometrically estimates, and simulates a structural model that incorporates not only a production structure channel through which immigrants influence area real wages and employment, but also demand and native labor supply channels. These are not the only channels through which immigrants might affect native workers. Among other potentially important channels are technological change, agglomeration economies, inflation, balance of payments, remittances, tax and transfer payments, use of public sevices, and externalities. -from Authors
This study estimates the extent and structure of poverty in Lesotho, based on a recent Household Budget Survey, using additive decomposable poverty indices. A special feature of Lesotho is that a high proportion of the male labour force is employed in the Republic of South Africa. Household members left behind, and the economy as a whole, are very dependent on miners' remittances. As part of our analysis, we simulate the effects on the extent and structure of poverty of the complete termination of these remittances. Copyright 1993 by Oxford University Press.
How did turn-of-the-20th-century immigrants perform in the American economy relative to native-born Americans? This article reassesses this question using data from the 1900 and 1910 American census files. I find in both cross sections that American immigrants perform well in blue-collar and white-collar occupations, with either faster growth in earnings or an outright earnings advantage over native-born Americans in the same occupational sector. Estimates of within-cohort growth reveal that the cross-sectional results do not overstate immigrant progress due to cohort effects. Immigrants also exhibit a high degree of mobility into the well-paid white-collar sector of the American economy, and the progress of the immigrant population as a whole was not slowed by the emergence of the “new” immigration.
Cross sections of workers’ wages and occupational status from the late 19th century suggest that the immigrants of the time, the “old immigrants” from northwestern Europe, experienced slower growth in wages and status than native-born Americans. This is the opposite of the pattern observed for most immigrant groups in the 20th century postwar period, and casts doubt on the models that have been used to explain the postwar pattern.