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2. Why Does Immigration Occur? A Theoretical Synthesis
- Russell Sage Foundation
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2 Why Does Immigration Occur? A Theoretical Synthesis Douglas S. Massey THE MODERN HISTORY OF international migration can be divided roughly into four periods. During the mercantile period, from 1500 to 1800, world immigration flows were dominated by Europe and stemmed from processes of colonization and economic growth under mercantile capitalism. Over the course of three hundred years, Europeans inhabited large portions of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Although the exact number of colonizing emigrants is unknown, the outflow was sufficient to establish Europe's dominion over large parts of the world. During this period, emigrants generally fell into three classes: a relatively large number of agrarian settlers, a smaller number of administrators and artisans, and an even smaller number of entrepreneurs who founded plantations to produce raw materials for Europe's growing mercantile economies. Although the number of Europeans involved in plantation production was small, this sector had a profound impact on the size and composition of population in the Americas. Given a preindustrial technology, plantations required large amounts of cheap labor, a demand met partially by indentured workers from East Asia; the most important source of labor, however, came from the forced migration of African slaves. Over three centuries, nearly ten million Africans were imported into the Americas, and together with European colonists, they radically transformed its social and demographic composition. The second period of emigration, the industrial period, began early in the nineteenth century and stemmed from the economic development of Europe and the spread ofindustrialism to former colonies in the New World. From 1800 to 1925, more than fony-eight-million people left the industrializing countries ofEurope in search ofnew lives in the Americas and Oceania. Of these emigrants, 85 percent went to just five destinations: Argentina, Australia , Canada, New Zealand, and the United States (the last alone receiving 60 percent). Key sending nations were Britain, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden, which all exported a large share of their potential population in the course of industrializing . Although international migrants were not exclusively European, the overwhelming majority came from that continent. Of all U.S. immigrants between 1820 and 1920, for example, 88 percent were from Europe, 3 percent were from Asia, and 8 percent came from the Americas. The period of large-scale European emigration faltered with the outbreak of World War I, which brought European emigration to an abrupt halt and ushered in a four-decade period of limited migration . Although emigration revived somewhat during the early 1920s, by then several important receiving countries (most notably the United States) had passed restrictive immigration laws. The onset of the Great Depression stopped virtually all international movement in 1929, and except for a small amount of return migration, there was little movement during the 1930s. During the 1940s international migration was checked by the Second World War. What mobility there was consisted largely of the movements of refugees and displaced persons and was not tied strongly to the rhythms of economic growth and development; this pattern persisted well into the subsequent decade. The period of postindustrial migration emerged during the 1960s and constituted a sharp break with the past. Rather than being dominated by outflows from Europe to a handful of former colonies , immigration became a truly global phenomenon as the number and variety of both sending and receiving countries increased and the global supply of immigrants shifted from Europe to the developing world. Whereas migration during the industrial era brought people from densely settled, rapidly industrializing areas into sparsely settled, rapidly industrializing nations, migration in the postindustrial era brought people from densely settled countries at the earliest stages of industrialization into densely settled, economically mature, postindustrial societies. Before 1925, 85 percent of all international migrants originated in Europe, but since 1960 Europe has contributed an increasingly small fraction of emigrants to world migration flows as emigration from Africa, Asia, and Latin America has increased dramatically. The number and variety of destination countries have likewise grown. In addition to traditional immigrant-receiving nations such as Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina, countries throughout Western Europe now attract significant numbers of immigrants-notably Germany, France, Belgium , Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands. During the late 1970s even longtime sending countries such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal began receiving immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, and after the rapid escalation of oil prices in 1973, several less developed but capital-rich nations in the Gulf region also began to sponsor massive labor migration. By...