Migration

I. SOCIAL ASPECTSWilliam Petersen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

II. ECONOMIC ASPECTSErinley Thomas

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. SOCIAL ASPECTS

In its most general sense “migration” is ordinarily defined as the relatively permanent movement of persons over a significant distance. But this definition, or any paraphrase of it, merely begins to delimit the subject, for the exact meaning of the most important terms (“permanent,” “significant”) is still to be specified. A person who goes to another country and remains there for the rest of his life, we say, is a migrant; and one who pays a two-hour visit to the nearest town is not. Between these two extremes lies a bewildering array of intermediate instances, which can only partly be distinguished by more or less arbitrary criteria (Lacroix 1949).

Permanence of movement

What should be the minimum duration of stay that differentiates a migration from a visit? With respect to international migration, the recommendation of the United Nations (and the practice of a number of countries) is to define removal for one year or more as “permanent,” and thus as migration, while a stay for a shorter period is classified as a visit. Note that the data reflect not behavior but statements about future behavior; and persons have been known to lie to immigration officials or to change their minds.

This kind of ambiguity often makes it difficult to interpret migration statistics. For example, according to a critical analysis of United States im-migration statistics (Kuznets & Rubin 1954, table 7), during the height of the mass immigration of 1890-1910 about forty per cent of the foreign-born returned. Conclusions from uncorrected immigration data, therefore, are likely to be grossly inaccurate. Remigrants—those who leave their country of origin for a period and then return to it—ordinarily differ from the emigrants who remain abroad, but not necessarily according to any consistent pattern. Particularly during an economic depression, some immigrants left the new country when they lost their jobs (Berthoff 1953, p. 73). Sometimes, on the contrary, it was the relatively successful that returned, either to find wives (Borrie 1954) or to retire. The rise of nationalism in the old country often attracted back some of the incompletely assimilated migrants (Saloutos 1956). A small percentage of the subsidized emigrants to Australia and Canada have returned to Britain, and the especially careful studies made of these groups are largely inconclusive (Appleyard 1962a; 1962b; Richmond 1966). Almost by definition, remigrants are less able to acculturate to their new environment than immigrants who remain there, but few valid generalizations can be added to that truism.

The ambiguity pertains also to the definition of internal migrants (Hamilton 1961; Taeuber 1961). Particularly in a federal country like the United States, “permanence” of movement is defined, in effect, by laws stipulating the meaning of domicile with respect to marriage and divorce, suffrage, and other prerogatives reserved to “bona fide residents.” Surveys by the U.S. Bureau of the Census show that each year approximately one person in five moves to a new residence (compare Wilber 1963). However, according to a detailed analysis of one particular community (Goldstein 1954), a sizable proportion of this large percentage is made up of persons who move more than once during a year and who are atypical also in other ways. A study of repeated migration in Denmark suggests that the phenomenon is not restricted to any one country (Goldstein 1964).

More generally, when one speaks of migratory birds, or migrant laborers, or nomads, the connotation is not of a permanent move from one area to another, but rather of a permanently migratory way of life, which often means a cyclical movement within a more or less definite area. Nomads (the word derives from the Greek for pasturing) typically follow their herds back and forth over a region delimited either by natural boundaries or by neighbors sufficiently powerful to repel incursions. Similarly, agricultural laborers often move with the growing season, and shepherds (in what is termed transhumance) alternate between high mountain pastureland in the summer and lowlands in the winter. Commutation, the daily “journey to work” (Liepmann 1944), constitutes a similar cycle within a smaller compass. One must not accept the common notion that such a separation of place of residence from place of work is peculiar to modern industrial societies. Many of the burghers of ancient Athens, fourteenth-century London, and preindustrial cities generally were part-time agriculturists (Petersen 1961, pp. 348-353). In many presently underdeveloped countries, particularly India and Pakistan, a peasant who migrates to the city often leaves his family in the village, to which he therefore returns periodically. In Africa south of the Sahara the temporary separation of male industrial or mine workers from village life has been institutionalized into the standard pattern (Mitchell 1961). In sum, whether short-term re movals should be included in migration depends on the purpose of the statistics being collected. Thus, no particular specification of the duration of stay suits all purposes, and each analyst has to adapt the available data to his needs as best he can.

“Significant” distances

The meaning of migration also varies according to how a “significant” distance is defined. The word derives from the Latin migrare, to change one’s residence, but by current definitions it means rather to change one’s community. A person who moves from one home to another in the same neighborhood, and who therefore retains the same social framework, is not deemed a migrant.

If we regard a nation as a community, then by this criterion all international movements are included under the rubric “migration.” Partly because of this rationale, partly because the two sets of statistics are separately collected, the distinction between international and internal migration sets the framework of most analyses. It is worth emphasizing, therefore, that in a general discussion of the phenomenon the distinction is more or less irrelevant. Not only do some types of migration fall outside of this dichotomy (prehistoric wanderings, for instance), but some of the most important and interesting characteristics of migrants apply whether or not they cross an international border (labor mobility, urbanization, migratory selection, acculturation, etc.). Moreover, there are often greater cultural differences within the boundaries of a nation than between nations.

In practice, geographical distance is generally taken as a rough measure of whether the migrant crosses into another community. Thus, the U.S. Bureau of the Census divides the mobile population between “movers,” who have changed their residence within a single county, and “migrants,” who have crossed a county line, and it subdivides the latter category according to whether they move within a single state, to an adjacent state, or to a nonadjacent state. This kind of classification passes over the fact that a farmer who moves to a town in the same county probably changes his way of life more than one who crosses the nation but remains a farmer. To take a more striking example, the tens of thousands of refugees who fled from East to West Berlin have traversed the most significant boundary line in Europe while remaining within the confines of a single city.

Models of migration

It is reasonable to suppose that the number of migrants within any area homogeneous with respect to all the other factors that affect the propensity to migrate will be inversely related to the distance covered. One can express this relation in an equation, as follows: M = aX/D&, where M stands for the number of migrants, D for the distance over the shortest transportation route, and X for any other factor that is thought to be relevant; a and b are constants, usually set at unity. In one version of this equation, the so-called P₁P₂/D hypothesis, the populations of the end points of the movement are taken as the X factor (Zipf 1949). Another variation is the familiar proposition that the number of persons going a given distance is directly proportional to the number of employment opportunities at that distance and inversely proportional to the number of intervening opportunities (Stouffer 1940). When “opportunities” were defined operationally as the number of in-migrants, the hypothesis could be validated in a number of instances. According to a detailed comparison of the two, Stouffer’s formulation is better than Zipf’s, since, in effect, measuring opportunities corrects the total population figures for the amount of unemployment in the two areas (Anderson 1955). (For other models, see Lovgren 1956; Thomlinson 1961; Heide 1963; Tabah & Cataldi 1963.)

A proposition about migration between only two points is too simplistic a unit, however, to be a useful building block for more elaborate theories. These have in general started from other premises. An important example is the three-volume study Population Redistribution and Economic Growth: United States, 1870-1950 (Kuznets 1957-1964), in which the available data concerning the regional distribution of the developing national economy and data concerning internal migration are combined into a unified analysis of the interaction between the two.

This kind of analysis is not limited to migration within a single country. A shorter work in the same broad perspective analyzes the post-1945 migration to Switzerland (Mayer 1966). According to several studies of the transatlantic movement, if conditions in the home country build up a propensity to emigrate, the volume, direction, and timing of the movement are set largely by the business cycle in the receiving country (e.g., D. S. Thomas 1941). A later work, however, challenged this interpretation and placed more emphasis on the unity of “the Atlantic economy” and the importance of “push” factors (B. Thomas 1954).

Noneconomic motives

In most of the supposedly general models of migration, it is presumed that movement is generated mainly by economic forces. This may not always be a reasonable postulate. Whether the correlation between business cycles and migratory movements is positive or negative, for example, sometimes depends only on how broadly the study is conceived. While the rise of Europe’s urban-industrial civilization brought a great increase in population and thus a pressure to emigrate, it also resulted in a general rise in the level of aspiration. Young men who were better off than their fathers were nonetheless dissatisfied, and many sought to better themselves overseas. Thus, it may be true to say that for certain periods the dominant motivation of emigrants from particular countries was economic, even though these countries had, by and large, far better conditions than those from which very few persons left. This paradox is not limited to economic factors: religious oppression, or the infringement of political liberty, was often a motive for European emigration, but before the rise of modern totalitarianism those who left came predominantly from precisely those countries least marked by such stigmata. An increasing propensity to emigrate spread east and south from northwest Europe, together with democratic institutions and religious tolerance. The anomaly that those who emigrated “because” of persecution tended to come from countries where there was less of it than elsewhere can be analyzed only by separating personal motivation from social causation. According to a recent survey of British emigrants’ motives, they tended to rationalize their general feeling of insecurity and inadequacy into more specific economic factors (Appleyard 1964).

At least in the United States, internal migration is also less motivated by economic factors than is usually assumed. At one time, the U.S. Bureau of the Census asked a sample of migrants who had moved during one year why they had moved (“Postwar Migration” . . . 1947; compare “Reasons for Moving . . .” 1966, which showed similar responses). Only 22.6 per cent said it was to take a job or to look for work. Family migration constituted 61.7 per cent (i.e., moving with the head of the family or to join him, moving because of a change in marital status); 6.4 per cent said it was because of housing problems. Health, climate, education, and miscellaneous motives accounted for the remaining respondents. This conclusion has been generally validated by the few other studies made of internal migrants’ motivation (e.g., Rossi 1955).

Migratory selection

That migration is both related to economic trends and yet not, in any simple sense, caused by them, should not occasion any surprise. The same is true of many other complex social phenomena. It would be no contribution to substitute for purely economic causes a list of other “factors,” ranging from the spirit of adventure to the development of transportation facilities; nor would it be a great improvement to divide such a list between circumstances at home that repel and those abroad that attract, that is, between “push” and “pull” factors. Given a sedentary population and an inducement to leave home, typically some persons go and some stay behind. Push and pull factors, in short, do not exert their force equally. The self-selection by which migrants differentiate themselves from the sedentary population is called migratory selection (or, by some authors, selective migration). An analysis of this process can afford a better understanding of why a migration takes place.

It is a valuable extension of the Stouffer-Zipf generalization, for example, to go beyond the counting of heads and differentiate among the types of migrants. It is not sufficient, even in an analysis restricted to economically motivated migrations, to posit job opportunities in general: potential migrants with specific skills go to places where there are openings specifically for them. Thus, among white migrants within the United States, those seeking higher-status positions generally have to move greater distances than those with lower levels of skill. And some job-seeking migrants are also strongly motivated by noneconomic factors: among American Negroes important reasons for moving have been to get out of the rural South (hence the high rate of urbanization), and prefer-ably to get out of the South altogether (hence the shift to the North and West). Negroes, therefore, move greater distances than would be expected from the level of skill in the jobs that they typically seek (Rose 1958; compare Stub 1962; Taeuber & Taeuber 1965).

It is possible to analyze migratory selection by a number of demographic and social characteristics in addition to occupation and race; and although the conclusions from different studies vary widely, some tentative generalizations are possible (D. S. Thomas 1938; Petersen 1961, pp. 592-603). In both internal and international movements adolescents and young adults predominate; for not only do the young adapt more easily, but since they are close to the beginning of their working life, they can more readily take advantage of new opportunities. It is feasible, therefore, to analyze migration by cohorts (Eldridge 1964).

One can argue a priori that either the less or the more intelligent will tend to migrate: since the more intelligent will have succeeded at home, the less intelligent will seek their fortunes elsewhere; on the other hand, the more intelligent will respond first to any stimulus to migrate, while the duller will remain behind. Various studies have seemed to validate one or the other of these propositions. It is possible to reconcile the contradiction by postulating that a selection by intelligence is in fact one by actual or potential occupational level (Hofstee 1952; compare Lee 1966). Thus, since urban occupations are generally more demanding, ruralurban movements typically select the more intelligent. This is not true, however, of agriculturists who move to manual jobs in the cities, such as Negroes in the United States (D. S. Thomas 1938, pp. 111-121), or in general of migrants who make no substantial change in vocational level.

Effects on populations

For the two areas concerned, migratory selection determines the significance of the movement almost as much as the number of migrants. Consider the ramifications of what can be taken as the most fundamental question in migration theory: If X persons leave country A and migrate to country B, what changes take place in the size of the two populations (Petersen 1955, chapter 9)? The common-sense answer, that country A is decreased and country B is increased by X, is true only in the short run. If the typically young migrants have their children in their new country, its fertility rate may go up, while that of their native country goes down. Since the remaining population of country A will then be older on the average, its death rate may go up, while that of country B goes down. In short, after a generation the transfer of X persons will in fact amount to X plus a certain proportion based on the migration’s effects on the population structures, and rates of population growth, of the two countries.

At a third level of analysis, however, this increment, and indeed X itself, may be canceled out. For Malthus, thus, emigration was a slight palliative, a partial and temporary expedient, with no permanent effect on population size (Malthus 1798, book 3, chapter 7). This is likely to be true of any country where the mortality of infants and children is high (so that emigration would reduce the mortality slightly), or where marriages and conceptions are put off because of economic pressure (so that a lesser pressure, the consequence of emigration, would result in a higher fertility). If one includes such indirect effects, the change in the population of the immigration country is also difficult to estimate. Immigration to the United States, for example, accelerated urbanization and industrialization; and these changes, in turn, increased the upward social mobility of the native population and thus tended to accelerate the secular decline of the birth rate.

In sum, even the simplest question—How many persons migrated?—cannot be fully answered merely by counting heads. Unlike mortality and fertility, migration has no biological dimension: it cannot be analyzed, even in preliminary terms, independently of its cultural context. Accordingly, there are no “laws” of migration in the sense of universal generalizations; the highest level of abstraction possible is the contrast of various types of migrants (Heberle 1955).

Migration typologies

In a study of migrants to Aberdeen—that is, of movement within the single country of Scotland over only a few years—it was found useful to classify respondents into a number of types. These included professionals seeking careers, young persons seeking education, workers taking specific jobs, casual workers looking for employment, former commuters moving for greater convenience, family migrants joining heads of families, and return migrants (Illsley et al. 1963, pp. 238-240). The conclusions to be drawn differed for these various classes.

If this is so for movements within a relatively homogeneous area, then it is manifestly the case for migration in its most general terms, encompassing the whole world and all of human history. In constructing a general typology, one should begin by choosing the criteria by which the types are to be distinguished (Petersen 1964, pp. 271-290). Perhaps the most fundamental is the distinction between innovating migrants, who move in order to achieve the new, and conservative migrants, who move in response to a change in their circumstances, hoping by migrating to retain their way of life in another locus. Within each of these two broad classes, one can distinguish types of migration according to the force impelling the movement. An ecological push results in what might be termed a primitive migration—not a wandering of primitive tribes as such, but one dependent on a people’s inability to cope with natural forces. When the activating agent is the state or some equivalent institution, the movement is forced or impelled migration, depending on whether the prospective migrants retain some power to decide whether to leave or not. A movement of adventurous pioneers, deviant religious or political groups, or similar individually motivated persons can aptly be termed free migration. Its importance is not in its size, which is never large, but in the example it sets for others. If the ensuing flow develops into a broad stream, an established pattern for whole social classes, an example of collective behavior, we speak of mass migration, similar to what has been termed “chain migration” (MacDonald & MacDonald 1964). Then individual motivations become correspondingly less important—indeed, the individuals involved may not be able to give a rational account of their decision to migrate. The motives they ascribe are likely to be trivial or, more probably, the generalities that they think are expected (Hansen 1940a, pp. 77–78).

Uses of typological method

The value of such a typology is in its utility: Does it help in solving analytical problems? The typology suggests, first of all, that migratory selection ranges along a continuum, from total migration at one extreme (food gatherers or nomads) to total nonmigration at the other. Intermediate instances, moreover, cannot be arranged along a single dimension. Sometimes it is the age or the sex or the occupation of the potential migrant that is relevant, but if an ethnic or social minority leaves to escape persecution or is shipped off to concentration camps, then the only pertinent characteristic is how the state defines “Jew” or “kulak,” for example.

For more than a century various governments, concerned about the depopulation (real or supposed) of villages, have sought measures to counteract it. It would increase understanding of the process merely to ask whether this is a conservative or an innovating migration: Do these agriculturists want better conditions within their present way of life, or do they move to cities for the sake of urban amenities? Perhaps the most useful distinction in the typology is that between mass migration and all other types, for it emphasizes the fact that the nineteenth-century exodus from Europe does not constitute the whole of the phenomenon. When this type of migration declined after World War i, largely because of new political limitations imposed by both emigration and immigration countries, this was very often interpreted as marking the end of significant human migration altogether (e.g., Forsyth 1942). It was rather, in large part, a change to neomercantilist migration, in which the welfare of the national state becomes the main criterion for judging whether the movement is desirable and in which state agencies foster or impede, force or prevent, the migration. The “natural” right of the passportless person to move about has been sup-planted by the “natural” right of the state to control that movement (Petersen 1955, chapter 1).

In the present age of total wars and totalitarian regimes, political motivations have set not only “Europe on the move” (Kulischer 1948) but also, partly as reverberations of European influences, much of the rest of the world. To take a notable example, the partition of British India into the nations of India and Pakistan was accompanied by one of the largest migrations in human history, in part induced by terrorists on both sides, in part arranged under state auspices. Many analysts prefer to omit this type of movement from their purview. In a United Nations publication, for example, international migration is defined as “the noncoerced migrations, which constitute the great majority of all migratory movements in normal times, and which are closely related to economic and social factors. . . . Specifically, ’migration’ excludes population transfers, . . . deportations, refugee movements, and the movements of ’displaced persons’” (United Nations 1953, p. 98). That an international body which includes some of the states most responsible for forced migrations should exclude them from its demographic analyses is understandable; but there is no reason why independent scholars should accept this arbitrary and misleading definition.

The number of refugees in the world today depends of course on how that term is defined. Data on “refugees” are compiled mainly by the various agencies set up to aid them, and the resultant totals considerably understate the number of persons who have migrated because of political stress and sought refuge elsewhere. The major world-wide agency, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, has a narrowly restricted prime mandate: to assist persons who do not want to return to their country because of actual or feared racial, religious, or political persecution; and it may also extend its “good offices” to certain other limited categories. This definition does not include several numerically important classes of uprooted peoples: (1) those who have fled from local political disturbances but remain within the boundaries of the same state; (2) those who are forcibly moved about within the boundaries of a single state (see, for example, Conquest 1960); (3) those who have been forced to “return” to what is now defined as “their” country, after having lived “abroad” sometimes for generations. Thousands of refugees remain as hard-core cases from World War i, the Spanish Civil War, and World War n. It has been estimated, probably conservatively, that about forty million persons became refugees in the dozen years following 1945 (Rees 1957); the implication of the figure can be better grasped when it is recalled that the usual estimate for the total migration from all of Europe from 1800 to 1950 is only one and a half times as large, that is, sixty million.

William Petersen

[See alsoPopulation; Refugees; and the biographies ofKulischer; Wlllcox.]

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II. ECONOMIC ASPECTS

This article is mainly concerned with international migration, which may be defined, in the strict sense, as a permanent movement of people, of their own free will, from one sovereign country to another. Transfers of this kind, however, account for only a small part of the redistribution of world population in the last three centuries. A comprehensive view of international migration must therefore include forced as well as free move ments, and temporary as well as permanent movements. It is also necessary to distinguish between intercontinental and intracontinental transfers.

Free and forced movements

Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century there were hardly any statistical records of international migration. Nevertheless, it is possible to indicate the main orders of magnitude. The first great Atlantic migration was the traffic in African slaves. It is estimated that over ten million slaves were transported to America between 1619 and 1776 and that 3.4 million of them went to the English colonies in America. The trade was initiated by the Portuguese and the Dutch. Britain also took part, beginning in the 1660s, mainly through the Royal African Company, which existed from 1672 to 1752. The plantation economies producing sugar in the West Indies, tobacco in Virginia, and rice and indigo in South Carolina entailed a growing demand for slave labor from Africa. In the West Indies white immigration was replaced by black on one island after another, until slaves constituted about four-fifths of the population.

In contrast, the white migration across the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was comparatively small. In the seventeenth century about 250,000 left the British Isles for the New World, and in the eighteenth century the out-flow was perhaps 1,500,000, of whom about half a million were Ulster Presbyterians. An indication of the volume of Spanish emigration to the New World is given by the fact that 150,000 were recorded as having embarked at the port of Seville between 1509 and 1740, but this is a serious underestimate. The only other prominent group of trans-Atlantic migrants up to 1800 was the 200,000 Germans estimated to have left for America.

The nineteenth century was the great age of mass migration from Europe across the Atlantic of people who went of their own free will, and most of what we know about the economic and social determinants and consequences of international migration is based on the experience of that remarkable period. Between 1846 and 1932 about 52 million people left Europe for oversea destinations. When this redistribution was over, one-eleventh of the population of the world were people of European origin living outside Europe.

One of the most somber features of our time is that while there has been a sharp decline in free international mobility, the relative scale of forced transfers is reminiscent of the eighteenth century. The world picture has been dominated by movements of refugees, as shown by the following rough estimates. The partition of India and Pakistan led to the expulsion of more than 18 million people from their homes. Other outstanding examples of inflows of refugees after World War n are West Germany, 12 million; Japan, 6.3 million; South Korea, 4 million; Hong Kong, 1.3 million; Israel, 1 million; Arab refugees from Palestine, 1 million. About 1.5 million refugees were settled overseas by the International Refugee Organisation and the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration [see Refugees, article on World Problems]. This is only a partial account, for it is impossible to give estimates of the considerable forced movements which have taken place between countries controlled by the Soviet Union and China. Even this partial estimate of the international transfer of “political” migrants gives a total of 45 million for the ten years beginning in 1945. It is a sobering thought that the number of people expelled from one country to another in the decade after World War II was equal to the entire oversea emigration from Europe in the century ending in 1913.

Temporary and permanent movements

Of the large number of passengers who enter or leave any country in a given period, only a proportion are genuine migrants. Persons to be counted as migrants are those who move from one country to a permanent residence in another, and, in accordance with United Nations standards, the criterion generally adopted is a declared intention to stay in the receiving country for more than one year. Owing to the wide variety of methods used in different countries, it is not easy to obtain accurate statistics. It must be recognized, however, that much of the international mobility of labor which is of economic significance is of a temporary nature. This is particularly true on the European continent, where daily or weekly or seasonal movements over national frontiers occur on a considerable scale. For example, permanent immigration into Switzerland rose steadily from 1946 to 1957 and amounted to 690,000 workers for the period as a whole; during the same period there were 942,000 seasonal workers and 275,000 frontier workers. The net immigration for the period was, however, only 250,000; this demonstrates that a number of the aliens admitted as “permanent” immigrants (a great many being women) are in fact in the temporary category. On the American continent a similar case may be seen in the seasonal traffic across the border between Mexico and the United States.

Intercontinental and intracontinental movements

The distinction between intercontinental and intracontinental movements is illuminating when we are dealing with the phases in the migration of Europeans. With the exception of the movement of Russians into Asia, the story of the outpouring of Europe’s population is largely one of oversea settlement, and it is noteworthy that the migrations which have had the deepest and most enduring effects have been those which were transoceanic and intercontinental. When migrants cross an ocean, there are strict limits to what they can take with them; their traditions, ideals, techniques, and material belongings, when applied in a distant and strange environment, yield a pattern of life quite different from the one they left behind. There is something irrevocable about crossing an ocean. The political, economic, and racial configuration of the United States today is very much the out-come of three transoceanic migrations—the Pilgrim Fathers and their successors, the slaves from Africa, and the European masses in the nineteenth century.

When we consider shifts of population in Asia, we find that intercontinental movements are not significant, for a journey by sea has often meant merely a transfer from one part of the same continent to another. The abolition of slavery in the British colonies in the 1830s saw the beginning of an outflow from the Far East to the countries of America, Oceania, and Africa; and throughout the nineteenth century the recruitment of indentured laborers from India, China, and Japan was a characteristic feature. This species of intercontinental migration came to an end in the 1920s, and its place was taken by interregional movements which have had important demographic and social effects. The chief suppliers of intracontinental migrants have been China, India, Pakistan, Japan, and Korea; the main recipients have been Malaya, Ceylon, Burma, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, British Borneo, the Philippines, and Manchuria. In most of these countries the immigrants have been mainly Chinese and Indians. In the Far East internal migration has been more important than transfers across national boundaries. For example, in Japan in the period 1920–1940 the net exodus from rural areas to urban areas amounted to 17.5 million persons. This was more than the entire increase in the population of Japan in this period, and it was ten times greater than the net emigration from the country.

The measurement of migration

Countries did not begin to keep records of genuine international migration until the big modern movements had passed their peak. For most of the nineteenth century the available statistics were by-products of acts or regulations introduced to achieve some other purpose. For example, in the United States and the United Kingdom, records of passenger movements were the results of acts passed to regulate shipping. In Britain, statistics began to be furnished under an act in 1803. But it was not until over a century later, in 1912, that the British Board of Trade decided to adopt a sta

tistical classification which defined a migrant as a passenger who declares that he has lived for a year or more in one country and intends to remain for a year or more in another. Statistical tests have shown that, despite their obvious deficiencies, “. . . the Board of Trade statistics of aggregate net passenger movement are a surprisingly good measure of the course of total net emigration from the United Kingdom in the period ending in 1912” (Thomas 1954, p. 52). This would not hold good for recent times, because air travel has become important and Britain persists in not including air migrants in her statistics.

The primary data used by various countries to measure international migration can be grouped under six headings: those yielded by controls at ports, by transport contracts, by population registers, by control at land frontiers, by passports, and by coupons detached from certain documents. In North America, South America, Asia, and Africa the usual practice has been to base the records on controls at frontiers and ports; in Europe, however, countries have adopted one or another of the six systems. Each government has tended to organize its migration statistics in accordance with its own particular policy objectives, without any regard to the need for international comparability. The result has been a bewildering variety of definitions and classifications.

Valuable attempts have been made by the International Labor Office to point the way toward a common pattern (see, for example, International Labor Office 1932; 1952). In recent years the problem of improving migration statistics has been thoroughly explored by the United Nations. An inquiry in 1950 showed that only 16 out of 45 countries classified emigrants by country of future residence or destination and only 17 classified immigrants by country of last residence or origin, while only 16 distinguished between continental

and intercontinental immigrants and 10 between continental and intercontinental emigrants. For the demographer it was disconcerting that only 16 countries gave information on the marital status of migrants, and in nine of these countries this information was not combined with age grouping. As a result of the work of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, most of the known statistics have been set out in two comprehensive mono-graphs (United Nations, Bureau of Social Affairs 1953; 1958). These surveys cover 33 countries and include tables classifying migrants by occupation or industry, state of dependency, possession or nonpossession of a contract for employment, and, for the United States, Israel, and South Africa, the amount of money which immigrants bring in with them (for additional detailed information, see United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs 1955).

Since progress in improving official sources on migration is inevitably a slow process, it is all the more necessary to check imperfect time series in the light of the more accurate population census data at decennial intervals. Thus, Kuznets and Rubin (1954) have compared the annual record of immigration into the United States over a long period with the estimates obtained from the census figures on resident foreign-born. Similarly, Keyfitz (1950) has drawn up a population balance sheet for Canada for the century 1851-1950, including the best possible estimates of immigration and emigration in each decade.

Some indications of the scale of intercontinental population movements from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth can be found in tables 1-3.

Economic determinants of migration

The period 1840-1924 was in several respects unique in the history of migration. The evolution of the Atlantic economy in that era necessitated a considerable movement of population and capital from the Old World, which was relatively well endowed with these factors, to the New World, where they were relatively scarce. Over 45 million people crossed the ocean; the average rate of growth of population in each decade of the nineteenth century was 29 per cent in the United States, 34 per cent in Argentina, and 8 per cent in Europe. The world’s chief provider of capital was Great Britain; of her foreign investments of over $17,000 million in 1913, nearly 70 per cent were located in North America, South America, and Oceania.

The motives which led these millions of people to leave their homelands were infinitely varied; a lengthy catalogue of them would be full of human interest but would not provide an interpretation of the phenomenon. At certain times and in certain places the operative force was political oppression or religious persecution or eviction by tyrannical landlords or the threat of starvation or evasion of military service or the love of adventure or the lure of gold or the attraction of a new country with limitless opportunities. But what has to be explained is why the individual decisions of millions of people resulted in four major upswings with intervening downswings, with an average interval of 15 to 20 years from peak to peak, in oversea emigration from Europe. The emigration upswings took place in 1845-1854, 1863-1873, 1881-1888, and 1903-1913. There can be no possible doubt about the explanation of the first of these: its inception had nothing to do with demand conditions in the United States. Calamity struck in Ireland in 1845, when the potato crop failed and a terrible famine followed; and as if this were not enough, the landlords added to the horrors by violently evicting thousands of peasants from their homes. In another part of Europe, southwest Germany, in the years 1848-1854 a severe crisis in the rural areas (in addition to the prevailing political unrest) brought population pressure to a head, and the only solution was emigration. In that period, of the 2,796,000 European immigrants who landed in the United States, no less than 80 per cent came from Ireland and Germany—1,283,000 from Ireland and 939,000 from Germany. This was essentially a Malthusian evacuation; both its timing and its magnitude were determined by exogenous driving forces in two stricken areas of Europe.

The explanation of the subsequent fluctuations in migration lies in a complicated process of inter-action between the economies of the Old World and those of the countries of new settlement overseas. It is significant that when the receiving countries, notably the United States, Canada, and Australia, were absorbing immigrants on a large scale, they were also experiencing a long upswing in capital construction (such as railroads and housing), which is sensitive to population growth. When this cycle entered its downward phase, with both migration and capital imports dwindling, there was simultaneously an upsurge in capital construction in the United Kingdom, where the rural surplus was now absorbed in urban areas at home. This capital construction was financed by loanable funds which were no longer attracted abroad (Thomas 1954).

Thus, there was an inverse relation between long swings in population-sensitive capital formation in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and in the United Kingdom there was an inverse relation between external migration and internal migration. The mechanism of this inverse long swing between the United Kingdom and the United States can be seen most clearly in the period 1870-1913; it arose because a substantial part of total capital formation was sensitive to the rate of population growth and the rate of population growth was determined by the net migration balance. There are some grounds for thinking that the propensity to emigrate was in some way related to a cycle of births in Europe that caused a periodic recurrence of swollen numbers in the emigration age groups (Thomas 1954).

In the interwar period some of the basic trends of the pre-1913 era were reversed. The United States had become the world’s leading exporter of capital, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 virtually closed the doors to further immigration except on a very modest scale. From the turn of the century, British settlement in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had been expanding, and British emigration to the Empire considered as a proportion of British emigration to the United States, which had been only 43 per cent in 1881-1900, had risen to 245 per cent by 1911-1913. After World War i Britain embarked on a substantial program of Empire settlement, and in the decade 1922-1931, 400,000 emigrants received financial support to enable them to settle in the overseas dominions. However, this outflow did not survive the world depression, which had such severe consequences that it actually reversed the world currents of migration. In 1932, 11 European countries of emigration received a net inward bal ance of 102,000 persons, and Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Uruguay together had a net outflow of 65,000 (International Labor Office 1932). The international migration picture had become a perverse caricature of its former self.

Changes since World War II

The factors determining the volume, quantity, and direction of international migration since World War II are quite different from what they were in the nineteenth century. Profound structural changes have taken place in the Atlantic economy, and they have had far-reaching effects on the pattern of world migration. It is necessary to distinguish between the years immediately after the war and the period beginning in 1952. The correspondence between international flows of people and of private capital, which was the outstanding feature of the nineteenth century, disappeared. In its place there emerged in the years 1945—1952 an international circular flow based on the immense net transfer of $33,800 million of public capital (government loans and grants) from the United States, $22,800 million of which went to Europe. This recovery program made it possible for the exhausted countries of Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, to resume exports of people and capital to the oversea territories with which they had a special relationship. It facilitated the revival of migration and mobility of capital within the British Commonwealth and strengthened the purchasing power of the less developed parts of the world. Perhaps the most significant effect of the recovery program was its contribution to basic capital formation in western Europe. This contribution was the prelude to the remarkable upsurge in economic growth in the 1950s [seeForeignAid].

After 1952 a new balance of economic forces emerged. American economic aid to Europe ended, but the volume of military aid rose considerably and the amount of private investment by American firms in Europe greatly increased, until in 1959 for the first time the flow of new American funds for direct investment was larger in western Europe than in either Canada or Latin America. Rapid economic growth in western Europe has meant a remarkable increase in intracontinental migration and a continued decline in emigration to oversea countries. Net immigration into the European Economic Community amounted to 288,000 in 1960 and 421,000 in 1961. The latter figure was particularly large because of the repatriation of French and Belgian nationals from Africa. Looking at the separate countries, we find that in 1961 West Germany had a net inflow of 421,000 and France 150,000, whereas Italy had a net outflow of 164,000. Over the five years 1956-1960 the net outward migration from Italy to other European countries was at an annual average of 83,000, and emigration from Italy to oversea countries fell from 111,000 in 1956 to 48,000 in 1960. Intracontinental migration is increasing at the expense of the traditional European outflow to countries such as those of Latin America, and this is basically determined by the economic resurgence of western Europe and the consequent change in the economic balance within the Atlantic economy.

New determinants are also operating on other continents. The complex problems of migration on the African continent have been explored in a comprehensive study by the International Labor Office (1958). The spread of industrial development draws Africans long distances from their rural homes, but they are often prevented from becoming members of a settled work force. They find themselves suspended with the maximum of insecurity between the village to which they are attached and the harsh conditions of the industrial labor market. This can have disastrous social consequences: the countryside is denuded of a large part of its labor, family life is broken up, the social structure disintegrates, and there is neither economic nor social security. The General Conference of the International Labor Office in 1955 adopted a recommendation on the protection of migrants in underdeveloped countries which is clearly relevant to Africa.

Most underdeveloped countries are detrimentally affected by current trends in the migration of qualified personnel. In the nineteenth century, skilled manpower tended to accompany capital flows from advanced to less developed countries: in the modern world the bulk of private investment is a circulatory process within the rich sector, and there is a suction of skilled labor from the poorer countries into the more advanced. Of the 9,245 immigrant engineers admitted to the United States in 1953—1956, 50 per cent came from Europe, 25 per cent from Canada, and 22 per cent from “other countries,” which included a number in a low state of economic development. The same was true of natural scientists ([U.S.] National Science Foundation 1958). Unskilled labor is often complementary to skilled, and when there is a decline in the immigration of the latter into a developing country, as has occurred, e.g., in Latin America, the scope for the absorption of unskilled immigrants is automatically curtailed. Some of the international movements of relatively scarce human capital ten to widen the disparity between rates of economic growth in rich and poor countries. Such transfers could be on such a scale that some underdeveloped countries could never begin the process of growth. There seems to be a conflict here between the principle of freedom to migrate and the goal of reducing inequality. However, in assessing the economic effects of the migration of a factor of production, the relevant criterion is not marginal private productivity, but marginal social productivity. Judged by this criterion, some of the international migration of skill in the world today is perverse.

Impact on receiving countries

It used to be argued that immigration into the United States had not added to the American population because its effect had been counterbalanced by an induced decline in the fertility of native-born Americans (see, for instance, Walker 1891). This proposition has been disproved. Modern demographic analysis has demonstrated that the immigrations of the last century had hardly any net effect on the rate of natural increase of the native-born population in the receiving countries. It is estimated that in France between 1801 and 1936 net immigration was 3,960,000 and contributed only a third of the growth of population within the 1936 boundaries of the country during that period. The white population of the United States in 1790 was about 3.2 million; their descendants living in the United States in 1920 have been estimated at 41 million, and in the same year the number of descendants or survivors of immigrants since 1790 came to about 53 million. In that period net immigration into the United States was about 26.5 mil-lion (United Nations, Department of Social Affairs 1953, p. 139).

One of the most striking examples of mass im-migration in recent times is that into West Germany, which absorbed 12 million immigrants in 12 years after the war. Although this influx increased the population of West Germany by one-third, it failed to make up for the gaps in the demographic structure caused by war losses, since the immigrant population had suffered the same kinds of losses in the same age groups (International Labor Office 1959, pp. 27-28).

In recent years there has been a dramatic change of trend in the United Kingdom, a traditional country of emigration. Since 1958 there has been an appreciable net inward movement of migrants. This reversal of trend was caused by the substantial inflow of colored Commonwealth citizens, mainly from the West Indies, India, and Pakistan.

This led the government to introduce legislation to regulate Commonwealth immigration; the Commonwealth Immigrants Act came into force on July 1, 1962. Although the total number of colored people living in the United Kingdom is only about 1 per cent of the population, the newcomers have tended to cluster in certain places, and this has given rise to difficult social problems. This is part of a wider phenomenon—compare, for instance, the situation of the Puerto Ricans in the United States or the north Africans in France. Where poor, overpopulated countries have special relationships with advanced countries, it is natural that an overflow of population will take place so long as channels of mobility remain open.

Impact on sending countries

Mass emigration can in certain circumstances turn into a self-reinforcing process with profound long-run effects on the sending country. This arises from one of the most significant of migration differentials, the fact that the incidence of migration is particularly heavy in the age group 15-30. Given a substantial initial outflow, the sequel can be as follows. There is a decline in the marriage rate and consequently a fall in the size of the age group 0-5; but, since the rate of emigration among children is relatively low, the 0-5 age group becomes a relatively large group ten years later. It is a paradox that countries which are heavy losers through emigration seem to be liberally endowed with teen-agers. The process is self-perpetuating because, after a lag of about 15 years from the original thinning out of the 15-30 age group, the number entering the high emigration age group of 15-20 is relatively high in relation to the total population.

The influence of mass emigration on age composition in the sending country can be observed most strikingly in the case of Ireland, from which the total outflow from 1850 to 1911 was 4,191,000. By 1951, 30 per cent of the population were aged 45 and over, as compared with 16 per cent in 1841, and 11 per cent were 65 and over, as compared with 3 per cent in 1841. The experiences of Ire-land, Sweden, and Scotland show that substantial emigration tends to reduce the marriage rate, but we cannot be certain about the long-run effects on fertility. There can be little doubt that prolonged emigration helps to explain why there are so many spinsters in Ireland; however, the women who do get married have relatively large numbers of children. As to the death rate, the tendency is for the loss of good lives from the 15-35 age group through emigration to raise the average death rate in that group.

Assimilation

It is broadly agreed that assimilation is best regarded as a mutual process of integration. An American sociologist has well said that “. . . the United States has not assimilated the newcomer nor absorbed him. Our immigrant stock and our so-called ‘native’ stock have each integrated with the other. . . . It will be apparent that this concept of integration rests upon a belief in the importance of cultural differentiation within a framework of social unity. It recognizes the right of groups and individuals to be different so long as the differences do not lead to domination or disunity” (Borrie 1959, pp. 93-94). One of the difficulties of group settlement, e.g., in Latin America, is that there arises a conflict between the immediate interests of the migrant in his group and the long-run objective of cultural integration. Much benefit can be derived from the provision of instruction to the migrant before he has left his own country. The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration has evolved effective means of selecting, educating, and pretraining European migrants, [SeeRefugees, article on AdjustmentAndAssimilation.]

Experts who have studied migration in Asia stress the importance of assimilation as a necessary condition of the diffusion of skills. In colonial regimes there was a tendency for skilled immigrants to remain a class apart, and they often sought to maintain the relative scarcity of their skill. The great need in Asian countries now is for the importation of skilled personnel who will assimilate easily and thereby facilitate the rapid spread of technical knowledge.

International migration no longer plays the role in economic growth that it did in the nineteenth century. Legislative restrictions, the changes in the economic determinants, and the population up-surge in different parts of the world have all tended to reduce the scale of movement. Countries which have been receiving a relatively large influx of migrants since World War II, e.g., Australia, will soon find that the rate of entry into the working population from the swollen lower age groups will make immigration on the old scale unnecessary. The international circulation of skilled manpower has become relatively more important, Intercontinental migrations have lost most of their significance and have been replaced by intracontinental movements.

Much more interdisciplinary research is needed into the problems of adjustment of immigrants, particularly where they are ethnically different from the population of the host country; the inter-action between external and internal migration; the relation between immigration and the incidence of mental health; the determinants of the rate of increase of immigrant groups in multiracial societies; and the economic and social consequences of the changing pattern of the international circulation of skilled manpower.

Brinley Thomas

[Directly related are the entriesCapital, Human; Refugees. Other relevant material may be found inAssimilation; Population, article on Population Distribution; and in the biographies ofGiniand Kulischer.]

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