History of human migration

Human migration, being the movement by people from one place to another with the intention of settling temporarily or permanently in the new location, typically involves movements over long distances and from one country or region to another, but internal migration is also possible for people.

Migration can be voluntary within one's region, country or beyond, or involuntary. Involuntary migration includes the slave trade, trafficking in human beings and ethnic cleansing.

Pre-modern migrations

A map of early human migrations.^[1]

Austronesians expansion map

4th to 6th century Migration Period

Historical migration of human populations begins with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia about 1.75 million years ago. Homo sapiens appear to have occupied all of Africa about 150,000 years ago, moved out of Africa 70,000 years ago, and had spread across Australia, Asia and Europe by 40,000 years BCE. Migration to the Americas took place 20,000 to 15,000 years ago, and by 2,000 years ago, most of the Pacific Islands were colonized. Later population movements notably include the Neolithic Revolution, Indo-European expansion, and the Early Medieval Great Migrations including Turkic expansion. In some places, substantial cultural transformation occurred following the migration of relatively small elite populations, Turkey and Azerbaijan being such examples.^[2] In Britain, it is considered that the Roman and Norman conquests were similar examples, while "the most hotly debated of all the British cultural transitions is the role of migration in the relatively sudden and drastic change from Romano-Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain", which may be explained by a possible "substantial migration of Anglo-Saxon Y chromosomes into Central England (contributing 50%–100% to the gene pool at that time.)"^[3]

Early humans migrated due to many factors such as changing climate and landscape and inadequate food supply. The evidence indicates that the ancestors of the Austronesian peoples spread from the South Chinese mainland to Taiwan at some time around 8,000 years ago. Evidence from historical linguistics suggests that it is from this island that seafaring peoples migrated, perhaps in distinct waves separated by millennia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages. It is believed that this migration began around 6,000 years ago.^[4] Indo-Aryan migration from the Indus Valley to the plain of the River Ganges in Northern India is presumed to have taken place in the Middle to Late Bronze Age, contemporary to the Late Harappan phase in India (ca. 1700 to 1300 BC). From 180 BC, a series of invasions from Central Asia followed, including those led by the Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians and Kushans in the northwestern Indian subcontinent.^[5][6][7]

From 728 BC, the Greeks began 250 years of expansion, settling colonies in several places, including Sicily and Marseille. In Europe, two waves of migrations dominate demographic distributions, that of the Celtic people and that of the later Migration Period from the North and East, both being possible examples of general cultural change sparked by primarily elite and warrior migration. Other examples are small movements like that of the Magyars into Pannonia (modern-day Hungary). Turkic peoples spread from their homeland in modern Turkestan across most of Central Asia into Europe and the Middle East between the 6th and 11th centuries. Recent research suggests that Madagascar was uninhabited until Austronesian seafarers from Indonesia arrived during the 5th and 6th centuries AD. Subsequent migrations from both the Pacific and Africa further consolidated this original mixture, and Malagasy people emerged.^[8]

One common hypothesis of the Bantu expansion c. 1000 BC to c. 500 AD

Before the expansion of the Bantu languages and their speakers, the southern half of Africa is believed to have been populated by Pygmies and Khoisan-speaking people, today occupying the arid regions around the Kalahari Desert and the forest of Central Africa. By about 1000 AD, Bantu migration had reached modern day Zimbabwe and South Africa. The Banu Hilal and Banu Ma'qil were a collection of Arab Bedouin tribes from the Arabian Peninsula who migrated westwards via Egypt between the 11th and 13th centuries. Their migration strongly contributed to the Arabisation and Islamisation of the western Maghreb, which was until then dominated by Berber tribes. Ostsiedlung was the medieval eastward migration and settlement of Germans. The 13th century was the time of the great Mongol and Turkic migrations across Eurasia.^[9]

Between the 11th and 18th centuries, there were numerous migrations in Asia. The Vatsayan Priests from the eastern Himalaya hills, migrated to Kashmir during the Shan invasion in 1203C. They settled in the lower Shivalik hills in 1206C to sanctify the manifest goddess. In the Ming occupation, the Vietnamese expanded southward in a process known as nam tiến (southward expansion).^[10] Manchuria was separated from China proper by the Inner Willow Palisade, which restricted the movement of the Han Chinese into Manchuria during the early Qing Dynasty, as the area was off-limits to the Han until the Qing started colonising the area with them later on in the dynasty's rule.^[11]

The Age of Exploration and European colonialism led to an accelerated pace of migration since Early Modern times. In the 16th century, perhaps 240,000 Europeans entered American ports.^[12] In the 19th century, over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas.^[13] The local populations or tribes, such as the Aboriginal people in Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Japan^[14] and the United States, were usually far overwhelmed numerically by the settlers.

Industrialisation and the Rise of Nationalism/Imperialism

While the pace of migration had accelerated since the 18th century already (including the involuntary slave trade), it would increase further in the 19th century. Manning distinguishes three major types of migration: labour migration, refugee migrations, and urbanisation. Millions of agricultural workers left the countryside and moved to the cities causing unprecedented levels of urbanisation. This phenomenon began in Britain in the late 18th century and spread around the world and continues to this day in many areas.

Industrialisation encouraged migration wherever it appeared. The increasingly global economy globalised the labour market. The Atlantic slave trade diminished sharply after 1820, which gave rise to self-bound contract labour migration from Europe and Asia to plantations. Overpopulation, open agricultural frontiers, and rising industrial centres attracted voluntary migrants. Moreover, migration was significantly made easier by improved transportation techniques.

Romantic nationalism also rose in the 19th century, and, with it, ethnocentrism. The great European industrial empires also rose. Both factors contributed to migration, as some countries favoured their own ethnicities over outsiders and other countries appeared to be considerably more welcoming. For example, the Russian Empire identified with Eastern Orthodoxy, and confined Jews, who were not Eastern Orthodox, to the Pale of Settlement and imposed restrictions. Violence was also a problem. The United States was promoted as a better location, a "golden land" where Jews could live more openly.^[15] Another effect of imperialism, colonialism, led to the migration of some colonising parties from "home countries" to "the colonies", and eventually the migration of people from "colonies" to "home countries".^[16]

Transnational labour migration reached a peak of three million migrants per year in the early twentieth century. Italy, Norway, Ireland and the Guangdong region of China were regions with especially high emigration rates during these years. These large migration flows influenced the process of nation state formation in many ways. Immigration restrictions have been developed, as well as diaspora cultures and myths that reflect the importance of migration to the foundation of certain nations, like the American melting pot. The transnational labour migration fell to a lower level from the 1930s to the 1960s and then rebounded.

The United States experienced considerable internal migration related to industrialisation, including its African American population. From 1910 to 1970, approximately 7 million African Americans migrated from the rural Southern United States, where blacks faced both poor economic opportunities and considerable political and social prejudice, to the industrial cities of the Northeast, Midwest and West, where relatively well-paid jobs were available.^[17] This phenomenon came to be known in the United States as its own Great Migration, although historians today consider the migration to have two distinct phases. The term "Great Migration", without a qualifier, is now most often used to refer the first phase, which ended roughly at the time of the Great Depression. The second phase, lasting roughly from the start of U.S. involvement in World War II to 1970, is now called the Second Great Migration. With the demise of legalised segregation in the 1960s and greatly improved economic opportunities in the South in the subsequent decades, millions of blacks have returned to the South from other parts of the country since 1980 in what has been called the New Great Migration.

The World Wars And Their Aftermath

See World War II evacuation and expulsion and Population transfer in the Soviet Union for World War II forced migrations.

Balkan Turks in 1912

Swiss woman and her children leaving Civil war in Russia, around 1921

The First and Second World Wars, and wars, genocides, and crises sparked by them, had an enormous impact on migration. Muslims moved from the Balkan to Turkey, while Christians moved the other way, during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In April 1915 the Ottoman government embarked upon the systematic decimation of its civilian Armenian population. The persecutions continued with varying intensity until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist and was replaced by the Republic of Turkey. The Armenian population of the Ottoman state was reported at about two million in 1915. An estimated one million had perished by 1918, while hundreds of thousands had become homeless and stateless refugees. By 1923 virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Turkey had disappeared. Four hundred thousand Jews had already moved to Palestine in the early twentieth century, and numerous Jews to America, as already mentioned. The Russian Civil War caused some three million Russians, Poles, and Germans to migrate out of the new Soviet Union. Decolonisation following the Second World War also caused migrations.^[18][19]

The Jewish communities across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East were formed from voluntary and involuntary migrants. After the Holocaust (1938 to 1945), there was increased migration to the British Mandate of Palestine, which became the modern state of Israel as a result of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.

Provisions of the Potsdam Agreement from 1945 signed by victorious Western Allies and the Soviet Union led to one of the largest European migrations, and the largest in the 20th century. It involved the migration and resettlement of close to or over 20 million people. The largest affected group were 16.5 million Germans expelled from Eastern Europe westwards. The second largest group were Poles, millions of whom were expelled westwards from eastern Kresy region and resettled in the so-called Recovered Territories (see Allies decide Polish border in the article on the Oder-Neisse line). Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians (Operation Vistula), Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and some Belarusians were expelled eastwards from Europe to the Soviet Union. Finally, many of the several hundred thousand Jews remaining in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust migrated outside Europe to Israel and the United States.

Pakistan-India

Rural Sikhs in a long ox-cart train heading towards India. Margaret Bourke-White, 1947. The migration was a "massive exercise in human misery", wrote Bourke-White.

In 1947, upon the Partition of India, large populations moved from India to Pakistan and vice versa, depending on their religious beliefs. The partition was promulgated in the Indian Independence Act 1947 as a result of the dissolution of the British Indian Empire. The partition displaced up to 17 million people in the former British Indian Empire,^[20] with estimates of loss of life varying from several hundred thousand to a million.^[21] Muslim residents of the former British India migrated to Pakistan (including East Pakistan, now Bangladesh), whilst Hindu and Sikh residents of Pakistan and Hindu residents of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) moved in the opposite direction.

In modern India, estimates based on industry sectors mainly employing migrants suggest that there are around 100 million circular migrants in India. Caste, social networks and historical precedents play a powerful role in shaping patterns of migration. Migration for the poor is mainly circular, as despite moving temporarily to urban areas, they lack the social security which might keep them there more permanently. They are also keen to maintain a foothold in home areas during the agricultural season.

Research by the Overseas Development Institute identifies a rapid movement of labour from slower- to faster-growing parts of the economy. Migrants can often find themselves excluded by urban housing policies, and migrant support initiatives are needed to give workers improved access to market information, certification of identity, housing and education.^[22]

In the riots which preceded the partition in the Punjab region, between 200,000 and 500,000 people were killed in the retributive genocide.^[23][24] UNHCR estimates 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were displaced during the partition.^[25] Scholars call it the largest mass migration in human history:^[26] Nigel Smith, in his book Pakistan: History, Culture, and Government, calls it "history's greatest migration."^[20]

See also

• Human migration
• Early human migrations
• Immigration § History

Notes and references

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "^{article name needed}". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Bibliography

Literature

Books

• Bauder, Harald. Labor Movement: How Migration Regulates Labor Markets, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Behdad, Ali. A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States, Duke UP, 2005.
• Chaichian, Mohammad. Empires and Walls: Globalization, Migration, and Colonial Control, Leiden: Brill, 2014.
• Jared Diamond, Guns, germs and steel. A short history of everybody for the last 13'000 years, 1997.
• De La Torre, Miguel A., Trails of Terror: Testimonies on the Current Immigration Debate, Orbis Books, 2009.
• Fell, Peter and Hayes, Debra. What are they doing here? A critical guide to asylum and immigration, Birmingham (UK): Venture Press, 2007.
• Hoerder, Dirk. Cultures in Contact. World Migrations in the Second Millennium, Duke University Press, 2002
• Kleiner-Liebau, Désirée. Migration and the Construction of National Identity in Spain, Madrid / Frankfurt, Iberoamericana / Vervuert, Ediciones de Iberoamericana, 2009. ISBN 978-84-8489-476-6.
• Knörr, Jacqueline. Women and Migration. Anthropological Perspectives, Frankfurt & New York: Campus Verlag & St. Martin's Press, 2000.
• Knörr, Jacqueline. Childhood and Migration. From Experience to Agency, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005.
• Manning, Patrick. Migration in World History, New York and London: Routledge, 2005.
• Migration for Employment, Paris: OECD Publications, 2004.
• OECD International Migration Outlook 2007, Paris: OECD Publications, 2007.
• Pécoud, Antoine and Paul de Guchteneire (Eds): Migration without Borders, Essays on the Free Movement of People (Berghahn Books, 2007)
• Abdelmalek Sayad. The Suffering of the Immigrant, Preface by Pierre Bourdieu, Polity Press, 2004.
• Stalker, Peter. No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration, New Internationalist, second edition, 2008.
• The Philosophy of Evolution (A.K. Purohit, ed.), Yash Publishing House, Bikaner, 2010. ISBN 81-86882-35-9.

Journals

• International Migration Review
• Migration Letters
• International Migration
• Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
• Review of Economics of the Household

Online Books

• OECD International Migration Outlook 2007 (subscription service)

Documentary films

• The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez
• El Inmigrante, Directors: David Eckenrode, John Sheedy, John Eckenrode. 2005. 90 min. (U.S./Mexico)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Human migration.

• iom.int, The International Organisation for Migration
• CIA World Factbook gives up-to-date statistics on net immigration by country.
• Western Sahara and Migration
• Stalker's Guide to International Migration Comprehensive interactive guide to modern migration issues, with maps and statistics
• Integration : Building Inclusive Societies (IBIS) UN Alliance of Civilisations online community on good practices of integration of migrants across the world
• migrations in history
• The importance of migrants in the modern world
• Mass migration as a travel business