Immigration in the 20th century

6 Key excerpts on "Immigration in the 20th century"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology

  • George Ritzer, Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  20 Immigration Noriko Matsumoto

  Migration and mobility have been factors in social formation throughout human history. Today, an unparalleled level of cross‐border mobility has become one of the defining features of our interconnected world. International migration is on the increase globally and the volume of immigration has surged in North America, Europe, and Australia since the latter half of the twentieth century. For the twenty‐first century, immigration represents a process central to domestic and international politics and has profound economic, cultural, and social consequences for society. In 2010, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA ), roughly 3% of the world's population, an estimated 214 million, could be classified as international migrants living beyond their country of birth (Castles et al. 2014 ).

  Migration does not concern immigrants alone. Population movements affect nonimmigrants and sending and receiving societies as a whole. The greater part of migration consists of legally admitted immigrants, but the proportion of unauthorized and forced migrants – including refugees and asylum‐seekers – is increasing. Although the study of migration involves internal migration (often in the form of rural–urban movement), this chapter provides an overview of the major themes and scholarly debates in international migration, with a focus on the United States.

  The study of immigration covers interdisciplinary topics and diverse themes related to complex social processes. Its theoretical and methodological approaches are drawn from anthropology, demography, economics, geography, history, law, and political science, as well as from sociology. Contemporary sociology of immigration seeks to understand the dynamics of human mobility accompanying rapid global transformations. Researchers employ a range of quantitative and qualitative methods, drawing on administrative data (census), surveys, interviews, and ethnography. Three basic concerns characterize the goals of the field and the existing literature:

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  Understanding Immigration

  Issues and Challenges in an Era of Mass Population Movement

  • Marilyn Hoskin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter 1 . New routes and lower fares served a larger market, facilitating travel by working- and middle-class immigrants. Unlike many other nations, the United States did not develop systems to track entrants to enforce visa limits; nor did it create effective permits for work or residence. As a result, overstaying visa limits and finding work proved to be relatively easy for those without documents. Control of the southern border became an issue after a very long period of relatively open immigration and easy naturalization. Borders thus emerged as problem areas for immigration in the late 1900s.

  Immigration in American History

  Immigration has been more or less continuous in North America since the late eighteenth century, as open space and opportunity presented a compelling alternative to destinations known for their historic conflicts and religious divisions, and lured populations who would define the new nation. Histories of the migration are numerous and varied, but they tend to employ common themes.

  Immigration as a History of Surges and Ebbs

  Students of immigration have identified three periods during which major surges occurred: from 1840 to 1860, 1880 to 1914, and 1965 to the present. Figure 2.1 illustrates the numbers and countries of origin in each. Britain and Ireland were the major source of immigrants in the first period, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia in the second, and Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean in the third. The end of each period was hastened when political forces united in their hostility to newcomers and pressured Congress to halt the flow. The years between surges, which often involved war or domestic conflict, slowed immigration, as national borders were more closely monitored and the number of potential migrants reduced by war casualties abroad. But the flow never stopped completely, as the lure of opportunity was constant and the supply of potential migrants plentiful.

  Figure 2.1. Number and Origins of Immigrants to the U.S., 1820–2009. (Source. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics , 2010)

  By the time the American colony separated from Britain and established a government, one hundred years of voluntary, unregulated immigration had already passed, creating an implicit template for much of the next century. In all three periods of surge, conditions in sending countries led to migration. In the first, the Irish famine was a prime mover. Some 250,000 people had already emigrated between 1750 and 1800; another 1–1.5 million followed between 1800 and 1845. The 1845–1852 famine devastated the native population, and one million emigrants left for America. Other European nations also suffered as the Industrial Revolution, which had brought millions of rural residents into urban areas, proved unable to accommodate all who sought employment. Crop failures and insufficient land increased risks of bankruptcy, pushing desperate Europeans to migrate. Even a devastating Civil War in the United States caused only a temporary lull in transatlantic relocation.

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  The Politics of Immigration in Western Europe

  • Martin Baldwin-Edwards, Martin A. Schain(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Politics of Immigration to Britain: East-West Migrations in the Twentieth Century

  ROBERT MILES and DIANA KAY

   

  This analysis places recent interest in East/West migration in a historical perspective. It argues that East/West migration to Britain is not a new phenomenon: Russian Jews arrived at the turn of the twentieth century and members of the Polish Armed Forces and Displaced Persons in the mid-to late 1940s. Official responses to these refugee movements varied as did the ideological representations of the incomers. In particular, prevailing political and economic considerations as well as ‘race-thinking’ informed official responses. Current British policy towards refugees from former Yugoslavia reinforces the argument that refugee status is socially determined, rather than inherent in a particular set of circumstances

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  Over the past 20 years, the focus of social science research on the politics of migration to Britain has been on responses to the entry and subsequent settlement of British subjects of colonial origin. The source of these colonial migrants (from the periphery of the world economy, specifically the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent) has meant that migration has usually been interpreted as a dimension of a North-South relationship. While other migrations have been, numerically and economically, almost as important (e.g., the uninterrupted migration from Ireland to Britain), this colonial migration has generated a specific political discourse and set of meanings which have led to the hegemonic view that an immigrant is, by definition, a ‘black’ person.

  Political developments in Europe since 1989 (notably the disintegration of the former Soviet bloc and the unification of Germany) have stimulated new migration flows within the ‘unified’ Europe. Given the emphasis on North-South migration, these East-West movements (real and speculated) appear to be historically novel: commentators often refer to the current migrations as new in a way which exhibits a remarkable amnesia. This interpretation is challenged by embracing a longer-term historical perspective: these recent intra-European migrations are a recurrence of previous patterns of (especially refugee) migration within Europe.

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  Immigration and Categorical Inequality

  Migration to the City and the Birth of Race and Ethnicity

  • Ernesto Castañeda(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Figure 3.10 Strong state, but threatened by globalization of finance and production. Strong citizenship formation continues from 1945–1968 period but perceived as threatened. Period of widespread political conflict over new international immigration, intensification of border. Underlying anxiety about globalization and global issues (e.g., terrorism, imperial wars). Internal movement extensive but dispersed; end of socially visible internal migrant. To be migrant is now only international migrant.

  Intersecting with these economic changes have been wrenching political stresses. To summarize the preceding analysis, the twentieth century witnessed a profound widening and deepening of citizenship in Tillyian terms, including military service, tax payment, administrative obedience, and public redistribution (e.g., old-age support through social security and Medicare). Alongside this, “American” nationalism, long a component of the U.S. polity, refocused on loyalty to the U.S. military neo-imperial project. Meanwhile, important internal divisions, especially North-South ones, were transcended, and post-immigrant cleavages of the past, such as that between Protestants and Catholics, were overcome through the expansion of the categories “white” and “citizen.” Nonwhites, such as African Americans and Mexican Americans, were not as fully included in these developments, but even they struggled for and received some elements of citizenship inclusion.

  This contemporary citizenship formation has intersected with two developments. One is the unprecedentedly strong distinction between legal and unauthorized (“illegal”) immigrants introduced earlier. That frame has enabled a double move in recent immigration politics: disclaiming explicit racism while practicing disproportionate enforcement against Latin American, especially Mexican, immigrants for whom legal visa categories are insufficient vis-à-vis employer demand and family reunification. In a period when U.S. citizens perceive their citizenship claims as insecure, these legal practices strengthen the citizen-versus-illegitimate-outsider distinction. The other process interacting with citizenship has been the administrative consolidation of the bounded territorial nation-state, especially by means of surveillance and coercive force at the Mexican land border (Nevins 2010). Previously, the U.S. state handled immigration in an administratively weak way, through spatially fragmented seaports. Not only practically but also symbolically, the border with Mexico has come to define and represent citizen insiders. In this process, the previously blurred mix of internal and international migrants to the United States became much more clearly separated into immigrants from abroad and mobile U.S. citizens.

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  Democracy and the Nation State

  • Tomas Hammar(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  When this is written, the fourth period, starting in 1973-1974, may already have come to its end. The sharp increase in refugee immigration from the Third World, and especially from Asia, that started in the beginning of the 1980s, will perhaps in the future be seen as a new and fifth period. It may be too early to decide when the fourth period has come to an end, but the characteristics of this fourth period seem to be clearly visible already now. Once again, the regulation of immigration has become very strict. Labour immigration is almost completely terminated in Western Europe, although exceptions exist in the form of seasonal workers e.g. in Switzerland and in the form of illegal immigrants in several countries. The trend in the late 1980s seems to be that illegal employment is more and more reduced by improvements in legislation and especially by considerable and effective fines on employers of illegal workers. All immigration to Europe has not stopped, however. Families are allowed to reunite, and political refugees are admitted. The control of those claiming that they are political refugees has therefore become crucial, when all other opportunities for immigration have been cancelled.

  The four periods of international migration which are suggested here are in sum the following:

  1	Free immigration and large emigration	1860-1914
  2.	Immigration regulation and aliens control: a provisional system made permanent, because of unemployment and racism.	1914-1945
  3.	Liberal immigration: recruitment of foreign labour, and colonial immigration	1945-1974
  4.	Strict immigration regulation: only family members and political refugees admitted.	1974-

  Citizenship and naturalisation policy have also changed during these four periods of shifting immigration policy, although not in the same manner of 1. opening - 2. closing - 3. opening - 4. closing the gates. It is the significance and meaning of citizenship that has undergone major changes during the twentieth century, and there are, as we shall see later, several other reasons for these changes besides those discussed here. But in 1914, when citizens were mobilised to fight in their countries' armies, and when citizens of enemy countries were considered to be unwanted and unreliable persons, perhaps even spies, the individual's citizenship and passport were suddenly given new weight and importance. And when the war was over, immigration remained strictly regulated, now in the interest of the domestic labour market.

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  An Introduction to Population Geographies

  Lives Across Space

  • Holly R. Barcus, Keith Halfacree(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5Placing human migration    

  5.1 INTRODUCTION: DEFINING MIGRATION

  5.1.1 What is migration?

  Migration remains the most widely studied and examined element within Population Geography (Boyle 2003, 2004). Moreover, whilst Geographers have played a pivotal role in shaping our contemporary understanding of it, the topic is of interest to numerous academic disciplines, including Demography, Sociology, Political Science, Economics and Anthropology (Brettell and Hollifield 2008a). In this respect, approaching migration as it occurs within the life course has considerable potential for bringing together a scattered body of scholarship often fragmented by “disciplinary partitioning” (Olwig and Sørensen 2002: 7).

  But what exactly is migration? Initially put, as in a recent textbook, it is “the movement of people to live in a different place” (Holdsworth et al. 2013: 96) or a “permanent change in residence.” It is residential relocation. Or, as expressed in UK and US censuses, a migration is deemed to have occurred when one’s “usual address” has changed within the last 1 or 5 years, respectively (ONS 2013; USCB 2013). Simple, then, one might think! However, as Holdsworth et al. (2013: 98) also noted, careful consideration of these definitions immediately raises a host of questions: what precisely is meant by “different place,” “live in,” “permanent,” or “usual address”? Consequently, by the end of the present chapter, “migration” will have been demonstrated to be at least as complex and multi-dimensional a concept as Chapter 4 revealed “fertility” to be.

  Starting with the idea of “different place,” the type of areal unit(s) involved in a migration is an initial important consideration when defining it specifically. A crucial starting point is whether a political boundary is crossed during a move. For example, an individual could move from one county to another within the same US state or from one state to another. Both moves are conventionally described as intra-national or internal migration, because neither involves leaving the US. In contrast, a move from the US to Canada, crossing an international border, is an international migration

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