Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Gone is the time when would-be emigrants waited
months, even years, for information about distant
places. News today travels faster than ever, including
news of job opportunities and ways to reach desired
destinations. Television, radio, cellular phone, and tele-
phone stimulate millions of people to migrate by relay-
ing information about relatives, opportunities, and
already established communities in destination lands.
Advances in communication technology strengthen
the role of
kinship links
as push or pull factors. When
deciding where to go, a migrant is often pulled to
places where family and friends have already found suc-
cess. Thus, Turks quickly heard about Germany's need
for migrant labor after World War II. Algerians knew
where the most favorable destinations were in France in
the same time period.
When a migrant chooses a destination and writes,
calls, or communicates through others to tell family
and friends at home about the new place, the migrant
helps create a positive perception of the destination for
family and friends, and may promise help with migra-
tion by providing housing and assistance obtaining a
job. Geographers call flows along and through kinship
links
chain migration.
When a migrant reassures fam-
ily and friends that a new community has been formed,
a place where they can feel home, this encourages fur-
ther migration along the same chain. Chains of migra-
tion built upon each other create
immigration waves
or swells in migration from one origin to the same
destination.
various push and pull factors, ranging from persecution
in civil war to environmental disaster, from disempower-
ment in the home to discrimination in the country, and
each migration fl ow is helped or hampered by existing
networks and governmental actions.
In this section of the chapter, we examine where
people migrate, that is, the destinations they choose. At
the global, regional, and national scales, we can see sev-
eral major migration fl ows over the past 500 years, fl ows
where hundreds of thousands of people migrated along
the same general path. We focus on the destinations in
these major migration fl ows. As we discuss migration
fl ows at the global, regional, and national scales in this
chapter, remember that these fl ows give only an overview
of migration. At the local and household scales, each indi-
vidual or family migration required life-altering decisions,
and those decisions fostered global change.
Global Migration Flows
Before 1500, long-distance,
global-scale migration
occurred haphazardly, typically in pursuit of spices, fame,
or exploration. To put exploration in perspective, note
that a complete map of the world's continents did not exist
until the early 1800s. European
explorers
, who included
surveyors and cartographers, played a major role in fi nally
mapping the world. On the heels of exploration came
European
colonization
, a physical process whereby the
colonizer takes over another place, putting its own gov-
ernment in charge and either moving its own people into
the place or bringing in indentured outsiders to gain con-
trol of the people and the land. First, Europeans colonized
the Americas and the coasts of Africa and parts of Asia
from the 1500s to the 1800s. Then, Europeans colonized
interior Africa and Asia starting in the late 1800s and into
the 1900s.
The past fi ve centuries have witnessed human
migration on an unprecedented scale, much of it gener-
ated by European colonization. The major fl ows of global
migration from 1500 on are shown in Figure 3.11. The
migration fl ows include movements from Europe to
North America (1); from Southern Europe to South and
Central America (2); from Britain and Ireland to Africa
and Australia (3); from Africa to the Americas during the
period of slavery (4); and from India to eastern Africa,
Southeast Asia, and Caribbean America (5).
Among the greatest human migrations in recent
centuries was the fl ow from Europe to the Americas.
Emigration from Europe (1 and 2 in Fig. 3.11) began
slowly. Before the 1830s, perhaps 2.75 million Europeans
left to settle overseas. The British went to North America,
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (3). From Spain
and Portugal, many hundreds of thousands of Europeans
emigrated to Middle and South America. Early European
Think about a migration fl ow within your family, whether
internal, international, voluntary, or forced. The fl ow can
be one you experienced or one you only heard about
through family. List the push and pull factors. Then, write a
letter in the fi rst person (if you were not involved, pretend
you were your grandmother or whomever) to another
family member at “home” describing how you came to
migrate to the destination.
WHERE DO PEOPLE MIGRATE?
It is tempting to reduce the fl ow of migration to
simple economics: a chance for a job in another place
trumps the lack of a job at home. However, migration is
much more complicated than that. Migration depends on
