Human migration is the movement by people from one place to another, particularly different countries, with the intention of settling temporarily or permanently in the new location. It typically involves movements over long distances and from one country or region to another. The number of people involved in every wave of immigration differs depending on the specific circumstances.
Studies show that the pre-modern migration of human populations begins with the movement of Homo erectusout of Africa across Eurasia about 1.75 million years ago. Homo sapiens appeared to have occupied all of Africa about 150,000 years ago; some members of this species moved out of Africa 70,000 years ago (or, according to more recent studies, as early as 125,000 years ago into Asia,[1][2] and even as early as 270,000 years ago).[3][4] It is suggested that modern non-African populations descend mostly from a later migration out of Africa between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago,[5][6] which spread across Australia, Asia and Europe by 40,000 BCE. Migration to the Americas took place 20,000 to 15,000 years ago. West-Eurasian back-migrations into Africa happened between 30,000 to 15,000 years ago, as well as pre-Neolithic and Neolithic back-migrations, followed by the Arab expansion in Medieval times.
Pre-Neolithic and Neolithic migration events in Africa.
By 2000 years ago humans had established settlements in most of the Pacific Islands. Major population-movements notably include those postulated as associated with the Neolithic Revolution and with Indo-European expansion. The Early Medieval Great Migrations including Turkic expansion have left significant traces. In some places, such as Turkey and Azerbaijan, there was a substantial cultural transformation after the migration of relatively small elite populations.[8] Historians see elite-migration parallels in the Roman and Norman conquests of Britain, 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 England (contributing 50–100% to the gene pool at that time)."[9]
Early humans migrated due to many factors, such as changing climate and landscape and inadequate food-supply for the levels of population. The evidence indicates that the ancestors of the Austronesian peoples spread from the South Chinese mainland to the island of Taiwan around 8,000 years ago. Evidence from historical linguistics suggests that seafaring peoples migrated from Taiwan, perhaps in distinct waves separated by millennia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages. Scholars believe that this migration began around 6,000 years ago.[10]Indo-Aryan migration from the Indus Valley to the plain of the River Ganges in Northern India is presumed[by whom?] to have taken place in the Middle to Late Bronze Age, contemporary with the Late Harappan phase in India (around 1700 to 1300BCE). From 180BCE a series of invasions from Central Asia followed in the northwestern Indian subcontinent, including those led by the Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians and Kushans.[11][12][13]
From 728BCE, the Greeks began 250 years of expansion, settling colonies in several places, including Sicily and Marseille. Classical-era Europe provides evidence of two major migration movements: the Celtic peoples in the first millennium BCE, and the later Migration Period of the first millennium CE from the North and East. A smaller migration (or sub-migration) involved the Magyars moving into Pannonia (modern-day Hungary) in the 9th century CE. 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 CE. Recent research suggests that Madagascar was uninhabited until Austronesian seafarers from present-day Indonesia arrived during the 5th and 6th centuries CE. Subsequent migrations both from the Pacific and from Africa further consolidated this original mixture[which?], and Malagasy people emerged.[14]
Between the 11th and 18th centuries, numerous migrations took place in Asia. The Vatsayan Priests migrated from the eastern Himalaya hills to Kashmir during the Shan invasion in the 13th century. They settled in the lower Shivalik Hills in the 13th century to sanctify the manifest goddess.[clarification needed] In the Ming occupation, the Vietnamese started expanding southward in the 11th century; this is known in Vietnamese as nam tiến (southward expansion).[16] The early Qing dynasty (1644-1912) separated Manchuria from China proper with the Inner Willow Palisade, which restricted the movement of the Han Chinese into Manchuria, as the area was off-limits to the Han until the Qing started colonizing the area with them (late 18th century) later on in the dynasty's rule.[17]
The Age of Exploration and European colonialism has led to an accelerated pace of migration since Early Modern times. In the 16th century, perhaps 240,000 Europeans entered American ports.[18] In the 19th century over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas alone.[19] The local populations or tribes, such as the Aboriginal people in Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and the United States, were often numerically overwhelmed by incoming settlers and by those settlers' indentured laborers and imported slaves.
When 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: labor migration, refugee migrations, and urbanization. Millions of agricultural workers left the countryside and moved to the cities causing unprecedented levels of urbanization. This phenomenon began in Britain in the late 18th century and spread around the world and continues to this day in many areas.
Industrialization encouraged migration wherever it appeared. The increasingly global economy globalized the labor market. The Atlantic slave trade diminished sharply after 1820, which gave rise to self-bound contract labor migration from Europe and Asia to plantations. Overcrowding, open agricultural frontiers, and rising industrial centers 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 favored their own ethnicity 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.[20] Another effect of imperialism, colonialism, led to the migration of some colonizing parties from "home countries" to "the colonies", and eventually the migration of people from "colonies" to "home countries".[21]
Transnational labor 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 labor migration fell to a lower level from the 1930s to the 1960s and then rebounded.
The United States experienced considerable internal migration related to industrialization, including its African American population. From 1910 to 1970, approximately 7 million African Americans migrated from the rural Southern United States, where black people 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.[22] 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.
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. I 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. Decolonization following the Second World War also caused migrations.[23][24]
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 created by 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,[25] with estimates of loss of life varying from several hundred thousand to a million.[26]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.
Research by the Overseas Development Institute identifies a rapid movement of labor 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.[27]
In the riots which preceded the partition in the Punjab region, between 200,000 and 500,000 people were killed in the retributive genocide.[28][29]U.N.H.C.R. estimates 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were displaced during the partition.[30] Scholars call it the largest mass migration in human history:[31] Nigel Smith, in his book Pakistan: History, Culture, and Government, calls it "history's greatest migration."[25]
↑ Compare: Kuo, Lily (10 December 2017). "Early humans migrated out of Africa much earlier than we thought". Quartz. Retrieved 10 December 2017. According to a study published this week in Science, new discoveries over the last decade have shown that modern humans likely originated from several migrations from Africa that began as early as 120,000 years ago. Researchers have found fossils in southern and central China dating between 70,000 and 120,000 years ago or 120 ka (kilo annum).
↑ Posth C, Renaud G, Mittnik M, Drucker DG, Rougier H, Cupillard C, Valentin F, Thevenet C, Furtwängler A, Wißing C, Francken M, Malina M, Bolus M, Lari M, Gigli E, Capecchi G, Crevecoeur I, Beauval C, Flas D, Germonpré M, van der Plicht J, Cottiaux R, Gély B, Ronchitelli A, Wehrberger K, Grigorescu D, Svoboda J, Semal P, Caramelli D, Bocherens H, Harvati K, Conard NJ, Haak W, Powell A, Krause J (2016). "Pleistocene Mitochondrial Genomes Suggest a Single Major Dispersal of Non-Africans and a Late Glacial Population Turnover in Europe". Current Biology. 26 (6): 827–833. Bibcode:2016CBio...26..827P. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.01.037. hdl:2440/114930. PMID26853362. S2CID140098861.
↑ Patrick Manning, Migration in World History (2005) p 132-162.
↑ McKeown, Adam. "Global migrations 1846-1940". Journal of Global History. 15 (2): 155–189.
1 2 Pakistan:History, Culture, and Government by Nigel Smith, Page 112
↑ Metcalf, Barbara; Metcalf, Thomas R. (2006), A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories), Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. xxxiii, 372, ISBN0521682258.
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. ISBN978-8484894766.
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.
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A diaspora is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of origin. The word is used in reference to people who identify with a specific geographic location, but currently reside elsewhere.
Human migration is the movement of people from one place to another, with intentions of settling, permanently or temporarily, at a new location. The movement often occurs over long distances and from one country to another, but internal migration is the dominant form of human migration globally.
Indo-Caribbean people or Indian-Caribbean people are people in the Caribbean who trace their ancestry to the Indian subcontinent. They are descendants of the Jahaji indentured laborers from British India, who were brought by the British, Dutch, and French during the colonial era from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. A minority of them are descendants from people who immigrated as entrepreneurs, businesspeople, merchants, engineers, doctors, religious leaders, students, and other professional occupations beginning in the mid-20th century and continuing to the present.
The immigration history of Australia began with the initial human migration to the continent around 80,000 years ago when the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians arrived on the continent via the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and New Guinea. From the early 17th century onwards, the continent experienced the first coastal landings and exploration by European explorers. Permanent European settlement began in 1788 with the establishment of a British penal colony in New South Wales. From early federation in 1901, Australia maintained the White Australia Policy, which was abolished after World War II, heralding the modern era of multiculturalism in Australia. From the late 1970s there was a significant increase in immigration from Asian and other non-European countries.
A migrant worker is a person who migrates within a home country or outside it to pursue work. Migrant workers usually do not have an intention to stay permanently in the country or region in which they work.
The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages. These are the predominant languages of today's Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, North India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
Mass migration refers to the migration of large groups of people from one geographical area to another. Mass migration is distinguished from individual or small-scale migration; and also from seasonal migration, which may occur on a regular basis.
The historical immigration to Great Britain concerns the movement of people, cultural and ethnic groups to the British Isles before Irish independence in 1922. Immigration after Irish independence is dealt with by the article Immigration to the United Kingdom since Irish independence.
Paleolithic migration prior to end of the Last Glacial Maximum spread anatomically modern humans throughout Afro-Eurasia and to the Americas. During the Holocene climatic optimum, formerly isolated populations began to move and merge, giving rise to the pre-modern distribution of the world's major language families.
Immigration to Greece percentage of foreign populations in Greece is 7.1% in proportion to the total population of the country. Moreover, between 9 and 11% of the registered Greek labor force of 4.4 million are foreigners. Migrants additionally make up 25% of wage and salary earners.
Early human migrations are the earliest migrations and expansions of archaic and modern humans across continents. They are believed to have begun approximately 2 million years ago with the early expansions out of Africa by Homo erectus. This initial migration was followed by other archaic humans including H. heidelbergensis, which lived around 500,000 years ago and was the likely ancestor of Denisovans and Neanderthals as well as modern humans. Early hominids had likely crossed land bridges that have now sunk.
Immigration to Malaysia is the process by which people migrate to Malaysia to reside in the country. The majority of these individuals become Malaysian citizens. After 1957, domestic immigration law and policy went through major changes, most notably with the Immigration Act 1959/63. Malaysian immigration policies are still evolving.
The ancestral population of modern Asian people has its origins in the two primary prehistoric settlement centres – greater Southwest Asia and from the Mongolian plateau towards Northern China.
In paleoanthropology, the recent African origin of modern humans or the "Out of Africa" theory (OOA) is the most widely accepted model of the geographic origin and early migration of anatomically modern humans. It follows the early expansions of hominins out of Africa, accomplished by Homo erectus and then Homo neanderthalensis.
The peopling of India refers to the migration of Homo sapiens into the Indian subcontinent. Anatomically modern humans settled India in multiple waves of early migrations, over tens of millennia. The first migrants came with the Coastal Migration/Southern Dispersal 65,000 years ago, whereafter complex migrations within South and Southeast Asia took place. West Asian (Iranian) hunter-gatherers migrated to South Asia after the Last Glacial Period but before the onset of farming. Together with ancient South Asian hunter-gatherers they formed the population of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).
Humans lived in the region that is now Burma as early as 11,000 years ago, but archeological evidence dates the first settlements at about 2500 BCE with cattle rearing and the production of bronze. By about 1500 BCE, ironworks were in existence in the Irrawaddy Valley but cities, and the emergence of city-states, probably did not occur until the early years of the Common era when advances in irrigation systems and the building of canals allowed for year-long agriculture and the consolidation of settlements, although local mythology dates back to c. 1000-600 BC with the immigration of some people from janapadas, ancient countries in modern-day India.
Religion and human migration have been intertwined throughout history. Religious demography changes are often the consequences, and sometimes the goals, resulting from mass migration to other territories. Often, political migration aims to establish a territory and governments biased towards and welcoming of sect members. Religious beliefs and practices have served as significant motivations for migration, with people seeking religious freedom or fleeing religious persecution. This interaction of religion and migration has led to the spread and diversity of religions around the world, as well as the emergence of new religious practices and beliefs as people adapt to new environments and interact with different cultures.
This article delineates the issue of immigration in different countries.
Migration from India into Africa pre-dates European colonization. The number of Indians in Africa increased greatly with the settlement of Indians in Africa as indentured servants during colonization, and has continued to increase into the 21st century.
Muhajir History or History of Muhajirs refers to the history and origins of the Muhajir people in Pakistan. Most Muhajirs migrated from what is now Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan, Bihar, Gujarat, and West Bengal, and that results in close ties between the ethnic groups and histories.
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