Consequences of Migration

7 Key excerpts on "Consequences of Migration"

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  Human Migration

  A Geographical Perspective

  • Gareth J. Lewis(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10

  Consequences of Migration

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003183051-10

  Although the preceding discussion has been concerned with the nature of migration as a response to social, political, economic and cultural changes within society, it is quite clear that migration can also be viewed as an independant variable, since it can initiate change itself (Figure 10.1 ). In other words, given a pattern of geographical mobility, what social, political, economic and cultural consequences ensue? However, it should be borne in mind that migration is only one of many agents which can initiate change. Among others which are of considerable significance are the dissemination of new ideas, information and techniques by means of spatial diffusion (Hägerstrand, 1967; Lewis, 1979b).

  Figure 10.1: A Simplified Representation of the Relationship between Selective Immigration and Changes in Britain’s Social Structure within a Time Perspective Source: Based on Kendall, 1977, 8-10.

  It is generally assumed that migration has a beneficial effect on economic development (Gaude and Peek, 1970). Such an assessment is based upon economic criteria, and, despite considerable research, the non-economic Consequences of Migration have too often been overlooked. This is rather surprising, when it is recalled that the greater part of this research has emphasized that migrants tend to experience considerable problems of adjustment and conflict as well as personal and community disorganization (Rose, 1969). Clearly, before a meaningful assessment can be made of the benefits of migration its effect upon those societies and individuals involved need to be discussed. Such a theme therefore necessitates a detailed examination in its own right.

  Mabogunje (1970), in his systems approach to the migration process, suggested that when an individual leaves the countryside for the town, the former has to adjust to the loss of a member and the latter to an addition (Figure 2.10 ). At the same time the individual himself has to adjust to a new way of life, and his experiences when fed back to the countryside become the basis of accelerating or dampening down further movement. When viewed in these terms migration has an effect on many aspects of human activity and at several geographical scales. These interrelationships can be represented in a simplified framework (Table 10.1

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  Altered Ecosystems

  • Judith Rosales(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Delve Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Human Migration and its Consequences in Ecological Disturbances CONTENTS 11.1. Ecological Effects of Rural and Indigenous People Migration ......... 210 11.2. Impact of Migration on Transportation .......................................... 214 11.3. Socio-Economic Consequences of Human Migration .................... 216 11.4. Impact of Migration on The Family Wage Labor ............................ 218 11.5. Impact of Rural-Urban Migration on Financial Expenditure (Remittance) ............................................................. 222 CHAPTER 11 Altered Ecosystems 208 Conventionally, migration is defined as a movement from one permanent residence to another, across political boundaries. Anthropologists were among the first scholars to study migration in developing countries. They emphasized economic factors as the most important factors causing migration. There are three factors causing migration. • The first set of factors are social and psychological, including the desire for adventure, the desire to be initiated into manhood, which migration represents and the desire to acquire urban goods. • The second factor causing migration is the desire to escape from domestic, communal problems. It can also be related to war, government despotism, and increased criminality. • The third and most important factor causing migration is economic necessity. There is rising level of wants among the members of the rural communities. Those whose wants can be met in the village stay here while those unable to adequately satisfy their wants at home move. High population density on land coupled with cash needs for fees, taxes, and the desire for urban goods usually lead to migration from rural neighborhoods to towns or main cities. Social and personal factors add to the decision to migrate. Persons disadvantageously placed in the hierarchy of the rural community will be more prone to migrate than people advantageously placed.

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  21st Century Geography: A Reference Handbook

  • Joseph P. Stoltman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Migration involves people leaving a place (origin) and arriving at a new place (destination) under varying circum- stances. Migration is not pursued in isolation because the decision to migrate is linked to numerous push and pull factors. If City A has 30% unemployment and City B has a 5% or lower unemployment rate, it seems apparent that the economic hardship would act as the push factor to encourage people to leave City A and the opportunity (low unemployment rate) would act as the factor pulling people toward City B. There are intervening obstacles, which may impede migration, and that discussion is presented later in the chapter. Wherever there are movements of people, there are consequent demographic, social, and economic changes with spatial implications. Geographers study the spatial nature of movement and seek to derive the motives that people have for moving. The geographic contexts for 231 232 • HUMAN GEOGRAPHY migration occurs in multiple forms, such as people fleeing regions experiencing military conflicts, land-poor people settling new lands that are available for agriculture, or the mass migrations of Europeans moving to the Americas during times of religious, economic, and political repres- sion. These movements represent humans' quest for new beginnings and illustrate the migration phenomenon and restructuring of populated places in the world. Geography as a spatial discipline synthesizes and analyzes migration at different scales in the context of a place of origin and a place of destination. What Is Migration? What is migration? It can be defined spatially, based on where and how long individuals change their residential address domestically or internationally. Is the move perma- nent or semipermanent? Is it migration if a person moves from downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood? How about Mr.

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  The Atlas of Environmental Migration

  • Dina Ionesco, Daria Mokhnacheva, François Gemenne(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The increasing incidence of some of these environmental threats is attributable to the very progress humanity has accomplished since the Industrial Revolution, Climate change constitutes one of the greatest challenges humanity will have to face, as it calls into question the economic and lifestyle choices our society has made, by threatening our very survival as a species. We have no other choice but to try to reduce our impact on the environment, and to adapt to some of the irreversible changes we have caused, or face increasing social and economic costs and damage. Migration will inevitably be part of this picture, either as a social and human cost of inaction or restrictive policies, or as a positive strategy to reduce risks and people's vulnerability, if we make the right political and economic choices. Good migration management can be part of the solution, together with sound environmental and sustainable development policies.

  Part 2 of the Atlas delves into the complex interaction between environmental phenomena, human society and migration, presents various sudden-onset events and slow-onset processes, natural or human-made, which affect the planet's population, and looks into the mechanisms through which environmental factors affect human mobility. A special focus is placed on climate change, the effects of which are often poorly discerned from other environmental phenomena. Environmental migration is then discussed within the wider context of the traditional drivers of migration.

  Understanding environmental hazards

  Our planet is a very complex system of interrelated natural geophysical, meteorological and climatological processes, which are associated with sudden, rapidly occurring natural events, as well as with long-term slowly developing processes of environmental change. The face of the planet keeps changing: the continuous movement of tectonic plates modifies the shape of the continents, builds new mountains and volcanoes, and forms fault lines. These internal geological processes provoke sudden-onset events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, landslides or avalanches, causing widespread damage to cities and infrastructure, and often resulting in great human losses.

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  Migration And Mobility In Britain Since The Eighteenth Century

  • Colin Pooley, Jean Turnbull(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The central question to be addressed in this chapter can be put very simply: did migration matter? This question can be explored by focusing on the impact on individual people and their families, on the places that migrants left and went to, and on change within the wider structures of economy and society. The main difficulty in examining links between migration and social and economic change at either the individual or societal level relates to the issue of causation. The fact that migration was occurring at a time of economic change in a particular region, or of turmoil in the lives of individual migrants, does not mean that the events were necessarily related. Even if there was a relationship the nature of causation is not always clear. For instance, was migration a response to forces of change operating within society as a whole, or was the process of migration itself an agent of change? Did an individual move because of major difficulties or changes in their circumstances, or did the act of migration itself create new problems and fundamentally change people’s lives?

  There are, of course, no simple answers to such questions, and in many instances a whole host of causes and effects will have been closely interrelated. Disentangling these for the more distant past may be an impossible task. The aim of this chapter is to use both the longitudinal migration data and evidence from diaries and life histories provided by family historians to begin to explore some of the impacts of migration on individuals, places and wider society. This is achieved by, first, examining the impacts of short distance and long distance mobility, suggesting that the impacts of these events would have been rather different. Second, the impact of migration on places is assessed by reviewing evidence from the aggregate data set for links between migration and processes of local and regional change. Third, the extent to which the meaning of migration, and its links to other processes of change, varied over time is explored by focusing on four cohorts of migrants with similar characteristics to examine the extent to which parallel processes were operating at different periods of time. It is obvious that historical events assume much greater significance if they had an impact on and meaning for the people involved, and if they were related to the broader processes of change that were taking place within society. Because of the volume of migration in the past, and its potentially disruptive effects in moving people from one part of the country to another, it is usually assumed that migration had such significance. This chapter explores this proposition in detail drawing on evidence provided by family historians.

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  Climate Change and Security

  A Gathering Storm of Global Challenges

  • Christian Webersik(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Social ties, or in other terms social capital—the web of relationships—is an important factor determining whether and where an individual or household migrates. Another factor affecting migrants’ choices is their ability to integrate into new communities at the receiving end. Population movements are very dynamic. People respond quickly in the case of a natural disaster or political instability. Especially in the develop- ing world, migration of one or more family members is a strategy to exploit opportunities in other regions. Remittances, money sent home by migrants, can be a significant contributor to the domestic economy. In some cases, as shown in Somalia, remittances are estimated to be far greater than the official Overseas Development Assistance (ODA). 47 Compared to the common categories of economically or politically motivated migration, as experienced in Western Europe and North America, environmental migrants are a new phenomenon. Whereas the former category of migrants often regard themselves as victims of persecu- tion deserving justice, the push factors for environmental migrants are less obvious. It is difficult to isolate the climate signal from socioeco- nomic factors. Though there is debate over whether the term climate change victims is appropriate, it remains difficult to identify a tangible perpetrator. Adamo and de Sherbinin list four layers that characterize environmen- tally induced migration, explaining the difficulty in distinguishing environ- mentally induced migration from other types of migration: Migration as an Outcome 79 1. The relation between environmental stress and population mobility is influenced by its socioeconomic context, its historical development, and its spatial differentiation. 2. Whether direct/proximate or indirect/contextual, environmental factors rarely act on their own.

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  Climate and Human Migration

  Past Experiences, Future Challenges

  • Robert A. McLeman(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  For migrants travelling long distances to settle in new and unfamiliar places, migration may be a long and arduous process, with integration into the destination population never completed within the migrant’s own lifetime, but continued by subsequent generations. The migration process as experienced by the individual does not exist in a vacuum; it is nested within larger sets of dynamic and interconnected cultural, economic, envi- ronmental, political, and social processes that shape human behavior more gener- ally. A decision to migrate today may be the product of any number of antecedent 2 Why People Migrate 2.2 Basic Assumptions of Modern Migration Research and Their Origins 17 conditions and events. And, once acted upon, the decision to migrate generates new sets of risks and opportunities not only for the migrant, but for his or her social net- work, and for the sending and receiving communities as well. Migration is more than simply a movement across physical space; it is a change in the trajectory of an indi- vidual and those connected to that individual through social space. The aim of this chapter is to provide the nonspecialist a clear overview of current scholarly understanding of the migration process and to introduce a set of basic the- ories, concepts, and terms that: Have been used in a wide variety of settings to explain and interpret how migration deci- • sions are made and the factors that shape migration behavior generally; Can be used to describe and analyze in a systematic fashion known examples of migration • related to droughts, floods, extreme weather events, and other climate-related phenomena; and Will be combined in • Chapter 3 with scholarship that considers human vulnerability and adaptation to climatic variability and change in order to create a conceptual framework that shows the interactions between climate and migration within the context of an adaptive human-environment system.

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