Immigration in the 20th century

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

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  The New Americans

  A Guide to Immigration since 1965

  • Mary C. Waters, Reed Ueda, Mary C. Waters, Reed Ueda, Helen B. Marrow(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Economic differentials were usually not sufficient in themselves to gen-erate the movement of populations, however. The impulse for self-betterment and the willingness to live and work in another country were based on social communi-cation about immigration opportunities and also on subjective factors shaped by at-titudes toward risk and a psychology of future-mindedness. From the cold war to the start of the 21st century, immigration achieved unprec-edented velocity, mass, spatial extension, and complexity. Concurrent with waves of permanent settlement, transient migration and repeat migration developed into commonplace phenomena, and the maintenance by migrants of active connections with their homelands coexisted with their integration into their host nations through acquisition of citizenship, acculturation, and social mobility. Through international migration, the whole world was in motion as never be-fore. Estimates of the global total of international migrants rose from 75 million in 1965 to 120 million in 1990 and to 175 million in 2000. The number of immi-grants grew more in the last decade of the 20th century than it had in the previous 17 Immigration in Global Historical Perspective 25 years. Furthermore, it is likely that the cumulative worldwide total of immi-grants in the last half of the 20th century surpassed the total of immigrants from 1830 to 1930. Throughout the 500-year evolution of modern world migration, the 13 colonies in British America and the successor United States acted as a destination hub of in-ternational migration. The role of the U.S. in the globalization of international mi-gration became paramount because it was produced by powerful long-term histori-cal trends. In the country’s colonial beginnings, the search for and recruitment of immigrants was a matter of constant concern.

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  The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture

  • Christopher Bigsby(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  4 R O G E R D A N I E L S Immigration to the United States in the twentieth century A broad overview of immigration to America Perhaps a million immigrants came to America between 1565 and 1800, about 20 million in the nineteenth century, and at least 55 million in the twentieth century. During the twentieth century, particularly after World War II, as American immigration laws and regulations became more com- plex, the phenomenon of illegal immigration became increasingly signifi- cant. The numbers above include some 10 million illegal twentieth-century immigrants. Even these approximate numbers are, in a sense, illusory, as they seem to record a permanent move from one nation to another. Yet, from the earliest colonial times, many who came either returned or went somewhere else, and many of those came back again. Specialists estimate that perhaps one immigrant in three later left. Many of these, often called sojourners, always intended to return: but many who came as sojourners – usually to make money – actually stayed, while others, who came intending to remain, eventually left. Almost certainly the most reliable statistic about American immigration is the incidence of immigrants – that is persons who were born somewhere else – in the total population. As Table 4.1 shows, the censuses from 1860 through 1920 report the incidence of foreign-born persons as close to 14 percent, one person in seven. Then began a half-century of decline: by 1970 only one person in twenty was an immigrant. By the end of the century the percentage had risen to 11 percent, one person in nine. The uneven pace of immigration in the twentieth century – more than half of all its immigrants came in just three decades – 1901–20 and 1991–2000 – was in part responsible for the largely foolish “furor” about immigration that erupted in its closing years.

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  Rethinking Social Work in a Global World

  • Gai Harrison, Rose Melville(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  51 Chapter 4 Immigration and People Movement in a Global World Introduction In this chapter, we foreground some more recent trends in people move-ment on a global level and how this impacts our understanding of practice with immigrant and refugee populations. Migration is in fact a centuries-old practice and in that sense does not constitute a new phenomenon. However, what is noteworthy in the current context is the increased num-bers of people moving around the world and the complex nature of these patterns of migration. In the first part of this chapter we briefly examine migration and globalization from both a historical and contemporary vant-age point. Following on from this discussion we chart some more recent trends in people movement, before moving on to explore the vexed issue of border control. Next, we examine how traditional ideas about the links between citizenship and the nation state are being contested in a global, post-colonial era by those who seek to promote more inclusive forms of global citizenship. In this context, the increased movement of people across borders challenges state-centric notions of citizenship. Finally, we explore the implications of these migratory processes for social work practice, with particular reference to those countries where cross-border movement is strictly regulated. In this section we also consider the role of social work in addressing migration-related concerns. Immigration in the era of globalization Globalization has been implicated not only in the increased flows of cap-ital, goods and ideas across borders but also in the increased movement of people across borders. Indeed, it has been suggested that border move-ments, both in terms of people moving around the globe and people adopt-ing border identities, shape the local demographics of social work practice (Martinez-Brawley and Brawley, 1999).

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  Transnational Nation

  United States History in Global Perspective since 1789

  • Ian Tyrrell(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  60 4 People in Motion: Nineteenth-Century Migration Experiences Americans have normally conceived of migration as a one-way process. Immigrants entered Castle Garden (and later Ellis Island) in New York from Europe to begin the painful and inevitable process of losing their culture and assimilating in a melting-pot process. Yet the resistance of immigrants to rapid assimilation makes the melting pot too crude an idea. Nowadays other metaphors prevail, designed to represent the diverse origins and inter-woven cultures of Americans. Modern historians tend to see the United States as a salad bowl, a quilt or a continuing conversation over national identity. The new multiculturalism recognizes important transnational influences in the making of immigration, but to a large degree the nation’s internal social history is still treated as distinct from migration considered as an economic and cultural system. The legal frameworks of immigration created national boundaries, but until 1924, there were few controls over immigration, and none except for those against Asian people were effective before the First World War. For this reason alone the transnational aspects of migration stand out, not only as a diverse process, but also as a recipro-cal and multilateral one. Topics such as internal geographical and social mobility are also difficult to separate from migration’s ebbs and flows. It is preferable to think, therefore, of immigration as part of a larger system of ‘movement’ made possible by global changes in communications and market dislocation. 1 It is a cliché to call the United States a nation of immigrants. With this glib phrase goes a connotation of exceptional status that is not entirely warranted. All new human settlement involves the mingling of peoples and cultures, and even when comparing migration only in the modern period since the age of the democratic and industrial revolutions, the American case is not unique.

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  The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology

  • George Ritzer, Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy, 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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  Essays on Twentieth-Century History

  • Michael Adas(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Temple University Press

    (Publisher)

  But at the same time, no migrant experience can be understood in isolation from the pervasive categories of migration control such as guest worker, permanent resi-dent, family reunification, occupational preferences, asylum seeker, refugee, illegal, undocumented, and irregular. A global perspective on twentieth-century migration history is grounded in two interlinked perspectives: (1) a broad picture of migrations around the world as embedded in shared global processes, and (2) more specific pictures that focus on ties between localities and people rather than on the imaginaries of nation-to-nation flows. Recent social science and historical scholarship has already produced much excellent work on the migration networks that make up perspective 2, but the implications and application of a historical global perspective are much less developed. The two perspectives, however, are deeply complementary. A global picture provides the demographic, economic, and political context for understanding migrant networks that transcend national borders, and the more particular histories of migrant flows help to flesh out the variations, contingencies, and basic mechanisms of those broad processes. 20 First Wave of Modern Migration, 1840s–1930s Estimating migration numbers is a challenging task. Records of long-distance migration are much more readily available than of short-distance and domestic migrations. But even many long-distance moves—such as those by ship passen-gers not traveling in third class or steerage—were not categorized as migration. Others were not recorded at all. In some cases, authorities did not have the interest or capacity to keep semiaccurate records; in others, migrants purpose- WORLD MIGRATION IN THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY • 15 fully avoided being recorded, as in the case of draft dodgers or anyone travel-ing in spite of restrictions. Return migration often went unrecorded. Repeated migration meant that the same individuals were counted more than once.

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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)

  Migration does not occur randomly. Disruption of some kind is almost always a prime mover: population growth and insufficient opportunities for work in nineteenth-century Europe undoubtedly influenced millions to move, adding 17 million new residents to the United States between 1890 and 1914 and securing an immigration tradition in the U.S. The continuation of this pattern was evident in the 1965–1995 period, when the population of Mexico tripled and its domestic economy grew at twice the rate of its equivalent in the United States. Migration to the United States included 5 million Mexicans even as 10 million moved from rural areas to Mexico City. The U.S. experience provides ample proof that positive as well as disruptive forces are constant and reliable predictors of surges with the potential to redefine national identities.

  Immigration as a History of Loosely Regulated Indifference

  Even with widespread resentment of new immigrants, America’s early history reflected mostly indifference to them. During the colonial period there was no effort to count and little to control immigrants, as the influx between 1776 and 1880 grew to include more and more diverse settlers. Even when the flow of foreigners increased dramatically with industrialization in the late nineteenth century, federal and state governments paid scant attention, responding only to pressure to restrict Chinese entry. Overall, movement to the United States was essentially one of large-scale voluntary relocation.

  With cities growing and Americans moving steadily into undersettled areas in the West, immigrants presented no real danger of overpopulation. Newcomers were economic additions, even in areas where they caused ethnic friction, and there is little evidence that local residents saw immigrants as part of some larger national issue. American census records indicate population growth from almost 4 million in 1790 to more than 50 million in 1880, including almost 22 million immigrants and their children or grandchildren. Given that 40% of the total population were immigrants, it is indeed odd that so few laws addressed them. Congress did pass legislation prohibiting further importation of slaves in 1808 (after some 375,000 had been brought forcibly to America), but essentially ignored other questions related to entry. In establishing and tinkering with naturalization rules, the government had the opportunity to define admission but did not act on it. In the 1860s, legislation was passed encouraging immigration (the Homestead Act of 1862, opening up land outside the original thirteen colonies, and the 1863 Contract Labor Law, which authorized payment of passage to the United States by companies recruiting workers). However, it was not until 1875 that hostility to Chinese immigrants in Western states led to passage of the Page Act, the first attempt to define as “undesirable” candidates for admission (Asian men brought in as forced labor, Asian women entering to work as prostitutes, and criminals). Political leaders who had abetted the railroad industry’s recruitment of Chinese to build the transcontinental railroad were pressured to restrict further entry when California fell into economic recession and the Chinese were cast as unwanted competition for jobs. Seven years later, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law to deny entrance to a specific national group.

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  Population and Society

  An Introduction to Demography

  • Dudley L. Poston, Jr., Leon F. Bouvier(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  For example, let’s say that a person leaves Ireland and moves to the United States. This person is an emigrant from Ireland and an immigrant to the United States. If at some later point in time the person decides to leave the United States and move back to Ireland, we would refer to him or her as a remigrant. The analogous concept with respect to internal migration is return migrant. We have already noted that international migration is the permanent movement of people from one country to another. International migrants may be distinguished from tourists and visitors because the latter return home without establishing permanent residence in the destination country. People who move to a foreign country as tourists or to work for a short period, for example, diplomats, are not regarded as international migrants (M ¨ unz, 2003). Twentieth-century immigrants to the major destination countries of the world (i.e., the United States, Spain, Italy, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia) may be grouped into four broad (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) categories: refugees/asylum seekers, migrants from former colonies, economic migrants, and “ethnic privileged” migrants (M ¨ unz, 2003). A refugee or an asylum seeker is one who involuntarily emigrates from his or her native country because of persecution, threat of violence, or extreme deprivation, often going to a neighboring country. Postcolonial migration began in the 1950s as a result of the decolonization of mainly 198 International Migration southern nations. Indigenous peoples moved from former colonial countries to the European countries that had colonized them in order to pursue better living conditions or to escape political persecution.

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  Moving Europeans, Second Edition

  Migration in Western Europe since 1650

  • Leslie Page Moch(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  133 Western Europe is implicated both in the tale of internal ethical failure and the more global tale of exploitation, and these are of pointed interest for the history of migration in the twentieth century. The enormous discontinuities and dislocations that came with two world wars do not fit into any social, economic, or demographic framework for migration. The wars and their cruelties intrude into peacetime migration history and explain massive discontinuities. Likewise, colonization and the conflicts inherent in decolonization, key segments of the global narrative of domination and uneven resource distribution, go a long way toward explaining the press of Third World people at the shores and borders of western Europe.

  The twentieth century marks a profound reversal of human movement between western Europe and the rest of the world. When Europe was a large—and relatively fast-growing—proportion of the human population toward the end of the nineteenth century, its people settled in the Americas, the South Pacific, Asia, and Africa. Especially since 1945, however, the flow of population has been toward Europe. At first, this followed independence for India, the partition of India and Pakistan, the independence of Indonesia, then of sub-Saharan and North African states. Movement in the interior of Europe was also rechanneled as centuries-old West-to-East trends were reversed by displacements after World War II and long-standing East-to-West movements were staunched by state policies during 45 years of Cold War. Throughout the century, however, a somewhat uneven trend to urbanization continued, as European youth gravitated toward city life.134

  These movements responded to the forces of state and international politics, on the one hand, and to economic and demographic needs, on the other. At the end of the twentieth century, both shifted as European states became wary of outsiders and increasingly tightened entry and citizenship restrictions. (For example, the French state discontinued automatic citizenship for children of Algerians, and Germany tightened its entry and citizenship provisions for Aussiedler

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  Migration in European History

  • Klaus Bade, Allison Brown(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  148 Migration in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Europe ‘century of refugees’. Persecution of national, liberal and democratic movements had created a type of refugee who was persecuted for some- thing he or she had done. At the close of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth, the age of the nation-states would create a type of refugee who was persecuted for something the persecutor viewed him or her as being.154 Citizenship and international migration Many national revolutionaries fought for the idea of the nation-state and became political refugees as a result. With the late state formations in Italy in 1861 and Germany in 1871, the nation-state had finally become the definitive political structure in Europe as a whole. The idea of the nation, which had once encompassed the dream of unity and freedom in a peaceful international community, was amplified in the world views and ideologies of the decades of high imperialism before the First World War into aggressive nationalistic patterns of ideas and judgement that had a dual function: on the one hand, domestic pacification and the stabilization of prevailing social structures by referring to latent or acute external threats to the ‘nation’; and, on the other hand, legitimiza- tion of the sacro egoism0 when representing ‘national interests’ in the power politics of foreign policy. Imperial Darwinism moved international relations into the context of a ‘national’ struggle for existence or survival. The concert of the powers sounded cacophonous and shrill. At the same time, nationalistic patterns in images of ‘self‘ and ‘other’ became ethnically charged into aggressive ethnonationalistic perceptions. These in turn were obscured by ethnocul- tural concepts as economic, social and political contrasts of interests, and rivalries were given a ‘cultural’ appearance and disguise.

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  U.S. Immigration in the Twenty-First Century

  Making Americans, Remaking America

  • Louis DeSipio, Rodolfo O. De La Garza(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The period of high annual levels of immigration in the current wave of immigration is much longer than the years of highest immigration during the Second Great Wave. However, though these levels are high by historical standards, today’s immigrants enter a United States that is much larger than it was at the turn of the century. Today, 1.1 million immigrants would constitute less than four-tenths of 1 percent of the national population. The same 1.1 million immigrants would have added 1.2 percent to the nation’s 92 million residents in 1910. Thus, depending on the measure, immigration can be seen as being at a record high or at just moderately high levels. But as we have seen in other eras of US immigration history, raw numbers are not necessarily the factors that generate concern about immigration among the US-born population. Instead, concerns arise from perceptions of economic or cultural challenges resulting from immigration and from fears that immigrants are not adapting adequately to life in the United States. These immigrants are not randomly selected from throughout the world. Although the 1965 act and its successors reversed the racist elements of the Quota Acts, they did not ensure unfettered immigration to the United States. Instead, the immigration law rewards foreign nationals who have immediate relatives in the United States, as well as those with desirable job skills. The consequence of the family preference bias in immigration law is that some nationalities dominate the contemporary immigrant flow (see Table 2.6). Over the last several decades, immigrants from Asia and Latin America have made up more than 75 percent of legal immigrants and an even higher share of unauthorized migrants. At any given period, a few countries have always dominated the immigration flow. Today, however, this phenomenon is a by-product of the law and not a function of private initiatives or the availability of transportation, as it was in the earlier periods of immigration

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  European Immigrants in Britain 1933–1950

  • Johannes-Dieter Steinert, Inge Weber-Newth, Johannes-Dieter Steinert, Inge Weber-Newth(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Saur

    (Publisher)

  44 Andreas Fahrmeir perspective on the nineteenth century does something to change our view of the twentieth. In many European states, the outlines of migration policy were more or less fixed - after a period of some experimentation 4 - by the end of the nineteenth century. The tools which are still used for migration control today (passports, 5 visas, residence permits and so forth) were developed by this time. These norms remained largely unaltered up to the 1930s. Moreover, certain national traditions which were if not to determine, then at least to influence how migration control was conceived and implemented, date back to this pe-riod. Developments in Britain were different from those in continental Europe. British policies progressed from no immigration restrictions between 1826 and 1905 to severe restrictions on the immigration of foreigners and refugees in the late 1930s. It is the purpose of this essay to trace this evolution, and, by doing so, to emphasise some of the particular characteristics of Britain's im-migration policies in comparison with those of other European countries. Traditions of national migration policies had little to do with 'national character' or incompatible conceptions of nationality. 6 The formulation of immigration policies always involved a considerable degree of international cooperation and negotiation. However, every national bureaucracy developed models, priorities and precedents to which it would likely return, because they were recorded in archives maintained in order to provide such informa-tion. This tended to make migration policy 'path dependent', in the sense that decisions taken at one point were difficult to undo. 7 One characteristic of British migration policies was the concern about the impact they would have on relations between the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Commonwealth.

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