WHAP UNIT 6.6-7 Causes and Effects of Migration

Causes/Effects of Migration

Voluntary & Involuntary migration was caused by:

• Imperialism

• Better transportation technology

• Decline of slavery

  • indentured servitude: paid to move to better city/pay off debt

  • Contract laborers: landless, unskilled, subsistence-paid

Effects:

• Ethnic Enclaves: mass migration from one country over a long time - also encouraged more migration

• Gender Roles: Majority male migrants → women = more autonomy, education, money, men’s jobs even after migrants’ return

  • Plowed/planted

  • sold excess cassava in SSAfrica

  • Where some men stayed = little change

• Remittances: Funds from foreign earnings sent home (also helped gender roles)

Ireland

Great Potato Famine: Staple crop potatoes rotting wide-scale → Landowners paid emigrants b/c cheaper than relief funds → 3M immigrants + remittances

• Politics: Absorbed into UK + no parliament

• Social: Roman Catholics persecuted + segregated from Protestants

• Economics: Instability → repealed Corn Laws (regulated grain trade) + tenant farmers evicted

Irish Americans: factory, farms, built canal system, railroads, lumber

• Nativism: anti-Irish & Catholic sentiment

• white collar/skilled-blue collar

• pop culture: baseball, boxers, wealth

Italy

Poverty + Farmlands generationally subdivided + organized crime → Skilled men moved to Europe, US, Argentina, Oceania as artisans, day laborers, farmers

• Argentina: Constitution encouraged immigration w/ civil liberties

  • underpopulated fertile land

  • significantly higher wages

  • cheap urban living (Buenos Aires)

Japan

Colonization Society: exported excess labor & goods

• US: West coast education

  • Gentleman’s Agreement: Informal agreement w/ US to limit JPN immigration + desegregate San Francisco schools

  • Immigration Act of 1924: US limited (Asian) immigration

• Contract Workers: Peru + Hawaii (sugar/pineapple plantations)

China

Population boom + famine + poverty → Illiterate + landless migrate to SEA especially when Opium War & Taiping Rebellion made it safer to leave

• US: Came for Gold Rush, worked on Trans-continental Railroad, restaurants, laundromats, gardeners, domestic laborers, garments

  • Chinese Exclusion Act

    • Enclaves: Chinatown

• Contract Laborers: sugar, opium plantations in Cuba, SEA, Africa, Caribbean

  • SEA: Intergenerational wealth from international trade/banking + colonial posts

UK

• Colonial Service: Temporary military, enterprises, plantations, gov. in India, Malaya, Kenya

• Engineers & Geologists: spread & blended tech in South Asian + Africa

• Argentina: Businessmen, bankers, traders, engineers + imported goods for middle class