World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century
The forces that explain the dynamics of migration help to explain paradoxes in the history of planet Earth and provide a basis for maintaining continuity despite cataclysmic break points.
Migration is a basic feature of the human species and one of the three basic mechanisms of human evolution.
Movement made possible the appearance of every hominid species, including our own, and the spread of Homo sapiens from our African cradle to every major area of the planet.
Migratory currents have connected all the continents since 1500 C.E., helping create the political, social, and ethnic landscapes of the world today.
Premodern societies were not static, but mass movement was a new phenomenon, as was the related "massification" of reproduction, production, trade, transportation, communication, consumption, and culture.
Mass migration is an integral part of the broader global processes that have shaped the modern world.
The first half of the nineteenth century offers a more meaningful turning point for mass migration than the beginning of the twentieth.
Since 1840, there has been a striking increase in human population, industrial and agricultural production, global trade, international capital flows, transcontinental economic integration, transportation and communication technology, and the movement of people. Forces of Migration:
Upsurges and regional unevenness created incentives for long-distance migrations and provided resources and technologies that made them possible.
Migrations provided the labor and markets that made these upsurges in production, integration, and flows possible.
Modern Migration:Unprecedented in volume and temporal concentration.
Less than 3 million Europeans went to the New World during more than three centuries of colonial rule (1492 to the 1820s), while more than 55 million did so during the eight decades that spanned the middle of the nineteenth century and the Great Depression of 1930.
More immigrants entered the United States in a single year (1.3 million in 1907) than had done so in the 170 years between the English settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the country's independence.
More Europeans entered the port of Buenos Aires alone in the three years preceding World War I than had come to the entire Spanish Empire during three centuries of colonial rule.
The nearly 2 million Chinese who arrived in Singapore from 1925 to 1930 equaled or exceeded the total number of Chinese who migrated to mainland Southeast Asia over the entire three centuries before 1820.
Total per capita migration in Europe increased from 6.5 percent of the population from 1750 to 1800 to more than 30 percent from 1850 to 1900.
Timeline:
Global migration increased dramatically from the 1840s to the 1870s.
Slowed a bit in the global depression from 1873 until the early 1890s.
Reached new peaks in the years up to 1914.
Shrank during World War I.
Revived during the 1920s.
Contracted again with the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War, except for internal migrations and refugees.
Rose after 1950, gaining momentum during the 1980s until the world recession of 2008-2009.
The second wave of migrants after World War II were about three times as numerous as those in the first wave, although in per capita terms, the peaks of international migration in the 1990s and 2000s were similar to those of the early 1910s and late 1920s.
130 million Chinese have moved from the interior to the coastal provinces since 1990.
900 million people in the early twenty-first century have left their homes every year for more than twenty-four hours.
Mobility is a continuation and expansion of practices that have been going on for centuries.
Migrations were inseparable from unprecedented urbanization and population growth, the expansion of industrial production and global markets, the spread of wage labor, the growth and extraction of food and resources, the revolution of transportation technologies, and the creation of an international system of nation states, borders, and population management techniques.
Cities were the epicenter and main magnet for migrants. Urbanization Statistics:
In 1800, 6 million people lived in the largest ten cities of the world.
By 2000, this had grown to more than 200 million, increasing over five times more rapidly than the world population.
In Europe, the number of town and city dwellers more than quintupled during the nineteenth century, from 19 million to 108 million or 12-38 percent of the total population.
Globally, the proportion of humanity that resided in towns and cities rose from 3 percent in 1800 to 14 percent a century later, and to 30 percent in 1950.
Currently, more than half of the people in the world live in cities.
The first wave of mass migration from the 1840s to the 1920s also filled the frontiers of the world, transforming remote plains, forests, and jungles into integral parts of the world's economic and political landscape.
Migrants mined, cultivated, or harvested resources that fed urban factories and the ever-increasing numbers of city dwellers and wage laborers.
Other migrants were the traders and shopkeepers who moved and exchanged these resources and manufactured goods across the world.
Labor demands and low frontier populations produced both higher wages and increased opportunities for employment and trade.
Increased commercialization impacted rural relations, creating both the need and the opportunities to spend money earned through the wages of migrants.
The growth of commercial agriculture and rural industry also provided an impetus for seasonal rural-to-rural moves.
Seasonal Migration in Europe: Increased nearly ten times between 1800 and 1900, while the population as a whole only doubled.
At least 90 percent of the more than 50 million migrants into Southeast Asia before 1940 moved to rural areas.
Transformation in Mass Transportation and Communication:Made the mass movement of people possible after the mid-nineteenth century.
Migrants built more railroad lines (which increased worldwide from 8,000 kilometers in the 1840s to more than a million by 1914) and steamers (whose tonnage increased twenty times over the same period).
Enabled the movement of even more people and of the heavy or bulky commodities with low price per weight or mass that came to make up much of global trade.
Required even more migrants.
Flows of goods and people have moved in tandem, relying on the proliferation of communication systems.
Communication Systems:Postal system
Telegraphs
Telephones
Photographs
Radios
Spread the information about markets, jobs, and opportunities that fueled both migration and trade.
Freedom of Migration:The new migrations were notably freer than those of the previous three hundred years, especially in the Atlantic and western Eurasia.
Two-thirds of the westward and eastward migrations out of Europe from 1500 to 1820 were coerced.
Coercion was more complete for the 1-3 million Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians traded in the Crimean Tartar slave traffic during the seventeenth century.
The largest migrations of any period before the mid-nineteenth century involved the move of 10 million African slaves across the Atlantic and a similar number across the Sahara Desert and the Indian Ocean.
The movement of Chinese and South Asians before 1820 was generally freer, dominated by traders and short-term debt arrangements.
Slave raiding was still common in the waters of Southeast Asia and grew increasingly common over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Post-Mid-Nineteenth Century Migration:Mostly free.
The transatlantic African slave trade had come to a virtual end by the 1850s.
The westward-bound movement of European indentured servants had ended decades earlier,
The eastward-bound movement declined.
After the 1840s, there was a small growth in the migration of Asians indentured to Europeans.
Most Asian migrants were free or organized through debt obligations to other migrants.
The swell in free global mobility corresponded with a reduction of state controls over migration.
By the end of the century, ever-growing numbers of migrants generated new efforts to control or restrict such mobility in the form of national borders and immigration policy. Rise of Nation-States:
Increased from a handful before the Napoleonic Wars to more than 190 by the early twenty-first century.
Emerged contemporaneously with increased integration and mobility.
Delimiting physical space, turning it into "territory," and establishing institutions of population management have been constant objectives of these polities.
The early days of this international system in the mid-nineteenth century were a heyday of liberal and laissez-faire mobility marked by a decline of coerced labor and many mobility controls.
By the 1860s, most European nations had dropped their exit, domestic movement, and passport controls.
The authority to manage mobility shifted away from localities to central governments as nation-states insisted on their power to register, count, deport, and monitor the peoples within their borders.
Trend toward liberal migration started to reverse with the exclusion of Asians from many white settler nations after the 1880s, the rise of medical inspections, and the more general rise of passport and systematic immigration laws after World War I.
Restrictions on international migration in the 1920s heralded the retrenchment of economic liberalism into greater isolation and autarky.
The later revival of global liberalism (after 1950 and more worldwide after 1990) did not stop the multiplication of migration controls, the proliferation of identity documents, and ever more complex laws to sift and select the optimal migrant.
Neoliberalism has proved to be more "quasi" than "neo," promoting the free movement of goods, capital, technologies, information, and culture, but not of people.
The consolidation of borders and purification of national spaces has produced millions of refugees.
Migration itself has become inseparable from the daily machinery of migration control and evasion.
Borders have shaped our knowledge of migration as deeply as the process of migration itself.
The historiography of migration is built and fragmented around nation-centered themes.
Recent work on "transnationalism," "diaspora," and migrant networks has tried to move beyond this kind of knowledge but more often than not it presents itself as a depiction of a "new" kind of migration and does not challenge nation-centered depictions of migration history.
No migrant experience can be understood in isolation from the pervasive categories of migration control. Global Perspective on Twentieth-Century Migration:
Grounded in two interlinked perspectives:
A broad picture of migrations around the world as embedded in shared global processes.
More specific pictures that focus on ties between localities and people rather than on the imaginaries of nation-to-nation flows.
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.
First Wave of Modern Migration, 1840s-1930s
Estimating migration numbers is a challenging task due to incomplete records, return migration, repeated migration, and variations in data from different sources.
Overland migration is particularly difficult to assess due to the lack of records and the difficulty of distinguishing between short-term travelers and migrants.
Data Limitations:
Most estimates for overland and domestic migration are based on census data, which means they are less likely to account for short-term travelers and those who made multiple journeys.
The movement of nomadic, seminomadic, and itinerant peoples is even more difficult to count and compare to other migrations.
Long-Distance Migration (1840-1940):Predominantly Out of Europe: The exodus of 73 million Europeans amounts to the largest global redistribution of human population, shaping the modern world.
Destinations: Temperate America (57 million), Siberia (13 million), Australia/New Zealand (4 million), and southern Africa (close to 1 million).
Impact: In 1800, less than 4 percent of all people of European ethnic origin lived outside of Europe; by 1940, one-third of them did.
Out of South China:More than 22 million Chinese migrated abroad from the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian.
The vast majority went to destinations throughout Southeast Asia.
Destinations: Singapore and Penang, Dutch Indies, Borneo, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Java, and the Philippines.
Chinese Migration to Southeast Asia: Dominated by free migrants, financed by family or Chinese merchants.
China to Manchuria:More than 30 million Chinese migrated to Manchuria.
Joined by Russians, Koreans, and Japanese.
Inflow acquired massive dimensions after 1900 and peaked in the 1930s.
Migration from India:Great majority ended up in tropical destinations, mostly around the Indian Ocean.
Destinations: Malaya, Burma, Ceylon, Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa, the Caribbean, and Canada.
Also to work on the tea plantations of Assam, in the weaving districts of Bengal, and on the plantations of the south.
Other Migrations Within Asia and Africa:Difficult to estimate due to the patterns of nomadic and seminomadic mobility.
Millions of workers moved to plantations and mines in southern and central Africa and to agricultural areas and coastal cities in western and eastern Africa.
Colonial governments regularly mobilized African labor as soldiers and to work on public projects.
Building of the Suez Canal and the creation of new irrigation projects in Egypt generated much migration.
Javanese traveled to plantations in Sumatra and the Southeast Asian mainland.
Pacific Islanders worked on plantations and as seamen throughout the region.
Other Forms of Movement:Millions of Christians moved from the decaying Ottoman Empire into Greece and the Balkans, and Muslims moved into Asia Minor.
1 million Armenians expelled from Turkey after 1915.
Merchant diasporas flourished.
More than 20 million people took part in the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca.
Migrations Within Europe and the Americas:Continued to be along short distances.
Most important change came in the tremendous increase in long-distance moves.
Moves were to more urban, commercialized, or industrial regions.
Italians crossed the Alps, and more moved north from the peninsula's Mezzogiorno to the industrial Piedmont and Lombardy.
Irish moved to England, and workers moved between the kingdoms and regions of the United Kingdom.
Poles moved westward.
The Ostflucht (flight from the East) carried migrants of various ethnicities from Prussia to the Ruhr.
Spaniards moved to the industrial areas of Asturias, Catalonia, and the Basque country.
Migrations Within North America:North Americans moved to the western frontiers of the United States and Canada.
Canadians moved to the United States, along with some from Mexico and the Caribbean.
Americans left the U.S. South for the industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest.
Migrations Within the Caribbean:West Indians moved to Cuba, the Atlantic coast of Panama and Costa Rica, and between other islands.
Migrations Within South America:Many migrants also moved down from the Andes, to the pampas of Argentina, and within and between the other nations of the southern cone.
Organizing the Data:Information can be arranged into three main systems of migration:
European migrants to the Americas (55-58 million).
Indians and southern Chinese to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean (48-52 million).
Northern Chinese, Russians, Koreans, and Japanese into central and northern Asia (46-51 million).
This highlights the role of migration in the major shift of world population toward frontier areas.
Global Migration Scope:From 1870 to 1930, approximately 35 million migrants moved into the 4.08 million square kilometers of Southeast Asia, compared to the 39 million migrants who moved into the 9.8 million square kilometers of the United States.
Peak annual emigration rates of around 10 per 1,000 population (averaged over a decade) were typical of Ireland and Norway in the 1880s, of Italy and Spain in the years before World War I, and of Guangdong, Hebei, and Shandong provinces in the 1920s.
Timeline:
The timing of the Atlantic and Southeast Asian migrations also was not greatly different, although the migrations to Southeast Asia did not peak until the late 1920s, about fifteen years after the peak of the European emigrations.
The North Asian migrations did not really get moving until the 1880s and 1890s, about four decades after the other two, but they are still contemporaneous enough to fit within an overall global wave.
Factors Driving Concurrent Rise of Overseas Migration:
Increase of mass communication
Rapid, inexpensive transportation
Growth of global markets and industrialization
Loosening of controls over internal migration
Expansion into global frontiers
These factors reinforced each other in a snowball effect, creating a world on the move.
There was a North Atlantic core to global migration, with inequalities and new differences.
In terms of the migrations counted above, emigration from Europe amounted to at least 15 percent of the total population in 1900, whereas the Chinese and Indian outflows fell somewhere in the range of 7-13 percent.
Less than a quarter of the world's population produced from one-third to half of the migration.
The variations in migration rates are significant, but still small in comparison to the enormous gaps in industrialization and urbanization that emerged in the same period.
Census:The 1851 U.K. census revealed a watershed demographic event: for the first time in the history of any large nation, more people lived in towns than in the countryside.
By the early 1900s, several other countries in Europe and in the European diaspora had reached that mark or were close to it.
By comparison, the proportion of China's inhabitants living in cities was 5 percent in 1800 and 4 percent a century later, and India's was 11 percent in 1800 and still 11 percent in 1921.
In 1800, only three of the world's top ten cites were in the North Atlantic. By 1900, nine out of ten (Tokyo being the tenth) were in the North Atlantic.
Manufacturing Production Trend:In 1800, China and India had produced more than half (53 percent) of the world's manufacturing output and Europe less than a third (27 percent).
By 1900, China and India's share had dropped precipitously to 8 percent, while Europe's had risen with equal speed to 60 percent.
These trends in urbanization and industrialization and the greater development of communication and transportation infrastructures also produced more dynamic patterns of emigration in Europe, where sources of overseas migration disseminated across the continent in a kind of "contagion."
In Asia, emigration began and acquired high intensity in particular regions without spreading its origins geographically.
The most dramatic example of differences between European and other migrations can be seen in the long-term demographic effects of migration.
In 1955, European emigrants and their descendants outnumbered Chinese and Indians more than four to one.
Migration:Several factors have gone into the making of these numbers, including differences in environments, occupations, and social structures at the destinations, different rates of return, female migration, and the general wealth and power of Europe.
Global Inequalities:Nearly all Asian emigrants other than those to Manchuria moved into tropical areas with well-established native or colonial states.
Rates of female migration also tended to be much lower for Asians until the 1930s.
Chinese and Indian migrants did indeed have higher return rates than Europeans before 1900.
More than fifty-five times as many Indians went to Southeast Asia as to the Caribbean, but by 1960, the Indian community in Southeast Asia was only four times larger than its counterpart in the Caribbean because returns from there were much lower and the female proportion among emigrants was much higher.
The Manchurian migrations are an example of migration to a temperate frontier with substantial urbanization.
Despite interludes of Russian and Japanese intervention, the Chinese ultimately maintained political control (not least because they overwhelmed the area with migrants).
Both the United States and Manchuria started with populations of about 6 million in 1800 and received similar numbers of migrants over the following 140 years, yet this produced a population of 134 million people of European descent in the United States by 1955.
Lower return rates, higher rates of female migration, greater economic growth, and better conditions of settlement all conspired to produce this disparity.
Global migration resulted from inequalities and, in turn, also reversed, produced, and diminished those inequalities.
The effects of migration on socioeconomic development in the Western Hemisphere are especially clear
Migration helped to create, rather than reverse, regional inequalities beyond the Western Hemisphere.
Wealth Gap:A wide wealth gap developed between the three main global exporters of emigrants between the middle of the nineteenth century and 1930.
By then, GDP per capita in Europe had become six times higher than India's and eight times higher than China's; the economies of India and China had stagnated while Europe's grew by a factor of 2.56.
Several factors explain such diverging results.
Land-to-labor Ratios:American agriculture in 1900 were four to ten times higher than in European countries, and output per agricultural worker was twice that of Germany and four times that of Italy and Spain .
High wages across the economy, empowering workers and making it easier to organize.
The transatlantic outflow diminished demographic, ecological, and social strain in Europe.
New World foodstuffs may have undermined Old World farmers, but they increased the caloric intake and life expectancy of its expanding urban population
Economic Growth: The benefits of emigration were more dramatic in the receiving countries and it also accrued to the sending country: New World.Latin America.
Australia. -The high coast of labor and resulting high incomes increased popular purchasing power, fueling the economy further through the expansion of mass consumption and domestic markets.
Emigrant regions tend to be highly commercialized
Asian Migration neither as dynamic and as deeply economically linked.
Manchurian Capital was travelling with the Europeans and Japanese however that land remained torn.
Migrant Networks
Global economic and political forces shaped broad trends, but migrants moved through specific networks.
Each migration has its own story of how it started, where it went, how many settled and returned, and what jobs migrants took.
Most migrations were organized locally through networks based on village, neighborhood, and kinship relations.
Migration decisions were taken mainly in the context of family rather than individual strategies.
Transregional or transnational families provided the basic mechanisms that made global migration possible and reproducible.
Kinship-based diffusion of information, behaviors, and habits had a multiplying effect.
It is true that many people migrated through non primary mechanisms of recruitment-such as military drafts, imperial bureaucracies, churches, political parties or groups, padroni (employment agents), and through labor recruiters for local governments, plantations, and businesses.
Family.Migrant families can be compared to an investment portfolio, sending children and spouses to a variety of diversified places and occupations.
These networks were often institutionalized as businesses, mutual aid organizations, and other associations.
The Second Wave, 1950 to Present
International migration began to grow again after World War 2 because of multiple aspects:
Global Population Growth: Population increases from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.8 billion in 2009.
Migrant Regulations Easing in Destination: Looser Migration Controls
More accurate regulations due to stricter legal regulations for migrants.
The forces that explain the dynamics of migration help to explain paradoxes in the history of planet Earth and provide a basis for maintaining continuity despite cataclysmic break points.
Migration is a basic feature of the human species and one of the three basic mechanisms of human evolution.
Movement made possible the appearance of every hominid species, including our own, and the spread of Homo sapiens from our African cradle to every major area of the planet.
Migratory currents have connected all the continents since 1500 C.E., helping create the political, social, and ethnic landscapes of the world today.
Mass migration is an integral part of the broader global processes that have shaped the modern world.
Since 1840, there has been a striking increase in human population, industrial and agricultural production, global trade, international capital flows, transcontinental economic integration, transportation and communication technology, and the movement of people.
Forces of Migration:
Upsurges and regional unevenness created incentives for long-distance migrations and provided resources and technologies that made them possible.
Migrations provided the labor and markets that made these upsurges in production, integration, and flows possible.
Modern Migration:
Unprecedented in volume and temporal concentration.
Less than 3 million Europeans went to the New World during more than three centuries of colonial rule (1492 to the 1820s), while more than 55 million did so during the eight decades that spanned the middle of the nineteenth century and the Great Depression of 1930.
Timeline:
Global migration increased dramatically from the 1840s to the 1870s.
Slowed a bit in the global depression from 1873 until the early 1890s.
Reached new peaks in the years up to 1914.
Shrank during World War I.
Revived during the 1920s.
Contracted again with the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War, except for internal migrations and refugees.
Rose after 1950, gaining momentum during the 1980s until the world recession of 2008-2009.
Mobility is a continuation and expansion of practices that have been going on for centuries.
Migrations were inseparable from unprecedented urbanization and population growth, the expansion of industrial production and global markets, the spread of wage labor, the growth and extraction of food and resources, the revolution of transportation technologies, and the creation of an international system of nation states, borders, and population management techniques.
Cities were the epicenter and main magnet for migrants.
Transformation in Mass Transportation and Communication:
Made the mass movement of people possible after the mid-nineteenth century.
Migrants built more railroad lines (which increased worldwide from 8,000 kilometers in the 1840s to more than a million by 1914) and steamers (whose tonnage increased twenty times over the same period).
Flows of goods and people have moved in tandem, relying on the proliferation of communication systems.
Freedom of Migration:
The new migrations were notably freer than those of the previous three hundred years, especially in the Atlantic and western Eurasia.
Post-Mid-Nineteenth Century Migration:
Mostly free.
Rise of Nation-States:
Increased from a handful before the Napoleonic Wars to more than 190 by the early twenty-first century.
The early days of this international system in the mid-nineteenth century were a heyday of liberal and laissez-faire mobility marked by a decline of coerced labor and many mobility controls.
Trend toward liberal migration started to reverse with the exclusion of Asians from many white settler nations after the 1880s, the rise of medical inspections, and the more general rise of passport and systematic immigration laws after World War I.
Global Perspective on Twentieth-Century Migration:
Grounded in two interlinked perspectives:
A broad picture of migrations around the world as embedded in shared global processes.
More specific pictures that focus on ties between localities and people rather than on the imaginaries of nation-to-nation flows.
First Wave of Modern Migration, 1840s-1930s
Long-Distance Migration (1840-1940):
Predominantly Out of Europe: The exodus of 73 million Europeans amounts to the largest global redistribution of human population, shaping the modern world.
Destinations: Temperate America (57 million), Siberia (13 million), Australia/New Zealand (4 million), and southern Africa (close to 1 million).
Out of South China:
More than 22 million Chinese migrated abroad from the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian.
China to Manchuria:
More than 30 million Chinese migrated to Manchuria.
Joined by Russians, Koreans, and Japanese.
Migration from India:
Great majority ended up in tropical destinations, mostly around the Indian Ocean.
Other Migrations Within Asia and Africa:
Difficult to estimate due to the patterns of nomadic and seminomadic mobility.
Colonial governments regularly mobilized African labor as soldiers and to work on public projects.
Migrations Within Europe and the Americas:
Continued to be along short distances.
Information can be arranged into three main systems of migration:
European migrants to the Americas (55-58 million).
Indians and southern Chinese to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean (48-52 million).
Northern Chinese, Russians, Koreans, and Japanese into central and northern Asia (46-51 million).
From 1870 to 1930, approximately 35 million migrants moved into the 4.08 million square kilometers of Southeast Asia, compared to the 39 million migrants who moved into the 9.8 million square kilometers of the United States.
Peak annual emigration rates of around 10 per 1,000 population (averaged over a decade) were typical of Ireland and Norway in the 1880s, of Italy and Spain in the years before World War I, and of Guangdong, Hebei, and Shandong provinces in the 1920s.
Timeline:
The timing of the Atlantic and Southeast Asian migrations also was not greatly different, although the migrations to Southeast Asia did not peak until the late 1920s, about fifteen years after the peak of the European emigrations.
The North Asian migrations did not really get moving until the 1880s and 1890s, about four decades after the other two, but they are still contemporaneous enough to fit within an overall global wave.
Factors Driving Concurrent Rise of Overseas Migration:
Increase of mass communication
Rapid, inexpensive transportation
Growth of global markets and industrialization
Loosening of controls over internal migration
Expansion into global frontiers
Census:
The 1851 U.K. census revealed a watershed demographic event: for the first time in the history of any large nation, more people lived in towns than in the countryside.
By 1900, nine out of ten (Tokyo being the tenth) were in the North Atlantic.
Manufacturing Production Trend:
By 1900, China and India's share had dropped precipitously to 8 percent, while Europe's had risen with equal speed to 60 percent.
Global Inequalities:
Nearly all Asian emigrants other than those to Manchuria moved into tropical areas with well-established native or colonial states.
Wealth Gap:
A wide wealth gap developed between the three main global exporters of emigrants between the middle of the nineteenth century and 1930.
By then, GDP per capita in Europe had become six times higher than India's and eight times higher than China's; the economies of India and China had stagnated while Europe's grew by a factor of 2.56.
Land-to-labor Ratios:
American agriculture in 1900 were four to ten times higher than in European countries, and output per agricultural worker was twice that of Germany and four times that of Italy and Spain .
Economic Growth: The benefits of emigration were more dramatic in the receiving countries and it also accrued to the sending country: New World.
Migrant Networks
Global economic and political forces shaped broad trends, but migrants moved through specific networks.
Most migrations were organized locally through networks based on village, neighborhood, and kinship relations.
Migration decisions were taken mainly in the context of family rather than individual strategies.
The Second Wave, 1950 to Present
International migration began to grow again after World