From individual migration to mass immigration
Humanity has always migrated and migration is part of its history. The religions of the Book (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) have moreover inscribed migration in the history of their peoples or of their guides: exodus, exile, Hegira.
Other important times in the history of the world were registered in migration and mobility: ancient societies gave a special place to mythical heroes who lived odysseys, to newcomers (metics), often inferior in rights to citizens because sedentary people have always had more rights than mobile populations, sometimes reduced to slavery. Then, the great invasions, the crusades, the great discoveries gave rise to multiple transfers of knowledge, powers, crossbreeding, violence linked to migration, invasion and conquest.
The populations overlapped and mixed with some more radical episodes: in Andalusia, mosques were transformed into churches after the fall of Granada while, at the same time, the capture by the Turks of Constantinople had the effect of the transformation of churches in mosques.
Later, the history of states has emphasized the unity, stability, sedentary lifestyle and autochthony of their populations and is based on the definition of a common identity, often anchored in a territorialized nation. with a single religion, if not a majority religion (cujus regio, ejus religio, “to each region its religion”). The migrants were then either an elite (writers, diplomats, explorers, scholars), or travel professionals (merchants, hawkers), or undesirable (religious minorities, political expellees).
It was during the 18th century, but especially throughout the 19th century, that international migration took on a new dimension, through the scale of the flows involved. Slavery to the sugar islands or the cotton plantations (Antilles, Reunion, Mauritius but also the southern United States, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador) had already led to transport to the colonies, for transplanting purposes, several hundred thousand slaves within the framework of the so-called triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas.
In the nineteenth century, several factors explain the phenomenon of massification of migration: technology, first, and in particular passage from sailing to steam navigation which made it possible to transport mass migration and above all forced the large shipping companies to make long-distance travel profitable by offering their services to potential migrants through touts crisscrossing Europe.
The constitution of nation-states, especially in Europe, which has resulted in the exclusion of many minorities, ethnic, religious or linguistic, finding, in flight, a solution to their marginalization; poverty combined with the demand for labor or population in the major regions of labor or settlement immigration; wars and internal conflicts, which resulted in the production of populations in exile.
The nineteenth century saw the development, in its second half, of a mass migration linked to the settlement of large empty or sparsely populated territories: the United States, Canada, Australia, Latin America, in a context of the entry into mobility of previously sedentary populations. Recall that Tocqueville was worried about the Germans’ ability to assimilate into the United States, that 31 million Italians left their country between 1860 and 1960, that France, a large country of immigration at the time before the United States, already had a million foreigners in 1900.
At the start of the 20th century, international migration made up 5% of the world’s population, compared to only 3.5% today. Two essential elements distinguish yesterday and today: it was mass migration essentially white because Europe was relatively populated compared to the vast territories to be occupied and the right of exit was difficult while the right of entry was easy.
From the end of the eighteenth century, Voltaire reminded Frederick II that it was necessary to let its populations go out and give others the desire to enter, in a word, to open up its borders. But the population was an instrument of agricultural and military wealth. , fiscal and international power, which encouraged closure on exit.
On the other hand, the large countries of immigration opened their territory to immigrants because they lacked manpower, as in France at the time of its massive industrialization from 1850, or wished to develop a settlement immigration. This was the case for the United States and, to a lesser extent, for Canada and Australia, but also for Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, which are largely populated by Europeans.
Migrants were both skilled and unskilled labor, as all skills were required. This is how the countries of Northern Europe lost about 30% of their population heading to North America, that the Germans formed the bulk of the newcomers, after the English and the Irish, to the States -United and that they contributed with the Italians, to populate the Hispanic and Portuguese South America because the health policies developed in the German States had had the effect of a large demographic increase by declining infant mortality.
For its part, Algeria was, like Australia, gradually populated by outlaws and then by colonists because both of them hardly attracted immigrants at their beginnings: convicted of common law, convicts, prostitutes and children. Abandoned for Australia, forty-eight, opponents of the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, Alsaciens-Lorrains after 1871, joining the Judeo-Spanish already settled in North Africa since the Inquisition.
From labor immigration to immigration as an option or way of life From World War I to the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The beginnings of the nineteenth century were both the theater of the pursuit of industrialization and of major works, of export agriculture (let us not forget the Chinese coolies who contributed to the construction of the railway of is in the west in the United States and in Russia because China was already very populated, nor the Indian workers of the sugarcane plantations after the abolition of slavery in the West Indies and Reunion, Mauritius and South Africa ).
The First World War, with the collapse of the great empires and its share of internally displaced persons, exiles and stateless persons, also resulted in labor shortages due to the needs of reconstruction. The disappearance of the Ottoman Empire resulted in mass departures of refugees, including the exile of Armenians who then found themselves stateless and then beneficiaries of the Nansen passport.
The exchange of population, Greek and Turkish, following the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which accompanied the formation of the Turkish state, caused upheaval in the regions then inhabited by Greek colonies in Turkey, while the Turks from Greece joined Turkey, except those from Thrace, who became Greeks while retaining their Muslim religion.
Other minorities, like the Kurds, have not seen their demand for the formation of a Kurdish state act. Divided between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, they still form a large contingent of refugees across Europe. The recent conflicts in the Middle East illustrate the fragility of the states thus created.
On the Russian side, the flight of white Russians, following the revolution and the civil war, had a profound impact on inter-war Europe, including in artistic and cultural production. The disappearance of Austria-Hungary also caused population movements with, for the Jews, the choice of the United States before and after the Holocaust, and the movements of refugees after the 1956 crisis in Hungary. World war on decolonization.
From World War II to decolonization
But it was the Second World War that resulted in the largest movements of migrants and refugees: first of all, the departure of the Germans from the territories that had become Polish (Silesia, Pomerania, Danzig) and Russian (Königsberg, which had become an enclave of Kaliningrad ) when Poland moved west after the Potsdam Agreements. Thus, 12 million Vertriebene returned to Germany after 1945.
Then, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 gave rise to illegal crossings and deaths among those who tried to cross it and settle in the west, the Ubersiedler. The border region of Guben (Gubin in Poland), then delimited by the Treaty of Görlitz, began to open up in 1972 thanks to the “friendship” between socialist countries, however perpetuating a national identity in place of a local identity marked by a common cross-border history which was struggling to assert itself.
The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 resulted in the arrival of new Germans in Germany, previously settled in Russia, Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Baltic States, 2 million Aussiedler acquiring German nationality there. had never had, because they had often left German territories in the time of Catherine II.
Other nationalities disentangled took place after 1989: Hungarians from Transylvania who became Romanian after 1918 to Hungary, exchanges of settlements between Czechs and Slovaks, following the partition of the former Czechoslovakia, departure of 500,000 Bulgarians of Turkish origin in Turkey, return of 350,000 Greeks from Pont-Euxin (present-day Georgia and Eastern Turkey) to Greece, departures of Russian Jews to Israel. The migration of the Albanians to Greece and Italy in 1991 also made an impression with the photos of boats packed with men looking for a break.
The decolonizations also caused numerous movements of population: the Pieds-Noirs and harkis (repatriates and French Muslims) towards France during and after the war in Algeria. A massive population exchange followed Indian decolonization in 1947, with the departure of Muslim populations to Pakistan by the millions, concomitant with the creation of the Indian state.
Other multi-ethnic and multi-cultural states have broken up, such as the former Yugoslavia, with the departure of refugees to Europe or Lebanon. Some conflicts have now reached the emblematic figure of 6 million internally or internationally displaced persons, refugees or exiles, sometimes without status: Palestinians, Afghans and Syrians.
Continuities and changes in migratory movements
If we wonder about the continuities and changes that affected migratory movements yesterday and today, we see that the starting factors have hardly changed, except that they are part of the globalization of trade with the help of a travel offer, including illegal travel, and the use of new information and communication technologies which constantly show a better world to those who seek to change their life and realize their project.
Poverty (even if it is never the poorest who leave), political crises, a taste for adventure, environmental disasters, ethnic or religious discrimination, new communication technologies, irregular travel offer, unemployment have brought the twenty-first century into the picture in a desire for mobility as a way of life, especially for those who can move around freely and are visa-free. Among these migrants, whatever the reason for their departure, some settle and others leave or go back and forth. It was the same in the past when the return was possible: more than 30% of Italians returned home, including at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The changes are mainly due to the reversal of the opening and closing of the border, inward or outward, the facilitation of transport, the transformation of the profiles of migrants, more urbanized, more urban and more educated, in place of women (51% of international migrants), the importance of the South (50%) as a destination and especially the fact that the world has started to move when, yesterday, it was mainly Europeans leaving.
Migration introduces disorder into the order of states, which often seek to assert their sovereignty more strongly through the dream of homogeneous populations, which has always proved to be an economic and cultural impoverishment and a dangerous chimera. Migration indeed creates transnational links beyond States, multiple influences, new figures such as the binational, the official refugees but also the undocumented, the stateless and the environmentally displaced who escape in one way or another at the sole order of the State of departure or installation.
