Mass Immigration Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

While human beings have migrated across the planet in large numbers for millennia, political concerns about immigration arose following the emergence of the modern nation-state, which increasingly desired to define its territorial boundaries, regulate who entered, and conscript and tax citizens. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, enormous population movements became a salient global phenomenon. Defined as the large-scale entry and usually permanent settlement of people in countries of which they are not native, mass immigration is characteristic of globalization in the twenty-first century.

Mass immigration, a corollary of mass migration and mass emigration, occurs for a wide variety of reasons, many of which are beyond the control of individual sending and receiving states. People leave their home countries en masse due to war, famine, poverty, underemployment, political oppression, religious persecution, natural disasters, forced expulsion, overcrowding, lack of opportunity, and wanderlust. They enter and settle permanently in other countries for equally diverse reasons, including economic opportunities, political freedoms, hope for a better life for their children, and sometimes because they are forcibly moved. Often the combination of powerful global push and pull forces and the great difficulty of controlling vast borders make it nearly impossible for governments to stop large-scale immigration. Consequently, in 2000 there were an estimated 56 million immigrants in Europe, nearly 50 million in Asia, over 40 million in North America, and 5.8 million in Oceania.

Drawing a conceptual line between immigration and mass immigration is largely a subjective endeavor, raising the question of precisely when the former turns into the latter. On the historical spectrum of great population movements resulting in permanent settlement, the most prominent have been characterized by the immigration of millions of people over decades and centuries. Modern international migration can be classified into the mercantile (1500–1800), industrial (1800–1914), interwar (1914–1945) and postindustrial (1960 onward) periods. There is a distinction made between mass immigration before and after 1945, with an emphasis on post– World War II (1939–1945) immigration from less economically developed to highly economically developed countries.

Patterns Of Mass Immigration

Patterns of mass immigration vary in nature and scope across time and space, but the European settlement of Oceania and North America stands out as particularly significant. The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are referred to as classic countries of immigration, because mass immigration was instrumental in the nation-building process and profoundly affected the culture, society, politics, and national identity of each country. Further examples of mass immigration resulting in lasting demographic change include European immigration to Latin America, in particular Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina; the forced immigration of approximately ten million African slaves to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; the legal and illegal Mexican immigration to the United States from 1848 to the present; and post–World War II immigration within and to Europe.

The United States, which until the 1880s had few regulations restricting entry, is among the world’s most prominent countries of immigration. The country’s general attitude toward most European immigrants was articulated by the celebrated author Herman Melville: “Let us waive that agitated national topic as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores . . . if they can get here, they have God’s right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them” (Zolberg 2007, 455). An estimated thirty million immigrants came to the United States between 1860 and 1920, when the number of foreign-born averaged between 13 and 15 percent of the total population. In 2006, over 37 million (12.5 percent of the total population) were foreign-born, with approximately 1.1 and 1.3 million immigrants legally entering the country in the fiscal years 2005 and 2006, respectively.

Many European countries, once the source of mass emigration, are now recipients of mass immigration. The number of foreigners living in the Federal Republic of Germany, for example, rose from 548,000 in 1950 to nearly 7.3 million in the year 2000. Currently, nearly 20 percent of the total Swiss population is foreign-born, while immigrants make up approximately one-third of Luxembourg’s population. Although immigration to European countries, the United States, and Australia has been on a large scale, it is also offset by simultaneous emigration. For every ten people who immigrated to the United States in 2001, three emigrated; for every three people who entered Australia and Germany in that year, two left, and in the United Kingdom, the ratio of immigrants to emigrants was five to two.

If mass immigration happens quickly, and if immigrants are racially, religiously, or linguistically different from the host population, this can stoke fears about rapidly changing national identity and lead policy makers to conclude that the country has reached its immigration capacity. German chancellor Helmut Kohl threatened to declare a state of emergency in 1992, in part because the entry of over 438,000 asylum seekers in one year alone created a widespread sense that the country was being inundated by immigrants. Similarly, in response to persistent mass immigration from Mexico and Central America, 59 percent of California residents voted in 1994 for Proposition 187, which proposed to withhold public benefits from undocumented immigrants, and in 2005 the U.S. House of Representatives recommended—in bill H.R. 4437—the erection of a 700-mile fence between the United States and Mexico.

Mass immigration is a manifestation of globalization and will, in the future, presumably change. Rather than Europeans settling in sparsely populated continents, as they once did, Africans, Asians and others will likely immigrate in large numbers to Europe. War, global climate change, and colossal humanitarian catastrophes may lead to unprecedented forms of mass immigration. Should the Netherlands be flooded by rising sea levels, will millions of Dutch immigrate to neighboring European Union countries? Will a warmer Greenland, Canada, or Siberia be future destinations of masses of immigrants? With the worldwide population expected to rise to as many as ten billion people by the middle of the twenty-first century, mass immigration is sure to persist as a significant global challenge.

Bibliography:

Castles, Stephen, and Mark J. Miller. The Age of Migration. New York: Guilford Press, 2003.
Cohen, Robin. The Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cornelius,Wayne A. Controlling Immigration. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Hatton,T. J., and Jeffrey G.Williamson. The Age of Mass Migration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
International Organization for Migration. World Migration 2005. IOM World Migration Report Series,Vol. 3. Geneva: IOM, 2005.
Massey, Douglas S. Worlds in Motion. International Studies in Demography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. International Migration Outlook: Annual Report. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2006.
Papademetriou, Demetrios G. Coming Together or Pulling Apart? The European Union’s Struggle with Immigration and Asylum. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; International Migration Policy Program, 1996.
United Nations. World Economic and Social Survey: International Migration. New York: United Nations, 2004.
Zolberg, Aristide R. A Nation by Design. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006.

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