Lakhasly

century Migration is not a new phenomenon:
successive waves of migration have shaped countries and societies. Just like today, the drivers of prior waves of migration were rising populations and changing population dynamics. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has compared the dimensions and patterns of the current migration crisis in Europe with historical periods. Its 2015 study offers a wider perspective on the scale of the current crisis, which nonetheless is in many ways unprecedented (OECD 2015). The unprecedented nature of the current crisis was underscored by a report by the UNHCR, Global Trends 2016, which found that 65.6 million people had been forcibly displaced from their homes in 2016, up from 33.9 million in 1997 (UNHCR 2016: 2). Migrants fled war and conflict in Burundi, Central African Republic, Iraq, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen (UNHCR 2016). The migration crisis has strongly affected many of the consolidated, Western democracies. The OECD reported that there were 4.8 million migrants in 2015, of which 1.65 million sought asylum in OECD member countries (OECD 2016: 10). It is important to be aware of historical patterns of migration. Today’s often polarized discourse on migration in democracies fails to acknowledge that most contemporary states are, in their way, the product of earlier waves of migration. After the colonization of North America and Latin America and the Caribbean, migration from Europe increased in the post-Columbian period, as approximately 11.3 million Europeans migrated to the ‘New World’ by 1820 and some 8.7 million African slaves were transported there. The transition to free migration increased the share of free migrants as a proportion of the total population of the Americas from 20 per cent in the 1820s to 80 per cent by the 1840s (Williamson 2006).
In many countries, including the USA, industrialization, the rise of new technologies and the search for better livelihoods induced people to migrate. Similar forces may be at work today, with the addition of the strong push factor of environmentally induced migration (for a bibliography of research on climate change and migration see International Organization for Migration 2012). Improved health and nutrition and falling child mortality rates increased demographic pressures in European countries during the industrial age, leading to the ‘first wave of globalization’ between 1870 and 1913. This took place during a period of free trade, capital mobility and the gold standard, known as the ‘age of mass migration’ (Hatton and Williamson 1998). In this period, around 60 million people migrated from Europe to countries such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand and the USA. Migrants came from ‘core and peripheral Europe’, or from France, Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, the Scandinavian countries, Spain and the former nations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Latin America, the main destination country for European migrants was Argentina, which received almost seven million immigrants. A relatively large number of European migrants also moved to Chile, Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay (Solimano 2004: 1–2).
Since the end of World War II, mass migration has taken place under what are known as restricted entry regimes (Williamson 2006). In the post-war period, migration increased drastically due to the existence of armed conflicts and large-scale natural disasters, growing global inequalities and new international agreements liberalizing personal movement (Castles and Miller 2009). Even so, annual immigration rose only gradually after World War II, The share of the population born abroad increased by about one-third in Oceania between 1965 and 2000 (from 14.4 to 19.1 per cent), more than doubling in North America (from 6 to 13 per cent) and more than tripling in Europe (from 2.2 to 7.7 per cent) (Williamson 2006).

The current migration wave is characterized by unprecedented numbers of undocumented, informal or ‘illegal’ (see Dauvergne 2008) immigrants; religious identities different from those of mainstream society; and a tendency of emigrants to maintain closer ties with their countries of origin. In the 21st century, migrants originate from ever more diverse economic, social and cultural backgrounds, and receiving countries often see different patterns than has historically been the case. Contemporary migration flows feature all types: voluntary and involuntary migration, temporary and permanent labour migration, as well as refugee and family reunion migration (Abel and Sander 2014)