Mass Migration In The World System

Mass Migration in the World-System brings to light the multiple experiences of migrants across different zones of the world economy. By engaging wide-ranging ideas and theoretical viewpoints of the migration process, the labor market for immigrants, and the rights of migrants, this book provides an important-and much needed-interdisciplinary perspective on the issues of mass migration.

Brings to light the experiences of migrants across the world by engaging wide-ranging ideas and theoretical viewpoints of the migration process.

About 55 million Europeans migrated to the New World between 1850 and 1914, landing in North and South America and in Australia. This mass migration marked a profound shift in the distribution of global population and economic activity. In this book, Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson describe the migration and analyze its causes and effects. Their study offers a comprehensive treatment of a vital period in the modern economic development of the Western world. Moreover, it explores questions that we still debate today: Why does a nation's emigration rate typically rise with early industrialization? How do immigrants choose their destinations? Are international labor markets segmented? Do immigrants "rob" jobs from locals? What impact do migrants have on living standards in the host and sending countries? Did mass migration make an important contribution to the catching-up of poor countries on rich? Did it create a globalization backlash? This work takes a new view of mass migration. Although often bold and controversial in method, it is the first to assign an explicitly economic interpretation to this important social phenomenon. The Age of Mass Migration will be useful to all students of migration, and to anyone interested in economic growth and globalization.

World mass migration began in the early nineteenth century, when advances in transportation technology and industrial revolutions at home enabled increasing numbers of people to set off for other parts of the globe in search of a better life. Two centuries later, there is no distant African, Asian, or Latin American village that is not within reach of some high-wage OECD labor market. This book is the first comprehensive economic assessment of world mass migration taking a long-run historical perspective, including north-north, south-south, and south-north migrations. Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, both economists and economic historians, consider two centuries of global mobility, assessing its impact on the migrants themselves as well as on the sending and receiving countries. Global Migration and the World Economy covers two great migration waves: the first, from the 1820s to the beginning of World War I, when immigration was largely unrestricted; the second, beginning in 1950, when mass migration continued to grow despite policy restrictions. The book also explores the period between these two global centuries when world migration shrank sharply because of two world wars, immigration quotas, and the Great Depression. The authors assess the economic performance of these world migrations, the policy reactions to deal with them, and the political economy that connected one with the other. The last third of Global Migration and the World Economy focuses on modern experience and shows how contemporary debates about migration performance and policy can be informed by a comprehensive historical perspective.

At the end of the 20th century nearly all developed nations have become countries of immigration, absorbing growing numbers of immigrants not only from developed regions, byt increasingly from developing nations of the Third World. Although international migration has come to play a central role in the social, economic, and demographic dynamics of both immigrant-sending and immigrant-receiving countries, social scientist have been slow to construct a comprehensive theory to explain it. Efforts at theoretical explanation have been fragmented by disciplinary, geographic, and methodological boudaries. Worlds in Motion seeks to overcome these schisms to create a comprehensive theory of international migration for the next century. After explicating the various propositions and hypotheses of current theories, and identifying area of complementarity and conflict, the authors review empirical research emanting from each of the world's principal international migration systems: North America, Western Europe, the Gulf, Asia and the Pacific, and the Southern Cone of South America. Using data from the 1980s, levels and patterns of migration within each system are described to define their structure and organization. Specific studies are then comprehensively surveyed to evaluate the fundamental propositions of neoclassical economics, the new economics of labour migration, segmented labour market theory, world systems theory, social capital theory, and the theory of cumulative causation. The various theories are also tested by applying them to the relationship between international migration and economic development. Although certain theories seem to function more effectively in certain systems, all contain elements of truth supported by empirical research. The task of the theorist is thus to identify which theories are most effective in accounting for international migration in the world today, and what regional and national circumstances lead to a predominance of one theoretical mechanism over another. The book concludes by offering an empirically-grounded theoretical synthesis to serve as a guide for researchers and policy-makers in the 21st century.

This monograph examines the political economy of immigration backlash and immigration policy in two global centuries.