History of human migration
is the movement by people from one place to another, particularly different countries, with the intention of settling temporarily or permanently in the new location. It typically involves movements over long distances and from one country or region to another. The number of people involved in every wave of immigration differs depending on the specific circumstances.
Historically, early human migration includes the peopling of the world, i.e. migration to world regions where there was previously no human habitation, during the Upper Paleolithic. Since the Neolithic, most migrations, were predominantly warlike, consisting of conquest or Landnahme on the part of expanding populations. Colonialism involves expansion of sedentary populations into previously only sparsely settled territories or territories with no permanent settlements. In the modern period, human migration has primarily taken the form of migration within and between existing sovereign states, either controlled or uncontrolled and in violation of immigration laws.
Migration can be voluntary or involuntary. Involuntary migration includes forced displacement, all of which could result in the creation of diasporas.
Pre-modern history
Studies show that the pre-modern migration of human populations begins with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia about 1.75 million years ago. Homo sapiens appeared to have occupied all of Africa about 150,000 years ago; some members of this species moved out of Africa 70,000 years ago. It is suggested that modern non-African populations descend mostly from a later migration out of Africa between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, which spread across Australia, Asia and Europe by 40,000 BCE. Migration to the Americas took place 20,000 to 15,000 years ago. West-Eurasian back-migrations into Africa happened between 30,000 to 15,000 years ago, as well as pre-Neolithic and Neolithic back-migrations, followed by the Arab expansion in medieval times. By 2000 years ago humans had established settlements in most of the Pacific Islands. Major population-movements notably include those postulated as associated with the Neolithic Revolution and with Indo-European expansion. The Early Medieval Great Migrations including Turkic expansion have left significant traces. In some places, such as Turkey and Azerbaijan, there was a substantial cultural transformation after the migration of relatively small elite populations. Historians see elite-migration parallels in the Roman and Norman conquests of Britain, while "the most hotly debated of all the British cultural transitions is the role of migration in the relatively sudden and drastic change from Romano-Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain", which may be explained by a possible "substantial migration of Anglo-Saxon Y chromosomes into England."File:Chronological dispersal of Austronesian people across the Pacific.svg|left|thumb|320px| Chronological dispersal of Austronesian people across the Indo-Pacific
Early humans migrated due to many factors, such as changing climate and landscape and inadequate food-supply for the levels of population. The evidence indicates that the ancestors of the Austronesian peoples spread from the South Chinese mainland to the island of Taiwan around 8,000 years ago. Evidence from historical linguistics suggests that seafaring peoples migrated from Taiwan, perhaps in distinct waves separated by millennia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages. Scholars believe that this migration began around 6,000 years ago. Indo-Aryan migration from the Indus Valley to the plain of the River Ganges in Northern India is presumed to have taken place in the Middle to Late Bronze Age, contemporary with the Late Harappan phase in India. From 180 BCE a series of invasions from Central Asia followed in the northwestern Indian subcontinent, including those led by the Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians and Kushans.
From 728 BCE, the Greeks began 250 years of expansion, settling colonies in several places, including Sicily and Marseille. Classical-era Europe provides evidence of two major migration movements: the Celtic peoples in the first millennium BCE, and the later Migration Period of the first millennium CE from the North and East. A smaller migration involved the Magyars moving into Pannonia in the 9th century CE. Turkic peoples spread from their homeland in modern Turkestan across most of Central Asia into Europe and the Middle East between the 6th and 11th centuries CE. Recent research suggests that Madagascar was uninhabited until Austronesian seafarers from present-day Indonesia arrived during the 5th and 6th centuries CE. Subsequent migrations both from the Pacific and from Africa further consolidated this original mixture, and Malagasy people emerged.
Image:Invasions of the Roman Empire 1.png|thumb|260px| 4th to 6th century Migration Period
Before the expansion of the Bantu languages and their speakers, the southern half of Africa is believed to have been populated by Pygmies and Khoisan-speaking people, whose descendants today occupy the arid regions around the Kalahari Desert and the forests of Central Africa. By about 1000 CE Bantu migration had reached modern-day Zimbabwe and South Africa. The Banu Hilal and Banu Ma'qil, a collection of Arab Bedouin tribes from the Arabian Peninsula, migrated westwards via Egypt between the 11th and 13th centuries. Their migration strongly contributed to the Arabisation and Islamisation of the western Maghreb, until then dominated by Berber tribes. Ostsiedlung was the medieval eastward migration and settlement of Germans – following in the footsteps of East Germanic Goths and North Germanic Varangians. The 13th century was the time of the great Mongol and Turkic migrations across Eurasia, where the Eurasian steppe has time and again provided a ready migration-path – for Huns, Bulgars, Tatars and Slavs.
Between the 11th and 18th centuries, numerous migrations took place in Asia. The Vatsayan Priests migrated from the eastern Himalaya hills to Kashmir during the Shan invasion in the 13th century. They settled in the lower Shivalik Hills in the 13th century to sanctify the manifest goddess. In the Ming occupation, the Vietnamese started expanding southward in the 11th century; this is known in Vietnamese as nam tiến. The early Qing dynasty separated Manchuria from China proper with the Inner Willow Palisade, which restricted the movement of the Han Chinese into Manchuria, as the area was off-limits to the Han until the Qing started colonizing the area with them later on in the dynasty's rule.
The Age of Exploration and European colonialism has led to an accelerated pace of migration since Early Modern times. In the 16th century, perhaps 240,000 Europeans entered American ports. In the 19th century over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas alone. The local populations or tribes, such as the Aboriginal people in Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and the United States, were often numerically overwhelmed by incoming settlers and by those settlers' indentured laborers and imported slaves.
Modern history
Industrialization
When the pace of migration had accelerated since the 18th century already, it would increase further in the 19th century. Manning distinguishes three major types of migration: labor migration, refugee migrations, and urbanization. Millions of agricultural workers left the countryside and moved to the cities causing unprecedented levels of urbanization. This phenomenon began in Britain in the late 18th century and spread around the world and continues to this day in many areas.Industrialization encouraged migration wherever it appeared. The increasingly global economy globalized the labor market. The Atlantic slave trade diminished sharply after 1820, which gave rise to self-bound contract labor migration from Europe and Asia to plantations. Overcrowding, open agricultural frontiers, and rising industrial centers attracted voluntary migrants. Moreover, migration was significantly made easier by improved transportation techniques.
Romantic nationalism also rose in the 19th century, and, with it, ethnocentrism. The great European industrial empires also rose. Both factors contributed to migration, as some countries favored their own ethnicity over outsiders and other countries appeared to be considerably more welcoming. For example, the Russian Empire identified with Eastern Orthodoxy, and confined Jews, who were not Eastern Orthodox, to the Pale of Settlement and imposed restrictions. Violence was also a problem. The United States was promoted as a better location, a "golden land" where Jews could live more openly. Another effect of imperialism, colonialism, led to the migration of some colonizing parties from "home countries" to "the colonies", and eventually the migration of people from "colonies" to "home countries".
Transnational labor migration reached a peak of three million migrants per year in the early twentieth century. Italy, Norway, Ireland and the Guangdong region of China were regions with especially high emigration rates during these years. These large migration flows influenced the process of nation state formation in many ways. Immigration restrictions have been developed, as well as diaspora cultures and myths that reflect the importance of migration to the foundation of certain nations, like the American melting pot. The transnational labor migration fell to a lower level from the 1930s to the 1960s and then rebounded.
The United States experienced considerable internal migration related to industrialization, including its African American population.
From 1910 to 1970, approximately 7 million African Americans migrated from the rural Southern United States, where black people faced both poor economic opportunities and considerable political and social prejudice, to the industrial cities of the Northeast, Midwest and West, where relatively well-paid jobs were available. This phenomenon came to be known in the United States as its own Great Migration, although historians today consider the migration to have two distinct phases. The term "Great Migration", without a qualifier, is now most often used to refer the first phase, which ended roughly at the time of the Great Depression.
The second phase, lasting roughly from the start of U.S. involvement in World War II to 1970, is now called the Second Great Migration. With the demise of legalised segregation in the 1960s and greatly improved economic opportunities in the South in the subsequent decades, millions of blacks have returned to the South from other parts of the country since 1980 in what has been called the New Great Migration.