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The Global Phenomena of Immigration
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12346 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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1 / 1987 |
3,852 Words |
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Charles Keely
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All over the globe people are on the move. Some are traveling long distances to find work or to share in the high wages of overseas employment, while some are seeking refuge and safe haven. Some want to build a new life altogether, but many have mixed motives.
We tend to think of overseas migration not just as the exception to the rule but as rare, unusual, and even deviant behavior. The image of a nation as a more or less culturally homogeneous and self-reproducing group of people attached to a shared history is an ideal one. Migrants are regarded as strangers who disturb the status quo and threaten the life people have come to know. Although in a statistical sense, fewer people migrate to a foreign country than live out their lives at home, migration is by no means rare. Moreover, migrants often send money home, and so those affected by migration are less rare still. In some countries, everybody is related to or knows an overseas migrant, or has seen the results of higher wages sent home.
It is impossible to enumerate the number of international migrants at any given time. Illegal or undocumented migration prohibits an easy estimate. Is a foreign student a migrant? What if he also works? Is a person on the pilgrimage to Mecca a migrant or does he only become one when he overstays his visa and gets a job? Is a Palestinian in Kuwait for 15 years still a migrant? He and his family (even if born in their adopted country) will probably never become Kuwaiti citizens nor have great hopes of a return to a home west of the Jordan River.
While practically insuperable barriers to an adequate global estimate are a reality, there are nevertheless millions of people on the move with more or less identifiable origins and destinations. These migrants change the lives and fortunes of their families, their regions, and their nations.
Migration around the globe
One can throw a dart at a map of the world and have a good chance of hitting a country involved in large-scale migration. The postwar economic boom in Europe faced manpower shortages. "Guestworkers" were imported from southern European countries like Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal; from Turkey and Yugoslavia; from France's former colonies in North Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco; from the British commonwealth; and from Finland, the poor cousin to other Scandinavian countries.
The economic miracle of postwar Europe petered out after the 1973 oil embargo and price rise. Europe has been in the economic doldrums for the last decade or so, and the labor force in most countries has been steady or has declined only slightly.
The guestworker programs had different effects on the countries that sent workers. Southern European countries bought breathing space while their economies developed. While not matching the growth of the "newly industrialized countries" (NICs) of the Far East, these latter-day entrants to the European Common Market are not just the "poor relations" any more. Italy, for example, is now a net importer of labor (much of it illegal migration) and reportedly has surpassed the British standard of living in the mid-1980s.
Turkey and Yugoslavia, on the other hand,
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