| Migration
and Diffusion
Learn
about migration and diffusion.
Migration
In a world of 100 million immigrant, migration is a major
social phenomenon, as it has been for thousands of years.
While the drama if millions of human beings migrating across
the oceans of the world had been limited to the past few centuries,
when modern shipbuilding and seafaring methods have made this
possible, land, and across smaller bodies of water for many
centuries before that. So the English of today are not necessarily
form England, nor the Malays to Malaysia, nor the Turks to
Turkey. Migration and conquest put them where they are.
Conquest
Conquest is only one of the ways in which people have migrated.
Ahead of conquerors, or sometimes in their wake, vast numbers
of refugees may migrate to escape the carnage or the tyranny
that has often accompanied conquest. Others have migrated,
not of their own volition, but in bondage. Whether on land
or sea, they have been shipped like merchandise to wherever
others wanted them to go. Free populations have also been
involuntarily moved, whether by explosions, forcible resettlements
such as the Ottoman Empire used to repopulate conquered areas
with politically reliable people, or "ethnic cleansing"
which acquired such grim connotations in the Balkans during
the last decade of the twentieth century. Explosions of Indians
and Pakistanis form East Africa in the 1970s, and of fellow
Africans from Nigeria in the 1980s, are part of a pattern
also found in Central Europe: "Deportations and evacuations,
exile and forcible repatriations, compulsory transfers and
panic-stricken flight are and essential part of Central European
history." The peaceful and voluntary movements we think
as immigrations are just one of the ways in which the populations
of the world have been redistributed over the centuries.
|
