Crossing Borders Immigaration

Introduction

Immigration is a subject of international agreements, most often bilateral, aimed at protecting the interests of newcomers in their adopted country. Both emigration and immigration is a subject of cooperation between international intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations. Large-scale migrations typically follow political upheavals, natural disasters, and wars. For example, Jews immigrated to the United States after pogroms in tsarist Russia; Chinese immigrated to Hong Kong after the communists came to power in mainland China in 1949; there was an exodus from Hungary after the USSR suppressed the Hungarian uprising in 1956; the Irish immigrated to the United States after the failure of the potato crop in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century; and after World War II, large numbers of immigrants from Europe settled in Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. Another fierce impetus is the search for jobs and a higher standard of living; examples include the immigration of Mexicans and Central Americans into the United States, Africans into France, and Turks into Germany. Countries sometimes have policies that limit immigration either numerically or according to the origin of the immigrants. Thus, after World War I the United States introduced quotas for immigrants based on their country of origin. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Australia and South Africa for many decades excluded immigrants from Asia. Relatively recent trends in immigration have included large numbers of Asians, mostly from Southeast Asia, who settled in Australia, Canada, and the United States after policies that had restricted their entry was liberalized in the period after World War II. Also, large numbers of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent have settled in England, and people from the Maghreb have settled in France. In the 1990s, the increase in immigration from Eastern Europe and Africa led to an upsurge of xenophobia in several western European countries, and to stricter requirements for would-be immigrants into the countries of EU (Julian, 89).

Discussion

Although immigration controls were sometimes imposed, for most of the period to 1945 relatively unfettered immigration was not only allowed but encouraged by the host countries that needed to increase their populations rapidly in order to develop their economies and exploit their territory. In the USA, the waves of immigration have been of immense importance socially and politically. As early as the 1920s politicians were attacking the tendency for everyone to be a 'hyphenated-American'; they were referring to the way US citizens described them as, for example, Italo-American, German-American or Irish-American. Nevertheless, by the middle of the 20th century less than half the US population was a second generation American. Similar examples can be found elsewhere: for example, only Athens itself has a larger urban Greek population than Melbourne in Australia (John, 57).

The golden days of immigrants being welcomed ended sometime during the 1950s, as population and labor levels reached and exceeded optimum levels. It was then that a different type of immigration came to prominence. It was no longer the movement of, often highly skilled, populations from old European ...