The Mark of the Great Migrations

A PHENOMENON LINKED TO THE CYCLES OF GLOBALIZATION, IT STOPS TRAGICALLY WHEN THE CULTURE OF OPENNESS IS REPLACED BY THAT OF NATIONALISM AND POPULISM. BOCCONI RESEARCHERS STUDY THIS PHENOMENON FOLLOWING DIFFERENT ROUTES

by Andrea Colli, Department of Social and Political Sciences

According to the World Bank’s statistics, the international migrant stock (including 16-20 million refugees) is today well over 240 million people, that is, little more than 3% of the total World population. In 1960, the stock of total migrants was far smaller, slightly more than 70 million, growing slowly to 100 million only a quarter of century later, in 1985. Then, a sudden acceleration: 152 million in 1990, 190 in 2005, up to the present level.
Migration is indeed a primary ingredient, as well as a consequence, of globalization, defined as the free-flow of goods and trade, of capital, of ideas and of course people. All the globalization waves of the past (and above all the one which preceded the present) have been characterized by an intense stream of people crisscrossing the globe, benefitting from new technologies of transport and communication.

One of the most “iconic”, famed, and best remembered tragedies of the modern era is the sinking of RMS Titanic, on a foggy night in mid-April 1912. Pop-imagery and culture, however, does not do enough justice to the event. The Titanic was a passenger transatlantic. It was carrying first-class wealthy, influential and famous people, but a very large portion of its over 2,200 passengers, and an overwhelming portion of those who lost their lives, were travellers in the second and third classes. They were mostly migrants crossing the Atlantic, some for the first time, some heading back to their chosed new motherland. The Titanic’s tragedy is a touching and sad outcome of this travelled, interconnected, networked, globalized World.

At the peak of its activity, between 1900 and 1914, something like 5 to 10 thousand people per day passed through the gates of immigration on Ellis Island. Europeans sailed everywhere, even to the most remote regions of the globe, such as Australia, New Zealand, Siberia. Asians moved as well: a massive Chinese migration, for instance, invested the American continent during the last decades of the nineteenth century. It is almost impossible to say how many migrants crossed the oceans and continents in an unprecedented flow of human beings. According to some rough calculations, between 1840 and the first world war about 30 million people migrated from Europe to the US. But migrations involved the whole of Asia and Far East too, and of course Central and South America. According to recent estimates, there were about 120 million migrants, more than 7% of the World population at the time (and twice today’s level).

These diasporas, of course, revolutionized and disrupted local societies and labor markets, ending often in harsh anti-immigration movements.

The nineteenth-century “ICT revolution”, and the time-space shrinking which followed, provided other opportunities and incentives for moving, at an increasingly cheap price, to a very different category of travellers. Thomas Cook, a British entrepreneur who had founded a travel agency, regularly sold organized trips in Continental Europe (included the highly targeted Swiss Alps) and Africa (where it organized exotic cruises on the Nile). In 1872, Cook offered for the first time a seven month “World Tour package” to a species of humans which was quickly multiplying: tourists.

Tourism was indeed a form of exploration. Vast regions of the globe were still unknown, not even to geographers, and new technology provided opportunities not available before: Amundsen successfully completed the North-western passage between 1903 and 1906, travelling from Greenland to Alaska by ship. In the meantime, Africa was a prized target for Victorian explorers like the legendary David Livingstone, while geographers were travelling into the unknown Central Asia territories and deserts, mapping rivers and Himalayan peaks – and also keeping under close scrutiny the very similar behavior of the Tsar’s secret agents, in an endless “Great Game”.

Other people also travelled, neither for necessity, or pleasure, nor for espionage: travels could indeed give access to knowledge, under various forms, a knowledge which could therefore be transferred in the country of origin. “Learning Travels” were a standard practice of the European high-class already during the Eighteenth century, and in general aimed at providing, or strengthening, the level of education and sociability of those undertaking them.

All in all, the experience of the mass migrations of the first globalization tells us a relevant message. Besides innovations in transport and communication techniques, migrations were possible thanks to another, indispensable pre-condition of cultural nature – the propensity to openness, exchange and the curiosity of the “unknown” common to many intellectuals, statesmen, and “influencers” of the time.  It was the idea of global citizenship as a distinctive feature of the “modern” World, and a natural consequence of the growing global openness and inter-connections: in a word, “cosmopolitanism”. Globalization was made in equal proportion by technology, and by a culture of openness – the first being useless without the second. When nationalism and closure started to prevail over openness (in part, as its unintended consequence), the whole architecture of the nineteenth-century global world went to pieces.

Global migrations ended in the tragedy of two World Wars – during which people started to travel sometimes over long distances in order to give death, or to die, as thirteen thousand young Australians, Indians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli did against the Ottomans. Others wandered in search of a place where to live, as did ten million displaced refugees, Jews, Germans, Polish and Italian Istrians expelled from their homes after 1945. A grave lesson to (hopefully) remember.

Read more about this topic:
Massimo Anelli. The Political Costs of Emigration
Alessandra Casarico. Market Benefits for Legalized Immigrants
Carlo Devillanova. The Uninformed Find the Door to Healthcare Shut
Joseph-Simon Goerlach. Moving from the South to the North Improves Your Salary. But Not Your Wealth
Paolo Pinotti. Foreign Students at School: How to Break Educational Segregation
Graziella Romeo. The Contradictions of the European Legal System