European migration patterns show a dispersion throughout the world. African migration patterns show concentrated numbers migrating to Europe and the Americas. How could you use history to propose a possible connection between these two migration patterns?
Answers
Answer:
well its easy
Explanation:
Africa is often seen as a continent of mass migration and displacement caused by poverty, violent conflict and environmental stress. Yet such perceptions are based on stereotypes rather than theoretically informed empirical research. Drawing on the migration and visa databases from the Determinants of International Migration (DEMIG project) and the Global Bilateral Migration Database (GBMD), this paper explores the evolution and drivers of migration within, towards and from Africa in the post-colonial period. Contradicting common ideas of Africa as a ‘continent on the move’, the analysis shows that intra-African migration intensities have gone down. This may be related to state formation and the related imposition of barriers towards free movement in the wake of decolonisation as well as the concomitant rise of nationalism and inter-state tensions. While African migration remains overwhelmingly intra-continental, since the late 1980s there has been an acceleration and spatial diversification (beyond colonial patterns) of emigration out of Africa to Europe, North America, the Gulf and Asia. This diversification of African emigration seems partly driven by the introduction of visa and other immigration restrictions by European states. Contradicting conventional interpretations of African migration being essentially driven by poverty, violence and underdevelopment, increasing migration out of Africa seems rather to be driven by processes of development and social transformation which have increased Africans’ capabilities and aspirations to migrate, a trend which is likely to continue in the future.
The idea that much African migration is essentially driven by poverty ignores evidence that demographic and economic transitions and ‘development’ in poor countries are generally associated to increasing rather than decreasing levels of mobility and migration and that the relation between development and migration is fundamentally non-linear. This argument was originally put forward by (Zelinsky, 1971) in his Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition. Zelinsky argued that processes of modernisation and economic development have historically coincided with increasing rural-to-urban migration followed by a subsequent increase in emigration. When societies become wealthy emigration decreases and immigration increases, leading to a mobility or migration transition, in which countries gradually transform from countries of net emigration into countries of net immigration. These ideas about a ‘migration transition theory’ have been further developed (De Haas, 2010; Martin & Taylor, 1996; Skeldon, 1997) and empirically tested using historical (Hatton & Williamson, 1998) and contemporary (Clemens, 2014; Czaika & De Haas, 2012; De Haas, 2010) data sources.
Such insights turn the predictions of conventional ‘push-pull’ models or neoclassical theories that predict that migration decreases as societies develop and income and other geographical opportunity gaps decrease upside down. In reality most migrants do not move from the poorest to the wealthiest countries, and the poorest countries tend to have lower levels of emigration than middle-income and wealthier countries. To understand why development is generally associated to more migration, it is important to move beyond views of (African) migrants as objects which are passively pushed around by external ‘push’ factors such as poverty, demographic pressure, violent conflict or environmental degradation, analogous to the way physical objects are attracted or repelled by gravitational or electromagnetic forces.