Appendix I Types of Migration

Appendix I Types of Migration As well as in stages, migration can be analysed according to different types and several typologies of migration have been developed (Cohen 1997; Manning 2005). At the most basic level we distinguish simply between ‘external’ and ‘internal’. External migration takes place ‘from inside to outside’, or between two ‘worlds’; whereas internal migration takes place ‘inside’ or within a ‘world’ – usually defined as a state or nation. Making a further distinction, we interpret external migration as either emigration (out-migration) or immigration (in-migration), according to whether our focus is mainly on the leaving or the arriving of the migrants. Since one person’s emigration is another’s immigration, it is well to realise that they are two aspects of the same process – migration – rather than two separate processes. Although the ‘worlds’ from which migrants emigrate and into which they immi- grate are usually defined as states or nations, we should also note that writers about migration sometimes define ‘old worlds’ and ‘new worlds’ as units smaller than that of the state or nation. In the Irish case these ‘worlds’ might be provinces, counties, towns, parishes or townlands, and someone writing about what is technically ‘internal’ migration between, say, Cork and Dublin, or Belfast and London, might refer to it as movement between the ‘the world of Cork’ and ‘the world of Dublin’, or ‘the world of Belfast’ and ‘the world of London’, as if it were ‘external migration’. Thus, even though it takes place within the ‘world’ of the nation or state, internal migration may be treated as if it were external migration in cases where it is thought of as taking place between two of the many different ‘worlds’ from which that of the nation or state is constructed. This close relationship between internal and external migration is particularly evident in the case of migration between Ireland and Britain before Partition in 1920, and after between Northern Ireland and Britain: whereas a Unionist might think of moving to Britain as internal migration within the United Kingdom, a Nationalist might think of it as emigration. Unless qualified otherwise, we have used ‘internal migration’ in this book to mean migration within the island of Ireland. Having clarified the distinction between internal and external, we can distinguish further types of migration according to the motivation of the migrants and the duration of their migrant ‘stream’ (Peterson 1958). According to motivation, migration may be either ‘voluntary’ or ‘forced’. In broad terms, people migrate when their economic situ- ation is relatively poor or when their personal security is in danger, as from natural dis- asters or political conflict (Bauder 2006). This may seem straightforward, but in practice it is often difficult to distinguish between those who left ‘voluntarily’ and those who were ‘forced out’ – as in the case of the 44 million who emigrated from Europe between 297 298 Types of Migration 1815 and 1914 (Baines 1986, 9). Not so, however, in the case of the 12 million West Africans who, over more than three centuries of legalised slavery (1502–1865), were taken to the new world (Braziel and Mannur 2003, 2). To the present day a main concern of migration policy is to discriminate between voluntary ‘economic’ migrants and ‘asylum seekers’, who seek to be granted the status of ‘refugee’. Although casually used to mean any displaced person forced to leave their home, as in the case of a natural disaster, ‘refugee’ in the technical, legal sense under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees is defined as: one who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country. So identifying the motivation of migrants also involves consideration of others, especially those causing forced migration. Here we should also note a form of forced migration which is not so obvious: ‘non-mobile’ migration. Although no physical displacement is involved, we can still see at work the core migration process of disassociation, transition and re-association. It is illustrated most clearly perhaps by the redrawing of national boundaries in Europe after the First and Second World Wars when, without physically moving home, millions found themselves moved, for better or worse, out of their ‘old country’ and into a ‘new country’ (Davies 1997, 926–7; Meinhof 2002). Again the obvious Irish case is that of Partition in 1920 when Ireland, then all part of the United Kingdom, was divided into the two new ‘worlds’ of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland (Coakley and O’Dowd 2005; 2007). According to the duration of the ‘stream’, migration may be classified according to the following types: pioneer, chain, seasonal, step and return. Pioneer migrants (whether internal or external) are the first from their families or communities to out- migrate or emigrate to a particular destination. Especially in the case of emigration to a ‘new world’, they may establish a ‘bridgehead’ and subsequently both encourage and assist relations and friends to join them, thereby establishing a ‘chain’ between old world and new which may extend to successive generations. Thus, in chain migration migrants ‘follow in the footsteps’ of the pioneers, as for example in the case of the ‘chain’ established in the late nineteenth century between the Allihies copper mining area of west Cork and the copper mines of Butte, Montana (Emmons 1992, 83; see also Mulligan 2001a; 2001b; 2004). We also see the power of chain migration expressed in the song ‘The Green Fields of America’: the singer remembers ‘the time when old Ireland was flourishing / When most of our tradesmen did work for good pay’ and con- trasts it with the present when ‘the lint-dams are gone and the looms are now idle’ and the tradesmen are gone, including ‘winders of baskets and creels’, ‘journeymen’, ‘ploughboys’ and ‘fiddlers’; concluding that ‘since our manufacturies have crossed the Atlantic / It’s now we must follow to America’ (Moloney 2002, 9). ‘Seasonal migration’, which may be internal or external, takes place between ‘home’ and a semi-permanent place of work elsewhere (as formerly with Irish ‘harvest-workers’ in Britain, and now with Irish construction workers world-wide). Step migration takes place in stages between places, either within a country (internal) or between countries (external), as in the case of those who emigrated from Ireland in pursuit of gold and went first to North America, then on to Australia, and finally to New Zealand (Hearn 2000, 84–5; Fraser 2007). Return migration is out-migration or emigration in reverse: from the new residence back to the old. Types of Migration 299 As well as distinguishing these different aspects or types of migration (internal, external, forced, voluntary, pioneer, chain, seasonal, step, return, non-mobile), we need also to apply the standard method of the social sciences and distinguish more specifically between groups of migrants in terms of their ethnicity, gender, politics (nationality, party or military affiliation), economics (class, occupation), social service (law and order, health, education), religion (creed or denomination) and culture (arts and sciences). Thus, for example, different types of ‘career’ migration, such that of soldiers, police, clergy, teachers, bank officials, domestic servants or musicians, may be singled out for investigation. High-skilled transnational migration of the kind promoted by multi- national corporations tends to result in ‘expatriate’ or ‘sojourner’ patterns of migration. An important special aspect of chain migration is family reunification. In Europe between 1974 and the mid-1990s (as labour immigration was suspended in the wake of the 1974 oil crisis) family reunification exceeded in volume both labour migration and forced migration (P. Mac Éinrí, pers. comm.). Types of migration in global perspective The process of human migration accounts for how groups and individuals have come to be scattered and concentrated around the world in the way that they are today. Taking the long view into the deep past, back to the emergence of Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago, migration is the process that accounts for the peopling of the earth ‘out of Africa’, from our east African ‘homeland’ (Manning 2005, 16–17). We now understand migration as a global process that has shaped the evolution of virtually all societies in the modern world, albeit to varying degrees (Cohen 1995; Lucassen and Lucassen 1997; Hoerder 2002). In contrast to the relatively small scale and slow rate of migration over the millennia, the scale of migration since the sixteenth century has increased enormously, and over the last 30 years in particular (Castles and Miller 1998). Today about 200 million people in the world live outside the country of their birth compared with 1970 when the number was less than half that (Mac Éinrí 2003; International Organisation for Migration 2003). The increase has given rise to the notion of an ‘international migration crisis’, according to which the developed countries of the North are seen as being about to be swamped by floods of migrants driven by poverty, violence and chaos in the South. This has been exac- erbated first by the end of the Cold War and more recently by the events of 11 September 2001, which moved migration – especially refugee migration – to the top of the security agenda (Reimers 1998; Zolberg and Benda 2001). Nonetheless, according to the Global Commission on International Migration (2005), the overwhelming majority of people in the world (6.5 billion) are still settled in their country of birth and the proportion of migrants ‘remains rather modest at around 3 per cent’ (191 million).

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