Of course the greatest "failures" at home were the Africans who were
captured and enslaved. People think failure is "personal" (and that
explains so much about out whole national attidude towards poverty,
education, health care, etc.) But often, failure is way beyond your
control that was true for the women shipped to Jamestown in 1619 to be
wives; the convicts shipped to many colonies, the indentured servants
sent by their parents, etc.
Paul
Debra Jackson/Harold Forsythe wrote:
> It should be obvious from all the cases that Paul has just cited that no
> unitary explanation of the history of migration is possible. My
> shorthand
> take on the general problem is that the majority of migrants are economic
> migrants while a minority are ideological: religious in the early modern
> era and political in the modern era. This latter category contains
> chiefly
> people whose economic situation in their place of origin is
> satisfactory but
> there are other push factors. i.e. ideological oppression that forces
> them
> to choose migration. These are all push factors.
> The pull factors I think chiefly motivate (as Doug Deal has already
> noted) where people migrate not if they migrate.
> But as I say, this is just my shorthand hypothesis and while I
> teach it
> as an hypothesis. I don't insist on its full explanatory power.
> There are
> exceptions.
>
> As to the cases that Paul brings up, first the Irish. At least a
> million Irish had migrated to Br. North America and the US BEFORE the
> potato
> famine of the 1840s. That is, political oppression of the British regime
> against Catholics in Ireland had already pushed many Irish out; those
> staving from the famine followed an established line of migration to
> the US.
> Two million more at least were to follow after 1850.
> Southern Italy was at the heights of the first phase of the
> demographic
> transition (first drop in death rates, continued high birth rate;
> second,
> birth rate drops to level population growth.) Migration from the Italian
> north preceeded that from the south, but the migration from the south of
> Italy was massive because there were just too many mouths to feed. It is
> important also to note that people fleeing a country experiencing massive
> population growth that is not absorbed through intensifying
> agriculture or
> industrial expansion, not only do themselves a favor by migrating but
> help
> the people they leave behind by aiding in real wage growth by making
> labor
> more scarce.
> Remember what was going on in China in the 1850s: the Taiping
> Rebellion
> (1852-1864) the most devastating war in terms of lives lost in the 19th
> century. The push factor for Chinese in the 1850 and 1860s is
> obvious. The
> pull factor was the demand for labor on the Pacific Coast of the US.
>
> Doug Deal is right to doubt that migrants are failures. They are
> rather
> victims of circumstances. Australia is a great test case. People
> undesireable in the UK were shipped as unwilling migrants to the ends
> of the
> earth. Given immense land resources, these unwanted Irish and English
> developed a rich agricultural society in the 19th century and an
> industrial
> power in the 20th century.
> But love of place seems to be a universal. Why else do we talk so
> fondly of Virginia? I imagine that planning to leave one's home place
> forever was never an easy decision so some amount of desperation must
> have
> figured into the calculation.
>
> Harold S. Forsythe
> Visiting Fellow (2005-2006)
> Program in Agrarian Studies
> Yale University
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Finkelman" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, December 04, 2005 11:07 AM
> Subject: Re: explaining migration
>
>
>> like the Irish in the 1840s? or Southern Italians and Eastern European
>> Jews in the late 19th century? Or the Chinese in the 1850s? Or even
>> the Cubans after 1959? They lost a civil war (revolution) and left.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>> J. Douglas Deal wrote:
>>
>>> There are indeed "push" (why leave place A) and "pull" (why go to
>>> place B)
>>> factors involved in any and every act of migration. But the suggestion
>>> that we were a magnet for people who had failed miserably somewhere
>>> else
>>> and had no other options just doesn't ring true. It could be said
>>> instead
>>> that people who migrate are risk-takers, adventurers, and enterprisers
>>> looking for opportunities that match their talents and aspirations. The
>>> key is how people adapt to failure or any other adversity, wherever
>>> they
>>> are. Sure, there will always be an admixture of restless misfits among
>>> those on the move, but my reading of our history and my observations of
>>> out-migration from today's "rust belt" (the people leaving are young,
>>> talented, ambitious--not failures at all) lead me to think that
>>> migration
>>> is a positive selection process (adaptation via drastic change in
>>> environment--which change always entails a rocky period of
>>> "adjustment"),
>>> not a negative one. Failures and "losers" typically stay put,
>>> tethered by
>>> inertia or genuine lack of options.
>>>
>>> Douglas Deal
>>> Professor of History and Chair of History Department
>>> State University of New York at Oswego
>>> Oswego, NY 13126
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>> (315)-312-5632
>>>
>>> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the
>>> instructions
>>> at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Paul Finkelman
>> Chapman Distinguished Professor of Law
>> University of Tulsa College of Law
>> 3120 East 4th Place
>> Tulsa, OK 74104-3189
>>
>> 918-631-3706 (office)
>> 918-631-2194 (fax)
>>
>> [log in to unmask]
>>
>> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the
>> instructions
>> at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
>>
>
> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
> at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
--
Paul Finkelman
Chapman Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Tulsa College of Law
3120 East 4th Place
Tulsa, OK 74104-3189
918-631-3706 (office)
918-631-2194 (fax)
[log in to unmask]
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