\chapter[Migrations in the 19th and 20th century]{Migrations in the XIXth and XXth century: contribution to capitalism's history}


\chapterauthor{Caroline Andréani}




Men have always migrated and one can legitimately ask the question of why capitalism would have a particular responsibility for migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Wouldn't this be a view of the mind, a bias against a system that, after all, only takes advantage of a natural phenomenon attested since prehistoric times, human migrations?

Traditionally, migration historians have broken down the causes of migration into two poles: repulsive causes and attractive causes.
Repulsive causes are the set of reasons that can push individuals to leave their place of life: misery, famines, wars, political or religious conflicts.
Attractive causes are the search for new land and the attraction of fortune. The same then make subtle distinctions between \enquote{spontaneous} and organized migrations.

Such definitions obviously guide the perception that one can have of migratory phenomena. First, repulsive causes and attractive causes combine in the majority of cases.
It is hard to imagine an individual driven from his home for many reasons looking for a place to live the same misery and persecution.
Second, the very notion of \enquote{spontaneous} migration is fallacious. Do we migrate spontaneously when fleeing intolerable political or economic situations?
It would probably be more appropriate to talk about forced migration and individual or collective routes.

Migration is in essence the consequence of extreme situations where the individual has as an escape only the departure to an unknown place and destiny.
It is then probably possible to distinguish between social advancement routes and survival migrations.
The social advancement route is planned by individuals who leave their place of residence with a medium- and long-term strategy of social advancement, for themselves or for the next generation.
Survival migration is the immediate response to intolerable situations: people flee to ensure their survival.
This type of migration often takes on a long-term character that the persons concerned had not originally expected.

Over the period in question, I will propose a classification — with the limits that any classification implies — distinguishing:
colonial migration, economic migration, and political migration. The two can also be combined.


\section{Colonial migration} 

Colonial migrations were initiated by the colonization of the Americas as early as the sixteenth century. While population flows are regular, they remain limited by the weakness of technical means.
It is estimated that the number of Spaniards who went to colonize Latin America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries amounted to 2 million individuals, the Portuguese to 1 million.
The African slave trade would represent, for the same period, between 7 and 9 million individuals\footnote{Figures on trafficking are controversial, with some putting forward the highly unlikely estimate of 100 million Africans deported. 
This does not stand up to analysis, especially when one takes into account the population density of Africa and the transport capacities of ships crossing the Atlantic.}.

The influence of capitalism on migration finds its first expression here.
Faced with the material problem of the \enquote{development} of Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese quickly compensated for the disappearance of Indian slaves by importing a workforce from Africa.
Captured, transported as vulgar commodities, African slaves are employed in mines and farms for the benefit of the European, Spanish and Portuguese elites, soon Dutch, French and English.

In the nineteenth century, the attention of Europeans turned to Asia, Oceania and Africa. Not that these continents have not been known before.
But the combined phenomena of the development of industrial capitalism and its imperatives (access to low-cost raw materials, development of new consumer markets, etc.),
and the development of technical means, facilitate conquests and allow the maintenance of the European presence in continents hitherto difficult to access.

Population flows were less to these continents than to the Americas. 
Despite a strong ideological incitement, textbooks, colonial exhibitions, travelogues of geographical societies, religious propaganda magnifying the colonial enterprise, the millions of Europeans who were candidates for emigration preferred in their majority other destinations.

Economic necessity drove Europeans to leave for the colonies. 
The testimony of Marguerite Duras on the small French settlers in Indochina\footnote{\emph{Le barrage contre le Pacifique}(The dam against the Pacific)Paris, 1950}, that of Simenon in his report published in 1932 in \emph{Voilà} on colonial Africa, clearly show the springs of these departures: 
a blocked future in metropolitan France, the possibility of living better in countries where, even without money, the European inevitably has an advantage over the colonized. 
In his report entitled \enquote{The Hour of the Negro}, Simenon leaves no ambiguity: 
\enquote{He (the European settler) will also leave because there, he has a boy who waxes his shoes and he can yell at him! 
He will leave mainly because he has no other future, because places are scarce in France. (...) 
There where, at least, the fact of being white, the last of the whites, is already a superiority...}


Nineteenth-century politicians and theorists had advocated settlements. This bet was successful in Oceania:
Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania have become, like North America, colonies populated almost entirely by Europeans.
The English colonization left virtually no chance of survival for the Pacific peoples. The Tasmanians were completely exterminated\footnote{The last Tasmanian died in 1874.}.
Aboriginal Australians and Maori of New Zealand were massacred, turned back to the least productive land, herded into reserves\footnote{At the end of the eighteenth century, the Aborigines were probably between 300,000 and 400,000 spread throughout the country. In 1989, there were 40,000 and 30,000 mixed. 
Recently, the Australian government was questioned about a policy carried out since the 1950s which consisted of removing Aboriginal children from their families and entrusting them to state institutions... 
Hundreds of children have been victims of these practices.}.
They still do not stop dying slowly at the moment: unemployment, delinquency, alcoholism are their daily lot.

The colonization of Australia began in the late eighteenth century.
The British were careful to prevent the settlement of non-European populations, including Chinese and Japanese. 
First populated by convicts (they were 150,000 in the mid-nineteenth century), Australia then attracted breeders, then gold miners from 1851 with the discovery of gold resources. 
This colonization continued late since from 1946, the Australian government favored the settlement of 1,500,000 migrants, mainly British. 
This migratory movement continues to this day: since the end of apartheid, many \enquote{petty whites}\rfootnote{(\emph{Petits blancs} in the original, whose literal translation is \emph{little whites}, an expression refering to poor whites settlers.
White trash sounded too lumpen, little sounded like it was referring to height.)} from South Africa have settled in Australia.

Europeans have also tried to turn parts of Africa into settlements. 
South Africa and Rhodesia were frequent destinations for English migrants from 1806, when England took possession of the territory.
In addition to the pre-existing European colonization\footnote{Since the seventeenth century, Dutch and French migrants (Huguenots driven out by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes) have settled in South Africa, constituting a first nucleus of European settlement. 
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, before the arrival of the British, this settlement remained restricted. 
Confined to the Cape Province, it then included 80,000 people, including about 16,000 Europeans.}, there was a massive English colonization from 1820 onwards. 
This European population will experience another important surge from the 1860s with the discovery of gold and diamond mines. 
The English colonization then invents the large-scale deportation of colonized from other continents: 
between 1860 and 1909, 120,000 Indians were sent to South Africa to work in conditions of quasi-slavery in the mining industry.

Other attempts ended in failure. From 1870, the France wanted to transform Algeria into a settlement. 
Through a policy of automatic naturalization of Jewish Algerians (1870) and Europeans (1896), it succeeded in artificially increasing the European population. 
France sought to attract would-be emigrants by offering them land\footnote{The ravages of phylloxera in the vineyards (1878) actually pushed many wine farmers from the Midi to settle in Algeria.}. 
These peasant settlers were quickly overtaken by land restructuring, victims of the big settlers and financial companies that dispossessed them. 
The European population remained confined to the cities and ultimately grew little: it did not reach one million men in 1954\footnote{Europeans were 109,000 in 1847, 272,000 in 1872, 578,000 in 1896, 829,000 in 1921, 984,000 in 1954.}. 
The war and the adherence of the majority of the European population to the repression of the Algerian national movement, then the policy of the OAS, pushed Europeans to leave Algeria in 1962, at the time of independence.

Finally, the last example of French colonization of settlement, New Caledonia. Annexed by the France in 1853, it first served as a prison. 
Here too, the deportations of populations were used.
Faced with the resistance of the Kanak population (and the risk of its complete disappearance), the French \enquote{imported} from 1893 Japanese workers to work in the nickel mines, and Tonkinese migrants from 1924 under employment contracts that left them without any defense against the local French employers.
But the example of New Caledonia is interesting because of the voluntary policy of minorization of the Kanak people carried out rationally from 1972, at the instigation of the Prime Minister of the time, Pierre Messmer.

The latter, in a letter to the Minister of the DOM-TOM*\rfootnote{DOM-TOM :\emph{ Départements d'Outre Mer-Territoires d'Outre Mer} which means oversea departments- oversea territories.}, wrote then: 
\enquote{New Caledonia, a settlement colony, although doomed to multiracial variety, is probably the last non-independent tropical territory in the world where a developed country can emigrate its nationals. (...)}\rfootnote{Missing end quote in original text}

\begin{quote}
\enquote{In the short and medium term, the massive immigration of metropolitan French citizens or citizens from overseas departments (Reunion), should make it possible to avoid this danger (a nationalist demand, Editor's note), by maintaining and improving the digital relationship of communities. (...)

The success of this undertaking, which is essential to the maintenance of French positions east of Suez, depends, among other conditions, on our ability to finally succeed, after so many failures in our history, in an overseas settlement operation.} \end{quote}

Let us bet that the current situation in New Caledonia, a consequence of the implementation of this policy, pursued by all the governments that succeeded that of Pierre Messmer, reinforces the latter in his analyses.


\section{Economic migration}

European migration took on a truly massive character from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards with the industrial revolution that transformed the economies of some Western European countries - first and foremost England, Germany and France - mostly rural into economies of an industrial nature.

The English peasants were among the first to bear the brunt of the industrial revolution.  From the beginning of the nineteenth century, England caught in a global process of economic transformation, reformed its agricultural production. 
Agriculture, competing on the English domestic market by European and colonial agriculture, was replaced by livestock.  The English peasants who had become useless were driven off the land. 
The inability of infant industries to absorb all of this workforce forced many English to move to North America, India, Africa and Oceania.
From 1825 to 1920, 17 million Englishmen left their country\footnote{80\% of them settled in the United States and Canada, 11\% in Australia, 5\% in South Africa.}.

Germany experienced a similar phenomenon: between 1820 and 1933, 6 million Germans emigrate to the United States, Brazil and Argentina. 
Most European countries, including Eastern Europe\footnote{From 1875 to 1913, 4 million nationals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire emigrated. From 1900 to 1914, Russia had only 2.5 million emigrants, many of them Poles and Jews driven out by intensifying religious persecution.}, with a time lag in relation to Western Europe, are experiencing these phenomena of emigration. 
United States and Latin America absorbs the bulk of European emigrants.

France is a special case. Its lack of demographic dynamism – the nineteenth-century France is a sparsely populated country – combined with the fact that its agriculture resisted better than English agriculture during the industrial revolution, makes this country a pole of immigration.

The case of Ireland in the nineteenth century is exemplary. Ireland was then a rural country whose inhabitants were largely small farmers living on tiny farms. 
Between 1814 and 1841, Ireland's population grew from 6 million to 8 million.
Crop failures following potato disease from 1846 to 1851 caused famines. 
Combined with cholera epidemics, they are responsible for the disappearance of a million people. 
In the same period, one million Irish left their country for England, Australia, Canada or the United States. This migratory flow is not drying up.

The majority of Irish migrants embarked for the United States\footnote{Between 1876 and 1926, 84\% of Irish emigrants left for the United States.}, until around the 1920s when restrictive laws blocked their entry into the United States.
From then on, migratory flows shifted towards Great Britain.  The United States offered greater opportunities for promotion and social success than England. 
They also showed greater religious tolerance than England, a colonizing country - Ireland would gain its independence in 1921 - and an oppressor.

In 1890, the Irish outnumbered the irish outside the country than in Ireland itself.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Irish developed a culture of emigration. 
The price of the boat for the crossing of the United States was collected at the level of the family network and the neighborhood. 
It could also be sent by family members already settled abroad. 
Disembarked in the United States, Canada, Australia, the Irish migrant was never isolated because he found networks of mutual aid.  
Arriving in the host country, he joined the migrants who had preceded him, settling in the same city and in the same neighborhood.
The mutual aid network welcomed him, housed him, and gave him a job.


Although rural, Irish migrants in countries of immigration have settled in the majority in cities. 
Poorly skilled even in the field of agriculture, they had greater opportunities for survival in urban areas. 
In 1940, 90\% of the Irish in the United States were spread out in cities. 
Half of them lived in the five largest American cities, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco.

In their way of migrating and settling with a focus on community-based relationships, the Irish in the United States did not differ from other migrants at the same time: 
Italians, Russians, Armenians, Eastern European Jews, Chinese, Japanese, etc. proceed in the same way by recreating networks of sociability with their compatriots in the host country. 
For the migrant, it is a question of reconstituting a privileged social space. For him, it is a question of survival in an environment that is generally hostile. 
It was not until the second generation that these privileged relationships faded. They continue thanks to political, cultural, religious associations, etc.

Without over-extrapolating, we realize that \enquote{community} solidarities\footnote{The term \enquote{community} is, like the term \enquote{ethnicity}, of delicate use.  It assumes that migrants from the same country form a coherent whole, with collective and identity reactions. 
Nothing is less certain. There are networks of sociability, more or less well organized.
In this case, in the absence of a more suitable term, this term refers to the reception network around the migrant, his family, his neighbors, relationships ...} — solidarity in departure, solidarity in arrival, solidarity in integration processes — still function in the same way today.

Economic migration is not necessarily intercontinental migration.  In many cases, migration is transcontinental migration, or even internal migration.

France, a country of immigration since the nineteenth century, welcomed since the 1850s Belgians, Poles, Italians, Spaniards, attracted by the employment opportunities offered by the country. 
At the same time, this demand was partly met by internal migration in the country. 
Rural French people left their land very early to migrate to the cities in search of a complementary income\footnote{Many rural French, Spanish or Italian people sought paid employment during the off-peak seasons, which they left to return to cultivate and harvest. 
This is the case whenever a farm is too small to support the family.  In some cases, it is the children who offer their services in this way, while waiting to settle in turn on the family farm.} or more remunerative work. 
The nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century saw men and women from the most repulsive regions leave their \enquote{country} to work \enquote{in the city}. 
It can be the capital of the canton as the regional capital or Paris. Their routes are often similar to intercontinental migrations. 
Bretons, Corsicans, Auvergnats, to name the most numerous, arrive in the city where they welcome solidarity networks similar to those of foreign migrants.

The reactions against them are not tender. How many texts, newspaper articles to denounce these provincials as \enquote{dirty}, \enquote{crude}, \enquote{unassimilable}... 
How many others to explain that the Poles do not practice \enquote{the same Christianity} as the French and that they are not able to integrate into French society.

In all cases, there is a phenomenon of competition on the labour market between nationals and migrants, exacerbated in the event of economic difficulties, and which employers know how to take advantage of to lower wages.

France of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century experienced numerous abuses against migrants. 
The North and Pas-de-Calais were agitated throughout this period by caning, manhunts and collective expulsions. 
In 1892, in Drocourt, in the Pas-de-Calais, the French population organized to expel the Belgian families settled in the village. 
Among the most dramatic abuses, the pogrom of which the Italians were victims in Aigues-Mortes in 1893 caused many wounded and deaths.

This type of collective violence seems to be banned today. Although the chronicles of the news are rich in attacks and murders of a racist nature. 
The young man thrown into the Seine in Paris on May 1, 1995, during the demonstration of the National Front by a group of skinheads shows how temptations and risks exist.


\section{Politically motivated migration}

Politically motivated migration is a thing of history. Many could be cited. 
They result in massive migrations of populations, some of which disappear almost completely from the places where they traditionally lived.

Among the most important, if a hierarchy is possible, we must speak of the migrations of Eastern European Jews driven out by pogroms and persecutions throughout the nineteenth century. 
This classic phenomenon of exacerbation of hatred and use of racism in a general context of transformation of European societies came to a head with the Second World War and the systematic extermination of Jews carried out by the Nazis. 
The Jews of Eastern Europe who escaped extermination chose in their great majority to expatriate, to Israel, the United States, western Europe. In some countries, Poland for example, Jews have practically disappeared.

The genocide perpetrated by the Turks and Kurds against the Armenians between 1915 and 1923 had similar consequences. 
Massacres and population displacements orchestrated by the Turkish authorities of the time left no choice to the Armenians who had to flee Cilicia, a region of Asia Minor where they had lived for centuries. 
While some of them joined Soviet Armenia, many others took refuge in Europe and the United States. 
Along with the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War, the Armenian genocide remains one of the greatest traumas of the twentieth century.

The twentieth century is rich in political and military events that forced entire peoples to flee. 
No continent is exempt from these phenomena, which are all problems left unresolved and which promise future conflicts: Palestinians, Saharawis, etc. 
For some, the wait has been going on for decades.

The misery orchestrated by the capitalist system, in which countries are kept, is more than ever conducive to the development of fascist ideologies ranging from Islamism to ethnicism.
Currently, peoples and their leaders have fewer and fewer demands in terms of revolution and resistance to the established order, and more and more in terms of opposition between peoples, populations, ethnicities, communities, etc. 
Many countries are experiencing situations of implosion, which result in internal conflicts and the departure of population groups: this is the case in Mauritania, Rwanda, Burundi...


\section{The current situation}

While Europeans made up the bulk of migrants in the nineteenth century, from the 1920s to the 1930s, flows became scarce. 
The great change came after the Second World War: it was then the peoples of other continents who became candidates for migration.

This is not really new. Since the First World War, European countries have asked their colonies to send men into battle, but also to compensate for the lack of manpower. 
French industry thus solicited Indochinese, Algerians, Moroccans, some of whom remained in metropolitan France after the conflict. 
In the same movement, recruiters brought to France, as early as the 1910s, several hundred Chinese for a limited period of time, who were employed as labourers, workers, nurses, etc.

Mass migration began after the Second World War. 
Recruiters are then numerous and determined to bring in cheap labor, which can not have significant requirements in terms of social protection and comfort of life, at the request of large mining, automotive, construction and public works companies. 
These were all sectors that required a low-skilled workforce accepting difficult working conditions.

The turning point took place in the 1970s. Faced with the economic crisis that is looming, in the face of industrial restructuring, the French government announces its desire for \enquote{zero immigration}. 
France, like Western Europe, no longer needs migrants. They cannot, according to a formula that will make a fortune later, \enquote{welcome all the misery of the world}.

As a result, rich countries set up legal barriers and a police arsenal to restrict the entry into their territories of these migrants from countries sometimes described as \enquote{Third World countries}, \enquote{underdeveloped countries}, \enquote{developing countries}, \enquote{countries of the South}...

This policy is mixed with a practice of great hypocrisy which consists in employing migrants, preferably in an illegal situation, in companies at prices lower than nationals. 
By imposing wages below the wages commonly applied, companies know that in the more or less long term, it is everyone's wages that will fall.

For example, California's large farms employ illegal Mexican workers in plain sight. 
It is Mexican workers who are hunted down by U.S. police when crossing borders, while the companies that exploit them are never worried. 
The same hypocrisy has prevailed and still prevails in France where, in the name of competition, contractors impose prices that do not allow subcontractors to earn a living, except to use hidden work.

But the most distorted view comes from the French political debate. 
Indeed, listening to each other's speeches, one might think that hordes of hungry people are at our borders, ready to sweep over France and Europe. 
It is not measuring current realities. Indeed, migration flows to rich countries are very much in the minority. 
They account for barely a fifth of global migration flows, which is small.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, most would-be emigrants have very few funds to begin with. 
They are therefore part of migration processes that are more about survival than anything else. 
For example, these 1.5 million Asian women, now registered as migrants, go to offer their services in very low-skilled occupations (housekeepers, domestic workers) or for prostitution.
Some suffer situations that are practically slavery. 
Pakistani or Filipino migrants, for example, forced to move to the Gulf States - major recruiters of labour from the Third World - have their passports confiscated as soon as they arrive and are forced to work under any conditions.

The case of a Sarah Balabagan\rfootnote{Sarah Balabagan, is a Filipina who was employed as a housemaid in the United Arab Emirates. She killed her employer in self-defense while he was trying to rape her.
 She was sentenced to seven years imprisonment and ordered to pay 150,000 dirhams (US\$40,000) in blood money to her employer's relatives, while at the same time awarded 100,000 dirhams (US\$27,000) as compensation for the rape.
However, the prosecution appealed the verdict, calling for the death penalty. On September 6, 1995, a second Islamic court found no evidence of rape and convicted her of premeditated murder, sentencing her to death by firing squad.
At her third trial, her sentence was reduced to a year's imprisonment and 100 cane strokes , along with payment of blood money.}, or, closer to us, a Véronique Akobé\rfootnote{Véronique Akobé, an undocumented Ivorian woman who have been employed as a maid by a Grasse industrial. She was raped by her employer and his son.
At the third collective rape, she wounded her boss and killed his son. Arrested in 1987, sentenced to 20 years in jail in 1990, she was pardoned in 1996}, are indicative of the new conditions available to migrants: more and more precariousness, less and less security.

The second reason is the restrictions on emigration to rich countries, which are implementing increasingly repressive strategies against migrants. 
While the rich countries have directly benefited from the impoverishment of the countries of the Third World, constituting part of their wealth on the plundering of resources, feeding on their underdevelopment and indebtedness, they now refuse to take charge of the logical consequences of this situation.

Third reason, capitalism is a system in constant evolution and adaptation. Today, the technical constraints are different from those that prevailed in the 1950s. 
Why produce in rich countries where it is necessary to pay — more or less — correctly for labour and to respect the laws of labour, when it is enough to relocate the units of production to benefit from a workforce whose wage is so low that it becomes marginal in the total cost of production. 
This is how the weight of the salary on the price of a pair of Nike shoes represents 0.125\% of its selling price... It is easy to understand that Moulinex closes its production plants in Alençon to settle in Mexico.

In all eras, capitalism has been able to stimulate large migratory flows for its needs. When he did not directly stimulate them, it knew how to take advantage of them. 
We are currently living in a period of transition where migration is no longer necessarily a benefit for capitalism as before.

\rauthor{Caroline Andreani}

Caroline Andreani is a historian.

