T.R.A.D.E. Occasional Papers 7

INTRODUCTION

The phenomenon of movement of people across geographical or political frontiers is as old as civilisation. The underlying causes behind the phenomenon are many and complex. People are by nature migratory and have constantly dispersed under compulsion or voluntarily either to escape from life threatening situations or in search of new places to find, food, water, land, resources or a better livelihood. They have also moved in search of physical security when faced with ethnic strife or invasions by other tribes. Movement of people across borders for commercial purpose is also a centuries old phenomenon. According to an estimate, there are currently about 150 million people living outside their country of birth.

The international migration, in its present sense, began with the slave trade. Around 1442, Portuguese sailors began to enslave Africans transporting them to Europe for use in their own households. It is estimated that some 15 million were brought to Europe and the West Indies to meet the need of intensive field labour in the sugar and tobacco plantations of the Caribbean. The mass migration of slaves was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 and in the USA in 1865. The slave trade was followed by transportation of indentured workers. By the end of 19th Century, in fifty years, about 50 million people (10% of their population) were brought from India and China to work as indentured labour in mines and plantations in the Americas, the Caribbean, Southern Africa and South East Asia. In the USA, workers were brought from Japan. Between 1840-1940 about 59 million people (12% of Europe’s population in 1900) left Europe for the USA, Australia and South Africa. The driving forces for emigration were land scarcity in Europe and the potato famine (push factors) and relatively cheap land abroad (pull factor).

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