Migration

The term migration refers to the forced or voluntary movement of people between one place and another. Immigration has a more limited meaning. It refers to an international movement of people that leads to the permanent settlement of migrants in the country of destination. While studies of migration have focused on particular periods of time and sending and receiving locales—such as the movement of some 30 million Europeans out of the continent between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I or the turn of the twenty-first century flows from the south of the world to the north—historians agree that human mobility has been the norm throughout world history. Some scholars even challenge the actual significance of migration history as a discrete subdiscipline, echoing the famous ...