Emigration

B. S. A. Yeoh, National University of Singapore, Singapore

& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

GlossaryYimin Migrant (Chinese).

A Brief History of Emigration

Usually defined as the departure of persons from theirnative land to settle permanently in another country,emigration has been part of human experience sinceancient times, although it is only with improvements intransportation systems in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies that the volume of emigration flows becamesignificant. Historically, emigration took different formsand had different demographic effects: for example, themovement of intact families to less populous regionstransplanted whole communities and cultures (e.g., theEnglish migration of members of the Puritan religiouscommunity to New England in the seventeenth century,or Jewish emigration to escape pogroms in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries), while that ofyoung, predominantly male, adults resulted in culturalmixing and the formation of creolized families (e.g., themigration of European men to Spanish and PortugueseAmerica; Japanese men leaving to work in the sugarplantations of Hawaii in the nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries; Chinese men as coolie labor to SoutheastAsia; and Indian men as indentured workers to Mauritius,South Africa, Malaya, Fiji, and the Caribbean).

The more spectacular emigrations in recent history interms of geographical and cultural scope have involvedthe transcontinental movements of people from the OldWorld to the New. One of the best-studied emigrationstreams in this respect was the flight of a million Irish onso-called ‘coffin ships’ mainly across the Atlantic to theUnited States during the 1845–52 ‘potato blight’ whichalso killed another million or more. Not all Europeanemigration stemmed from cataclysmic events of course.Between 1850 and 1914, more than 40 million persons ofdifferent occupations and social class left their Europeanbirthplaces for a variety of reasons – one-tenth of themean total population of 400 million and perhaps one-fourth of the labor force. Large numbers, for example,moved from Britain across the Atlantic to the UnitedStates, as well as to settler colonies of the British Empire,including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The vastmajority of the emigrants paid their own fares, although asmall proportion took advantage of government-

sponsored ‘assisted’ emigration schemes, including as-sisted passages under the Empire Settlement Act put inplace to divert British and Irish emigrants from theUnited States to Australia and New Zealand with the aimof populating the white dominions with British stock, aswell as the Sao Paulo scheme aimed at recruiting workers– mainly Italians – for the coffee plantations in Brazil. Itshould be remembered, however, that until the 1830s, theenforced emigration of blacks to the Americas (8 millionbefore 1820) was numerically more important than whiteemigration (2.5 million before the same date).

Empire building in the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies in the hands of European powers was charac-

terized by the expansion of control over trade and ter-

ritory in non-European parts, which in turn generated a

large demand for labor met mainly through the migration

of non-Europeans. During this period, more than

50 million Chinese migrants and 30 million Indian mi-

grants left their homelands, many to seek work oppor-

tunities in European-controlled territories. It should be

noted that among the Chinese in particular, leaving

China was considered a form of ‘sojourning’, a concept

that signified a temporary absence from home which

would come to an end with eventual return. Despite the

fact that some never returned, in the official Chinese

view, there was no concept of permanent emigration;

instead for all intents and purposes, those who leave

China were, as historian Wang Gungwu noted, ‘‘either

sojourners who had gone out to trade and would even-

tually return or defiant lawbreakers who dared not return

for fear of severe punishment.’’ In fact, the word yimin,

the Chinese term for ‘migrant’, implies ‘movement en-

forced by officials away from one’s own land or village’;

traditionally, migration to the Chinese is never a volun-

tary act but rather ‘a great evil or calamity to be avoided’.Mass European emigration reached record levels just

before World War I and declined thereafter as a result ofthe introduction of quotas and restrictions on both emi-gration and immigration prompted by increasing eco-nomic and political nationalism. The rise oftotalitarianism in parts of Europe also led to further fallsin emigration rates. The intense period of worldwidemigration during the age of empire further attenuatedwith the establishment of nation-states in the post–WorldWar II era as political control of the nation-state’s bor-ders and institutional barriers regulating entry wereheightened. The task of national self-definition thatpreoccupied new nation-states in the postwar decadesdepended not only on strategies of inclusion to

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strengthen group cohesion and belonging to the nation,but also entailed exclusionary strategies which dis-tinguished ‘self ’ from ‘Other’. Not only were immigrantsoften thought of as ‘out of place’ in transgressing thenational geobody, emigrants who unmoored themselvesfrom their ‘birth’ nation-states were also considered ‘outof place’ in betraying their homelands.

The closing years of the twentieth century and thedawn of the twenty-first ushered in an increasinglyglobalized age of quickened mobilities of people, ideas,and commodities as well as a heightened sense of inter-connectivity among places. The number of internationalmigrants reached an estimated 175 million in 2000 (i.e.,one out of every 35 people in the world is an inter-national migrant living in a country other than that inwhich they were born), having risen by 18 million in1970–80, 27 million in 1980–90, and 21 million in 1990–2000. Migratory moves are increasingly taking on atransnational character where movement is no longerbased on permanent uprooting and settlement, but oftenmultidirectional, complex, provisional, and based on amultiplicity of interconnections and networks sustainedbetween ‘home’ and ‘host’. In this context, the originalnotion of emigration as a form of permanent departurefrom a home-nation (usually paired with the notion ofimmigration as a form of full incorporation and per-manent settlement) needs to be rethought using frame-works of transnationalism that accord more provisionalityand flexibility to people movements. As Toro-Morn andAlicea noted, ‘‘the demarcation line between ‘sending’and ‘receiving’ countries is no longer a clear-cut linebetween core and periphery.’’

Emigration Dynamics

Emigration is a multifaceted social, economic, and pol-itical phenomenon. The current ‘emigration climate’ ispartly shaped by the migration policies of sending andreceiving countries, while postcolonial migration path-ways often reflect historical links based on ties withformer colonial metropolises, military occupation, as wellas trade and investment flows. Among African countries,for example, Zairians emigrate to Belgium, Senegalese toFrance, and Nigerians to the United Kingdom. However,historical and geographical relationships are no longerthe primary drivers of migration; instead, there arechanging poles of attraction which add considerablecomplexity to the current patterns of movement.

Globalization dynamics have widened the gap be-tween the developed and developing world through theincreasing concentration of capital encouraged by foreigndirect investment, and this has in turn created newconditions for mobilization that has spurred un-precedented population movements. For example,

Mexican emigration, one of the largest in volume in thecontemporary world, cannot be decoupled from Mexico’sinsertion into the world economy: on the one hand, highlevels of unemployment, low wages, deterioration ofagricultural resources, and overall economic instability inMexico impel movement out of the country, whereas, onthe otherhand, greater income inequality, demand forcheap labor, and the territorial and economic reorgan-ization of the US economy combined with long-standingsocial networks between communities on either side ofthe border, result in ‘pull forces’. Among the under-developed island-states in the Caribbean, emigrationpressures are clearly linked to structural economic fac-tors such as debilitated institutions, strong macro-economic imbalances, dilapidated infrastructure,depleted productive assets, and pervasive poverty. How-ever, emigration decisions (as in the case of the Anglo-phone Caribbean) are not just tied to negative economicpressures but must also be understood in the context ofhistorical linkages, social networks, and the degree ofsuccess in establishing transnational communities in hostcountries. Emigration hence does not signal permanentdeparture, but forms a part of circular migration based onthe formation of highly interactive transnational house-holds linked by to-and-fro movements of people andcircuits of remittances, commodities, care, and emotions.

Within the New World Order, emigration in the formof labor migration is undoubtedly the dominant trend incurrent international migration (illustrated for Asia inTable 1). In South Asia, for example, internationalpopulation movements are numerically dominated byflows of documented and undocumented workers, mainlyunskilled young male workers (except in the case of

Table 1 Average annual number of migrants leaving for

employment abroad in Asia: 1990–2003

Country Number of migrant workers departing

(in thousands)

1990–94 1995–99 2000–03

Bangladesh 174 263 -

China 75a 375b -

India 377 360 297

Indonesia 118 328 387

Pakistan 145 118 130

Philippines 489 746 867

Sri Lanka 52 165 195

Thailand 87 193 165

Vietnam - 13 47

Total 1517 2561 2088

a Average for 1990–91 includes workers abroad both under

international labour contracts and under project contracts.b Average for 1998–99 includes workers abroad both under

international labour contracts and under project contracts.

Source: Adapted from UN-Habitat (2006). Additional Migration

Statistics. http://www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/Media/

WHD%20 Additional%20Statistics.pdf, 3 (accessed 2 May 2008).

Emigration 435

Sri Lanka where over half of emigrant workers are fe-male) seeking work in the Middle East, Europe, as well asmore-developed Asian countries such as Japan and Ma-laysia. The importance of the Middle East to Indianworkers led the Indian government in 1983 to pass a newEmigration Act which sought to protect the welfare andinterest of Indians abroad.

New ‘feminized’ streams of labor migration have alsoevolved, in response to changing production and repro-duction processes worldwide predicated on a gendereddivision of labor. Production activities relocated fromcore economies to the periphery to take advantage ofcheaper input costs draw on preexisting gender relationsand target cheap and flexible female workers – manyfrom countries with declining employment opportunities– to work in the ‘global assembly line’ in export pro-cessing zones and industrial parks in rapidly industrial-izing countries. Women from underdeveloped countriesin Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean havealso left ‘home’ for overseas jobs as paid domestic workersas a result of the intensification of the ‘care deficit’ inadvanced industrialized countries where reproductivelabor is being shifted from the household to the market.The feminization of labor migration has also taken theform of more women migrating to work as ‘entertainers’or sex workers in response to the expansion of hospitalityand sexual services as male executives and entrepreneursbecome more mobile.

While the widening economic and demographic div-ide between underdeveloped and developed countries isan important factor in driving emigration dynamics,‘‘there is no cut-and-dry relationship between poverty,demography and emigration,’’ as noted by Trebilcock andSudak. Indeed, the impact of war, political oppression,and environmental degradation in many countries oftenin association with worsening economic conditions arealso major contributors. In the underdeveloped econ-omies of Africa, for example, a potent cocktail of negativeeconomic growth rates, military or authoritarian rulewith poor human rights records, interethnic strife andconflict, the effects of Structural Adjustment Plans onwage freeze and inflation, and the deterioration of theliving environment has spurred emigration. Emigrationstreams are highly complex: they range from cross-borderor intraregional movements to departures for inter-national destinations, and may involve labor-seekingmigrants using migration as a household strategy tocombat poverty and landlessness, whole families escapingpolitical or religious strife and deteriorating living con-ditions, or skilled workers seeking professional advance-ment. Similarly, among several countries of CentralAmerica, emigration is linked not only to economic crisesand structural adjustments but also to the dwindlingcapacity of the state, social, and armed conflict, andhuman rights violations.

Apart from macro structural factors, emigration de-cisions are often dependent on negotiations within thefamily and community, as well as social networks theaspiring emigrant has with those living in potential hostcountries. In historical and contemporary times, ‘chainmigration’ where emigrants tend to follow similar path-ways and head for similar destinations as family andcommunity members who have emigrated earlier pro-vides a mechanism for minimizing risk and uncertainty,and maximizing information and assistance. Once a sys-tem of social networks is put in place, migration takes ona self-sustaining and self-perpetuating character. Withthe passage of time, emigration generates its own raison

d’etre and also habituates people into leaving. Sustainedemigration flows breed a culture of migration charac-terized by a general acceptance of migration as part of thelife course and an increasing dependency of the com-munity on outside resources and employment. In thePhilippines, for example, after 30 years of labor migra-tion, emigration as a means of seeking work has become,as Maruja Asis put it, ‘‘knitted into the survival or mo-bility strategies of many individuals and families, [as wellas] a common pathway to achieve the good life.’’

Changing Discourses on Emigration

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that early usage of theterm ‘emigration’ may also apply to the departure of thesoul from the body, either as a result of death or ecstaticrapture. Echoing this duality of meanings, official dis-courses about emigration today span those carryingconnotations of flight, disloyalty, and exile, on the onehand, to those which revalorizes emigration as a modernand even patriotic act on the other. Within academic andpopular discourses, a similar variety of representationspersists.

In their broad survey of emigration dynamics throughrecent history, Lowenthal and Comitas identified differ-ent stances that home-societies may take toward emi-gration: those which do not countenance emigration at all(people who leave do so against the will of the com-munity, maintain no contacts, and return only at theirperil); those which encourage emigration but do notexpect aid from emigrants (e.g., prosperous economiessuch as England in the context of seventeenth- andeighteenth-century mercantilism); those where emigrantsare expected to contribute support but are discouragedfrom coming home (as in the case of the Irish who viewedemigration as a ‘safety valve’); and those where indi-viduals are encouraged to leave, to send remittanceswhile away, and eventually return home (see later). These‘social imperatives’ of home society affect ‘‘the emigrant’sattitude toward his [sic] homeland, the duration or

436 Emigration

permanence of his stay abroad, and the speed and easewith which he assimilates to his adopted land.’’

At the turn of the new millennium, discourses onemigration among home-countries in the developingworld have generally taken on more positive conno-tations. While individuals who leave the People’s Re-public of China were once regarded as ‘traitors’ withinstate narratives, such mobility is now encouraged forcertain groups as a strategy to tap business potentialinherent in the development of diasporic networks. In thecase of overseas students, the key policy is encapsulatedin the ‘Twelve-words Approach’, ‘zhichi liuxue, guli huiguo,laiqu ziyou’ (meaning ‘support study overseas, encouragereturns, guarantee freedom of (international) move-ment’). In the case of the Philippine state, turning citizensinto labor commodities in the global marketplace byinstitutionalizing employment abroad through the Phil-ippine Overseas Employment Program has become amajor strategy to address poverty and unemployment,and to siphon in remittances vital to the Philippineeconomy. With over 800 000 Filipinos annually deployedto take up work in foreign countries and roughly 10% ofits population abroad, the Philippines has positioned it-self within the new international division of labor as amajor source country of workers, supplying workers ofvarying skill levels to over 100 countries. This is ac-companied by a consistent state discourse where all thepresidents from Marcos to Macapagal-Arroyo have lau-ded overseas contract workers as the nation’s ‘new her-oes’. At the same time, imaginaries of the ‘nation’ – i.e.,the ‘transterritorial nation state’ in Luis Guarnizo andMichael Smith’s words – based on a shared ethnicitycontinue to be drawn upon to protect the integrity of thenation and sustain its longevity. There is also the as-sumption here, as Filomeno Aguilar put it, that ‘‘at theirdestinations, emigrants will be transnationalists’’ whowould engage in transnational circuits – both emotionaland material – to contribute to the development of their‘homelands’.

Among host countries, however, emigration is viewedin far more ambivalent terms. In the early 1990s, a projecton Emigration Dynamics in Developing Countries fun-ded by the International Organization for Migration andthe United Nations Population Fund was initiated toaddress ‘widespread concern’ about ‘‘the increasingnumbers of refugees, irregular migrants and asylumseekers’’ from the South ‘‘grasping the emigration optionas a last chance for survival and moving, uninvited, to y

developed countries.’’

Consequences of Emigration

While the demographic profile and socioeconomic sus-tainability of many countries in Europe were vitally

affected by transatlantic emigration during the past fourcenturies, emigration at a level high and sustainedenough to lead to depopulation of an entire country isnot common. The latter is best exemplified by thenineteenth-century exodus of the Irish to North America,which not only seriously depleted the population of thesending country (where the demographic effects lastedfor more than a century), but also left behind a countrymade up of ‘residual people’ whose young and moreproductive members had left permanently. Without itsmost creative and energetic members, Irish societystagnated throughout much of the twentieth century, andonly experienced economic, social, and cultural revival inthe last two decades of the twentieth century. Irishemigration, however, represents one extreme in terms ofits demographic consequences on home-society. Underdifferent circumstances, emigration has been used bygovernments as a deliberate means to relieve populationpressure on national resources. In the case of Japan in the1920s, for example, emigration to South America, andespecially Brazil, was encouraged as part of nationalpolicy in order to address the twin problems of popu-lation growth and economic instability. Today, whilemany developing countries have been consistently losingpopulation as a result of emigration, the impact onpopulation growth is usually small given the high naturalincrease rates in these countries.

In weighing the economic costs and benefits of emi-gration to sending countries in the contemporary world,Trebilcock and Sudak concluded in tentative terms:

Although emigration poses risks of fiscal loss and human

capital depletion, the empirical basis for these fears is

unclear given possible offsetting factors such as remit-

tances, return migration, and skills transfer, initial in-

centives for education, and dynamic investment effects of

citizens living abroady. Emigrants are properly viewed

not as a stink cost, but as a resource to be cultivated

(Trebilcock and Sudak, 2006).

Among the ‘emigration threats’ feared, ‘brain drain’ or‘human capital flight’ and its impact on developingcountries has been an issue of widespread concern givenits scale. As a rough measure, it has been noted, for ex-ample, that between a third and half of the developingworld’s science and technology personnel now live in thedeveloped world. On the one hand, the depletion ofskilled, educated, and talented individuals may adverselyaffect the development of local knowledge and science,retard economic growth, erode tax revenues, and cripplepublic institutions and service delivery. In small de-veloping countries with high rates of emigration such asthe poorer Caribbean island-states, the sheer volume ofemigration often means that any possible positive effectsmay be outweighed by negative impacts on economic

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dynamism, the delivery of key public services, and thedepletion of the political classes. It has also been argued,for example, that the hemorrhagic loss of health pro-fessionals from African countries has incapacitated healthsector reforms and perpetuated a vicious cycle of illhealth and poverty.

On the other hand, these negative views have beenchallenged by those who argue that the emigration oftalent is not so much a ‘drain’ but part of ‘brain circu-lation’, and that positive effects for the source countriescan include remittance flows, mobilization of foreigncapital, exposure to new ideas and technologies, and thecreation of diaspora networking that facilitates the ex-ploitation of unique trade and business opportunities.Such an approach to emigration effects is predicated onthe presence of transnational linkages among emigrantsand their homelands, including the possibility of return.Strong transnational connectivities appear to hold in arange of migration scenarios. For example, the massiveout-migration from Latin America and the Caribbean tothe United States, Canada, and Europe has been char-acterized by the transnational ties that immigrantsmaintain across borders between their home and hostcommunities, and that incorporate return and counter-flows. More specific examples include the formation ofthe Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park in Taiwan inthe 1980s and 1990s benefited from the return of Tai-wanese entrepreneurs and engineers from Silicon Valleywhile the growth of India’s Bangalore and Hyderabadsoftware development and outsourcing centers is tied tobusiness networks facilitated by Indian engineers work-ing in Silicon Valley.

An issue central to understanding the developmentalconsequences of emigration concerns the complexquestion as to whether remittance gains might sufficientlyspur development to offset human capital loss. Not-withstanding the huge volume of remittances flowingback to source countries of the developing world (US$51billion out of a total remittance amount of US$63 billionwas estimated to have been sent back to developingcountries in 2000), the verdict with regard to the devel-opment impact of remittances is still an open one. Whileremittances invested in land purchase, business andtechnology, or in improving health, education, and in-frastructure in source countries may have significantmultiplier effects, those used to finance consumptionpurchases may not generate longer-term benefits andinstead increase consumerism (e.g., of imported goods)and engender a culture of dependency.

Turning finally to the social consequences of con-temporary emigration on source areas in the developingworld, scholars have stressed the need to understandthe processes operating at the nexus between emigrationand the ‘left behind’ population, and to avoid treatingthe latter as passive recipients of migration effects.

Out-migration from rural Southeast Asia, for example, hasbecome so widespread that it has a ‘demonstration andemulation’ effect on aspirations and achievementthroughout communities, making it misleading to assumethat the left behind would always hold on to ‘traditionalvalues’ or remain static in their worldviews. In other in-stances, far from being deserted by migrating children,left-behind parents actively participate in providing fi-nancial and emotional support for their children’s mo-bility, leading to the emergence of a translocal extendedfamily linked by multistranded, fluid relations betweenmembers across geographical space. Similarly, studies onmigrating mothers and their left-behind children high-light the (re)enactment of episodes of family interactionthrough distanced communication as the family takes ontransnational dimensions. New work has also called at-tention to the gender politics implicit in a range of mu-tually constitutive interactions between migrants and theleft behind: in areas such as rural Indonesia and Vietnamwhere feminized out-migration streams predominate, es-tablished gender ideologies may either be challenged bychanging social practices where women assume bread-winner roles, or continue to regulate traditionally scriptedroles for men and women but in new ways.

Conclusion

In defining emigration as ‘don’t-look-back exit for a newexistence elsewhere’ and the ‘converse and historicalcomplement of diaspora’, Roger Sanjek is able to point toseveral ‘unambiguous instances of historical emigrations’,but only with the benefit of hindsight as human inten-tions at the point of exiting may be unclear or maychange. With the proliferation of transnational con-nectivities, multidirectional mobilities and hybridizedidentifications in a globalized new order, emigration as aunidirectional people movement of nonreturn is likely tobecome even more provisional and ambivalent. Instead,emigration as a form of ‘home-leaving’ and ‘border-crossing’ may become a recurring moment, held in ten-sion with ‘transiting’, ‘sojourning’, ‘settling’, ‘rooting’,‘returning’, ‘homecoming’, ‘inclusions/exclusions’, andother multiple experiences of migrations.

See also: Immigration I; Immigration II; Migrant Workers;

Migration; Remittances; Transnationalism.

Further Reading

Aguilar, F. V. (2004). Is there a transnation? Migrancy and the nationalhomeland among overseas Filipinos. In Yeoh, B. S. A. & Willis, K.(eds.) State/Nation/Transnation, pp 93--119. London: Routledge.

Appleyard, R. (1998). Emigration Dynamics in Developing Countries,(Vols 1–4). Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Asis, M. B. (2005). Caring for the world: Filipino domestic workers goneglobal. In Huang, S., Yeoh, B. S. A. & Abdul Rahman, N. (eds.) AsianWomen as Transnational Domestic Workers, pp 21--53. Singapore:Marshall Cavendish.

Baines, D. (1995). Emigration from Europe 1815–1930. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Guarnizo, L. and Smith, M. (1998). The locations of transnationalism.In Smith, M. & Guarnizo, L. (eds.) Transnationalism from Below,pp 3--34. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2005). World Migration2005: Costs and Benefits of International Migration. Geneva:International Organization for Migration.

Lowenthal, D. and Comitas, L. (1962). Emigration and depopulation:Some neglected aspects of population geography. GeographicalReview 52(2), 195--210.

Manning, P. (2005). Migration in World History. New York: Routledge.Nguyen, L., Yeoh, B. S. A. and Toyota, M. (eds.) (2006). Special section

on migration and the well-being of the ‘Left-behind’ in Asia. AsianPopulation Studies 2(1).

Nyiri, P. (2004). Expatriating is patriotic? The discourse on ‘newmigrants’ in the People’s Republic of China and the identity

construction among recent migrants from the PRC. In Yeoh, B. S. A. &Willis, K. (eds.) State/Nation/Transnation, pp 120--143. London:Routledge.

Sanjek, R. (2003). Rethinking migration, ancient to future. GlobalNetworks 3(3), 315--336.

Toro-Morn, M. I. and Alicea, M. (eds.) (2004). Migration andImmigration: A Global View. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Toyota, M., Yeoh, B. S. A. and Nguyen, L. (2007). Special issue onmigration and the ‘‘Left Behind’’ in Asia. Population, Space andPlace 13(3).

Treilcock, M. J. and Sudak, M. (2006). The political economy ofemigration and immigration. New York University Law Review 81(1),234--293.

UN-Habitat (2006). Additional Migration Statistics. http://www.unhabitat.org/downloads/docs/Media/WHD%20Additional%20Statistics.pdf, 3 (accessed 2 May 2008).

Wang, G. (2003). Don’t Leave Home: Migration and the Chinese.Singapore: Eastern Universities Press.

Xiang, B. (2003). Emigration from China: A sending countryperspective. International Migration 41(3), 21--48.

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