International Migrations

International migrations -- the movements of people from one sovereign territory to another -- have played a crucial role in the history of Tripartite Alliance Earth. Populations have grown from next to nothing to immense numbers thanks to international migration, while powerful states have been weakened or strengthened by migrational trends. Without its specific historical pattern of migrations, Tripartite Alliance Earth's history would have been changed beyond recognition.

The modern history of international migration can be said to begin with the Great Migrations. Beginning in 1850 and ending with the onset of the First World War, tens of millions of poor, persecuted, and underemployed individuals from southern and eastern Europe moved to the open lands and bustling cities of Latin America, the South Pacific, and North Africa, and to the industrial cities of western Europe. The single largest contributors to the Great Migrations were the European states on the Mediterranean littoral, Germany, the Austrian Hapsburg empire, and the Russian Empire, while by far the largest net recipients were in South America. The population growth of the prosperous Argentine Republic was mostly drawn from the incredible rate of immigration: One-third of the German emigration, half of the Spanish emigration, one-third of the Italian emigration, and half of the total Russian and Austrian emigration permanently settled in Argentina. Uruguay, Chile, and Venezuela experienced much the same patterns, though Irish immigration was relatively stronger in Venezuela and German immigration more important in Chile. After a slow start, Brazil began to absorb a large number of European immigrants, becoming by 1914 the single largest nation receiving immigrants in the world. One-third of the Russian emigration, fully half of the Irish emigration, and a quarter of the Italian, Portuguese, and Austrian emigration all settled in Brazil.

France and its colonial empire constituted the single major recipient country in western Europe. The relatively small rate of natural increase in France, and the rapid growth of France's urban industry, made immigration a necessary factor for French prosperity. In all, a third of Italian emigrants, a quarter of Spanish emigrants, and two-thirds of Belgian emigrants were destined for France and Algeria, making a considerable influence on French population growth. In France, the emigrants were concentrated in the major cities; in Algeria, the emigrants were dispersed throughout the country.

Other major recipients of European immigrants included the Anglophone countries of Canada, the United States, Australia, and South Africa. Due to very restrictive immigration policies, the North American population grew only slowly, but together, thinly-populated Australia and South Africa received the plurality of all British emigration.

The Russian Empire's participation in the Great Migrations is interesting for the simple fact that despite rapid Slavic population growth, most Slavs did not take part in the Great Migrations. Although two million Ukrainians and a half-million Lithuanians did settle permanently in South America, Russians and Ukrainians overwhelmingly tended to settle in colonial and underpopulated Siberia and Turkestan. Persecution by the Imperial government drove Polish and Jewish emigration -- before the First World War, five million Poles emigrated to France and to South America, while state-sponsored pogroms encouraged the diaspora of an estimated 40% of the Russian Jewish population to western Europe, the Americas, and the British and French colonies in the Southern Hemisphere.

In the mid-19th century, migrant flows appeared that were directed not from Europe but rather from non-European destinations. Perhaps the largest of these was the vast outpouring from India, directed towards tropical colonies of settlement in the British Empire and elsewhere -- by the century's end, new Indian societies emerged in British Guyana, Fiji, the islands of the Indian Ocean, Malaya, Trinidad, and in southern and eastern Africa. In Southeast Asia, the influx of Chinese emigrants was scarcely less impressive, displacing the Malays of Malaya as the single largest population, creating a new Thai-Chinese middle class in the cities of the Kingdom of Thailand, and middleman minorities in French Indochina, the Spanish Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies. The settlement of French Guyana in the 1850-1910 period by almost a million and a half Afro-Brazilians, French Antilleans, and French West Africans was also historically significant.

The First World War -- fought between the major alliance systems of the European nation-states -- led to widespread dislocations of peoples across Europe and the Middle East. Though the worst fighting occurred on Belgian soil, the countries of central and south-central Europe -- in particular Poland, Bavaria, Austria, and Greece -- suffered greater economic and political instability than those further west. France and its colonies of settlement took in almost half of the total number of emigrants, almost one and a half million people. Chile and Venezuela were known for their Germanophile sentiments, and the two countries received most of the half-million emigrants from Bavaria and Austria. For the first time Britain received large numbers of immigrants, mainly from northern Europe and Russia, as its low birth rate made immigration a necessity in order to prevent a decline in the English population.

This conflict created two new diasporas in Europe and the Americas. The first diaspora, that of the Armenians, dated back centuries, but the genocide of almost a million Armenians by the wartime Turkish government forced their dispersal worldwide. Many Armenians returned to their newly-independent homeland, comprising most of former Turkish northeast Anatolia and the former Russian Armenian provinces, but many others chose to live in the safer environments of France, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia. The one and a half million Armenians of this new diaspora managed to create a stable Armenian comm unity in their new countries of adoption, and successfully balanced their adoptive loyalties to their concern for the fate of Armenia. The Russian diaspora, though, created by the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, led to the emigration of three million Russians ahead of the Iron Curtain. Most of these settled in suitably Orthodox (if Polish) Ukraine, but others were dispersed evenly throughout western and central Europe: Paris, Prague, and Constantinople each had a Russian community amounting to more than a hundred thousand people, all decidedly Russian-nationalistic and anti-Bolshevik, and all maintaining a thriving community life.

By the mid-1920's, pronounced anti-nativist sentiment led the immigration states of South America and Australia to close their doors to immigrants. (The United States and Canada rewrote their immigration laws to exclude most of the few immigrants who could enter their national territories.) Although France and Britain maintained their open door policies towards immigration, France beginning its tradition of Algerian immigration at this time, the lack of any substantial outlet for emigrants destabilized Germany and Poland, and thus contributed to the devastating Second World War.

This war devastated a huge swath of Europe, from the Meuse in the west to the Volga in the east. The sheer breadth and depth of the slaughter led to vast and uncontrollable migrations throughout Europe and the wider world. Of the seven million ethnic Germans expelled from Poland and the Soviet Union, six million were settled in the German successor states, excluding Bavaria and Austria, which prohibited the resettlement of "foreign" Germanophones. This settlement was achieved with no small measure of disruption in Saxony and Germany proper, but by the 1960's, it was essentially completed. The remnants of eastern European Jewry also emigrated en masse, mainly to the new state of Israel and to Argentina, France, and South Africa. In addition to German and Jewish refugees, a quarter-million Balts and a million Poles fled the imposition of Soviet rule in their homelands, settling principally in Scandinavia, South Africa, and Argentina.

Amid the creation of the European Communities (later Confederation) in the 1950's and Europe's rapid economic growth in the quarante glorieuses, large numbers of migrant workers travelled from the relatively poor southern member states of the European Commonwealth (Spain, Portugal, southern Italy, and the Balkans) to wealthier northern Europe. As southern Europe gained economic parity with the north in the 1970's, an increasingly large number of Algerians, Libyans, Turks, and Syrians migrated to the industrial cities of Europe. Similar phenomena occurred in South America (where natives of the Andean states migrated to Argentina, Chile, and Brazil), Nouveau-Dauphiné and Nouvelle-Calédonie (where Polynesian economic migrants and Indochinese refugees settled), and Japan (where migrants from Japanese-controlled Taiwan and independent Korea formed an increasingly large proportion of the work force).

Increasingly, the United States of America became a major destination for emigrants. Although the United States' economic growth was less than that of any other major industrialized country, its sophisticated technological base and its below-replacement birth rate made immigration a necessity. The radical liberalization of American immigration policy in the 1950's led to the permanent settlement of ten million immigrants from Mexico in the southwestern United States and of two million French Canadians in New England within two decades. The sheer magnitude of this immigration, along with the rapid rate of natural increase among these immigrants, their indigenous co-linguals (New Mexican and south Texan Hispanics, Louisianan Francophones), and other non-Anglo groups (Native Americans, New Africans), disturbed many Americans. Combined with declining Anglo population was a major contributing factor to the rise of the Chang regime, and indirectly, the Third World War.

In the combatant countries themselves, only 20% (in the United States) to 3% (in China and Siberia) of the pre-War population survived the decade. Impoverished territories completely deprived of food imports and prey to the epidemiological and radiological aftereffects of the massive conflict -- such as most of sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent -- suffered population collapses taking anywhere from one-half to three-quarters of the pre-War population. Even in wealthy Europe, South America, and the South Pacific, a tenth of the population died as a direct result of the war and its aftereffects.

The tremendous population decline in Europe combined with the terrible dislocation of African and Middle Eastern states to produce the mass immigration to Europe of 20 million people in the 1980's. Francophone and Francophile countries such as the West African Federation, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria provided the largest portion of this wave of emigrants. In the 1990's, these sources of immigration to Europe declined in relative importance, and were replaced by such states and regions as Kurdistan and Africa north of the equator. Presently, 12% of the European Confederation population is made up of post-Third World War immigrants and their descendants, with large immigrant populations even in those countries like Latvia, which have historically not received many non-European immigrants. Australia experienced a similar phenomenon, with two million Indonesian and Filipino refugees settling on a permanent basis in the Republic. Japan has become a society of mass immigration par excellence, as the 30 million Asian refugees recruited to fill the least-popular jobs in the Japanese occupational structure have become permanent residents. In the 1990's, Egypt emerged as a major destination for emigrants from Yemen, Hijaz, and eastern Africa, as a rapidly falling birth rate and a high demand for labour in Egyptian manufacturing industry has attracted five million people over the course of the decade. South America, for its part, received large numbers of immigrants from Yorubaland and southern Africa. Even in the South Pacific Confederation, Samoan and Tongan populations have declined as young Polynesians in both Confederation member-states have become attracted to the high standards of living in Nouveau-Dauphiné.

Over the next generation, many demographers predict that birth rates in the countries along the Mediterranean coastline, in Andean South America, and among the new immigrant populations of the First World, will soon decline to First World averages, barely above replacement. Most demographers also believe that birth rates shall remain high in India and in southern and eastern Africa, fuelling future waves of emigrants to the wealthy countries of the world -- perhaps even to off-world destinations. Tripartite Alliance Earth might also attract large numbers of immigrants -- migrant workers from Dynasty Earth are beginning to appear in large numbers in the European Confederation and in northeast Asia.