Dictionary:

migration

  (mī-grā'shən)

1. The act or an instance of migrating.
2. A group migrating together.
3. Chemistry & Physics.
   1. The movement of one atom or more from one position to another within a molecule.
   2. The movement of ions between electrodes during electrolysis.

(1) A change from one hardware or software technology to another. Migration is a way of life in the computer industry. For example, once known only to those in the glass-enclosed datacenter, users today understand the meaning of migrating from one operating system to another.

(2) Moving data from one storage system to another (data migration). See HSM.

noun

Departure from one's native land to settle in another: emigration, exodus, immigration, transmigration. See approach/retreat.

The movement of people from one place to another. The terms in-migration and out-migration are used for internal migration, where no national boundaries are crossed, and the simplest classification separates this from international migration.

While voluntary migration refers to unforced movements, compulsory migration describes the expulsion of minorities from their country of birth by governments, or by warring factions. In the 1970s Asians were expelled from Uganda and Kenya, and the 1990s saw ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia (See genocide).

Migrations may be temporary or permanent. In the case of commuting, migration is a daily act, but, because there is no change of residence, a purist would not call commuting a migration, preferring the term mobility. Temporary migrations may be seasonal, as migrant workers move in search of work, or periodic, as when a worker, usually male, moves to an industrial, urbanized area and sends money back to the women and children, perhaps over a period of a year or two. A good example of periodic migration is the movement of males from their homes in Botswana and Lesotho to work in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa.

Other classifications are based on the nature of the points of origin and arrival, such as rural-rural or urban-rural. Rural-rural migration may be seen in the movement of nomadic people while urban-rural migration might include the movement of elderly people when they retire or when richer people move from the city to suburbs. Rural depopulation describes rural-urban migrations.

Further classifications are concerned with the motive for migration. Compulsory movements, such as the repatriation of Ghanaians from Nigeria, are seen to be entirely due to push factors. Other cases include pull factors: in innovative migration people move to achieve something new, like settlement of new lands, in economic migration people move from a poor to a richer area, and in betterment migration people move to uphold a lifestyle which is being threatened.

See also emigration, gravity model, immigration, intervening opportunity, ravenstein's ‘laws’ of migration, refugee.

The permanent movement of individuals or groups from one place to another. Migration is of course a basic fact of human history. Recent work on the ‘mitochondrial Eve hypothesis’ has used the diversity of mitochondrial DNA to trace the maternal lineage of different ethnic groups and hence infer the patterns of population migration. Mitochondria are the energy generators of the cell, which have their own genetic message of DNA, separate from that in the cell nucleus. Mitochondrial DNA may be regarded as an evolutionary clock. The more similar the mitochondrial DNA of a pair of individuals, the more recent was their last common ancestor. The oldest branching of the mitochondrial tree separated the group studied into two subsets, one of them consisting only of Africans and the other of people from all five continents; and the diversity among Africans was much greater than that within any other ethnic group. This research therefore suggests that we all have a common mitochondrial ancestor, who lived in Africa perhaps 200,000 years ago.

The politics of migration and race can be explosive. Emigrants are pushed by war or starvation. Immigrants are pulled by freedom or jobs. Émigrés (literally those who have emigrated; used especially of those who fled from the French Revolution and supported counter-revolutionary armies against the French Republic) are angry about whatever drove them from home and therefore may campaign, peacefully or otherwise, against those who occupy their homeland. Émigré politics gave popular support to Hitler's drive to the East before and during the Second World War, as many Germans lived to the east of Germany's inter-war boundaries. Irish émigré politics have led to massive support, especially in North America, for both the peaceful and the violent wings of Irish nationalism. Immigrants typically provoke the hostility of the native population, who accuse them of taking their jobs or undermining their culture. Easily identifiable immigrants are a handy scapegoat for frustration, whatever its true cause may be.

Democratic societies have various ways of trying to resolve these tensions. Many have severe restrictions on immigration, although trying to dump the problem on somebody else is not a generalizable solution to the problem. Some, such as the United States, base citizenship on birth in the country. Others, such as Ireland, base it on having had direct ancestors who were born in the country. Others again, such as Germany and Israel, base it on ethnicity irrespective of place of birth. Given that the member states of the European Union face common domestic hostility to immigration, have enormous pools of potential migrants close to their external frontier, and have very different conceptions of citizenship, it is unsurprising that the politics of migration and political asylum prove so intractable there. See also irredentism; refugee.

The spreading or creeping of a sealant onto adjacent surfaces, usually to the detriment of bond.

Across time and cultures individuals migrate to improve their lives, seek better opportunities, or flee unbearable conditions. In Russian history, migration highlights social stratification, underscores the importance of social management, and provides insight into post-Soviet population change. Migration motivations in Russia were historically influenced by direct governmental control, providing a unique case for assessing barriers to migration and a window into state and society relations.

The earliest inhabitants of the region now known as Russia were overrun by the in-migration of several conquering populations, with Cimmerians, Scythians (700 B.C.E.), Samartians (300 B.C.E.), Goths (200 C.E.), Huns (370 C.E.), Avars, and Khazars moving into the territory to rule the region. Mongol control (1222) focused on manipulating elites and extracting taxes, but not in-migration. When Moscow later emerged as an urban settlement, eastern Slavs spread across the European plain. Ivan III (1462 - 1505) pushed expansion south and west, while Ivan IV (1530 - 1584) pushed east towards Siberia. Restrictions on peasant mobility made migration difficult, yet some risked everything to illegally flee to the southern borderlands and Siberia.

The legal code of 1649 eradicated legal migration. Solidifying serfdom, peasants were now owned by the gentry. Restrictions on mobility could be circumvented. Ambitious peasants could become illegal or seasonal migrants, marginalized socially and economically. By 1787 between 100,000 and 150,000 peasants resided seasonally in Moscow, unable to acquire legal residency, forming an underclass unable to assimilate into city life. Restricted mobility hindered the development of urban labor forces for industrialization in this period, also marked by the use of forced migration and exile by the state.

The emancipation of serfs (1861) increased mobility, but state ability to control migration remained. Urbanization increased rapidly - according to the 1898 census, nearly half of all urbanites were migrants. The Stolypin reforms (1906) further spurred migration to cities and frontiers by enabling withdrawal from rural communes. Over 500,000 peasants moved into Siberia yearly in the early 1900s. Over seven million refugees moved into Russia by 1916, challenging ideas of national identity, highlighting the limitations of state, and crystallizing Russian nationalism. During the Revolution and civil war enforcement of migration restrictions were thwarted, adding to displacement, settlement shifts, and urban growth in the 1920s.

The Soviet passport system reintroduced state control over migration in 1932. Passports contained residency permits, or propiskas, required for legal residence. The passport system set the stage for increased social control and ideological emphasis on the scientific management of population. Limiting rural mobility (collective farmers did not receive passports until 1974), restricting urban growth, the exile of specific ethnic groups (Germans, Crimean Tatars, and others), and directing migration through incentives for movements into new territories (the Far East, Far North, and northern Kazakhstan) in the Soviet period echoed previous patterns of state control. As demographers debated scientific population management, by the late Soviet period factors such as housing, wages, and access to goods exerted strong influences on migration decision making. Attempts to control migration in the Soviet period met some success in stemming urbanization, successfully attracting migrants to inhospitable locations, increasing regional mixing of ethnic and linguistic groups across the Soviet Union, and blocking many wishing to immigrate.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, migration restrictions were initially minimized, but migration trends and security concerns increased interest in restrictions by the end of the twentieth century. Decreased emigration control led to over 100,000 people leaving Russia yearly between 1991 and 1996, dampened only by restrictions on immigration from Western countries. Russia's population loss has been offset by immigration from the near abroad, where 25 million ethnic Russians resided in 1991. Legal, illegal, and seasonal migrants were attracted from the near abroad by the relative political and economic stability in Russia, in addition to ethnic and linguistic ties. Yet, the flow of immigrants declined in the late 1990s. Refugees registered in Russia numbered nearly one million in 1998. Internally, migration patterns follow wages and employment levels, and people left the far eastern and northern regions. Internal displacement emerged in the south during the 1990s, from Chechnya. By the late 1990s, the challenges of migrant assimilation and integration were key public issues, and interest in restricting migration rose. While market forces had begun to replace direct administrative control over migration in Russia by the end of the 1990s, concerns over migration and increasing calls for administrative interventions drew upon a long history of state management of population migration.

Bibliography

Bradley, J. (1985). Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Brubaker, Rodgers. (1995). "Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives" Ethnic and Racial Studies 18 (2):189 - 218.

Buckley, Cynthia J. (1995). "The Myth of Managed Migration." Slavic Review 54 (4):896 - 916.

Gatrell, Peter. (1999). A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lewis, Robert and Rowlands, Richard. (1979). Population Redistribution in the USSR: Its Impact on Society 1897 - 1977. New York: Praeger Press.

Zaionchkovskaya, Zhanna A. (1996). "Migration Patterns in the Former Soviet Union" In Cooperation and Conflict in the Former Soviet Union: Implications for Migration, eds. Jeremy R. Azrael, Emil A. Payin, Kevin F. McCarthy, and Georges Vernez. Santa Monica, CA: Rand.

—CYNTHIA J. BUCKLEY

Movement of living things from one place to another by their own volition. Also used to describe movement of nonliving biological material, e.g. migration of protein in electrophoretic media.

• m. inhibition factor — see leukocyte migration-inhibition factor, macrophage inhibition factor, migration inhibition test (below).
• m. inhibition test — an in vitro test for detection of cell-mediated immunity (or delayed hypersensitivity) in which peritoneal exudate cells (lymphocytes and macrophages) are packed in capillary tubes and placed in a medium; if the medium contains an antigen to which the lymphocytes are primed, macrophage migration from the tubes is inhibited by lymphokines, particularly macrophage inhibiting factor, released by the antigen stimulated lymphocytes.