Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

Migration, and Migratory Myths 9
forced into wage labour by regimes which deprive them of their land and/or
force them to raise money to pay taxes and where once recruited they are
virtually deprived of their liberty, to situations where the dislocations caused
by imperialism and war more or less force people to seek work and safety
abroad. After the Second World War European governments sent agencies
to recruit workers from, for example, southern Europe, North Africa, Turkey
and the Caribbean. Especially in Germany and Switzerland, workers were
recruited on contracts which denied them the right to change employment
or to settle and gave them few of the other rights enjoyed by native workers.
There have been four periods of major migrations from the beginning of
the capitalist period in the sixteenth century until now. The first was entirely
forced, the second partially so, the third was mainly voluntary, and the
fourth has been more mixed. The first major migration was the forced transportation
of between 10 and 20 million people as slaves from Africa to
America. This took place from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, after
European colonisers had decimated local populations in the Americas and
needed new labour for their mines and plantations. The second major
migration was of indentured or bonded labour, or temporary slaves, from
India and China, again to remedy the lack of cheap or available labour in the
places of destination. In theory the indentured workers signed a contract
with employers and labour agencies of their own free will. In practice for
most of them the choice was little greater than that presented to slaves
transported from Africa, and their contracts provided them with no political
or human rights. Thirty million indentured workers left India during the
colonial period and up to the First World War. They provided a workforce
for the mines and plantations of Burma, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore,
Mauritius, South Africa, Guyana and Jamaica. Several million Chinese
people migrated in this way to South-east Asia, the Pacific Islands, the
Caribbean and South Africa. After the period of the contract, which was of
at least ten years, the migrants were meant to return to their country of
origin. Some 24 million Indians did return. Many did not, for lack of money
or sometimes from personal choice.
The third major world migration was of Europeans to America and
Australia, which began in the eighteenth century and reached its peak in
the first decade of the twentieth century. According to Sutcliffe in Nacido en
otra parte it is estimated that, from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s,
more than 60 million Europeans migrated to America and Australasia, of
whom 5.7 million went to Argentina, 5.6 million to Brazil, 6.6 million to
Canada, and 36 million to the United States. Other Europeans migrated to
parts of Central and southern Africa. They did so for a variety of reasons,
ranging from destitution to a desire for adventure. The experience was in
many ways a positive one for the migrants, although its positive aspects have
sometimes been exaggerated, for example in the mythology of enterprise,
freedom and prosperity in the United States. Its counterpart was the