Migration

Leanna C. Shawn Vettom. Conor Westphal. Stephanie Chen. __Reason's for migration__ The main reason for moving home during the 19th century was to find work. On one hand this involved migration from the countryside to the growing industrial cities, on the other it involved movement from one country, in this case Britain, to another. Poor working conditions, housing and sanitation led to many people opting to emigrate. In the 1840's Ireland suffered a terrible famine. Faced with a massive cost of feeding the starving population many local landowners paid for laborers to emigrate (it was cheaper than paying them poor relief for a long period of time).

__Effects of Massive Migrations__ Many people moved from the country side to urban centers seeking new jobs. this migration was so massive that by 1900, 50% of the population in most industrialized countries lived in towns, not the countryside.There were also more than 150 cities that each had over one hundred thousand people spread out in Europe and North America. These crowded cities had their own problem such as shoddy houses, poluted air, and inadequate water supply. To cope with these problems in the rapidly expanding cities, governments passed building codes that raised the standards of builds and built sewer systems to get rid of wastes.

__Migration in Britian__ The British at the time controlled a massive empire including America, Canada, South Africa, Austrailia, and people soon started to move to these countries in search of a new life. Some had no choice, the were transported as a punishment for a crime. Migration was not just people moving out of the country, it also invloved a lot of people moving into Britain. order to keep in head of the game in Industrialization, Britain did not allow skilled workers to immigrate to other countries. This decision came as a reaction to the many workers leaving their countries to find work in industrializing countries, and to sell their inventions that were successful in Britain for a profit.



__The United States in Migration__ The United States also had problems with the immense amount of migrants arriving there. In 1907, the United States Senate formed the Dillingham Commission to study the origins and consequences of immigration. In a series of reports published in 1910 and 1911, the Commission claimed that a crucial shift in European immigration patterns corresponded to the rise of festering social and economic problems in the United States. Before the 1880s, according to the Commission, most migrants to the United States had arrived from northern and western Europe. After the 1880s, however, "inferior" migrants from places in southeastern Europe, such as Austria--Hungary, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Lithuania, Romania, and Greece, increasingly dominated European immigration. In the end, the Commission's 42-volume report placed the blame for the nation's festering problems on these new migrants and recommended that the federal government use literary tests to prevent poor and uneducated immigrants from entering the nation and causing further social unrest. Also, the American Government took some drastic measures to control the amount of migrants allowed in. One law they passed was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which made immigration from China illegal, and the 1906 "Gentleman's Agreement," which gave the United States the right to exclude Japanese immigrants.