LITERATURE

Sociology of Immigration

Sociology of Immigration

Introduction

Migration is an old story. For thousands of years, people have migrated to search for food, survive, conquer frontiers, and colonize new territories, escape from war zones or political turmoil, and look for new and more rewarding and exciting opportunities. Originating from Africa, the modern Homo sapiens arrived in Eurasia at least 40,000 years ago and in North and South America more than 20,000 years ago (Davis 1974; Diamond 1997; Hirschman 2005). In a broad sense, the history of the world is a history of human migration and settlement.

As a country of immigrants, the United States is perhaps the best example in this regard. Sociologists have long been interested in theorizing about different types of societies—from Ferdinand Tönnies's dichotomy of “community” and “society” to Émile Durkheim's “mechanic solidarity” and “organic solidarity.” The former, being the more traditional society, is characterized by more intimate relations among members—that is, people in the group know each other well. Decisions in these communities were often made by village or clan leaders rather than collectively.

In contrast, in modern societies, it is impossible to know all the people in the community, and decisions concerning the welfare of community members are more likely to be made jointly in one way or another. The typology of the founding fathers of sociology clearly captures the major trends of social change and transformation over time; what was not made explicit was that underlying this transition from a traditional to a modern society, there is also a story of migration. As cities become centers of economic activities, there is also an increase in rural to urban migration. Urban communities are commonly much larger than villages, and anonymity is a major feature of urban society. Likewise, migration is also dealt with in some of Karl Marx's writings. For example, Marx wrote, “In the sphere of agriculture, modern industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for this reason, it annihilates the peasant, that bulwark of the old society, and replaces him by the wage-labourer” (quoted in Tucker 1978:416). More often than not, the wage laborers in England that Marx was referring to then were migrants from rural areas.

Migration as a Multidisciplinary Field Of Study

Migration attracted scholars from multiple disciplines from the very beginning. Given the large body of literature on migration contributed by scholars from different fields—economics, demography, anthropology, history, geography, and sociology—it is impossible to discuss all the major practitioners in the field. Therefore, instead of providing an exhaustive list of scholars in these disciplines who study migration, I will highlight the most important contributions by practitioners from two major disciplines (geography and economics) to the field of migration studies.

In fact, one of the earliest scholarly papers on migration was written by a geographer, Ravenstein (1889) using census data from England, in which he outlined several laws of migration. Naturally, geographers are concerned with migration because migration inevitably involves crossing geographical boundaries and changes the spatial distribution of the population (within and across ...