Introduction

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, virtually all developed nations became countries of immigration. International migration is inextricably bound to the globalization of the economy. As international trade and investment expand and markets penetrate more deeply into regions and sectors that were formerly outside or on the margins of global capitalism, the structural organization of society shifts in ways that accelerate geographic mobility (Massey, 1988). Since industrialization first permitted the global expansion of markets beginning in the early nineteenth century, two eras of globalization have prevailed (Hatton & Williamson, 2006; Massey, 2009; Williamson, 2004).

The first occurred during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and involved exchanges between the industrializing nations of Europe and their overseas extensions – settler societies in the Americas and Oceania and colonies in Africa and Asia. From 1846 to 1924, some 48 million migrants left Europe in response to the dislocations of industrialization, with more than 60 percent going to the United States and the rest proceeding mainly to Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia (Massey, 1988). This first era was curtailed in 1914 by World War I, which squandered massive amounts of capital and labor in the trenches and destroyed the international order on which trade and commerce had rested (O’Rourke & Williamson, 1999).