This section focuses on the movement of people in the world, nation, or state, and the physical, cultural, economic, and political reasons for that movement. The material presented is designed to help you meet the following objective.
- Identify and analyze physical, cultural, economic, and political reasons for the movement of people in the world, nation, or state.
Many reasons exist for human movement across the planet. These include physical, cultural, economic, and political reasons, as well as subsets or combinations of these reasons (for instance, migration due to political reasons may include cultural reasons as well, such as religious persecution). Most migration in human history has been group migration, but present-day globalization has changed that. Except for those who are displaced by disasters or the effects of climate change, most people now move singly or in family units, and their reasons for moving are due largely to economic factors. Modern communication and transportation systems allow immigrants to easily maintain cultural ties with their communities of origin.
Physical reasons for migration include sudden disasters. This category may include hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and flooding. Some physical reasons may develop slowly over time. This second category may include famine, overpopulation, prolonged drought, and, increasingly, sea level rise. The crop failures that led to the Irish potato famine occurred over a period of a few years and resulted in death for around a million people and migration for more than a million people from about 1845 to 1852. Today, with the slow encroachment of sea level rise, the tiny island nation of Tuvalu in the South Pacific, comprising nine low-lying coral atolls, is being pounded by flooding, coastal erosion, and increasing salinity. Some estimates project about 50 years before the islands are uninhabitable, and some citizens of Tuvalu have asked Australia or New Zealand for refuge.
Watch the brief video at the following link to find out more about these physical pressures causing Tuvalu's people to leave their island nation, and also about strategies for adaptation being implemented by the Tuvaluan government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR5fYBSh5wQ
Cultural reasons for migration can include quests for education or religious freedom. People may also move to areas that have already been settled by others from their culture. In 1848, two Chinese immigrants took up residence in San Francisco, one of the first of a wave of immigrants who ultimately established the community known as Chinatown, the largest Chinese community outside of Asia and the most densely populated urban area in the United States west of Manhattan. Around the same time Chinese immigrants began to move to San Francisco, violence and religious persecution from non-Mormons forced Mormons to leave Nauvoo, Illinois and migrate west to the Great Salt Lake Valley, where under the leadership of Brigham Young, they established a Mormon majority territory that was integrated into the United States as the Territory of Utah, later admitted into the union as a state.
Read about the history and cultural identity of San Francisco's Chinatown here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown,_San_Francisco
Read about "The Great Mormon Migration" here:
