Political Reasons for Migrating

People migrate because of push factors and pull factors:

• A push factor induces people to move out of their present location.

• A pull factor induces people to move into a new location.

As migration for most people is a major step not taken lightly, both push and pull factors typically play a role. To migrate, people view their current place of residence so negatively that they feel pushed away, and they view another place so positively that they feel pulled toward it.

An environmental or political feature that hinders migration is an intervening obstacle. The principal obstacle traditionally faced by migrants to other countries was environmental: the long, arduous, and expensive passage over land or by sea. Transportation improvements have diminished environmental obstacles. Today, the major obstacles faced by most immigrants are political. Legally, a migrant needs a passport to emigrate from a country and a visa to immigrate to a new country. Intervening obstacles often cause people to engage in step migration, which is migration that follows a path of a series of stages or steps toward a final destination.

Forced Migration of Native Americans

Forced political migration occurred extensively in the United States during the nineteenth century. The victims were Native Americans. Like other people in North America, many Native Americans also migrated west in the nineteenth century. But their migration was forced rather than voluntary. This inequality was written in law, when the Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the U.S. Army to remove five Native American tribes from their land in the southeastern United States and move them to an area now included in the state of Oklahoma. The Choctaw were forced to emigrate from Mississippi in 1831, the Seminole from Florida in 1832, the Creek from Alabama in 1834, the Chickasaw from Mississippi in 1837, and the Cherokee from Georgia in 1838 .

Trail of Tears Routes

The five removals opened up 100,000 square kilometers (25 million acres) of land for whites to settle and relocated the tribes to places that were too dry to sustain their traditional ways of obtaining food. Approximately 46,000 Native Americans were estimated to have been uprooted, and many of them died in the long trek to the west. The route became known as the Trail of Tears; parts of it are preserved as a National Historic Trail

The Memorial Passage sculpture in Chattanooga, Tennessee, marks the beginning of the forced journey of Cherokee Tribes west to Oklahoma.

Pause & Reflect 3.3.1

What similarities and differences do you see in the migration patterns of Native Americans and those of the larger U.S. population over the last 230 years (refer to Figure 3-14)?

Forced Political Migration

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) recognizes three groups of people who are forced to migrate for political reasons:

• A refugee has been forced to migrate to another country to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights, or other disasters, and cannot return for fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion.

• An internally displaced person (IDP) has been forced to migrate for similar political reasons as a refugee but has not migrated across an international border.

• An asylum seeker is someone who has migrated to another country in the hope of being recognized as a refugee.

The United Nations counted 25.4 million refugees, 40.0 million IDPs, and 3.1 million asylum seekers in 2017.

Refugees & Idps, 2017

Refugees From Syria Arrive In Jordan