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534 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1994)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0534 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE International migration, the movement of people across borders, has affected states and societies since time immemorial. It is one of history's great constants. Yet its role in forging states and societies not infrequently is ne- glected or forgotten. The oft repeated slogan that Germany is not an immi- gration land perhaps best testifies to the commonplace disregard of migration history. As late as the early 1970s, study of international migration appeared an esoteric pursuit, save perhaps for historians of countries like the United States, Canada, Argentina, or Australia. Major subdisciplines of the social and political sciences, like international relations, despite the richness of their theory, had little to say about international migration and scarcely took note of it. Now, as more and more states are wont to declare that the boat is full, it finally is becoming clear that, with respect to one of the principal determinants of global order and disorder in the late twentieth century, international relations theory missed the boat. Fortunately, more generous assessments can be made: anthropology and demography fared better. The contemporary migratory epoch dates from the late nineteenth century, when industrial states of the North Atlantic began to regulate international migration. The predominance of migration for employment defines the cur- rent period. Mass international migration linked to industrialization, chang- ing labor markets, and transnational employment networks, however, has taken place along with concomitant flows of refugees, family reunification, and settler migration. One of the hallmarks of late-twentieth-century migra- tion is the blurring of various, formerly more distinctive, types of migrants. Western democracies in particular face increasingly difficult tasks, for in- stance, in distinguishing refugees from economically motivated migrants. No one is certain how many international migrants there are; 100 million recent international migrants is a figure commonly heard. If this is anywhere near the mark, migrants would represent only about 2 percent of the world's population. Clearly, the vast majority of the world's population resides at home. But virtually all available information suggests that a major quanti- tative upsurge in international migration has occurred over the past several decades. In addition, more so than in the past, international migration is a global phenomenon, affecting all areas of the world. As late as 1988, interna- tional migration specialists could joke that, if the world consisted of states like Japan and Albania, the former understood to be a land without immi- grants and the latter a state from which it was virtually impossible to leave, there would not be a need for students of international migration. Only several years later, Japan finds itself grappling with difficult issues related to preventing a rising tide of illegal immigrants, and a substantial fraction of the Albanian population has gone abroad, mainly to nearby Greece and 8

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