Global Movements, Global Walls: Responses to Migration, 1885-1925
Author(s)
Zolberg, Aristide R.
Abstract
The erection of a global network of barriers that successfully confined most of the world’s population in their countries of birth, precisely at a time when social and economic forces disposed them to expand the domain of their movements and endowed them with an enhanced capacity for doing so, constitutes a remarkable example of the contradictory character of historical change and an even more remarkable demonstration of how apparently irresistible historical trends can be contradicted-for better or for worse-by concerted human action. Even as worldwide movement multiplied opportunities for the cultural and biological mixing of groups hitherto separated and thereby enhanced the unity of humankind, the retrenchment of nations behind their self-made walls helped foster a cultural construction of “societies” as self-contained population entities with a common and homogeneous ancestry, growing by way of natural reproduction alone. In relation to these endogenous entities, immigration came to be regarded as a pathogenic source of otherness. It was the first episode in the protracted confrontation of the world’s paramount “imagined communities” with the realities of globalization.
