4. ESTUDIO ADMINISTRATIVO
4.2. MANUAL DE NORMAS Y PROCEDIMIENTOS
Classification of migration into systems or types of migration can aid our understanding of the conditions predisposing some people to migrate and gives us a view of their networks. Older migration theories tended to apply an overarching explanatory system at one level of analysis only, such as destitution at home, assimilation, modernity or wages differentiation between the sending and receiving countries. These migration models emphasized impersonal forces and implicitly denied a role for human agency, with migrants being seen as pawns of broad social and economic processes. Motives for migration are never simply push or pull. An understanding of the complex interaction between broad forces and varying levels of human agency provides a more satisfactory analytical framework and allows one to compare migrations, at different times or in different regions.
Dirk Hoerder suggests a model of migration systems and human agency to analyse immigration to the United States.21 He identifies four migration systems populating North America from the early modem period. Cross-cutting these four streams of people, Hoerder identifies three levels of human agency; a macro-level of capital flows and national power relationships; a meso-level of regional networks in the home and receiving regions; a micro level of individual and family decision making. Multi-layered migration systems models make it feasible to compare migration from Britain to Australia and other countries, particularly the United States, which was a highly attractive immigrant destination. Immigrant motivations and varying immigrant flows to both destinations indicate immigrants’ rational decision making, based on an understanding of the state of the economies of both countries. More English emigrants chose Australia in preference to the United States in the late 1830s and early 1840s and again in the 1850s, when English emigration moved ahead of emigration from Ireland.
21 Dirk Hoerder, ‘From Immigration to Migration Systems: New Concepts in Migration History’,
Historians of nineteenth Australian immigration have drawn on some aspects of migration systems, but have generally not attempted to locate the patterns perceived within a broader paradigm. Chain migration and the quality of the immigrants have dominated in recent studies of nineteenth century British and Irish migration to Australia, taking over from earlier work on the political economy of immigration. Histories of Irish migrants in Australia reveal chain migration reaching back into specific regions of Ireland and some amount of regional concentration in Australia. Scottish Highlander and rural Cambridgeshire migrants have been shown to have taken up the migration opportunity within a regional and kin support system.2 23 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Colonial debates on the poor quality of the immigrants have been shown to have been emotive rather than factual. McDonald, Richards, Haines and others have used Australian assisted immigrant passenger lists and other data to analyse the skills and literacy of assisted immigrants.24 They judge them to be above the bottom strata
2“ Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present, 3rd ed. (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000); David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts o f Irish Migration to Australia
(Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1995); Richard E. Reid, ‘Aspects of Irish Assisted Emigration to New South Wales, 1848-1870’ (PhD Thesis, Australian National University, 1992); Richard Reid, ‘Green Threads of Kinship: Aspects of Irish Chain-Migration to New South Wales 1820-1886’, Familia 2, no. 3 (1987): 47-56; Malcolm Campbell, The Kingdom o f the Ryans: The Irish in Southwest New South Wales 1816-1890 ( Sydney: UNSW Press, 1997).
23 Eric Richards, ‘The Highland Passage to Colonial Australia’, Scotlands 2 (1995): 28-44; Eric Richards, ‘Varieties of Scottish Emigration in the Nineteenth Century’, Historical Studies 21 (1986): 473-494; Don Watson, Caledonia Australia: Scottish Highlanders on the Frontier o f Australia, 2nd ed. (Milson’s Point: Vintage, 1997); Colin Holt, Family, Kinship, Community and Friendship Ties in Assisted Emigration from Cambridgeshire to Port Phillip District and Victoria 1840-1867’ (MA Thesis, La Trobe University, 1987); Paul Hudson and Dennis Mills, ‘English Emigration, Kinship and the Recruitment Process: Migration from Melbourn in Cambridgeshire to Melbourne Victoria in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Rural History 10, no. 1 (1999): 55-74.
24 John McDonald & Eric Richards, ‘Workers for Australia: A Profile of British and Irish Migrants Assisted to New South Wales in 1841’, Journal o f the Australian Population Association 15, no. 1 (1998): 1-33; John McDonald & Eric Richards, ‘The Great Emigration of 1841: Recruitment for New South Wales in British Emigration Fields’, Population Studies 51 (1997): 337-355; Eric Richards,
‘How Did Poor People Emigrate from the British Isles to Australia in the Nineteenth Century?’,
Journal of British Studies 32 (July 1993): 250-279; Robin Haines & others, ‘Migration and Opportunity: an Antipodean Perspective’, International Review o f Social History 43 (1998): 235-263; Robin Haines, ‘”The Idle and the Drunken Won’t Do There”: Poverty, the New Poor Law and Nineteenth-Century Government-assisted Emigration to Australia From the United Kingdom’,
of the home society and to be resourceful people taking up an opportunity to emigrate when it offered. Using demographic data as surrogates for evidence of motivation, these studies indicate assisted immigrants made active choices to migrate.
Eric Richards and Ralph Shlomowitz have employed a migration systems approach to nineteenth century Australian immigration.25 Shlomowitz examined convict, free and indentured migration, the shipping trade and the costs and benefits to the immigrants. Richards analysed disjunctions affecting the various immigrant streams to Australia and questioned the degree of coercion and choice for some of the so called ‘free immigrants’. He drew attention to the conditions at various times in the sending and receiving countries, as these do appear to have had an influence on the flow of migrants to the Australian colonies. It may be that the ‘push-pull’ model is applicable to nineteenth century Australian immigration and indicates that potential emigrants were able to choose Australia or north America on the basis of information available to them.
Four migration systems operated to Australia in the nineteenth century; a northern European-Pacific system, migration between colonies, return to Britain and an Asia-Pacific system. The northern European-Pacific system involved movement
Australian Historical Studies 108 (April 1997): 1-21; Robin Haines & Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘Emigration from Europe to Colonial Destinations: Some Nineteenth Century Australian and South African Perspectives’, Flinders University o f South Australia, Working Papers in Economic History, no. 63 (August 1995); Robin Haines, ‘Indigent Misfits or Shrewd Operators? Government-Assisted Emigrants from the United Kingdom to Australia, 1831-1860’, Population Studies 48 (1994): 223- 247.
25 See in particular, Eric Richards, ‘How Did Poor People Emigrate from the British Isles to Australia in the Nineteenth Century?’, Journal o f British Studies 32 (1993): 250-279; Eric Richards, ‘Migration to New Worlds: Migration Systems in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Australian Journal o f Politics and History 41, no. 3 (1995): 391-407; Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘Coerced and Free Migration from the United Kingdom to Australia, and Indentured Labour Migration from India and the Pacific Islands to Various Destinations: Issues, Debates and New Evidence’ and Eric Richards, ‘Migration to Colonial Australia: Paradigms and Disjunctions’ in Migration, Migration History, History, 131-150, 151-176.
of both coerced and free immigrants from Britain and Ireland, and in much smaller numbers from Germany. This northern European-Pacific system intersected with the Euro-Atlantic migrant stream to north America, with British and Irish emigrants involved in both the European-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic migration systems. The Euro-Atlantic system and its relationship with the European-Pacific system had a significant bearing on the variable flows of immigrants to eastern Australia between the 1830s and 1860s.
Some emigrants from the United Kingdom moved between the Australian colonies, New Zealand, other British colonies and the United States. Return migration from the Australian colonies was acted on by an unknown number of people in all social groups, with the probable exception of labouring families and single women, both of whom would have had difficulty in raising the return fares. In addition to the three European migration systems operating in Australia, there was an Asia-Pacific system involving Chinese, Indian and Pacific Islander peoples migrating as indentured workers in the pastoral and agricultural industries and in the case of the Chinese, to seek gold.26
In Australia in the nineteenth century, the macro level of human agency underlying immigration was formed by the flows of capital between Britain and Australia and by the British presence in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Capital and market activities intersected with British and colonial government strategies to divert a proportion of the emigrants from Britain and Ireland to the Australian colonies. At the meso-level of the Australian migration system, regional influences and relationships operated in both the United Kingdom and Australia and the micro-level of individual, family, kin and neighbour relations was experienced by all migrants.
The Australian People: an Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and Their Origins ed. James Jupp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) for a survey and guide to the literature on non-British immigration to Australia, as well as British and Irish immigration.