Chapter 1 - The Meaning of Relevant Words and Their Use

Summary

Human migration is defined here as a comprehensive process of a movement of people within and between geographic spaces. The background, direction, depth and result of this process encompass factors within the regions of origin and destination as well as regions crossed during the movement from origin to destination. Like integration of immigrants, as defined above, it is usually a complex, long-term and multidimensional process, which occurs throughout history.

Migration

Detailed definitions of ‘migration’ are provided by dictionaries and other lexical resources, such as The Historical Thesaurus of English. The Thesaurus charts the development of use and meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It aims to include almost every word in English recorded from early medieval times to the present day, arranged in detailed hierarchies of meaning. It records ‘migration’ as a noun under ‘Society’ (‘Furnishing with inhabitants’). With this meaning ‘migration’ was used since 1527. A later meaning occurs from 1611: change of place of a thing. ‘Migration’ can have the sense of ‘movement’, which itself is listed since the fourteenth century, with ‘transmigration’ listed since the seventeenth century.

The Online Etymology Dictionary defines ‘migration’ as a change of residence or habitat, removal or transit from one locality to another, especially over a distance. The English word came from the Latin migrationem (a removal, change of abode). ‘Migration’ is a noun of action from the past participle stem of migrare (to move from one place to another).

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists ‘migration’ as: 1. the action or an act of moving from one place to another and 2. the migrating of a person or a people from one country or place of residence to settle in another, or an instance of this. According to the OED, ‘migration’ can also involve animals, plant distribution or the random movement from one place to another by a cell, atom, molecule and so forth. All these meanings appear neutral. Similarly neutral are the definitions of ‘migration’ of humans in Merriam-Webster Dictionary – the act, process or an instance of migrating – and Collins English Dictionary – the act or an instance of migrating. However, Cambridge Dictionary7 defines ‘migration’ also as the process of people travelling to a new place to live, usually in large numbers.