See also: Forcible removal, resettlement, expulsion, emigration, deportation, ethnic cleansing, evacuation, exile, flight, medieval land development/settlement of the East, colonisation of the East, population settlement, remigration, late resettlers, resettlers (Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR), resettlement, abduction, expulsion, forced migration.

Migration is the geographical relocation of the centre of one’s life – undertaken with a view to a longer-term stay – by individuals, families, groups or even entire populations. Various forms of geographical population movements can be distinguished:

Individuals, families or groups seek, through movements between geographical and social spaces, to improve their prospects for employment or settlement, or to gain access to opportunities for work, education, training or marriage, or to open up new opportunities for themselves, apart from cases of forced migration, which will be discussed further below. A distinction can be made between various underlying causes and the spatial and temporal dimensions of migration:

Migration decisions were generally driven by multiple factors; a variety of different motives determined the decision to emigrate or immigrate to a particular area. In most cases, economic, social, political, religious and personal motives were closely intertwined in various combinations, each with its own scope.

Movements across geographical areas aimed at opening up or exploiting opportunities were not solely directed towards stabilising or improving the economic and social situation of immigrants in the destination area. Equally, the centre could be on the situation in the area of origin, as in the case of seasonal labour migration or return migration after years or decades of gainful employment abroad. To this day, the mostly regular remittances sent by migrants to family members left behind are of immense importance to individual households, regional economies and even entire national economies.

In the contexts mentioned, migration formed part of life planning and was frequently linked to fundamental (occupational) life choices such as marriage, the choice of profession or a place of work; the vast majority of migrants moving for work, education, settlement or marriage were therefore young. In such circumstances, the decision to migrate resulted from personal choices or arrangements within family economies. However, there were often no alternative courses of action available to individuals or families, particularly when existential hardship prevailed or was imminent due to economic, social or environmental crises.

In the case of migration driven by the search for new or, at any rate, better economic and social opportunities, the region of origin and the destination area differed primarily in terms of an economic disparity. This should by no means be understood as an overarching economic development gap between two large regions, but was rather often limited to individual, small-scale market segments. Specific social characteristics of individuals or members of families or groups – including, above all, gender, age and position in the family life cycle, occupational status and qualifications, as well as attributions (particularly regarding membership of‘ethnic groups’, ‘castes’, ‘races’ or‘nationalities’), which were not infrequently linked to privileges and birthrights, determined access to the market and thus also the ability to seize opportunities for migration.

Communication processes motivated and structured spatial population movements; whether and to what extent emigration was viewed as an individual or household-based economic alternative depended crucially on knowledge of migration destinations, routes and opportunities. For labour, educational and settlement migration to reach a certain scale and duration, continuous and reliable information about the destination area was required. The forms through which such information was conveyed were diverse and often closely interlinked: A key element was the oral or written transmission of knowledge about employment, training, marriage or settlement opportunities by migrants who had already gone ahead (pioneer migrants), whose reports were considered highly valuable due to family ties or personal connections. Information regarding opportunities and risks – regarded as trustworthy and sufficient to enable the decision to migrate – was often available to potential migrants only for a single destination, or for individual, locally limited settlement options, or specific segments of the labour or training market, meaning that realistic choices between different migration destinations were by no means always available.

The importance of information exchange via networks cannot be overestimated. Relatives or acquaintances, for example, were the first stop or the direct destination of the journey for 94 per cent of all Europeans who arrived in North America at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Regions of origin and destination were generally linked through migration networks, through communication systems held together by kinship, acquaintances and communities of origin, as well as through the establishment of well-established migration traditions. This applied not only to long-distance cross-border migration, but equally to intra- and inter-regional migration patterns and thus, for example, to communication between cities and their surrounding areas in the context of European urbanisation in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Furthermore, knowledge about the opportunities and risks of emigration and immigration, about destinations, transport routes and the psychological, physical and financial burdens involved was conveyed through oral and written information provided by state, church or private aid organisations and advice centres, as well as through publications. The state or private recruitment of labour migrants or settlers – for example, with the help of agents or recruiters – can also be understood as a form of knowledge transfer regarding migratory opportunities.

State or official action constitutes one of the most significant underlying causes of forced migration, which is another key form of migration. Forced migration is caused by coercion to leave one’s home, which leaves no realistic alternative course of action. It may take the form of fleeing violence that directly or foreseeably threatens life and liberty, usually for political, ethno-national, racist or religious reasons. However, forced migration can also involve violent expulsion, deportation or resettlement, which often affects entire population groups. It is not uncommon for such forms to be associated with forced labour. A typology of forced migration encompasses a wide range of different terms, which in turn are associated with their own specific problems of definition:

Forced migration was usually the result of war, civil war or measures taken by authoritarian regimes. The world wars in particular, but also the processes of colonisation and decolonisation, were key catalysts in the history of forced migration.

Beyond forced migration and beyond the factors described above – whether affecting individuals or specific groups – migration regimes influenced the implementation and shaping of migration options, and controlled, promoted, directed or restricted the actions of actors involved in the migration process. Elements of migration regimes include ideological and political principles relevant to the framing and shaping of migration processes, rules laid down by the authorities or the state, institutional structures and administrative decision-making procedures. Migration regimes thus highlight the far-reaching interplay between the state and migration. Authorities or states may perceive spatial population movements and their accompanying and consequential effects as economic, social, legal, cultural or domestic and foreign policy challenges. The nature and extent of this perception of the problem were guided by the state’s self-attribution of areas of responsibility and tasks, as well as by the associated objectives. Changes in statehood and the understanding of the state, in the form of government and state activity, and in state legitimacy and representation led to shifts in the state’s perceptions of migration.

The history of the Germans in Eastern Europe can be understood as a history of migration: The recruitment and settlement of settlers from German-speaking regions from the High Middle Ages through to the 19th century in various areas of Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe constitute the phenomenon examined in this encyclopaedia. Diverse migratory links between the regions of origin in Central Europe and the destination areas persisted for centuries; they played a significant role in the economic, social and cultural development of the German-speaking population in Eastern Europe. The world wars of the 20th century and their consequences destroyed a large proportion of the main German settlements in Eastern Europe through forced migration. In particular, flight and expulsion during and after the end of the war in 1945, as well as the decades-long process of emigration by resettlers, which reached its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, brought an end to the presence of German-speaking population groups and minorities in Eastern Europe.

• Klaus J. Bade: Europe on the Move. Migration from the late 18th century to the present day. Munich 2000.
• Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen, Jochen Oltmer (eds.): Encyclopaedia of Migration in Europe from the 17th Century to the Present Day. 3rd ed. Paderborn 2010.
• Mathias Beer: The Flight and Expulsion of the Germans. Background, Course, Consequences. Munich 2011.
• Detlef Brandes, Holm Sundhaussen, Stefan Troebst (eds.): Encyclopaedia of Expulsions. Deportation, Forced Resettlement and Ethnic Cleansing in 20th-Century Europe. Vienna et al. 2010.
• Jochen Oltmer: Migration in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Munich 2010 (Encyclopaedia of German History 86).
• Christoph Bergner, Matthias Weber (eds.): Resettlement and Minority Policy in Germany. Assessment and Prospects. Munich 2009 (Publications of the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe 38).
  

Jochen Oltmer: Migration. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2012. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32744 (accessed 14 December 2021).