The Great Migration refers to the movement in large numbers of African Americans during and after World War I from the rural South to industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. One million people left the fields and small towns of the South for the urban North during this period (1916-1930).

The South and North were the two region the Great Migration heavily affect.

By 1970, when the Great Migration ended, its demographic impact was unmistakable: Whereas in 1900, nine out of every 10 Black Americans lived in the South, and three out of every four lived on farms, by 1970 the South was home to less than half of the country’s African Americans, with only 25 percent living in the …

Arguably the most profound effect of World War I on African Americans was the acceleration of the multi-decade mass movement of black, southern rural farm laborers northward and westward to cities in search of higher wages in industrial jobs and better social and political opportunities.

The Great Migration was the movement of some six million African Americans from rural areas of the Southern states of the United States to urban areas in the Northern states between 1916 and 1970. It occurred in two waves, basically before and after the Great Depression.

During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of African-American sharecroppers who fell into debt joined the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. According to Greenberg, by 1940 1.75 million African Americans had moved from the South to cities in the North and West.

Others chose to emigrate because they feared the long mandatory military service that many European countries required of their male citizens. With the outbreak of the First World War, transatlantic steamship travel became more limited and dangerous, even as additional refugees sought to escape the conflict.

In contrast to earlier immigrants, peasants and unskilled workers, who came primarily to better themselves and their families economically, this period brought immigrants in search of political, psychological and economic freedom.

University of Manitoba

During WW1, the Government suspended all immigration from enemy nations – Germany, Austria and Hungary. Immigration policy continued to tighten after WW1 as Canada faced political and economic uncertainties with the rise of communism, organized labour movements and the Great Depression.

On August 3, 1882, the forty-seventh United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1882. It is considered by many to be “first general immigration law” due to the fact that it created the guidelines of exclusion through the creation of “a new category of inadmissible aliens.”

Eventually, about 300,000 immigrant soldiers would attain citizenship through military service in the war. On the home front, with immigrant labor concentrated in wartime industries—coal, steel, textiles, oil, lumber and many others—newcomers to the U.S. contributed mightily to mobilization and war work.

The first Immigration Act 1869 declared an open door policy excluding only criminals but imposed impossible barriers on the sick and poor. In practice, Canada’s immigration policy was ethnically selective favouring British and American immigrants followed by northern, then central Europeans.

The Immigration Act of 1869 was intended to encourage immigrants to settle the Canadian West, as well as re-enacting controls previously enacted by the British North American colonies.

The Immigration Act of 1906 introduced a more restrictive immigration policy, expanding the categories of prohibited immigrants, formalizing a deportation process and assigning the government enhanced powers to make arbitrary judgements on admission.

Under Canadian nationality law, an immigrant can apply for citizenship after living in Canada for 1095 days (3 years) in any 5-year period provided that they lived in Canada as a permanent resident for at least two of those years.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act) It also ended Asian exclusion from immigrating to the United States and introduced a system of preferences based on skill sets and family reunification.

Sifton was appointed Minister of the Interior under Laurier and implemented a vigorous immigration policy to encourage people to settle and populate the West. Sifton established colonial offices in Europe and the United States. He enticed people to come to western Canada.

In an oft-quoted statement, the western booster described what he saw as the ideal immigrant: When I speak of quality I have in mind something that is quite different from what is in the mind of the average writer or speaker upon the question of immigration.

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Middlesex County, Canada