From Migrants to Citizens

By the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century some fifty-five million Europeans had left Europe to go elsewhere. And, today, the growing demographic pressures, primarily in Asia, Africa and the Carribean are such that immigration is now a phenomenon of gigantic proportions, the poor or persecuted seeking salvation in a kind of global immigration. Thus, out authors see the problem within its broader context. Countries of southern Europe, which sought to relieve their demographic, economic and political pressures by sending their sons and daughters to foreign lands, have ceased to be major contributors to the flux of immigration and have become, in their turn, receptacles of the immigration of the poor and persecuted.