Unit 6.7 — Effects of Migration, 1750–1900

Topic 6.6 explained why so many people moved between 1750 and 1900. Topic 6.7 covers what that movement actually did to both the places migrants left and the places they arrived — effects the exam splits cleanly into receiving-society and sending-society categories, plus a specific political backlash worth knowing by name and date.

Receiving societies: ethnic enclaves and cultural exchange

Migrants sharing a common origin frequently settled near one another in their new country, forming ethnic enclaves — concentrated neighborhoods that preserved language, food, religion, and social networks from home while adapting to a new setting. Named, citable examples worth having ready: Chinatowns that formed across the United States and other receiving countries, and Italian neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, reflecting the massive wave of Italian migration to Argentina in this period. These enclaves weren't simply isolated — the exam wants you to recognize that ethnic-enclave culture frequently influenced the broader receiving society in return, through food, language, and religious practice diffusing outward from these concentrated communities into the wider population, a small-scale version of the cultural diffusion patterns you've tracked since Topic 2.1's Silk Roads.

Sending societies: a real but uneven effect on gender roles

Migration in this period was disproportionately male — men leaving to find wage labor abroad while family remained behind — and the exam tests a genuinely nuanced, non-uniform effect on gender roles in these sending societies. Where a male migrant left without another male family member to take over his responsibilities, women's roles in household management and the wider community expanded to fill the resulting gap — a real, if situational, expansion of women's social and economic authority. But this wasn't universal: in other cases, families deliberately waited until another male relative was available to take over the departing migrant's role, in which case existing gender roles remained largely unchanged. This is a precise point worth stating carefully in an essay — migration's effect on gender roles depended on specific family circumstances, not a single uniform outcome across every sending society.

Restrictive immigration laws: the political backlash, named and dated

Growing migration, especially from Asia, provoked increasing prejudice and formal legal restriction in receiving societies — a direct, testable consequence worth citing precisely. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by the United States in 1882, banned nearly all Chinese immigration and is the exam's standard example of formal legal exclusion targeting a specific migrant group by name. Australia's colonies moved in the same direction across the 1880s–1890s with restrictive anti-Chinese immigration laws that were later formalized nationally as the White Australia Policy at the time of Australian federation. Both examples show receiving societies actively debating who counted as an acceptable immigrant and citizen, and both connect directly back to Topic 6.1's Social Darwinism and racial-hierarchy rationales — the same ideological framework used to justify overseas imperial expansion was also used to justify excluding migrants from those same regions once they arrived at a receiving society's own borders.

Why this matters for the exam

Topic 6.7 rewards keeping receiving-society effects (ethnic enclaves, cultural diffusion) and sending-society effects (situational gender-role change) as genuinely distinct categories, plus knowing the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and White Australia Policy by name as concrete evidence of the restrictive political backlash migration provoked. A strong essay connects this topic's exclusionary laws back to Topic 6.1's racial ideology — imperialism's justifications and immigration restriction's justifications drew on the same intellectual toolkit.

Sources: Albert.io AP World History Review, Fiveable — Effects of Migration.