Countries rarely count who leaves, but some have built walls to stop them
Most nations keep careful track of arrivals yet record little about departures, so emigration figures often have to be reconstructed from other countries' immigration files. Some governments have cared intensely about leavers, though. From a Qing willow barrier in the 1680s to the Berlin Wall, states have repeatedly tried to keep their own people in.
After 1668 the Qing emperor barred Han Chinese from migrating into Manchuria, and in 1681 he ordered the Willow Palisade built as a boundary they could not cross into Manchu and Mongol territory. Soviet Russia began restricting departures in 1918, and by 1928 even illegal emigration was nearly impossible. Internal passports and city residence permits, known as propiska, limited movement inside the country too.
After World War II more than 15 million people moved west from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe within five years. By the early 1950s most of the Eastern Bloc had copied Soviet controls, and westward migration from 1950 to 1990 totalled 13.3 million. Divided Berlin, governed jointly by the four wartime powers, remained a gap. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans crossed each year, many of them young, educated professionals, and by 1961 nearly a fifth of the population had gone. That year East Germany strung up barbed wire that grew into the Berlin Wall, which stood until 1989.
Demographers often explain migration through push factors, such as scarce jobs, persecution or corruption at home, and pull factors, such as higher pay, education, relatives already abroad or even the search for a partner. The historian Jose C. Moya objects that similar lists could be compiled for times and places where nobody moved at all. Over the past few centuries, millions left Europe for the Americas and Oceania, and millions more left South China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Armenia offers a modern case where leaving has become woven into the culture. About 1.5% of its population departs each year, and between 1990 and 2005 roughly 700,000 to 1,300,000 Armenians emigrated, mainly to Russia, France and the United States.
Source: Emigration
