The Globalization of Migration Has the world really become more migratory?

It is commonly assumed that international migration has accelerated of the past half century, and that migrants travel over increasingly large distances, and that migration has therefore become much more diverse in terms of origins and destinations of migrants (Arango 2000: 291). A related argument is that more and more countries are now experiencing significant volumes of immigration and emigration than before – in other words, countries are increasingly integrated in international and global migration systems (cf. Skeldon 1997). All these trends combined would have made global migration patterns more complex in terms of the assumed neater structuring and more clear-cut division between immigration and emigration countries of the past. This is also liked to the ideas that, in the past, migration flows often concentrated in a few bilateral corridors, and often followed colonial links (cf. Vertovec 2007). For instance, until the early 1970s, the vast majority of Moroccan migrants moved to the France, the former colonizer. In recent decades Moroccan migrants have fanned out to a wide array of European and North American destinations.