AS Human Geography help!!!!!!!!

Could someone read over this essay (15 marker) and give some feedback on this please? I didn't really know how to approach the question so any help is appreciated!

“Emigration is the door to the modern world and once it’s open, it is very difficult to close.”
How far do you agree with this view?

To a large extent, I agree with this statement. Globalisation and increasing use of social media can promote emigration even more. In the example of migrants from LICs, we see that through time-space distanciation, many people are exposed to the better lives that migrants can access when moving to HICs. This can be seen in San Agustin-Poughkeepsie ethnography, where San Agustin migrants began to reside in the 1980s. As a result, in a study done in the 1990s, it found that a quarter of San Agustin’s residents were in Poughkeepsie at any point in the year. As the number of San Agustin migrants settling in Poughkeepsie increases, this builds a community which can help new migrants assimilate faster as well as removing the intervening obstacle that most migrants fear, which is the fear of alienation and ostracisation in their destination area. As a result, this encourages more migration which is difficult to quell due to the sheer size of people moving. While there are attempts to quell the sheer number of illegal migrants from Mexico through stricter migration laws and increasing security at the Mexico-US border, we must consider that this will only increase the scale of illegal immigration rather than decrease migration as a whole. Political instability and hostile environments created by cartels will still encourage the Mexican population to emigrate at large levels to access a higher standard of living. Thus, emigration is incredibly difficult to contain on the destination country’s part, especially if there isn’t any cooperation between the source country to prevent these conditions in the first place.

To add, increasingly similar standards of living in other countries as well as methods to move becoming much easier due to advancements in technology will compel more people to move to other regions. For example, when the UK was still part of the European Union (EU), many Britons lived overseas in Spain, which had the largest population of Britons outside of the UK. Combined with the benefit of freedom of movement within the EU removing the legal barriers behind immigrating to another country as well as better weather, this would encourage many people to move to Spain and so as pull factors in Spain exceed those in the UK and there are increasingly less obstacles, emigration becomes much more likely. This would likely be inhibited by the UK’s departure from the EU but the decrease probably won’t be as large since those who decide to move to experience new cultures and such would most likely have the resources to sort through the legalities needed to leave. For example, it tends to be that richer retirees are more likely to leave to other countries since they simply have the finances to do so. This is contrasted by perhaps eastern European guest workers, whose likelihoods of being able to pay for a visa to work in the UK for barely any money in comparison are much lower.

Moreover, we see that while attempts at reducing emigration of certain groups of people may succeed for certain countries, this may only move the destination at which groups emigrate as well as highlighting perhaps that there is no need to heavily police borders. For example, taking the example of the UK’s quota system, whereby you must accumulate “points” in order to move there, this discriminates against lower-skilled workers such as truck drivers and farm labourers. Consequently, shortages of petrol due to lack of truck drivers transporting it into the UK as well as large shortages of jobs in construction and farm labour have highlighted the importance of these workers in our country. Combined with the effects of the UK leaving the EU, we see that perhaps emigration may not necessarily need to be closed. There are many benefits to emigration, such as being able to decrease the effects of an ageing population (an increasingly significant issue in HICs such as the UK) through creation of a larger tax base as well as being able to fill gaps in low-skilled employment that have low demand among the resident population. Therefore, while it may be difficult to decrease emigration, to what extent is this really necessary?

To conclude, emigration is a product of globalisation and opens a country to heightened levels of development due to perhaps migrants bringing back new ideas and technology to their respective countries as well as remittances helping the development of a local area’s economy. As it is integral to a country’s development and is beneficial to both source and destination areas, it isn’t exactly necessary to decrease emigration rates. While it may lead to brain and brawn drain in the source area, wages are simply higher in other countries and so the sheer scale and desire to migrate as well as pull factors in the destination region make it very difficult to contain emigration if there was any need to do so in the first place.

This is an excellent answer! A good introduction, excellent examples and relevant discussions about the points you make with place specific information. I would give this a 14 or 15. Amazing!