Was migrating way easier back then (e.g., people can just board a ship with their bags to the US and settle there)? What makes migrating to most countries so difficult now?
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I would not say that is remotely easy. Especially since traveling at all exposed you too all of the dangers of the road, which very often would mean that you would end up dead on the way to where you are going by violence or disease.
And even in ancient days plenty of places did not allow migrants, or even just straight up and slaved or killed them.
In fact, pretty much the only way it has gotten harder is the fact that technology has enabled better surveillance.
In the very early days, you could just board a ship and go. But it didn’t take long before there were immigration controls, and some groups (Irish, Jews, etc) had lots of controls.
Migrating is difficult now because countries want to control their economies and cultural makeup.
Migration to the Americas slowed as these destinations transitioned from being sparsely inhabited wildernesses to developed economies with tens of millions of people or more. The original draw was cheap pristine land, away from other people if you like. As land availability decreased, so too did migration.
It depends on location and era.
In the feudal system you had the “right” to leave at any time, find some unclaimed piece of land and start a farm.
in practice it did happen but the cost and danger were so high success was very low and so very few people did it.
In practice that was the primary block.
You also had language barrier, insularity of the community you were trying to join and legal differences.
The legal boundaries I think you’re thinking of were put in place a lot more recently because the cost of moving became less prohibitive so something else was put in place to stop countries that treated their lower class citizens like slaves from fleeing en masse to any other country that didn’t.
In brief: No it was CONSIDERABLY harder but the stories written were by the ones that survived the process.
In terms of the US immigration policy, there really wasn’t a national policy until the later parts of the 1800s. Before then, states could set their own rules on immigration, but these were pretty hard to enforce in reality. A harbor like Boston or New Orleans had literally thousands of people from all over the world coming and going every week due to trade and commerce alone — to try and keep track of all of these people would have been annoying for both the harbormasters and the merchants and would have been basically logistically impossible anyway. And given that the states all had their own policies, it just took one state saying “yeah, we’ll take anyone” to basically undermine any other state’s attempt to try and keep people out. So for the most part, if you could afford to make the journey to the US you could likely stay and settle — and the government was basically fine with this, as they were always looking for people to move West and settle the interior of the US anyway.
By the late 1800s, steamships and railroads had made reaching the US both much easier (weeks down from months) and more affordable. This was also a particularly tumultuous time in Europe and the pressure to leave was immense. In part due to xenophobic and racist ideologies, the US began trying to centralize and control the process of immigration, and this is when you see Ellis Island and Chinese Exclusion Acts the peak migrations of the early 1900s. The federal government took over and put in place much more control over who could settle.
All of this of course is not counting the border with Mexico, which remained extremely fluid and where the “militarized” nature we see now is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Nowadays? There are a thousand reasons for this but I’ll just lay out the big picture. Migration is so messy now because people have unprecedented access to anywhere in the world via international travel and the internet — someone from as far away as Afghanistan or Nigeria or Venezuela has never had an “easier” time getting to the border of a rich country looking for safety or opportunity or just a chance at a new life (you have Russian political dissidents showing up in Juarez looking to get into the US). At the same time the tools governments have to manage these migrations have never been more powerful — drones, facial recognition, smart phones, etc. Immigration has never been particularly politically popular in most places, but the problems of much of the developing world are extremely dire and the underlying causes of migration are not going away anytime soon, so more people are going to keep coming. So you’re seeing a bit of a unstoppable force meets an immovable object kind of dynamic.
In the past there were fewer or no legal barriers to immigration however there were often higher social/cultural barriers.
When you look at things like Irish or southern European immigration to the US east coast. Due to the existing Irish/Italian/Jewish communities in places like NYC, the cultural/social barriers were also low. Meaning you could easily find people who shared your language and religion and overall culture. And the legal barriers hadn’t yet been implemented
There have been brief periods of time where migrating was “easy”. The discovery of the Americas combined with manageable shipping was one of them. You also need a population sufficiently distressed to be willing to give up almost anything for a new life. I expect the death rate was higher than we would tolerate today even when it was “easy”.
For most of human history migrating was quite difficult.
In the 19th and early 20th century, both the USA, and British and later independent Canada, wanted to expand west to the Pacific, and needed to bring in immigrants to settle the land quickly, to freeze out each other, as well as block both natives and other countries from controlling large areas. So they advertised for European settlers and promised them land grants and other incentives – they also encouraged their own easterners to spread out to the west.
Priority was likely given first to English and Scottish protestants, then to German Protestants, but as needed they brought in Scandinavians, Irish Catholics, eventually Ukrainians, Basques or whoever, almost exclusively white, in order to have at least some cultural homogeneity and because of racial prejudice against non-whites.
There was a lot of surplus population in Europe, so it was easy to recruit starving Irish and displaced Scottish serfs, but also a lot educated and rich people saw a chance to make their fortunes in new lands likely to experience massive economic growth. So it was win win.
When my grandparents came to the US in the 1910s, there weren’t any immigration laws and anyone could come. Xenophobes upset with people that they thought were a little too ethnic, passed the Johnson-Reed Law in 1924, enacting strict quotas and curbing most immigration.
The main issue is that the entirety of the planet is now claimed with delineations (property lines) of private and national concern. As such, in order to migrate somewhere, someone else who is already there either has to move or share their land. In the past when this has happened it resulted in warfare. (excellent examples being the germanic migrations into the english islands in the 400-600AD by saxons displacing the welsh and engles and then again by the danes/others in the 800-1000AD)
But back then, borders were very porous, squishy things. Most nations now have legitimate fences and walls between others (borders like the usa which have few active defenses are incredibly uncommon elsewhere) and when caught entering without permission, you face imprisonment/eviction.
Whereas when you used to migrate, people would basically either displace the current residents of a land, or fill in the gaps. Now, you need to buy those gaps and typically those fleeing places aren’t exactly wealthy.
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