Immigration and emigration

A full bus in Frankfurt, Germany. Some people are on their way home from work, or school. One of them just played football, another is on the way to visit a friend. Listen. On the bus, several languages are being spoken.

It seems like the passengers come from many different places. Now Nadia gets off the bus. She was born and raised in Romania. She went to school and got her education in the town where she grew up, but now she has moved to another country to work. Nadia is an immigrant in Germany.

Omar continues to the next stop. He was also born in another country, in Syria, but he has moved here for a completely different reason. War. Omar and his family had to escape bombs and violence. They are refugees.

Nadia and Omar, who were born in different countries, now live in the same city. They have moved from one country to another. They have migrated, and are migrants. Migration means people moving between cities, or between countries, to settle in a new place. Nadia and Omar have emigrated from their countries of birth.

You emigrate from a place. They have immigrated to their new home country. You immigrate to a place. The very first people on earth moved across large areas. Some people settled in one place for their whole lives, but others moved.

And migration has occurred throughout history. People have moved: to find food for themselves and their family to get away from conflicts because the environment and climate changed to carry out trade, or because human beings are curious, and want to discover what it’s like in other places. Do people migrate for the same reasons today? Nadia moved to Frankfurt because she was curious. She found a job that seemed fun, and she found it exciting to live in another country, experience a new culture, learn a new language.

A lust for discovery drove her to move. Omar fled from war with his family. Life was not safe where they lived. The war caused poverty. It was difficult, dangerous and expensive to buy food on the market.

The competition for groceries forced Omar’s family close to starvation. So both Nadia and Omar have migrated for the same reasons people have always moved: curiosity for Nadia, conflict for Omar. Today, war and poverty are the most common reasons for people to migrate. This is Hans, who has fallen asleep in the rear of the bus. He used to live by the sea and made a living as a fisherman.

But the fishing became worse, maybe because the sea got warmer. Eventually, Hans could not make a living fishing. He chose to move to Frankfurt where he and his wife could find other jobs. Environmental change caused them to move. And here is Cecilia.

She is from Spain, and she works buying and selling stocks. Frankfurt has one of the world’s largest trading markets for stocks, the Frankfurt stock market. Cecilia wanted to live close to her workplace and that’s why she moved, migrated, to Germany. We have met four migrants on the bus. All have moved for different reasons.

Reasons that for thousands of years have caused humans to migrate.