Hubs of Transregional Migration: Organising the Mass Movement of People in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries – Towards a Research Agenda

Abstract

This article explores the history of «Hubs of Transregional Migration» in the age of mass migration. Russia was a location of considerable significance in the landscape of transna- tional processes and migration regimes around the turn of the twentieth century. It was the starting point for millions of Poles, Jews, Germans, and Balts to leave for a new home in the Americas. In the meantime, the Tsarist empire itself was the scene of internal trans- continental migration processes on a gigantic scale, as Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian colonists sought to establish livelihoods beyond the Urals, in Siberia, the steppes and in the Russian far east. Millions of emigrants from the Russian Empire passed through reception camps at the Russian-German border, in Germany and the US. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands of their compatriots encountered comparable socio-spatial con- ditions in the transit camps established for trans-Ural migrants. These «resettlement points» (peresenlencheskie punkty), located, for example, in the city of Cheliabinsk, were significant sites in these migrations. The paper describes the modern institution of recep- tion and transit camps for trans-migrants, as they emerged at various locations along global migration routes in the late nineteenth century. They are regarded as a specific form of a «site of modernity» (Ort der Moderne) with typical features. Apart from the pereselencheskii punkt in Chelyabinsk, these Hubs of Transregional Migration included the Auswandererhallen in Hamburg, the Auswandererbahnhof in Ruhleben near Berlin, privately-run transit-camps and check-points at the Russian-German and Russian-Aus- trian border, as in Myslowice, and the much better-known and much more thoroughly researched checkpoints and transit points at the US border such as Ellis Island near New York City and Angel Island near San Francisco.