History and the Social Sciences: Interdisciplinary Exchange in Migration Studies

Eclectic in its methodology and borrowing from both humanities and social sciences, history’s main theoretical contribution to migration studies is periodization, as historians situate human movement within the flow of time from “then to now.”  In the past four decades, historians have increasingly shifted from short-term, micro-level studies of immigration or emigration toward analysis of mobility as a persistent characteristic of all human life. Their conclusions challenge social scientists’ depictions of contemporary migrations as unprecedented or problematic. However, in the uneven dialogue of history with the social sciences, many social scientists have not yet heard the challenge.