ABSTRACT
The final decades of the nineteenth century constituted a moment of perceptible globalization of the economic, strategic, and cultural spheres. Economic competition among the leading states in a worldwide arena, under conditions of accentuated economic fluctuations whose effects were concomitantly worldwide, resulted in the reorganization of the global economy into neomercantilist segments. Rapid population expansion in the world at large was expected to produce a Malthusian crisis of subsistence, for which the only remedy would be migration. The expansion of population movements was vastly facilitated by the development of an integrated worldwide network of rapid and inexpensive mass transportation. Ironically, although the vast expansion of international migrations in the final decades of the nineteenth century was largely rooted in the affluent states' soaring demand for labor, at home or in their colonies, and in the worldwide impact of the market forces they unleashed, the receivers quickly came to see themselves as victims of an alien invasion.
