PUSH/PULL factors in Immigration

In the last half of the 1800s and the early years of the 1900s, the forces motivating immigrants to leave their homeland can be divided into “Push” factors and “Pull” factors.

Push factors were forces that drove them out of their home countries such as:

• poverty
• a shortage of land
• the military draft
• political or cultural repression
• religious discrimination

Pull factors were:

• the promise of jobs in the new lands
• cheap farmland in America and Canada
• the magnetic pull of “chain “