How was massive migration an integral part of Western expansion?

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Vaccinating Migrants Bound for Hawaii, 1904First Chinese, then Japanese, and finally Koreans and Filipinos went across the Pacific in large numbers to labor in Hawaii on American-owned sugar plantations in the late nineteenth century. The native Hawaiians had been decimated by disease, creating a severe labor shortage for Hawaii’s plantation economy. (© Corbis)

AA POIGNANT HUMAN DRAMA accompanied economic expansion: millions of people pulled up stakes and left their ancestral lands in the course of history’s greatest migration. It was, in part, because of this global mass migration that the West’s impact on the world in the nineteenth century was so powerful and many-sided.

A note on vocabulary may be in order here: migration refers to general human movement; emigrants (or emigration) refers to people leaving one country for another; immigrants (or immigration) refers to people entering one country from another. People emigrate from and immigrate to.