Demographic and Environmental Developments h 257In Egypt, President Nasser attempted to improve agricultural productivity through
the construction of the Aswan Dam. Although the project provided additional farmland,
its interference in the normal fl ood patterns of the Nile River deprived the land of the fer-
tile silt deposited by the Nile’s fl ooding. Also, parasites that caused blindness appeared in
greater numbers, and increased deposits of salt were found in the soil.Migration Patterns
After World War I, the population of Latin America swelled as immigrants continued
to pour into Argentina and Brazil as well as into other Latin American countries. Urban
areas grew rapidly. Latin America experienced sizable migration within the continent as the
inhabitants of rural areas migrated to urban regions in search of employment. Newcomers
often were forced to live in shantytowns on the outskirts of urban areas. Sometimes these
settlements were incorporated into urban areas, resulting in somewhat improved living
conditions within the former shantytowns.
In the 1920s, workers from Mexico crossed into the United States at the same time
that Central Americans were crossing into Mexico in search of employment. During the
1940s, the United States set up programs with Mexico to provide workers. Hundreds of
thousands of migrants, both legal and illegal, continued to cross the border into the United
States. Throughout Latin America, migration in search of employment occurred across
national borders. Other migrants reached, or attempted to reach, the United States to
escape political oppression and warfare. This last group included immigrants from Cuba,
Haiti, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.
Population fl ight from countries undergoing ethnic or religious strife or alterations in
political boundaries remained an issue in the period since 1914. The largest displacement
of people in history occurred in South Asia in 1947 and 1948, when the partition of India
and Pakistan produced a major migration of Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to India.
The fi rst Arab–Israeli War in 1948 created hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab
refugees. In 1998, in the Balkan region of Kosovo, thousands of ethnic Albanians of the
Muslim faith fl ed the region in the face of Serbian massacres. From 2000 to 2004, religious
confl ict in Nigeria caused Christians and Muslims to fl ee to areas where their religion was
the majority faith. In the Sudan, inhabitants of the southern region of the country, most of
them Christians or practitioners of native religions, were displaced from their homes when
Sunni Arabs from the northern regions of Sudan attempted to impose Islamic law upon
the southern regions. By 2004, the Sudanese confl ict focused on the region of Darfur and
involved a confl ict between Arab and non-Arab Muslims.
Another pattern of migration involved the movement of South Asians and Arabs
toward the oil-producing regions of the Middle East. Also, workers from developed nations
including the United States sought employment with their own nation’s companies in the
oil fi elds of the Middle East.Environmental Concerns
The world faced a number of environmental issues: damage to marine life from oil spills,
the danger of meltdowns from nuclear plants, and the devastation of warfare. During the
Vietnam War, for example, the United States employed chemical defoliants in South Viet-
nam. During the Persian Gulf War, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein spilled huge amounts of oil intohttp://www.ebook3000.com