An History of Migration in Colombia: 1850-1957

This paper intends to study the evolution of the Colombian immigration for a hundred-year period (1850-1957). In this period, we have two main proposals on the subject. The first one is of the radical Liberals, who, since the mid-19th century, developed in the country the ideal of “civilization vs. barbarism” proposed by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Argentina. Our Liberals promoted the arrival of the white race to implement a whitening process and the removal of lower races as the indigenous and Africans. The second project is of the 20th-century conservatives that pursued the same ideal of racial improvement, but which also attended religious objective, and ended up with the coming of European Catholics as, for example, the Polish. Finally, with the military dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, immigration served to eradicate the undesirable Communist barbarians who inhabited the eastern plains of our nation.