Libya Emigration and Immigration

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Libya Emigration and Immigration

"Emigration" means moving out of a country. "Immigration" means moving into a country.
Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in the country. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants’ names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birthplaces. Sometimes they also show family groups.

Immigration into Libya

  • Libya was variously ruled by Carthaginians, Persians, Egyptians and Greeks before becoming a part of the Roman Empire. Libya was an early center of Christianity.
  • After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the area of Libya was mostly occupied by the Vandals until the 7th century when invasions brought Islam to the region.
  • In the 16th century, the Spanish Empire and the Knights of St John occupied Tripoli until Ottoman rule began in 1551.
  • Ottoman rule continued until the Italo-Turkish War which resulted in the Italian occupation of Libya and the establishment of two colonies, Italian Tripolitania and Italian Cyrenaica (1911–1934), later unified in the Italian Libya colony from 1934 to 1947.
  • During the Second World War, Libya was an area of warfare in the North African Campaign. The Italian population then went into decline.
  • Libya became independent as a kingdom in 1951.
  • Historically, Libya has been a host state for millions of low- and high-skilled Egyptian migrants, in particular.
  • In the 2006 census, around 359,540 foreign nationals were resident in Libya out of a population of over 5.5 million (6.35% of the population). Almost half of these were Egyptians, followed by Sudanese and Palestinian immigrants.[1]

Emigration From Libya

  • During the 2011 revolution, 768,362 immigrants fled Libya as calculated by the IOM, around 13% of the population at the time, although many more stayed on in the country.

KNOMAD Statistics: [2]

Records of Libya Emigrants in Their Destination Nations

Dark thin font green pin Version 4.png One option is to look for records about the ancestor in the country of destination, the country they immigrated into. See links to immigration records for major destination countries below.

References

  1. "Libya", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya, accessed August 2021. If consular records prior to the revolution are used to estimate the immigrant population, as many as 2 million Egyptian migrants were recorded by the Egyptian embassy in Tripoli in 2009, followed by 87,200 Tunisians, and 68,200 Moroccans by their respective embassies. Turkey recorded the evacuation of 25,000 workers during the 2011 uprising.[234] The number of Asian migrants before the revolution were just over 100,000 (60,000 Bangladeshis, 20,000 Filipinos, 18,000 Indians, 10,000 Pakistanis, as well as Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and other workers).
  2. "Libya", at KNOMAD, the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, ,accessed August 2021