Question

Which of the following is an historical example of a cultural push factor?

Answer 1

Answer:

d. The U.S. government's policy of relocating the North America's indigenous population to reservations in the West.

Explanation:

In the field of human geography, push factors refers to the reasons why people emigrate out from one place to another. Their opposites are the pull factors, which are the reasons why people immigrate to a new place coming from another.

There are three main push factors: economic, environmental, and cultural. In the provided answers, option a is an example of an economic push factor, as Mexican laborers moved to the US in search of the job opportunities given to them during World War II. Option b is clearly an environmental factor. Option c is another example of an economic factor, as Europeans farmers were motivated to emigrate looking for better economic conditions in the New World. Option e is another clear example of an environmental push factor.

Option d is the one cultural factor. Starting in 1830 with the passage of the Indian Removal Act, the United States government forcibly relocated most of North America's indigenous population to reservations in the sparsely populated western part of the country. In this case, discrimination against Native Americans was a huge cultural push factor. While many Indians tribes had already started to assimilate into American culture of the time, they were still widely seen as alien nations that had no real place in the United States, and they were forced to move in order to give their lands to white settlers.