Migration & Geography

Migration is a permanent move to a new location. Geographers document the migration of people across Earth as well as reasons for the migration. Migration is a specific type of relocation diffusion, which was defined in Chapter 1 as the spread of a characteristic through the physical movement of people from one place to another.

Geographers study migration in part because it is important in explaining changes in population in various places and regions. Around 11 percent of Americans migrate in a year (Figure 3-1). Migration is also important because when people migrate, they take with them to their new home cultural values and economic practices.

Migration of Americans

Around 11 percent of Americans migrate in a year. The percentage has declined from around 20 percent during the 1980s.

Migration is a form of mobility, which is a more general term covering all types of movements from one place to another. People display mobility in a variety of ways, such as by journeying every weekday from their homes to places of work or education and once a week to shops, places of worship, or recreation areas. These types of short-term, repetitive, or cyclical movements that recur on a regular basis, such as daily, monthly, or annually, are called circulation. College students display another form of mobility—seasonal mobility—by moving to a residence hall each fall and returning home the following spring.

Geographers are especially interested in why people migrate, even though migration occurs much less frequently than other forms of mobility, because it produces profound changes for individuals and entire cultures. A permanent move to a new location disrupts traditional cultural ties and economic patterns in one region. At the same time, when people migrate, they take with them to their new home their language, religion, ethnicity, and other cultural traits as well as their methods of farming and other economic practices.

The changing scale generated by modern transportation systems, especially motor vehicles and airplanes, makes relocation diffusion more feasible than in the past, when people had to rely on walking, animal power, or slow ships. However, thanks to modern communications systems, relocation diffusion is no longer essential for transmittal of ideas from one place to another. Culture and economy can diffuse rapidly around the world through forms of expansion diffusion.

Why would people make a perilous journey across thousands of kilometers of ocean? Why did the pioneers cross the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, or the Mojave Desert to reach the American West? Why do people continue to migrate by the millions today (Figure 3-2)? The hazards that many migrants have faced are a measure of the strong lure of new locations and the desperate conditions in their former homelands. Most people migrate in search of three objectives: economic opportunity, cultural freedom, and environmental comfort. This chapter will study the reasons why people migrate.

International Immigrants Parade, New York

Migration Principles

Geography has no comprehensive theory of migration, although an outline of migration principles written by nineteenth-century geographer E. G. Ravenstein is the basis for contemporary geographic migration studies. To understand where and why migration occurs, Ravenstein’s principles can be organized into three groups:

• The distance that migrants typically move (discussed in Key Issues 1 and 2).

• The reasons why migrants move (discussed in the first part of Key Issue 3).

• The characteristics of migrants (discussed in the second part of Key Issue 3).

Geographer Wilbur Zelinsky identified a migration transition, which consists of changes in a society comparable to those in the demographic transition (Table 3-1). The migration transition is a change in the migration pattern in a society that results from the social and economic changes that also produce the demographic transition. According to the migration transition, international migration is primarily a phenomenon of countries in stage 2 of the demographic transition, whereas internal migration is more important in stages 3 and 4.

Comparing the Demographic Transition and Migration Transition

Destination of International Immigrants By U.S. State, 2016

California, New York, Florida, and Texas are the leading destinations for immigrants. More than one-half of all immigrants in 2016 went to one of these four states.

Immigrants From Italy Arrive In The United States At Ellis Island, 1911

Pause & Reflect 3.1.1

What might the migration transition look like in a possible stage 5 of the demographic transition?