Abstract
Human migration involves the movement of people from one place to another. It is a geographical process. Our synopsis of contemporary thinking about migration in Geography begins with a section entitled the Intensity of Migration. Writing in the nineteenth century, Ravenstein observed that short distance moves outnumber long distance moves and we leverage this fundamental observation to examine the ideas of distance decay and the gravity model in migration research past and present. Although short moves internal to countries continue to dominate, migration research in Geography is increasingly interested in longer-distance/international migrations and their effects. Following Ravenstein further, we next consider the role that economic forces play in migration and use this section to reflect on “the decision to migrate”, occupational migration, and migration during the recent Great Recession and its lingering aftermath. We then consider the relationship between migration and development, the Age of Migration (Castles S, Miller MJ, The age of migration, 4th edn. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2009) and the so-called “mobilities turn” in Geography and allied fields. A discussion of circulation and transnational migration (also very much a part of global flows) follows, which leads to a discussion of scholarship on gender and migration. Last, we comment on channelization and networked flows and the implications for understanding immigrant’s settlement patterns, neighborhood segregation, and metropolitan divisions of labor.
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Notes
- 1.
As do some other fields.
- 2.
This is where Russell King begins his retrospective but it is also, for example, the starting point for Michael Samers’ own assessment of migration theory. It is also the place where graduate seminars on migration began in the department where we both earned our PhDs (taught by Dennis Conway at Indiana University).
- 3.
Following tradition in geographic scholarship on spatial mobility, our definition of internal migration excludes short distance intra-urban moves that better fit within the realm of residential mobility research. Internal migration moves people well beyond the range of their previous daily time-space geography whereas most local residential adjustments retain some overlap with this prior daily field of activity.
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Wright, R., Ellis, M. (2016). Perspectives on Migration Theory: Geography. In: White, M. (eds) International Handbook of Migration and Population Distribution. International Handbooks of Population, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7282-2_2
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