Employment, education, and family: Revealing the motives behind internal migration in Great Britain

Abstract

Distinctions between internal migration and residential mobility are often formed with reference to assumed differences in motivation, with migration typically linked to employment and educational motives and shorter distance mobility to housing and family. Using geocoded microdata, this article reveals how employment‐led migration represents only a minority share (≈30%) of total migration events over 40 km. Family motives appear just as important, even at distances ≥100 km, with the desire to live closer to non‐resident family/friends being the most frequently cited family submotive. Estimated propensities to undertake employment and educational‐related migration fit very closely to predictions of human capital models of migration, being highest among young, residentially flexible and highly educated individuals. Migrants citing family‐related motives are disproportionately drawn from midlife and later‐life phases, with family shown to be a key motive among migrants with care‐related needs (e.g., parents with children) or access to fewer resources (e.g., social renters and low educational attainment).

Settlement intention of migrants in the Yangtze River Delta, China: The importance of city‐scale contextual effects

“…Firstly (dis)incentive is the employment structure of the host city. One major force that drives migrants to leave their hometown is the greater potential of job opportunities in a city (Liu & Shen, 2014;Thomas, 2019). Job opportunities are also crucial for settlement decision-making.…”

Internal Migration and the Role of Intergenerational Family Ties and Life Events

“…The importance of nonresident family has been further supported by the findings of recent studies of self‐reported motives for migrating. Using data for the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden, Thomas, Gillespie, and Lomax () found family‐related factors to be just as important as a primary motive for migrating as employment or educational concerns, while a more detailed study of the United Kingdom revealed desires to live closer to nonresident family/friends to be the most frequently cited family‐related submotive (Thomas, ).…”

Variations in migration motives over distance

“…His work reveals that the propensity to cite employment-related motives increases with distance while the propensity to cite housing-related motives decreases. While there are important differences in how distance and motives are reported and classified, broadly similar patterns have been found in studies looking at Australia (Clark and Maas 2015), Great Britain (Dixon 2003;Thomas 2019), New Zealand (Morrison and Clark 2011), and the United States (Geist and McManus 2012).…”