Studying internal migration in a cross-national context

Abstract

This book draws together empirical material on temporal trends in internal migration in selected countries across the developed world in order to explore whether the decline in migration intensity observed in the USA is evident in other developed societies. If the trends in the USA are observed across a suite of comparator nations, then it becomes plausible to contend that the structural economic and social changes that have taken place across the advanced nations of Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia have acted to reduce the propensity for internal migration. If, on the other hand, each country has experienced different, and possibly unique, temporal trends in migration rates in recent decades, the opportunity for grand theory formulation becomes less attractive. Alternatively, it may be that declining migration intensity is not confined to countries that are economically advanced, but that it is more widely spread across nations at earlier stages of development, as indeed seems to be the case with the evidence presented in Chapter 1, which suggests that there is a general period effect that is acting on all countries to a greater or lesser extent. The question which is the focus of the book clearly requires a cross-national comparative perspective. Given the weight of research that has focussed on internal migration in all its guises across several disciplines, it is tempting to assume that cross-national analysis is straightforward and analyses of migration behaviour in different countries abound. This, however, is not the case; our basic question is easy to pose but much harder to answer as countrieseven those with well-established population data systemsdiffer in the way that data are collected, in their definitions of migration, and in the spatio-temporal coverage of the data that are available. Consequently, previous cross-national studies of internal migration have tended to focus on comparisons between a relatively small number of selected countries rather than confront the challenges of data collection and harmonisation associated with a more comprehensive set of countries. This book falls primarily into the former category by asking individual experts to produce case studies for seven countries that answer the same general questions without being rigidly prescriptive about the means of doing this. In this sense, it differs from studies designed to compare migration using a standard set of migration indicators in two countries (e.g., Bell et al., 2002) or to compare one dimension of migration amongst a relatively small set of countries (e.g., Long et al., 1988). However, it does also

Ethnic internal migration: The importance of age and migrant status

“…There is evidence that one drives increases in the other (Green, , p. 42; Lomax & Stillwell, ), and that areas gaining international migrants lose internal migrants (Lomax et al., ). While international migration may influence internal migration through additional pressure on housing and labour markets (Stillwell et al., ), it is not clear whether such effects diminish over time as international migrants settle and assimilate with the host population. Age further complicates this.…”

Multiple moves and return migration within developing countries: A comparative analysis

“…Mobility has far‐reaching implications for economic transformation and for people's livelihoods in developing countries. Internal migration is central to matching labour demand and supply at local and regional spatial scales, and where someone lives is an important determinant of their life chances, educational success, and life expectancy (Stillwell, Bell, & Shuttleworth, 2017).…”