Internal Migration Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Internal migration is typically defined as the permanent residential relocation of an individual or population from one geographical unit to another within a particular country. Examples of internal migration include a move between regions of a country, between a rural area and a city, from one city to another, and between the neighborhoods of a city.

Internal migration flows represent the redistribution of the existing population of a country and affect patterns of population growth and composition in both the sending and receiving areas. Thus, internal migration affects competition for food, housing, and other resources in both locations, helps to maintain equilibrium between the distribution of economic opportunities and the distribution of labor across areas of a country, and is a primary individual-level mechanism shaping broader population patterns, including regional growth trends, population decentralization, and residential segregation. The push—pull theory — viewing migration as a function of the relative economic and social attributes of various residential options and intervening factors related to the costs of making a move — remains the most widely used explanatory framework in the study of internal migration. Individual-level variations in the response to various push and pull factors and the strength of intervening obstacles help to shape migrant populations that are selective of certain characteristics, including race, socioeconomic status, age, and gender. As a result, migrants are rarely representative of the populations in either the sending or receiving areas so that patterns of migration have the potential to dramatically alter the composition of both sending and receiving locations.

Depending on the type of move, internal migration may also have profound effects on migrants themselves, necessitating not only a change in residence, but also often a change in the range of economic opportunities, exposure to different social and environmental contexts, and the disruption of old personal networks.

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