AP Human Geography
Population Migration
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Population migration
What we need to know about this topic:
• Causes and consequences of migration are influenced by economic,
cultural, political, demographic and environmental factors.
– Push and pull factors contribute to migration
• Push factors are often negative, while pull factors are often perceived as positive
– Forced and voluntary migration
• Forced migrations include those involving refugees, internally displaced persons, and asylum
seekers
• Voluntary migrations may be transnational, internal, chain, step, and rural-to-urban
• Patterns of forced and voluntary migration may be affected by distance and physical features
– refer to Ravenstein’s ‘Laws of Migration’
• Major historical migrations
– Include forced migrations of Africans to the Americas
– Immigration waves to the US and Canada
– Emigration from Europe and Asia to colonies abroad
• Consequences of migration for sending and receiving regions:
– cultural, economic, environmental, and political – remittances, spread of
languages, religions, innovations, diseases
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Population migration
The process of migration involves
the long-term relocation of an
individual, household, or larger
group to a new locale outside of
the community of origin.
Your etext defines migration as
move beyond the same
political jurisdiction,
involving a change of
residence either as
emigration or as
immigration
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• When migrants move from one country to another
and therefore cross an international boundary,
they become part of the vital statistics of the
country they leave as well as the one they enter.
• They become emigrants and immigrants.
Russian Jews emigrated from
tsarist Russia to escape the
pogroms in the 1800s.
Immigrants arriving at
Quebec City, Quebec c.
1908.
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12 million immigrants to the United States between
1892 and 1954 were processed at Ellis Island in New
York harbour.
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• In Canada, from the 1920s to the 1970s, Pier 21 in
Halifax harbour was Canada's 'front door' to over a
million immigrants, wartime evacuees, refugees,
troops, war brides and their children.
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A growing trend in today’s world involves
transnational migrants – those people who
set up homes and/or work in more than one
nation-state.
Countries also experience
internal migration, often in well-defined
streams that change over time.
For example, in the USA in the early 20th century tens
of thousands of African-Americans moved from the
South to the industrializing cities of the Northeast and
Midwest.
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What specific factors impel people to pull up
stakes and leave the familiar for the uncertain?
Usually it is not just one factor but a
combination of factors that leads to the decision
to move. These are the key factors, or catalysts,
of migration.
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Economic conditions
Political circumstances
Armed conflict and civil war
Environmental conditions
Culture and traditions
Technological advances
Flow of information
Push and pull factors
Distance decay
Intervening opportunity
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Consider these ideas:
1. What economic conditions would impel people to cross
a. The Pacific Ocean?
b. The Rocky Mountains?
c. The Fraser River?
2. Identify a political circumstance that has resulted in migration streams.
3. Identify a recent (within the last decade) armed conflict or civil war that
has resulted in migration streams.
4. Identify a significant environmental condition that resulted in migration
streams.
5. People who fear that their culture and traditions will not survive a major
political transition, and who are able to migrate to places they perceive as
safer, will often do so. When British India was partitioned into a mainly
Hindu India and an almost exclusively Muslim Pakistan, millions of
Muslim residents of India migrated across the border to the new Islamic
sate of Pakistan. How can technological advances promote or facilitate
migration?
6. How can the flow of information promote or facilitate migration?
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Distance decay involves the various degenerative
effects of distance on human spatial structures and
interactions. Since interaction with faraway places
decreases as distance increases, prospective migrants
are likely to feel much less certain about distant
destinations than about nearer ones. This leads many
migrants to move less far away than they originally
contemplated. Many migration streams that appear
on maps as long, unbroken routes in fact consist of a
series of stages, or step migration.
For example, a peasant family in Brazil is likely to move to a village, then to a nearby
town, later to a city, and finally to a metropolis such as Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro; at
each stage or step a new set of pull factors comes into play.
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• Intervening opportunities are nearer
opportunities that greatly diminish the attractiveness
of sites farther away.
• Chain migration involves the migration of people
to a specific location because relatives or members of
the same nationality previously migration there.
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Push and pull factors
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Push and pull factors
• A pull factor is one that
induces people to move
to a new location.
• A push factor is one that
induces people to leave
old residences.
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Push/pull factors can be
economic
cultural
demographic
political
environmental
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Seasonal movement is the seasonal transfer of
hundreds of thousands of travelers from one area to
another, e.g. from the northern US (including the
‘Rustbelt’) and Canada to the “Sunbelt” states.
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Nomadism
Nomadism is movement
among a definite set of
places.
Most nomads are
pastoralists, that is, they
practise a particular type
of agriculture that
involves the raising of
livestock.
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• A specialized form of agricultural migration is transhumance
- a system of pastoral farming in which livestock and their
keepers move according to the seasonal availability of pastures:
from warmer, lowland areas in the winter to cooler, highland
areas in the summer (altitudinal migration) or from warmer,
southerly areas in winter to cooler, more northerly areas in
summer (latitudinal)
• Example: Switzerland; the ‘Horn’ of northeast Africa
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In the 1880s, the British demographer Ernst
Ravenstein studied internal migration in England. He
proposed several “laws” of migration. These “laws,”
or generalizations, are still relevant today.
• Net migration amounts to a fraction of the gross migration
between two places [counter migration].
• The majority of migrants move a short distance [step
migration].
• Migrants who move longer distances tend to choose big-city
destinations.
• Urban residents are less migratory than inhabitants of rural
areas.
• Families are less likely to make international moves than young
adults.
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Ravenstein also considered that there was an inverse
relationship between the volume of migration and the
distance between source and destination; that is, the
number of migrants declines as the distance they must
travel increases. This relates to the gravity model,
which is a measure of the interaction of places.
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Forced Migration
Before you learn the facts about refugees, spend a
few minutes at
http://www.playagainstallodds.ca/
Refugee
a person who leaves his or her country due to a wellfounded fear of persecution because of race, religion,
nationality, political views, or membership in a particular
social group; people fleeing conflicts are also generally
considered to be refugees since they are seeking refuge
(safety); refugees have specific rights and protections
under international law
Internally Displaced Person (IDP)
a person who is forcibly uprooted within his or her
country but who has not crosses an international border;
IDPs may be forced from their home as a result of armed
conflict, human rights violations, or natural or humanmade disasters, yet remain in their country
Asylum Seeker
a person who has moved across international borders in
search of protection and filed a claim for asylum with the
host country’s government; while the government reviews
the claim, the person remains an asylum seeker; if the claim
is accepted, the person becomes a “refugee” in the eyes of
the government; e.g. someone from Syria who is living in
Germany and waiting to hear the outcome of his or her
asylum application would be considered an asylum seeker
• The most common reasons for refugees to
leave their region or country are war, famine
(often war-induced), environmental
degradation or disaster, or governmental
coercion or oppression.
• Examples:
– Rwanda 1994 (see next slides)
– Afghanistan after 9/11
– Japan in 2011
– Libya, Tunisia, Egypt 2011
– Syria and Iraq at present
• https://securemedia.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap15_frq_huma
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n_geography.pdf
Many refugees live in camps, some of them for the rest of their
lives.
Alternatively, they seek asylum or refuge in other countries,
hoping to gain permanent residence. Some countries restrict
the number of refugees they accept, and it is often difficult to
gain refugee status.
The Rwandan Genocide, 1994
During the Rwandan
genocide of 1994,
hundreds of thousands
of Rwandans fled to
neighboring African
countries such as Zaire
(now the Democratic
Republic of Congo),
Uganda, Tanzania, and
Burundi to escape the
atrocities in their home
country.
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)
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Read Window on the World,
pp 88-89, on Internal Displacement
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