Migration is defined as the movement of a person or persons, either across an international border, or within a country.
It is a population movement, encompassing any kind of movement of people regardless of time involved, composition and causes.
It includes the movement of refugees, displaced persons, economic migrants, and persons moving for other purposes, including family reunifications.
Migration may be forced, circular or irregular.
Forced migration includes refugees, asylum seekers and people forced to move due to external factors.
Circular migration is the fluid movement of people between countries, whether for the short or long term in response to push and pull factors like seasonal labour demand.
Irregular migration is the movement of people outside the regulatory norms of the sending, transit and receiving countries.
Basically, there two categories of migration: internal (within a country) and international (across borders of countries).
Characteristics of internal migration are that it happens within a country. It involves crossing of domestic jurisdictional boundaries such as movements between states or provinces.
Normally, there is little government control in such movements.
Factors responsible for internal migration are employment-based, involving the movement of people seeking greener pastures or better jobs.
Such movements could also be retirement-based, that is, people moving because they want to settle down after retirement.
Internal migration could also be education-based, that is people moving in order to exploit education opportunities, like the movements of the youth from rural areas to urban areas to attend studies in college or university.
Civil conflicts can also result in an internally displaced population. Migration may be voluntary or non-voluntary.
In voluntary migration, the person moving makes the decision to move.
Involuntary migration is forced. The person moving has no role in the decision-making process. Examples are internal displacement, refugees, military conscription, children of migrants and situations of divorce or separation.
Voluntary migration is the outcome of a choice, while involuntary migration is the outcome of a constraint.
International migration involves crossing an international boundary.
Types and characteristics of migration are as follows: international migration involves movements of people across international borders.
It is easier to control. It is regulated, and normally caused by difference in income. It attracts movements of between 2-3 million people world-wide per year.
National migration is the movement of people between states or provinces in a country. It involves little control. It is mostly happens due to employment opportunities, education or retirement.
Local migration is the movement of people within a city or region.
It is mostly caused by a desire for change of income or lifestyle.
Migration, in most cases, is selective.
This means it does not represent a cross section of the source population.
Differences are based on age, sex and level of education.
Migration is also age-specific. This is because one age group is dominant in a particular migration.
International migration tends to involve younger people who can withstand extreme and rugged conditions that migrants tend to be exposed to.
The dominant group is between 25 and 45 years. Peak age of immigrants is 26.
Studies (the quest for education) and retirement are also age-specific types of migration. Studies involve youthful populations while retirement is restricted to the elderly.
Sex-specific migration involves males and females.
Males are often dominant in international migration because they tend to be more oriented to survival and risk taking.
Once they are established in the destination country, they often try to get their wives to join them.
Females often dominate rural to urban migrations.
They tend to look for jobs as domestic help or in new factories. Once they are settled, the often send remittances back home.
“Mail-order bride”: 100,000 – 150,000 women a year advertise themselves for marriage. This happens mostly in Southeast Asia and Russia.
Such women often come from places where jobs and educational opportunities for women are scarce and wages are low.
Migration is related to the economic sector in terms of jobs and the labour market.
At a high level, migration can be useful in filling highly skilled positions in science, technology and education.
This happens in countries lacking highly trained personnel, such as in the United States of America (USA) and other developed countries that could be losing their work force as a result of factors like aged populations.
At a lower level, migration can be used for filling low paid jobs (at the minimum wage level) that most people do not want, like in agriculture and low level services.
Such economic migration can be used to maintain low wages in low skilled jobs and could be seen as a possibility towards creation or impacting an informal economy.
Migration also causes brain drain.
Brain drain relates to educationally specific selective migrations as can be seen in the case of countries that are losing the most educated segment of their population.
Brain drain can be a benefit for the receiving country. But it is a problem to the country of origin.
The receiving country normally gets highly qualified labor contributing to the economy right away.
It promotes economic growth in strategic sectors like science and technology, and the receiving country does not have to pay any education and health costs.
For example, it costs about US$300,000 to educate an average American, while 30 per cent of Mexicans with a PhD are in the USA.
For the country of origin, education and health costs are not paid back.
There is a loss of potential leaders and talent.
Developing countries mostly in Africa lose 15 per cent of their graduates. For example, between 15 and 40 per cent of a graduating class in
Canada will move to the USA. 50 per cent of Caribbean graduates leave.
Brain drain has a long term impact on economic growth. But it also creates remittances.
In terms of remittances, which are a direct result of labour mobility, capital sent by people working abroad to their family /relatives at home was in 2004 estimated at $126 billion globally.
For example, $16 billion goes out of Saudi Arabia each year as remittances.
Brain drain can also cause a reverse migration trend as a result of: high costs in developed countries; new opportunities in developing countries; part of the offshoring process of many manufacturing and service activities and qualified personnel returning to their countries of origin with skills and connections.
Migration is a response of individual decision-makers. It involves negative or push factors in the individual’s current area of residence.
Such negative factors could be unemployment and little opportunity, poverty, crime, repression or a recent disaster (like a drought or an earthquake).
Migration also involves positive or pull factors in the potential destination country. Such factors, which tend to attract migrants, are high job availability and higher wages, a more exciting lifestyle, political freedom, greater safety and better security.
However, migration also has intervening obstacles. Costs and transportation, tough immigration laws and policies of the destination country are among such obstacles.
Labor mobility tends to be the primary issue behind migration.
Labour mobility equilibrates the geographical differences in labor supply and demand, and is accelerated with the globalization of the economy.
In the issues of (illegal) immigration and the welfare state, some people feel welfare policies appear to be promoting illegal immigration.
Employment laws, such as the minimum wage, benefits, tend to make employing foreign nationals artificially high.
This is said to attract immigrants that can be offered lower wages and no benefits.
Coming to refugees, the United Nations (UN) definition of refugees comes from the 1951 Convention regarding the status of refugees and the 1967 protocol on the status of refugees which says: “… any
person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for any reasons of race, religion, nationality, member of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…”
The problem lies in the definition of who is a refugee.
There are no international agreements to protect people who cross boundaries for their economic survival.
Conditions to qualify for refugee status are as follows: political persecution must be demonstrated; an international boundary must be crossed, meaning domestically displaced persons do not qualify;
protection by one’s government is not seen an alternative, meaning the government may be the persecutor or it could be incapable of protecting its citizens from persecution.
There are also migrants falling under the ambit of environmental and economic refugees. These are people who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their homelands because of primarily environmental or economic factors of unusual scope.
Sources of environmental and economic refugees are natural disasters, human alterations to the environment that cause climate change, contamination (pollution) of the environment, lack of development and opportunities.
These factors render continued residence to relocation in that particular location unsustainable.
An example could be sighted in the case of Mozambique where floods made one million people homeless in February 2000.
The floods destroyed agricultural land and cattle.
All these issues of population movement require the media to have a correct understanding of migration terms in order for them to correctly report on migration and migrants issues.
This will increase awareness and reporting as well as advocate for migrants and migration issues.