Internal Migration in the Developed World

Are we becoming less mobile?

Tony Champion, Thomas Cooke, Ian Shuttleworth, Tony Champion, Thomas Cooke, Ian Shuttleworth

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472478061
• eBook ISBN: 9781317114482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The frequency with which people move home has important implications for national economic performance and the well-being of individuals and families. Much contemporary social and migration theory posits that the world is becoming more mobile, leading to the recent 'mobilities turn' within the social sciences. Yet, there is mounting evidence to suggest that this may not be true of all types of mobility, nor apply equally to all geographical contexts. For example, it is now clear that internal migration rates have been falling in the USA since at least the 1980s. To what extent might this trend be true of other developed countries?

Drawing on detailed empirical literature, Internal Migration in the Developed World examines the long-term trends in internal migration in a variety of more advanced countries to explore the factors that underpin these changes. Using case studies of the USA, UK, Australia, Japan, Sweden, Germany and Italy, this pioneering book presents a critical assessment of the extent to which global structural forces, as opposed to national context, influence internal migration in the Global North.

Internal Migration in the Developed World fills the void in this neglected aspect of migration studies and will appeal to a wide disciplinary audience of researchers and students working in Geography, Migration Studies, Population Studies and Development Studies.

Part I
Setting the scene

1 Introduction

A more mobile world, or not?

Tony Champion, Thomas Cooke and Ian Shuttleworth

Much of social and migration theory seems to be wedded to the assumption that the world is becoming more mobile, with migration increasing over the long term as an adjunct of economic and social development. As recounted in more detail below, the literature contains frequent mentions of our now living in ‘the age of migration’, ‘a world on the move’ and witnessing the emergence of a ‘hypermobility’ that is eroding attachment to place and creating a ‘liquid modernity’ that is leading to the end of territory and place. Thus, there is a need to refocus from territorial understandings of space to an understanding based on networks and spaces of flows. The notion that modernisation is associated with an increasingly footloose society has a long currency in migration theory and related social science that can be traced back to the ‘laws of migration’ set out in the latter half of the nineteenth century and that were placed on a more formal footing nearly a century later. Such ideas have underpinned the rise of the New Mobilities Paradigm (NMP) and the associated ‘mobilities turn’ that has recently influenced the social sciences in the current era of globalisation.

Yet there is mounting evidence that this belief in increasing mobility does not apply to all types of mobility nor to all geographical contexts. In particular, it is now clear that migration rates have been falling in the USA, and not just due to the so-called Great Recession that was sparked by that country’s sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007, but instead dating back to at least the 1980s. This observation has stimulated researchers in other parts of the world to examine the experience of their own countries in order to discover whether they have followed the US trend. Simultaneously, new insights have been emerging from a newly established worldwide inventory of internal migration data known as the IMAGE project (see below), indicating that several other UN members besides the USA have in recent years seen some reduction in people’s propensity to move homes. Additionally, a closer examination of the theoretical literature reveals a rather more nuanced perspective than a deterministic relationship between migration and development.

It is this divergence between what appears to be conventional theoretical expectation and what is now emerging from the empirical migration literature that provides the main stimulus for this book. As outlined in the preface, the editors’ interest was prompted by their finding that the UK, another member of the Anglo-American world, did not appear to be experiencing any long-term decline in between-area migration rates similar to the USA. Why should this be the case? Have the many similarities between the USA and the UK in terms of demographic, economic, social and technological changes not been reflected in similar patterns of change in human behaviour? In other words, have what appear to be general social and economic developments across advanced economies associated with globalisation not—so far at least—been able to erode the role of national differences in governance, regulation, institutional arrangements and cultural attitudes? Hence the central purpose of this book to document long-term trends in internal migration in a variety of more advanced countries and explore the factors behind these changes.

The remainder of this chapter sets out this context and rationale in more detail. It begins by reviewing the theoretical context, describing what the current literature suggests about whether migration rates should be expected to be rising or falling. Next, the latest statistical evidence is presented on national rates of address-changing, looking cross-sectionally at the differences between countries before tracing trends over time and distinguishing between types of migration in terms of distance of movement. The rather complex and confusing picture that results from these accounts then forms the basis for selecting the research questions addressed by the book and the methodology adopted for it, especially in terms of the use of the case-study approach and of the reasons for choosing the particular countries that are put under the spotlight. The final section describes the structure of the rest of the book and outlines the role of each subsequent chapter.

Theoretical expectations

As mentioned at the outset, there appears to be a general acceptance across the social sciences that we are living in an era of rapidly increasing mobility. In this section, this statement is substantiated and its underpinnings are examined before looking at the reactions to the observation that US internal migration rates have declined substantially in recent years. In particular, this review reveals that, despite the widely held belief that modernisation in the form of economic and social development leads to progressively higher levels of population movement, some theoretical frameworks do allow the possibility of a reduction over time in the frequency with which people move homes. In the broadest terms, this possibility involves two lines of reasoning. One is the expectation that overall intensities of migration will fall due to a shift in the composition of the population towards less migratory groups resulting from the demographic transition process, most notably through the rising share of older people with their lower than average rates of migration. The other is that a variety of factors are working to reduce the desire or the ability to move homes, with this applying to all types of people but to varying extents according to their differential susceptibility to such influences.

Looking first at mainstream social theory, common discourses nowadays refer to the concept of ‘modernity’ and its role in generating a ‘hypermobility’ that leads to ‘dislocation’, resulting in a reduction of people’s attachment to place and a switch of emphasis to the primacy of flows and networks (Urry, 2007; see also Adey, 2010). Theories of a ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000) are linked to ‘de-territorialisation’ processes that spell the end of nation states as containers for societies and help to convey the impression that we now live in ‘the age of migration’ (Castles et al., 2014). Globalisation theory identifies mobility, migration and related population flows as being essential to the constitution of the ‘global’ (Robins, 2000). However, this perhaps exaggerates the extent to which nation states have ceased to matter. For example, whilst their borders are porous to flows of capital and goods, they are far less open to flows of people despite the rhetoric of globalisation (Shuttleworth, 2007). Indeed, international migration, and the political need to restrict it, has become a theme in the second decade of the twenty-first century, which has led pressures to close national borders to migrants. At the same time, there is empirical evidence that international migration rates are decreasing (Abel and Sander, 2014)—perhaps another case where conventional expectations (and social theory) do not match the data.

These ideas about globalisation and de-territorialisation have been embraced by the NMP (Sheller and Urry, 2006), according to whom ‘All the world seems to be on the move’ (p. 207). In this context, Cresswell (2006, p. 15) emphasises the centrality of mobility within modernity, highlighting Sennett’s (1994) quotation that ‘the modern individual is, above all else, a mobile being’. Hannam et al. (2006, p. 2) make clear the pervasiveness of this development: ‘The global order is increasingly criss-crossed by tourists, workers, terrorists, students, migrants, asylum-seekers, scientists/scholars, family members, business people, soldiers, guest workers and so on.’ They go on to point to the multiple and intersecting nature of these mobilities and to the way in which they seem to be producing a more networked patterning of economic and social life. As a result, a ‘mobilities turn’ is spreading into and transforming the social sciences, not only placing new issues on the table, but also transcending disciplinary boundaries. It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences. This is the justification that was used for the 2006 launch of the journal Mobilities, designed to ‘address this emerging attention to many different kinds of mobilities, both by those engaged in practising and regulating diverse mobilities and by those involved in researching and understanding present-day and historical mobilities’ (Hannam et al., 2006, pp. 1–2).

These ideas of accelerating mobility are not new. They build on a long tradition in the literature on migration and related social science, extending back to Ravenstein’s pair of classic papers on ‘The laws of migration’ published in the 1880s. In the second of these, he specifically raises the question ‘Does migration increase?’ and answers it in the affirmative: ‘Wherever I was able to make a comparison I found that an increase in the means of locomotion and a development of manufactures and commerce have led to an increase in migration’ (Ravenstein, 1889, p. 288). Viewed in the historical context of industrialisation in nineteenth century Europe, this opinion is unsurprising. Three quarters of a century then elapsed before the subject of migration intensity was next addressed in a systematic manner by Lee (1966) in his refinement and extension of Ravenstein’s ideas. In his ‘theory of migration’, Lee set out several hypotheses relating to the volume of migration, two of which relate to changes in migration rates and numbers: ‘Unless severe checks are imposed, both volume and rate of migration tend to increase with time’ and ‘The volume and rate of migration vary with the state of progress in a country’ (Lee, 1966, pp. 53–54). His rationale was primarily four-fold: ‘Industrialisation and Westernisation … increase the diversity of areas’, people become more diverse occupationally, developments in transport reduce the barriers posed by intervening obstacles and the act of migration itself makes a person more likely to make a further move. He concludes: ‘We may argue that a high rate of progress entails a population which is continually in a state of flux, responding quickly to new opportunities and reacting swiftly to diminishing opportunities’ (Lee, 1966, p. 54).

This mooted association between migration intensity and development level was further codified by Zelinsky (1971) in his ‘hypothesis of the mobility transition’. Drawing primarily on Lee but also ‘join[ing] together a number of ideas already immanent in the literature’ (p. 221), he summarised his central thesis thus: ‘There are definite, patterned regularities in the growth of personal mobility through space-time during recent history, and these regularities comprise an essential component of the modernisation process.’ (pp. 251–252). He specifically designed his ‘mobility transition’ to sit alongside the demographic transition model, which he relabelled as the ‘vital transition’ with its two components of the epidemiological and fertility transitions, and suggested that ‘A high degree of interaction may exist among all the processes in question’ (p. 222). As such, it is a stage-based developmentalist model that delineates a shift from the situation of ‘little genuine residential migration’ characteristic of pre-modern traditional society through the early and late transitional phases to the advanced society. By this latter stage, ‘For the individual migrant, … one can postulate a lifetime cycle of residential shifts, along with an elaborate schedule of circulatory trips’ (Zelinsky, 1971, pp. 245–246). This is ‘a state in which the term “sedentary” no longer appears apposite’ and people ‘frequently migrate in the sense of formal change of residence’ (p. 247). His final axiom is that: ‘Such evidence as we have indicates an irreversible progression of stages’ (p. 222), although he does suggest a final stage where address-changing decreases and is substituted by other types of spatial mobility.

Zelinsky’s idea of the irreversibility of the mobility transition is a very logical one in the context of the time when he was writing and, as he said, in terms of the available evidence. For one thing, almost all the contemporary evidence was cross-sectional in nature across a range of societies at different levels of development rather than monitoring temporal trends. This allowed Zelinsky to demonstrate that lifetime migration was much higher in the USA than any other country for which he could find statistics, with his Table II showing that just 25.7% of its population were living in the city or county of birth in 1958. This is much lower than his next country, Switzerland, with 44.3% living in their commune of birth in 1941. All his other examples had levels of above 50% for their own smallest reporting areas, with over 90% for the regions of the USSR in 1926 and the prefectures of Taiwan in 1930. Even here, however, Zelinsky (1971, p. 237) urges caution, saying that ‘Table II must be taken with a grain of salt’, not just because of the wide variation in the dates of the observations but more importantly because of the ‘non-equivalence among reporting units’. He is fully aware of Ravenstein’s (1885) first law that states that most migration takes place over short distances, meaning that ‘the chance that a migration will be noted rises as the size of the areal unit decreases’ (p. 237)—a good example of what has since become known as the Modifiable Area Unit Problem (MAUP), which has traditionally bedevilled comparative analysis of migration but no longer does so, as will be shown in Chapter 3 of this book.

With regard to evidence on trends in migration over time, the conclusion that Zelinsky reaches from a review of a variety of studies and data relating to each of the four phases that many countries had by then experienced is a broad one: ‘each phase represents a major gain in aggregate territorial mobility’ (Zelinsky, 1971, p. 243). At that time, there was clearly a dearth of time-series data that could be used to trace the experience of a country as it passed through all of these phases. Perhaps somewhat worryingly, he did not seem to be aware that internal migration rates had been calculated for the USA on a yearly basis since 1947, though his mention of the current US rate of 20% (tucked away in a footnote without a source cited) was likely based on this data. In any case, the picture depicted by that time series largely corroborated Zelinsky’s overall conclusion, showing the US rate lying around this one in five level for the first two decades of its existence, with only minor fluctuations. It was only in the late 1960s that the rate dipped significantly below this, but migration researchers know full well not to read too much into short-term changes that can result from period factors such as the business cycle. However, as shown in Figure 1.1, this dip proved to be start of a downward trend that has continued to the present day, apart from the temporary uplifts recorded after each of the four economic recessions that have occurred since the late 1970s (namely 1980–1981, 1990–1991, 2001 and 2008–2009).

The evidence of Figure 1.1 means that there can be no room left for doubt about Americans moving homes much less frequently now than 30 years ago. Even so, it took a long time for this idea to sink in, as lamented by Wolf and Longino in their 2005 paper ‘Our “increasingly mobile society”? The curious persistence of a false belief’, but perhaps it is not so surprising given the prevalence of theories about the close link between modernisation and increasing mobility just outlined. It is almost as if the US experience since the mid-1980s has turned ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• The book and the series
• Book editors’ preface
• PART I Setting the scene
• PART II In-depth country analyses
• PART III Commentary and synthesis
• Index