Migration Transition Analysis

Migration transition analysis applies Wilbur Zelinsky's 1971 hypothesis of the mobility transition, which holds that there are definite, patterned regularities in the growth of personal mobility through space and time and that these regularities are a basic component of the modernization process. Just as the demographic transition links falling birth and death rates to development, Zelinsky argued that societies pass through ordered phases — from a premodern traditional society with little movement, through early and late transitional phases marked by massive rural-to-urban and frontier and emigration flows, to advanced and superadvanced societies dominated by inter-urban and circular movement rather than permanent relocation. Each phase carries a characteristic mix of mobility types, so a society's stage can be read from the balance of rural-urban, frontier, international, and circular movement it exhibits. Massey and colleagues' 1993 review placed Zelinsky's framework among the macro-level accounts that connect migration to the structural transformation of economies. The analysis stages countries by their mobility profile and traces how that profile shifts as development proceeds, including the well-known migration hump in which emigration first rises and then falls with income. It supplies a developmental scaffolding for comparative migration research.