Migration Aspirations-Capabilities Survey

Involuntary immobility, Carling's central concept, describes people who aspire to migrate but lack the capability to do so — they want to leave but cannot. It matters because conventional migration data count only movers and treat everyone who stays as a willing stayer, rendering this large group invisible. Recognizing involuntary immobility shows that restrictive policies do not simply reduce migration; they strand aspirants in place, with consequences for frustration, livelihoods, and risky irregular attempts. Measuring aspiration and capability separately is precisely what makes this group countable.

A single intention question conflates desire and feasibility, so it cannot distinguish someone who plans to move because they can from someone who would move if only they could. The aspirations-capabilities survey asks two questions — do you wish to migrate, and are you able to — and crosses them into four types. This reveals the gap between aspiration and capability that an intention item hides, and it places non-migrants who want to move (involuntarily immobile) and migrants-by-default differently. Intention prediction then logically follows, modeling whether aspirers who are able actually go.

De Haas adopts Sen's framing because it treats the ability to migrate or to stay as a substantive freedom, not merely a means to an income. In this view, development should expand people's real options, and the capability to move is one such option; immobility can be a deprivation of freedom even when people do not move. This recasts migration outcomes as joint products of what people value (aspiration) and what they can actually do (capability), giving the typology a normative and theoretical grounding rather than treating migration as a simple cost-benefit calculation.