Migration Aspirations-Capabilities Survey

The migration aspirations-capabilities survey measures two distinct things that migration research had long run together: whether a person wants to migrate and whether they are able to. Jorgen Carling's 2002 study of Cape Verde introduced the crucial insight that wanting to leave and being able to leave are separate, and that their mismatch produces 'involuntary immobility' — the large and often overlooked population that aspires to move but cannot. Hein de Haas's 2021 aspirations-capabilities framework generalized this into a broad theory of migration grounded in Amartya Sen's idea of capabilities as substantive freedoms. The measurement strategy asks respondents about their aspiration to migrate and, separately, their perceived capability to do so, then cross-classifies the two into a two-by-two typology: voluntary mobility, involuntary immobility, voluntary immobility, and acquiescent or trapped immobility. This simple cross-tabulation reframes migration as one outcome of the interaction between freedom and constraint, putting non-migration and trapped populations on the analytic map alongside actual movers. The survey thereby measures not just who moves but who wishes to and the gap between desire and possibility.