Intention-to-Migrate Prediction

Intention-to-migrate prediction models stated plans to migrate as a forecast of actual migration behavior, taking seriously that what people say they will do is informative but imperfect. Migration surveys routinely ask whether respondents intend or plan to move, and these stated intentions are among the strongest available predictors of who later migrates; yet the link is far from one-to-one, because intentions are frustrated by constraints and some moves happen without prior plans. Jorgen Carling's 2002 work on involuntary immobility highlighted exactly this slippage between wanting or planning to migrate and being able to, and Hein de Haas's 2021 aspirations-capabilities framework formalized why intentions translate into behavior only when capability is present. The method estimates the probability of intending to migrate from individual and contextual covariates, relates intention to subsequent observed moves, and explicitly measures the intention-behavior gap. It then calibrates and validates its predictions against later migration, and refines them by conditioning on capability. The aim is honest, validated prediction rather than treating stated intention as destiny.