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migration — English
The movement of people from one place to another. There are many different types of migration and one should distinguish the one from the other in order to assess the potential short and long term effects of the process. Normally migration means that people shift their abode (the place where they live) from one place to another in order to live there for a long period. But it is also common for people to go and live in another place for a relatively short period such as a few years. Some people move to other places for an undetermined time and they would move back to their original home regions at the end of a stint in another place. Even very short-term movement, such as a tourist’s visit, is sometimes regarded as “migration”, although tourism is mostly not regarded as migration. One type of movement which is seldom regarded as migration, is the cross-border movement of one member of a family to work for 11 months per year in another country, and returning to their home countries for a month or two, before going back to the host country (see “refugee”) to earn money. The reason why this type of movement is seldom regarded as migration is the fact that those worker’s family stays behind and the worker him/herself does not intend to live in the host country permanently. An example of this type of human movement is the large numbers of migrant workers from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Angola, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and a number of other African states who annually move to South Africa because there are no employment opportunities in their home countries. Migration might be internal, that is, people move from one area in their own country to another region in the same country. Urbanisation belongs to this category of migration. In other cases people move to another country with the full intention of never returning to their country of origin; this is called external migration (or emigration). There are numerous reasons why people migrate, and two distinct types of reasons are distinguished, namely push factors and pull factors. The former include war, famine and starvation, tribalism, religious intolerance, racism, political factionalism, poverty and the inability to make a living. When migrants move as family groups in order to save life or limb, they are in fact fleeing, often do not carry any documentation, have no possessions and are regarded as refugees. Migration because of pull factors is usually financially motivated. If their home country does not offer its citizens the opportunity to make a proper living or find paid employment, the people migrate to another country. “Push” and “pull” factors are not always easy to distinguish. Currently, innumerable people from a variety of African states flock to South Africa and enter the country – legally or illegally – for either economical and/or political reasons (see “refugee”). Here they find employment or at least a way to make a living, which was impossible to do in their home countries. Thus their migration is caused by both “push” factors and “pull” factors and it is really impossible to identify which of the two is actually responsible. Immigration (“in-migration”) could have an enormous effect on the demographic structure (see “demographic data” and “population pyramids”) of a population. Although the crude birth rate in the United States of America is nearly as low as in the affluent, Western European nations, the annual population growth rate for the USA is the highest in the world. The reason is that people from all over the world attempt to, and often succeed in, moving into the USA for the economical and financial opportunities it presents.
