Envision the Earth as a busy colony of common honeybees. Hundreds or even thousands are thriving and bustling. With ever-changing resources, microclimates, environmental conditions, seasonal conditions and other drivers, it is often determined that it is necessary to relocate the colony partially or entirely. Similarly driven by more favorable sites and situations, humans too often decide that relocation is necessary to improve their quality of life. While not necessarily driven by more abundant and more sought after wildflowers and fruit trees, humans do often qualify their decisions to relocate based on “bread and butter;” whether you are a bee or a person, where you choose to live often depends on a matter of economics.
In pursuit of what a bee may consider easier or more competitive access to their resources, humans will comparatively relocate in search of education. Where a colony of bees may move due to habitat destruction, predation, or even down to the level of a juvenile with a rock, human migration too is often driven by threats to security and social and political climate. Adversity, opportunity, and sheer adventure have driven my mother's bloodline to travel from thousands of miles over at least 3 traceable continents to end up where I am today. It is in the nature of able beings to travel and the reasons and manners in which they do so is a subject of great curiosity; grasping why can help procure a greater understanding of how our cultures came about where they could be destined in the future.
Because of the importance of relative space on migration, it is vital to grasp the methods used to analyze space. Location is one criteria of space; it can refer to Cali, Colombia, for example, as the place by name, or it can refer to 3° 25' North latitude and 76° 30' West longitude, the definitive coordinal location of that city. Location can be analyzed in terms of physical state of the location, including all resources and the composition of the landscape, as well as in terms of the situation of the land, or how this location is situated in such a way to be able to interact with human activities. Accessibility of a location to transportation and communication are key factors in determining a location's connectivity to other locations. Immigration is the movement of a person to a location and emigration is the movement away from a place. All human movement is collectively considered migration. Migration can be voluntary and driven almost entirely by pull factors ranging to forced migration against one's will which is heavily influenced by push factors. Migration within a country is considered internal migration, versus international migration which is between countries; both can be forced or voluntary.
In each decision to migrate, there are various factors which dictate movement. Push factors drive emigration by various causes ranging anywhere from war and famine to climate dissatisfaction and boredom with a location. Pull factors attract people to immigrate to an area such as economic opportunities and favorable geological site and situational conditions. The gravity model for migration dictates that with the more people that are concentrated in one area, the more the area will become a desirable place to live. Especially for long distance moves, large cities can provide a sense of security in the form of intervening opportunity. Intervening opportunity is the consideration that the more people there are in an area the more opportunity there are likely to be for improved quality of life. Because of the economies of scales associated with living and working with more humans per square mile, it is easier to improve quality of life with less economic capitol. Step migration is generally more based around internal migration in the movement of people from rural areas to more populated urban areas.
Channel migration is the chain reaction of immigrants from a certain area following one of more people from that area to a new location. The fact that at least one other person has already migrated means that they can give information, emotional support, and economic support for other that would also like to migrate to that area. This creates a migration field where there is a concentration of migrants from a certain area in one place. Assimilation is eased in channel migration, increasing the desirability of a new location. When people migrate even over a relatively short distance, they take with them the memories, values, languages, religions, foods, etc. from their previous locations and from their ancestors which will then have to merge with the new location's equivalents. When immigrants are concentrated into a certain area, assimilation can sometimes take on the effect of modifying the new area based on the culture of the immigrants. Understanding population movements and their effect is integral to understanding the reasons and manners in which people move.
