Migration

Migrations are of interest for a variety of social disciplines that, as Brettell (2003) points out, share a set of questions around the subject: who moves? why do they move? and what happens after the move? The emphasis on each question varies from one field of specialty to another. Anthropology has centered on the two terms of the migratory process, starting on the place of origin, asking why people leave, and then what happens at the place of arrival, including if people remain connected to the place of origin and how (Brettell: 2003).

The study of migration
Micolta León (2005) distinguishes two main work lines that guide theory development in the study of international migration. The first of them is the one started by geographer E. G. Ravenstein (1834-1913) at the end of the XIX century, and the second is the one that has as its main antecedent the work of W. I. Thomas and Florian Znanieccki “The Polish Peasant in Europe and America” (1918-1920), were they analyzed the experience of Polish immigrants in the United States through their personal testimonies.

For Ravenstein, the main causes of migrations are economic inequalities between countries of origin and destination. So he started the well-known theory of push and pull factors. The second line of work, by contrast, focuses on the psychosocial implications of migrations, taking into account cultural and psycho-sociological factors (Criado: 2001).

Types of migrations
Migrations can be classified as international or internal, depending on the kind of frontiers that people cross. The first ones imply crossing borders between countries and include overseas migrations that describe traditional moves from one side of the world to the other: from Europe to America, for instance. The second involve mobility inside a country and include classic anthropological research on urban-rural mobility.

More recent approaches defy the uniqueness of the migratory experience, and the dichotomies involved in those categorizations (King: 2002). In an ever-changing word these researchers argue that there are different temporalities, motivations and ways of moving over space.

So migratory trajectories can be (at least): linear or circular, in reference to space; permanent or temporary, in reference to time; and economic or not, in reference to motivation. Pries (2003) proposes this interesting classification based on the intersection of some aspects of the trajectories:

Other concepts used nowadays to take into account the diversity of moving experiences are those of nomad, transhumant, expat, third culture kid (Pollock and Van Reken: 1999), families in transit (Korenblum: 2003), migratory circulation (Chadia Arab: 2008), etc.