A Study of Rural Migration in Central Wales

Abstract

THE STUDY of migration has always figured prominently in demography and G. W. Barclay even suggests that it 'probably occupies more attention than any other topic in demography'.1 However, the vast bulk of migration studies have been concerned with international migration and very few have analysed migration within a state in any detail; for example, in Population Studies, 1-17 (1947-64), there are five times as many articles on international migration as on internal migration. The main reason for such a disparity is the relative availability of data. While the movements of people across international boundaries are invariably recorded by the states concerned, movements within a particular country are seldom registered because of the considerable administrative work involved. National Registration provided detailed information on migration within Britain during and just after the Second World War since individual movements had to be reported to the local National Registration and Food Office;2 in France similar information is provided by 'le fichier bis de la carte d'alimentation' for I941-42 and i946.3 These British and French data are, however, of only limited value for studying the general character of internal migration because of the disruption of normal population movements during and immediately after the war. Generally speaking, therefore, one has to rely on national censuses for information on internal migration; but the value of this information is diminished considerably by the general lack of direct census questions on migration. Thus the volume of migration experienced by any area during an intercensal period can in most cases only be calculated net, by comparing the total population change with the natural increase between the two censuses; the much more considerable gross intake and outflow are not recorded. The direction of migrations has to be deduced from birthplace statistics but these are quite inadequate for this purpose since there is no way of knowing whether the movement from place of birth to place of enumeration was undertaken in one or several steps, nor is any indication given of the time when the individual migrations were made. Similarly the selective aspects of migration have to be inferred in a very approximate manner from a comparison between the sending and receiving populations by age, sex, occupation and so on. Prominent among the very few censuses which do obtain and publish direct information about migrants are those of the United States (since 1940) and Sweden, but in Britain it was not until 1961 that direct questions on migration appeared in the census, and even then only on a io per cent sample basis.4 The inadequacy of migration data within Britain can be illustrated well by the admission of a committee studying depopulation problems in Mid-Wales: 'it is not certain that migration from Mid-Wales is selective in character, in the sense that it takes place more from one section of the community than from another.'5 While numerous studies of overall population trends and of the general causes of migration have been made in Britain and elsewhere, many of them by geographers, very little work has been done on the character of internal migration, that is, the distance and direction of movements and the composition of migrants by age, sex, education, occupation, and so on;