Geographical Theories of Migration

Abstract

This chapter considers some of the foundational theories that shape geographical understandings of migration and human mobility as well as theories that animate the discipline’s flourishing migration scholarship. It argues that geographers have a long-standing thematic interest in human migration from Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration in the 1880s to Zelinsky’s Mobility Transition and Tuan’s humanistic work regarding Place and Space. At the core of much of this work is a profound interest in explaining spatial patterns, human networks, barriers and catalysts to mobility, and society-environment dynamics. Geographic theories show a sensitivity to space, place, scalar shifts, and bordering practices. As a discipline, geographers map and model migration flows, but they also engage in qualitative and ethnographic understanding. In the last three decades, variations in spatial assimilation models, explorations of transnationalism, and appreciation for bordering practices and geopolitics animate insights about settlement patterns, limits to human mobility, practices of placemaking, development, and integration, as well as the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. Looking forward, there is renewed interest in the environmental drivers of migration especially connected to climate change and increased precarity among migrants, and in the migrant experience.