Ravenstein Revisited: The Analysis of Migration, Then and Now

Abstract

In 1876, 1885 and 1889, Ernst Ravenstein, an Anglo-German geographer, published papers on internal and international migration in Britain, Europe and North America. He generalized his findings as “laws of migration”, which have informed subsequent migration research. This paper aims to compare Ravenstein’s approach to investigating migration with how researchers have studied the phenomenon more recently. Ravenstein used lifetime migrant tables for counties from the 1871 and 1881 censuses of the British Isles. Data on lifetime migrants are still routinely collected but, because of the indeterminate time interval, they are rarely used to study internal migration. Today, internal migration measures from alternative sources are used to measure internal migration: fixed interval migrant data from censuses and surveys, continuous records of migrations from registers, and “big data” from telecommunications and internet companies.
 Ravenstein described and mapped county-level lifetime migration patterns, using the concepts of “absorption” and “dispersion”, using migration rates and net balances. Recently, researchers have used lifetime migrant stocks from consecutive censuses to estimate country to country flows for the world. In the last decade, an Australian-led team has built an international database of internal migration flow data and summary measures. Methods were developed to investigate the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), in order to design summary internal migration measures comparable across countries. Indicators of internal migration were produced for countries covering 80 percent of the world’s population.
 Ravenstein observed that most migrants moved only short distances, anticipating the development of “gravity” models of migration. Recent studies calibrated the relationship between migration and distance, using gravity models. For mid-19th century Britain, Ravenstein found the dominant direction of internal migration to be towards the “centres of commerce and industry”. Urbanization is still the dominant flow direction in most countries, though, late in the process, suburbanization, counter-urbanization and re-urbanization can occur. Ravenstein focussed on place-specific migration, whereas today researchers describe migration flows using area typologies, seeking spatial generality. Ravenstein said little about migrant attributes except that women migrated more than men. In recent decades, the behaviour of migrants by age, sex, education, ethnicity, social class and partnership status have been studied intensively, using microdata from censuses and surveys.
 Knowledge about processes influencing internal and international migration has rarely been built into demographic projections. Scenarios that link migration with sub-national or national inequalities and with climate or environmental change are influencing the design of policies to reduce inequalities or slow global warming.
 * This article belongs to a special issue on “Internal Migration as a Driver of Regional Population Change in Europe: Updating Ravenstein”.

Defining distance thresholds for migration research

“…In publishing his seven laws of migration, Ravenstein (1885) set out a series of empirical generalisations about why people move, which groups are more mobile and how the distance over which migrants travel varies widely. Subsequently, a wealth of empirical research has expanded and built upon Ravenstein's laws (Rees & Lomax, 2019), with a focus on who moves where, for what reason, and over what distance. That the motives for migration vary over distance is widely acknowledged, however, Niedomysl (2011) argues that the precise nature of this relationship between motive and distance has, to date, been under researched due to inadequate data availability and the use of surveys with fixed response options.…”

Social and Economics Perspective of Rural-Urban Migration: A Case Study Middle and Lower Shabele Regions in Somalia

“…A few examinations have been led on various parts of the country to urban relocation; these investigations have talked about the multiple determinants/variables of the migration from rural to urban. In the nineteenth century, the first study has made by Rees and Lomax [13] concerning provincial to urban migration. Right now, existing writing on country urban migration is studied, and goals has examined, strategies and discoveries of various significant investigations are made regarding examine the reasons for movement from rural to urban regions.…”

Migratory Outflow from Wrocław: Directions of Population Flows within the Framework of Internal Migration in the Period 2002–2018

“…The migration laws proposed by Ravenstein to some extent go beyond the time frame and are thus repeatedly reproduced in many scientific papers concerning this area of research (Rees, Lomax 2019), but they cannot be considered uncritically and unequivocally valid in the contemporary diverse world. It appears that some of Ravenstein's laws of migration are out of date today.…”