MIGRATION
Introduction:
“Man is a mobile creature, capable of enquiring, susceptible to suggestion, and endowed with imagination and initiative. This explains why, having conceived with the notion that his wants might be satisfied elsewhere, he may decide not merely on going there but also on the means by which his can be achieved.”
The word ‘migration’ is derived from the Latin word ‘migrate’, which means to change one’s residence. The Encyclopedia Americana defines the term as a co-ordinated voluntary movement of a considerable number of people from an accustomed habitat to a new one. The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences has defined it as the relatively permanent movement of persons over a significant distance. In International Encyclopedia of Population, ‘migration’ is defined as a geographical mobility that involves a change of usual residence between defined political or statistical areas or between residence areas of different types.
Migration is one of the distinguishing features of human beings that has been occurring since it started from the very beginning of man’s appearance in this universe. Though human mobility was the characteristic of even the stone age man, the rapidity of industrialisation and urbanisation of the modern age has given it big push and with the development of modern means of transport and communication, thousands of people in each country –especially from the third world - started to leave their usual abode in search of new jobs and fresh opportunities.
Migration is one of the causes of social change and it is one of the three basic reasons of demographic change, the other two being birth and death. “Migration is a two – way process; it is a response to economic and social change and equally it is a catalyst to change for those areas gaining and losing migrants.”A large number of studies have come out regarding migration analysis. Due to different approaches and methodologies used by each investigator and also by varied purposes and perspectives in their analysis the whole migration literature itself has become highly complex.
Volume of migration
1). The volume of migration within a territory varies with the degree of diversity of areas included in that territory.
2). The volume of migration varies with the diversity of people.
3). The volume of migration is related to the difficulty of surmounting the intervening obstacles.
4). The volume of migration varies with fluctuations in the economy.
5). Unless severe checks are imposed, both volume and rate of migration tend to increase with time.
Stream and Counter stream
1) Migration tends to take place largely within well-defined streams (e.g. From rural areas to nearby towns and towards major cities).
2) For every migration stream a counter stream develops (may be because of disappearance of positive factors at origin or acquisition of new skills or wealth at destination).
3) The efficiency of stream and counter stream tends to be low if origin and destination are similar.
4) The efficiency of migration stream will be higher if the intervening obstacles are great.
5) The efficiency of migration stream varies with economic conditions, being high in prosperous times and low in times of depression.
Characteristics of Migrants
1) Migration is selective which simply means that migrants are not a random sample of the population at origin.
2) Migrants responding primarily to plus factors at destination tend to be positively selected ( e.g. Highly educated).
3) Migrants responding primarily to minus factors at origin tend to be negatively selected; or when the minus factors are overwhelming the entire population groups, they may not be selected at all.
4) The degree of positive selection increases with the difficulty of intervening obstacles e.g. The voyage of the Europeans to North Americas in the 17th and 18th c eliminated many of the weak.
5) The characteristics of migrants tend to be intermediate between the characteristics of population at origin and the population at destination.
System Approach
Some have conceived migration as a system in which migration is viewed as circular inter – dependent and self – modifying system in which the effects of changes in one part has a ripple effect through the whole system.
Mabogunje, after his study of rural – urban migration in Africa has presented a paper ‘A System Approach to a Theory of Rural – urban Mgration’ (1970). According to him migration system is made up of three basic element; Firstly, the migrant who is urged to leave the rural sector by incentives from the surroundings. Secondly, there are certain institutions that control and direct the degree of migration flow. Thirdly, various social, economic and political forces which play major role in he process. Although Mabogunje’s study is concerned with rural – urban migration in Africa, the conceptualisation has a wider application.
Systems Approach to a Theory of Rural-Urban Migration
In the growing literature on the study of migration, two theoretical issues have attracted the greatest attention, namely, why people migrate and how far they move. A simple model for explaining the reasons why people move has been formulated in terms of the “pull- push” hypothesis [Id, 191. This has been elaborated variously to take account of internal migration movements of the rural-rural, rural- urban, or urban-urban types and international migrations. The issue of how far people move has, in turn, given rise to the formulation of a surprisingly large number of models of varying degrees of statistical or mathematical sophistication.
Rural-urban migration also represents an essentially spatial con- comitant of the economic development of a region. Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the basic goals of economic development is to reverse the situation wherein 85 per cent of the population is in agriculture and lives in rural areas while only about 15 per cent is in non-agricultural activities and lives in the cities [lQ]. Rural-urban migration represents the spatial flow component of such a reversal. It is a complex phenomenon which involves not only the migrants but also a number of institutional agencies, and it gives rise to significant and highly varied adjustments everywhere in a region.
It can be argued with a great deal of justification that few of the theoretical models provided so far have considered migrations, espe- cially rural-urban migration, as a spatial process whose dynamics and spatial impact must form part of any comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. It is the main contention of this paper that such an understanding can best be achieved within the framework of General Systems Theory [50]. This approach demands that a particular com- plex of variables be recognized as a system possessing certain proper- ties which are common to many other systems. It has the fundamental advantage of providing a conceptual framework within which a whole range of questions relevant to an understanding of the structure and operation of other systems can be asked of the particular phenomenon under study. In this way, new insights are provided into old problems and new relationships whose existence may not have been appreciated previously are uncovered. In this paper no attempt is made to define major components and relationships in a formal, mathematical manner. The emphwis here is on a verbal analysis of the ways in which the system operates. This, it is hoped, will enable us to identify areas where present knowledge is fragmentary and where future re- search may be concentrated with some profit.
Defining the System of Rural-Urban Migration
A system may be defined as a complex of interacting elements, together with their attributes and relationships [ll]. One of the major tasks in conceptualizing a phenomenon as a system, therefore, is to identify the basic interacting elements, their attributes, and their relationships. Once this is done, it soon becomes obvious that the system operates not in a void but in a special environment. For any given system, this environment comprises “the set of all objects a change in whose attributes affects the system, and also those objects whose attributes are changed by the behaviour of the system”. Thus, a system with its environment constitutes the universe of phenomena which is of interest in a given context.
It can be shown theoretically that areas with isolated and self- sufficient villages such as were found in many parts of Africa until recently, are not likely to experience rural-urban migration, since, in any case there would be hardly any cities in such areas. The fact that today such movements characterize many parts of the continent and are lately assuming spectacular proportions means that rural areas are in general no longer isolated or self-sufficient. It is therefore relevant to ask: what forces have contributed and continue to con- tribute to the decline in these conditions of isolation and self-sufficiency in the rural areas? They are, in the main, forces set in motion by increasing economic development. In most African countries, this was brought about initially by the colonial administrations and further reinforced in recent years by the activities of the new African governments. Decreasing isolation means not only improvement in transportation and communication links but also greater integration of the rural economy into a national economy. Such integration makes the rural economy more responsive to changes in wages and prices, consumer preferences, and the overall demand pattern within the country.
Within the systems framework, attention is focussed not only on the migrant but also on the various institutions (sub-systems) and the social, economic, and other relationships (adjustment mechanisms) which are an integral part of the process of the migrant’s transformation. The two most important sub-systems are the rural and the urban control sub-systems. A control sub-system is one which oversees the operation of the general system and determines when and how to increase or decrease the amount of flow in the system. A simple example is provided by the thermostat which controls the amount of heat that flows within a given area. If we accept the existence of control sub-systems in this type of migration movement, the problem then is to identify which institutions operate in this manner both in the rural and the urban areas.
In the rural areas, a true control sub-system would, of course, be the family, both nuclear and extended. In the first place, it is the family that holds back potential migrants until they are old enough to under- take the move. Even when they are of an age to move, the family still acts as a control sub-system in many ways. In some places, it enables members of both sexes to move out; in others, members of one sex tend to get away more easily than those of the other. Where the potential migrant is married, the issue of whether he can move alone or with his wife and children may depend on the customary role of the sexes in agricultural activities, the age at which marriage is encouraged, and the circumstances and age at which a young man may expect to be economically independent of his parents. More important as a control mechanism is the relation of family members to the family land, especially as this relation is expressed through the lineage system and the inheritance law. An inheritance law that encourages most of the land to go into the hands of the first child (the primogeniture rule) will tend to stimulate more migration of the other children [d] compared to one based on the equality of access (partible inheritance rule) by all the children. In either case, the size of the farmland, the nature of the major agricultural products, and the prevailing prices for these would also be of decisive significance.
Apart from the family, the village community itself may act as a control sub-system. Its controlling role is not often direct but is obvious in either a positive or negative way in the various activities which it sponsors or encourages. Thus, a village community which attempts to improve its economic conditions, for instance, through co-operative farming or marketing, may discourage, at least in the short-run, permanent migration. On the other hand, a village com- munity which puts emphasis on social betterment, for example, through education, may inadvertently stimulate migration to the city through training the younger generation to be more enlightened and more highly motivated. A pertinent aspect of the study of rural-urban migration is thus to assess how different rural communities react to migration away from the village. Such assessment should involve more than the opinion survey of the older generations. It should include an investigation of village activities and administration, and of the degree of cohesiveness in the community.
The Energy Concept in Systems Analysis
A system comprises not only matter (the migrant, the institutions, and the various organizations mentioned) but also energy. In the physical sense, energy is simply the capacity of a given body to do work. It can be expressed in a number of ways, but two forms of it are relevant here. There is “potential energy’’ which is the body’s power of doing work by virtue of stresses resulting from its relation either with its environment or with other bodies. The second form is “kinetic energy” which is the capacity of a body to do work by virtue of its own motion or activity. In a theory of rural-urban migration, potential energy can be likened to the stimuli acting on the rural individual to move. What is the nature of these stimuli? As pointed out earlier, a number of studies have tried to identify why people migrate and have come up with a variety of answers generally subsumed under the push-and-pull hypothesis. This suggests that people migrate from rural areas to the cities because of one of two general causes: overpopulation and environmental deterioration in the rural areas (the push factor) or the allurement or attraction of the city (the pull factor or the so-called “bright-light theory”). The push factor, it is claimed, explains migrations directed to earning extra income to pay the annual tax or to take a new bride or to buy a few manufactured articles or to escape oppressive local mores. The pull factor, on the other hand, explains migrations undertaken as a modern form of initiation ceremony to adult status or as the basis for later receiving preferential admiration of the village girls or as the product simply of an intense curiosity about the city. These explanations, to the extent that they have any theoretical validity at all, are relevant only at the aggregate level.
Relation Between a System and its Environment
Systems can be classified into three categories depending on the relationship they maintain with their environment; first, the isolated systems which exchange neither “matter” nor “energy” with their environment; second, the closed systems which exchange “energy” but not “matter”; third, the open systems which exchange both “energy” and ‘(matter.” The distinction between the categories, however, is largely one of scale and depends on which elements are regarded as belonging to the system and which to the environment. Thus, if the scale was to be reduced significantly, an open system could become an isolated system. Given the system in Figure 1, it can be seen that rural-urban migration is an open system involving not only an exchange of energy but. also of matter (in this case, persons) with the environment.
CONCLUSION
Rural-Urban migration is a circular, interdependent, progressively complex, and self modifying system in which the effect of changes in one par can be traced through the whole system. Rural-Urban migration is a continuous process, occurring in most countries all the time though at different levels of complexity. Migration systems link people, families, and communities over space in what today might be called transnational or translocal communities. This results in a geographical structuring and clustering of migration flows, which is far from a ‘random state’. By advancing the systems approach, Mabogunje is concerned with recognizing migration as a process with feedback mechanisms that change the future patterns of migration. He applies the systems approach to rural–urban migration within the African continent as a way of explaining why and how a rural migrant becomes a permanent urban dweller.
REFERENCE
Beajeau – Garnier, Geography of Population (Longman, London, 1966), p.171.
Encyclopaedia Americana, Vol. 19 (America Corporation, New York, 1969), p.48.
International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol.10 (Macmillan and Free Press, 1968), p.286.
Internatioonal Encyclopaedia of Population, Vol. 2 (The Free Press, New York, 1982), p.448.
C.J.Lewis, Human Migration: A Geographical perspective (Croom Helm, London and Canberra, 1982), p.1.
See W. Farr, ‘Birth places of the people and the laws of migration’, Geographical Magazine, 3 (London, 1876), p.35- 37.
“Wage Labour and African Population Movements in CentraI Africa,’’ in Essays on African Population, ed. K. M. Barbour & R. M. Prothero. New York, 1962. P. 232.
MORRILL, R. L. “Migration and the Spread and Growth of Urban Settlement,” Lund Studies in Geography, Ser. B, 26 (1965).
HALL, A. D. and R. E. FAGEN. “Definition of System,’’ General Systems Yearbook, 1 (1956), 18.
LEWIS, W. A. Theory of Economic Growth. London, 1955. P. 333.
VON BERTALANFFLY. , “An Outline of General System Theory,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 1 (1950), 134-165; - . “General System Theory,” General Systems Yearbook, 1 (1956), 1-10; -. “General System Theory-a Critical Review,” General Systems Year-book, 7 (1962), 1-20.
Mabogunje, A. L. (1970) ‘Systems approach to a theory of rural urban migration’, Geo- graphical Analysis, 2(1): 1-18.
No comments:
Post a Comment