Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Duvalier controlled Haiti, pilfering wealth for his family
and ruling with a private militia. Papa Doc died in 1971,
and his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, called Baby Doc, took
control. He continued to rule and steal from Haiti until
his exile in 1986. Under these brutal dictators and in the
turmoil since, thousands of Haitians have sought refuge in
the United States.
Since 1981, the United States has interdicted,
detained, and returned illegal Haitian migrants. The spike
in 1991-1992 of over 37,000 Haitians interdicted followed
a 1991 military coup d'etat, which overthrew democrati-
cally elected President Aristide with military rule. Haiti
remained unstable, and the second spike in the graph in
1994 marks the turmoil leading up to the reinstatement
of Aristide as president in 1994, under U.S. pressure.
Governance of the country fl ipped back to military rule in
2004. Before the January 2010 earthquake, Haiti was the
poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Since the
death of 250,000 people in the devastating earthquake,
the situation in Haiti has only worsened. In response, the
Department of Homeland Security granted all Haitian
nationals who were in the United States as of January 12,
2010 an 18-month temporary protected status, which
allowed them to remain in the United States while Haiti
tries to recover from the tragedy of the earthquake and
cope with a cholera outbreak.
Across the world from Haiti, for more than 30 years,
people from Afghanistan have left the country in search
of safety fi rst from civil war, then the Taliban, and cur-
rently the instability of the Afghan War. Approximately
10 million Afghans have been refugees since 1979, fl eeing
mainly to Pakistan and Iran. Policies toward Afghan refu-
gees have shifted over time. The international commu-
nity sends substantial aid to Pakistan to help the Pakistani
government serve the Afghan refugee population within
their borders.
After the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in
1994, support for Pakistan waned and the Pakistan gov-
ernment forced the repatriation of thousands of Afghans.
Since September 11, 2001, the international commu-
nity, led by the United Nations High Commissioner on
Refugees (UNHCR), has helped Pakistan and Iran repa-
triate nearly 5 million refugees to Afghanistan. Currently,
3 million Afghans are registered refugees in Iran and
Pakistan, and approximately 1 million more Afghans in
Pakistan are not registered as refugees. The repatriation
of Afghans continues and is complicated by the current
war and the fact that over half the Afghan refugees in
Pakistan and Iran were born there . . . not in Afghanistan.
of voluntary migration fl ows indicate that the intensity
of a migration fl ow varies with such factors as similarities
between the source and the destination, the effectiveness
of the fl ow of information from the destination back to the
source, and the physical distance between the source and
the destination.
Over a century ago, British demographer Ernst
Ravenstein sought an answer to the question of why
people voluntarily migrate. He studied internal migra-
tion in England, and on the basis of his data he proposed
several
laws of migration
, many of which are still rel-
evant today including:
1.
Every migration fl ow generates a return or countermi-
gration.
2.
The majority of migrants move a short distance.
3.
Migrants who move longer distances tend to choose
big-city destinations.
4.
Urban residents are less migratory than inhabitants of
rural areas.
5.
Families are less likely to make international moves
than young adults.
Ravenstein also posited an inverse relationship between
the volume of migration and the distance between
source and destination; that is, the number of migrants
to a destination declines as the distance they must travel
increases. Ravenstein's idea is an early observation of
the
gravity model
, which predicts interaction between
places on the basis of their population size and distance
between them. The gravity model assumes that spatial
interaction (such as migration) is directly related to the
populations and inversely related to the
distance
between
them—an assumption that had more meaning in an age
before airplane travel and the Internet. In mathematical
terms, the equation for the gravity model is the multi-
plication of the two populations divided by the distance
between them.
Although the gravity model gives us a guide to
expected migration, migration is not as simple as a math-
ematical equation. When an individual, family, or group
of people makes a voluntary decision to migrate, push
and pull factors come into play.
Push factors
are the
conditions and perceptions that help the migrant decide
to leave a place.
Pull factors
are the circumstances that
effectively attract the migrant to certain locales from
other places, the decision of where to go. A migrant's deci-
sion to emigrate from the home country and migrate to a
new country results from a combination of push and pull
factors, and these factors play out differently depending
on the circumstance and scale of the migration. Because a
migrant is likely to be more familiar with his or her place
of residence (source) than with the locale to which he or
she is moving (destination), a migrant will likely perceive
Push and Pull Factors in Voluntary Migration
Why do people choose to migrate? Researchers have been
intrigued by this question for more than a century. Studies
