 Hi everyone and welcome to this knowledge clip on theories of international migration. This time I will be talking about migration transition theories which have become much more popular over the past years to explain why international migration exists. So here we have much more contemporary migration theory compared to more classical migration theories like the neoclassical theory, the push-pull model, the new economics of migration, labor market segmentation approaches or structuralist approaches which you might have already watched in the other knowledge clips that have been recorded. If you did not do so please do so because this is relevant background material but so migration transition theories they kind of get into a different direction and why is that well because these previous classical theories they start from the idea that migration and development tend to be kind of linear right so the more developed a country becomes the less likely it is for example that people do migrate out of that country. Now migration transition theories argue that this is actually much more complex and that we should fundamentally consider the relationship between development and international migration as a non-linear relationship and what does that mean? Well basically it means that when people are poor so that means on the graph that you see here next to me when you are at the left side of the graph you see that migration is slow and development is slow. Why is that the case? Because people if they live in poor societies are very unlikely to have sufficient financial resources to migrate. This is sometimes called the poverty constraint which kind of forces them sometimes to stay in the country of origin and the more developed the country becomes as you can also see in the graph the more developed the country becomes the more people will start to emigrate from that country and that is of course because of financial possibilities for example among others of people will increase with development and so migration transition theories in that sense are reacting also against this very popular idea sometimes in politics but sometimes you also see that in the news the idea that if you send development aid to countries of origins that that will kind of curb international migration. What we actually see in the figure is that this won't happen because the more a country develops the more people will eventually migrate until a certain tipping point when a country is sufficiently developed and when emigration will go down and you see with emigration we see a different graph emerging here namely poorly developed countries do not have a lot of immigration and the more a country gets developed the more migration you get towards the country as well. So on the macro level we do see this kind of pattern and that explains also why for example we do not have a mass migration from people from let's say Malawi because that's a very poor country and the people there do not have the capacities or the financial capacity very often to move and that is why we see that many migrants today are originating from middle income countries think about Turkey think about China, India, Mexico, Brazil for example where we see a much higher rate of out migration because these countries are already much more developed. Now the migration transition theory in its classical form has been formulated already in the 70s by Zelinsky a demographer but lately since 2010 there has been a couple of scholars particularly Jürgen Karling and Hans De Haas who further worked on the migration transition theories particularly to explain the micro level mechanism behind the general pattern and so what they say is that actually we should consider that for people once they are in the migration decision making process there's two different things that we need to think about on the one hand we need to think about the capabilities of people and on the other hand we have to think about their aspirations. Now when we talk about capability we can define this in line with Sen as the ability of human beings to lead the lives they have reason to value and to enhance the substantive choices that people have so if you have if you are capable to move to another place that's already something compared to people who do not have that capacity but so they argue that with development with the more developed the country becomes the more the capabilities of people increase but also the more that their aspirations increase that might be a little bit lower slower as you can see in the graph next to me the capabilities compared to the aspirations but still you see the migration aspirations and the capabilities they do increase together with the level of development so how does that work basically these scholars they argue that when people for example live in a developing country there is development aid and there is more education being offered to people that means that many more people in the country of origin in that specific country will have access or will have views on what is happening outside of their own community outside of their own country so they're much more exposed to alternative lifestyles which can influence their aspirations right and the ideas on what the good life exactly is and that explains for example why we see rural Morocco that despite the fact that it has been developing consistently over the years that we still see many people that have aspirations to move abroad because the capabilities they do not increase as fast as their aspirations the same there is a study by Shuval in rural Ethiopia which also shows that with the more educated the people become the more the aspirations to move abroad actually increase whereas the capabilities linked to development do increase much slower and that explains why we see so much migration then from a developing country because with development you increase the aspirations and lately also the capabilities which means that people with development will also be much more likely or tend to move abroad or internationally and that leads them to this figure again so that's the first figure that I also already showed which shows that the relationship between development and migration is really non-linear so that this idea that there is a linear relationship which implicitly is the idea behind the classical migration theories that that simply is not true now together Jorgen Karling and Hande Haas they made this matrix which put together the migration capabilities and the migration aspirations of people indicating whether they are high or whether they are low and then they allow to classify international migration into four different forms so you have for example low migration capabilities with low migration aspirations high migration aspirations that leads to involuntary immobility which means that some people they really want to move but they're not capable to do so think about Malawi again for example people might have an idea okay I want to move to a developed country but actually they do not have the capability so that means involuntary immobility they have to stay where they are at the same time you can also have of course that people do have a lot of migration capabilities and they do have high migration aspirations and then we get into most forms of international migration namely voluntary mobility next to this we can also classify here and that is interesting because many of the earlier theories really focused on economic migration but their conceptualization also allows to put forced migrations somewhere in namely people who have low migration aspirations so they generally were not kind of aiming to move but they have capabilities then you become involuntary mobile for example right because you have to move you have the capabilities you do not want to but moving of course is a better option than staying and that leads then to involuntary mobility and then there is a final form of mobility which they call acquiescent immobility which means simply that people have low migration aspirations and they have also low migration capabilities and that then leads to a situation where they also can keep in the place where they are rooted so this is migration transitions theory and aspirations capabilities model in a nutshell I hope you enjoyed this video