 Hi everyone and welcome to this knowledge clip on theories of international migration. Today I will be guiding you through push-pull theories which are very popular set of theories that have been very often used in many studies on international migration. As you can see behind me you see a mine, right, so in the 1950s, 1970s you have to imagine Europe was destroyed by the Second World War, there was the Marshall Plan, a lot of money went to Europe to recover Europe from the disastrous war and that meant that the heavy industry in northwestern Europe was heavily expanding. The mines in Belgium for example, also in the Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, they all needed workers to work there because the local population was not willing to do the heavy jobs anymore. And push-pull theories, they do explain the kind of movements that we see emerging in this guest worker period from the 1950s to the 1970s whereby many people from Italy, from Spain, from Portugal, Greece, but also Northern Africa came to Belgium, to the Netherlands, to northwestern European countries in order to work. And what push-pull models actually say is very, very simple. On the one hand you have pull factors that pull people towards a certain area. So think about the guest worker period, that means that people are pulled towards Belgium, towards the Netherlands because there is a lot of job opportunity. All these jobs in the mines, in the metal industry, they needed to be filled in and the local population was not willing to do that anymore. And the push factors are the factors that push people outside of their country of origin. So think here about Italy, for example, in the 1950s. There was a lot of unemployment, people were not able to get around in life, then there was active recruitment from northwestern European countries to get workers in the mines and so people saw an opportunity, they were pushed out of their region of origin, particularly in southern Italy because of the unemployment and then they went to because of the pull factor to northwestern Europe. So very easily push-pull models indicate there is factors that push people out of the country of origin, or region of origin, and pull factors that explain why people move to certain locations. There's other examples that we can think about here. So as you can see on this picture, we see two different pictures of a lake. And that is Lake Popu in Bolivia. Now in 1986, as you can see in the middle, the lake was still quite large. But as you know, we have climate change, which meant that the lake has been shrinking over the past years until it reached a very, very small state, as you can see in the other picture. And here's the point where by all the fishermen communities that were living on the shores and were living from catching fish were not able to survive, which meant that many people moved away from Lake Popu and were finding work in cities, for example, to survive. So here again, the push factor in this case is then environmental change. Another example of a push factor can be war. Here you see a picture of Ukraine. So the invasion of Russia of Ukraine starting in 2022 can be considered to be a push factor for many people in Ukraine to leave the country and to move elsewhere or to move within their country, depending where they were living in Ukraine. And finally, we see here a pull factor tank, for example, that you're living in northwestern Europe or northern Europe. You're tired of all the rain all the time. So that could be a push factor, but a pull factor in this case would be, well, you moved to Spain, let's say, Italy, Turkey, or another location at the Mediterranean Sea where you have better weather. So in this case, better weather is a pull factor. Now, thinking this through, the push-pull models are rather simplistic. One can say because migration is never, of course, just the movement because of a push factor and a pull factor. There's also some things that come in between. And there was a sociologist who is called Everett Lee from the University of Pennsylvania. And he actually adapted the push-pull model with two extra factors. So on the one hand he said again, OK, there's things that push people out of the country of origin. There's things that pull people towards certain destination countries. But in between you have intervening obstacles and personal characteristics that explain why not everybody's moving from point A to B. Because you have to imagine if these pull factors work the same for everyone, then you would say that let's take Ukraine, that everybody needs to move out of Ukraine when the war started. And that, of course, did not happen. Or when you see environmental change and you see that, for example, desertification in Africa, that some people will move, but other people will remain in the region of origin. And so he indicated on the one hand there's personal characteristics, which means that generally people who move are younger and older people are more likely to remain in the location of origin. He also indicated, for example, that there is the gender dimension, depending on what migration flow you're looking at, females or males might be more likely to move. There's also socioeconomic status, of course. So depending how much money you have, you might be able to move or not because migration is always a costly enterprise. And so that is it for the personal characteristics. So very classical sociological variables, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, age can play a role over there. And then finally, we also have intervening obstacles, which are things that can impede some people to move towards a certain location. Think about restrictive migration laws. That can be that your country of origin does not allow certain people to move out of the country. Think about Saudi Arabia, for example, or Iran. Whereas women, it might be more difficult to move internationally. You can also think about migration laws of the country of destination that bend certain or make it more difficult to certain nationalities to move to that country of destination. Thinking about Donald Trump, for example, in the United States, when he announced a ban on migration from Muslim countries, that meant that that was quite a significant intervening obstacle for those people. So altogether, push-pull theories are relatively simple, but very popular and very often used in migration studies. They say there is a push factor, there is a pull factor. And then, of course, there is the adaptation of Everett Lee, which is very important because it explains why there is also variation and why the push and pull factors do not work for everybody because there is personal characteristics and there is also the intervening obstacles that are kind of acting as a filter on migration decisions. So thank you for watching this knowledge clip on international migration push-pull theories.