 Hi everyone and welcome to this knowledge clip on international migration, more specifically theories of international migration. So today I'm going to explain in a very basic way the laws of Ernest Ravenstein, who can be considered one of the classical theories of international migration. So Ravenstein, he was a cartographer at the British War Office at the end of the 19th century and he established a series of migration laws which he published in a journal at the end of the 19th century based on an analysis of census data. So census data are full population data that governments do gather around their population every couple of years, that can be every 5 years, can be every 10 years. And he used this data to investigate how people moved, migrated within the United Kingdom at the end of the 19th century. And the laws that he formulated have been applied to international migration as well afterwards and some of them as you will see are still relevant today and we will discuss this also probably if you follow one of my lectures on campus or hybrid lectures as well following up on this knowledge clip. So let's dive into the different laws that he formulated but let's start first to be very clear about the scope of the laws that he formulated, right? So Ernest Ravenstein indicated that the primary motivation for migration generally is always the economy. So people move to another location because of higher wages, because of better work. So there is some certain economic determinism in the laws that he formulated and so it can be used to explain why people move or why economic migration exists but it is less apt to apply for example to refugees or forced migration. So that is something important to keep in mind. Okay so let's start with the first law of Ravenstein. So most migrants migrate short distances to absorption centers which means that generally people do not tend to move very long away from their home. So generally what we see if you come let's say from Tilburg for example the likelihood of moving to internationally or nationally to Amsterdam to Antwerp in Belgium for example will be much higher compared to moving to New York or SACA or somewhere in South Africa for example. So generally migrants tend to move short distances to absorption centers which are places where more people migrants generally are already residing. The second law that he formulated is that people also tend to move from rural areas to urban areas. But this has an effect of course because the more people move from agricultural regions towards city areas the less people live in these rural areas. So you have rural depopulation and these gaps he indicated are generally also filled up by new migrants who also then move from further areas away towards these rural areas. The third law of Ernest Ravenstein is that absorption or in migration is at the expense of dispersion or out migration. This simply means that if you have many people that migrate towards a certain location you generally will see that less people move away from that location. And if you want to know a little bit more about fine-grained dynamics how this work I also recommend to watch the knowledge clip on migration transition theories where we specifically link in migration out migration to levels of developments of countries. So if you want to know more about this law I recommend to watch that knowledge clip as well. But the important is to remember in migration so in migration people moving into a certain location into a certain country generally means that there is less people that are going out of that country and that is related but that's for another knowledge clip to developmental processes. The fourth law of Ravenstein was that each migration stream has a counter stream. This is also quite logical it simply means that if you have people moving from let's say Poland to the United Kingdom that you also have people moving from the United Kingdom to Poland that can be British citizens that move towards Poland but that can also be of course return migration of Polish migrants who after a while decide to return to their country of origin. Then the fifth law of Ravenstein is that long-distance migrants so those who move long distances not the short distances which are predominantly what migrants do they tend to move to great centers of commerce and industry. So when people decide to move for a very long distance generally they will not end up in a rural area or a small town somewhere but they tend to go to the big cities the big urban areas where there is a lot of commerce a lot of industry particularly job opportunities and higher wages which also are at the core of the loss of Ravenstein. The sixth and that is almost the last law already of Ravenstein is that those in rural areas migrate more compared to those in urban areas that is something that we still see today people who live in agricultural regions are much more likely to move to urban areas and are much more likely to move compared to those who already reside in an urban area and then finally it also indicated that women migrate more so we already had some interest in the gender dimension of migration and he indicated that particularly short distances so women are much more likely to move short distances away compared to men and they also more likely to move compared to men. So this is in a nutshell what Ravenstein was talking about at the end of the 19th century. Bushpool model theories for example are also based on his insights but that is for another knowledge clip. Thank you for watching and I hope you enjoyed this video.