No comprehensive theory of migration yet exists, although experts generally agree that migration is highly dynamic, complex, and changeable, and that migration patterns are fluid and undergo constant transformations. Further, several major determinants and conditions both drive and explain international migration: migration systems, migration networks, macroeconomic forces, non-economic factors, migration politics, and demographic developments.

Migration systems link regions and states historically, culturally and linguistically, economically, politically, and socially. Within such systems are simultaneous flows of information, capital, goods, and people of any kind, for any purpose, and in any direction. Meanwhile, as systems have become global, global markets for information, capital, and goods, and labor now facilitate global and sustainable movements of people. Migration networks link individuals of sending and receiving communities; they provide potential migrants with preconditions such as information, finances, support with finding accommodation, and employment that encourage migration. Networks can also take the form of migration industries--businesses ranging from human smugglers to recruitment agencies and visa services--that facilitate migration. Networks often explain why migration continues even under adverse conditions, such as lack of economic incentives or unemployment in destination countries.

Macroeconomic forces are mostly the demand for labor and higher wages on the one hand, and by unemployment and lower wages (possibly also overpopulation) on the other hand. Thereby, so-called push and pull factors determine the flow of people, and economic modeling aims to analyze, explain, and predict these migration movements.

Microeconomic and behaviorist theories present migrants as individuals or families assessing their (economic) situation, considering alternative opportunities, and calculating costs and benefits of migration to improve their quality of life. Thus, migration motivations can rest within concepts of individual and collective decision making. Non-economic reasoning instead reflects climatic, cultural, or political criteria, such as warm winters, political stability, and freedom, or opportunities to enjoy a specific culture or to practice a specific religion or lifestyle.

Demographic imbalances--aging and decreasing populations in developed countries and increasing young populations elsewhere--impact on migration, migration discourses, and migration policies. While high-average age, high dependency ratio communities worry about future supply of labor and, at least in Europe, the lack of economically active contributors to pension and other funds, low-average age communities become natural resources to address both these issues by sending migrants.

Migration politics and policies such as recruitment schemes, immigration restrictions, and conditions put on entry and stay shape migration. Thus, the law determines type and character of migration, accepting a migrant as refugee or laborer or refusing entry to a migrant. Individual migrant decision making responds to set conditions and opportunities; vice versa, politics can influence individual decision making. Nevertheless, migration politics also have unintended effects; for example, controls drive people underground and recruitment stops, often resulting in migrants settling down instead of returning as anticipated.

Natural and ecological factors will increasingly cause migration. Global warming, desertification, freak weather, and rising ocean level will almost certainly cause massive population movements.

Bibliography:

1) Castles, Stephen and Mark Miller. [1993] 2003. The Age of Migration: International Migration Movements in the Modern World. Houndmills, England: Palgrave.

2) Cole, Philip. 2000. Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.

3) Global Commission on International Migration. 2005. Migration in an Interconnected World. Report. Geneva, Switzerland: Global Commission on International Migration.

4) Hoerder, Dirk. 2003. Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.

5) Jordan, Bill and Franck Duvell. 2003. Migration: Boundaries of Equality and Justice. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

6) Massey, Douglas S., Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and Edward J. Taylor. 1998. Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.

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