What is internal migration?
Internal migration is the movement of people within a country involving the establishment of a new temporary or permanent residence. These movements can be voluntary, as in the case of a person who decides to move from a rural to urban area, or they can be forced, in which case they refer to movements of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), further described in the sub-section of this chapter on forced displacement. It is important to note that the term covers foreigners as well as nationals, provided the movement involves a change of residence (IOM, 2019).
Why should we collect data on internal migration?
Given the large disparities in living standards between administrative units, studying internal migration is important for reducing within-country geographic inequality. For example, studying rural to urban migration can be useful for developing policies incentivizing migration linked to labour opportunities for the rural poor (Kirchberger, 2021). Urbanization, or the movement of people from rural to urban areas, is defined more formally by the UN Population and Development Commission as “a change in a population that is dispersed in smaller rural settlements, in which agriculture is the dominant activity, towards one that is concentrated on larger and denser urban settlements characterized by a domain of industrial activities and services” (ECOSOC, 2018:22). Given the increasing pace of urbanization in many lower-income countries, studying internal migration is important for understanding why internal migrants and their households choose to settle in certain neighbourhoods and how those choices affect access to basic services, urban planning, inequality and intergenerational mobility. However, data on internal migration can also be used to study the urban to rural exodus or movement from larger to smaller cities (Kirchberger, 2021).
In 2009, UNDP came up with a “conservative” global estimate of 740 million internal migrants, underscoring that most migrants move within the boundaries of their country or country of usual residence as internal migrants (Skeldon, 2018). However, as will be elaborated in the measurement chapter of Part II of the EMD, there are many challenges associated with defining the limits of internal migration. Nonetheless, measuring internal migration may be of great interest for many countries, not only for understanding the dynamics of movement across provinces, but also because internal migration is a vector for international migration, as rural to urban migration is often the first step to migrating across international borders (Bell and Charles-Edward, 2014).