The Next Great Migration: The Story of Movement on a Changing Planet

by Sonia Shah

People who decide to migrate are not a random cross-section of the population, like those found perusing the aisles of a grocery store or wandering around a train station. Whether it’s money, skills, connections, or stamina, migration requires capital. Those with no capital, such as the very poor, cannot easily afford to undertake it. Nor can those whose capital derives from land ownership, aristocratic lineage, or titles. They have wealth and status, but they can’t take it with them. Instead, social scientists have found, migrants tend to be the kind of people who don’t have big bank accounts or landholdings or titles but are rich in good health, skills, education, and social connections with people in other places. Their capital is portable. Demographically, in other words, they’re the kind of people who are “the bedrock of successful communities,” McLeman notes. They’re working people from the middle classes, younger and better educated than their nonmigrant peers, and more likely to hail from societies on the middle rungs of economic development. They’re healthier, too.