Push and pull factors in international migration patterns

Migration

For some decades now, migration has become a trend to people in some countries, specifically those from third-world regions. This activity is not just a trend though. Rather, there are different reasons that migrating people considers why they choose to move from their homeland to another country. Such reasons are called push and pull factors.

Push factors are reasons that drive people away from their current location or county while pull factors are the reasons that attract people to move to another location or country. Some of the push factors are poverty, unstable government/political conditions, increasing population growth, high cost of living, low wage labor but high labor taxing, and many others. Some of the pull factors, on the other hand, are employment opportunities, high labor wage, low cost but high standard of living, good physical environment, stable political/government conditions.

One example of a country where migration of people from other regions has a high rate is the United States. People from regions such as Asia and Africa choose the United States as their new homeland because they find that U.S. can provide them with better opportunities, such as high labor wage, that their previous or original country cannot provide them. Studying such activity of migration, both the push and pull factors are easy to determine. This is because the reasons in both factors act together, in that the push factors are contrasting forces of the pull factors that make people decide to leave their country and transfer to another. For instance, the push factor of a low labor wage is a contrast of the pull factor high labor wage.