The Ten Commandments of Migration Research

In 1885 Sir Ernest George Ravenstein published his seminal paper titled ’The laws of migration’ in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Association. Among other observations, he asserted the preeminence of the economic motivation for understanding geographic patterns of population movement. Since that time, a voluminous literature has developed on the analysis of human migration as influenced by, and influencing, geographic distributions of economic activity. Because a significant portion of all research appearing on migration takes off from Ravenstein’s century-old assertion about the primacy of the economic motivation, and because the multidisciplinary field of regional science provides a common meeting ground for scholars from economics, geography, sociology, and the various other disciplines in which the bulk of migration analysis appears, we believe that it is appropriate that migration is still one of the major themes in regional science research all over the world.