Step migration reaches a big city one smaller move at a time

Step migration is a staircase of short moves

Step migration describes a migrant who reaches a distant goal through several shorter moves rather than one long jump. The usual staircase runs from a village to a small town, then to a regional city, then to a national or foreign metropolis. The idea comes from Ernst Georg Ravenstein, whose 1885 paper The Laws of Migration argued that most migrants move only a short distance and that migration proceeds step by step. The CED cites Ravenstein's laws in Topic 2.8 and names step migration as a voluntary type in Topic 2.11.

Each stop pays for the next one

A long move is expensive and risky. A short move is cheap, and it teaches the migrant how to rent a room, find wage work and live among strangers. Savings from a job in the town pay the fare to the city, and contacts made in the city point toward the next destination. This is distance decay at work: interaction falls with distance, so the nearest town feels possible before the far city does. Many international migrants make an internal rural to urban move first, then cross a border later.

Intervening opportunities can stop the climb

Samuel Stouffer proposed in 1940 that the number of people who travel a given distance depends on the opportunities at the destination and on the intervening opportunities along the way. A migrant aiming for the United States who finds steady factory work in a Mexican border city may simply stay. Everett Lee later added intervening obstacles, such as a mountain range, a border wall or a visa rule. Both ideas explain why a planned staircase can end on a lower step.

One traveller, several stops, one direction

Step migration follows one person, or one household, through a sequence of places that climb the urban hierarchy. Chain migration follows many people along one corridor, each joining relatives who went first. The two can combine: a woman steps from village to capital, then her cousins skip the middle steps and come straight to her. Transhumance is a third pattern students mix in, but it is a seasonal round trip with herds, so it has no final destination.

Not every stopover counts as a step

The common slip is to label any pause on a journey as step migration. If the migrant stops because a job appeared on the route, the stronger answer names an intervening opportunity. If a refugee crosses several countries while fleeing war, the movement is forced, and the CED lists step migration only among voluntary migrations. Write step migration when the stages are deliberate and each settlement is larger and farther than the last. The step migration literature also notes that scholars still argue over how to measure it.

What a free response question asks

A typical prompt gives a migrant's route and asks you to identify the pattern, explain why it happened in stages, and describe one effect on the final city. Name the type, name a cause such as cost or information, and tie the effect to growth of the urban population. The Unit 2 page lists the related migration topics. Photograph your notes on migration types, and photo to quiz turns them into questions that describe a route and ask which type it shows.

Last updated: 2026-10-03 · Written with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing.