Internal migration or domestic migration is human migration within a country. Internal migration tends to be travel for education and for economic improvement or because of a natural disaster or civil disturbance, though a study based on the full formal economy of the United States found that the median post-move rise in income was only 1%. Cross-border migration often occurs for political or economic reasons. A general trend of movement from rural to urban areas, in a process described as urbanisation, has also produced a form of internal migration.

History

Many countries have experienced massive internal migration.

Secondary migration

A subtype of internal migration is the migration of immigrant groups—often called secondary or onward migration. Secondary migration is also used to refer to the migration of immigrants within the European Union. In the United States, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services's Administration for Children and Families, is tasked with managing the secondary migration of resettled refugees. However, there is little information on secondary migration and associated programmatic structural changes. Secondary migration has been hypothesised as one of the driving forces behind the distribution of resettled refugees in the United States.

Methods for analysing internal migration

Various methodologies are proposed and used in the literature to analyse internal migration. Ravenstein used extensive cartographies to detail migration patterns. Slater employed networks to model migration. Goldade et al. employed geographical bounds and political afliation of communities, in addition to utilizing network structures. Gursoy and Badur proposed signed network analysis, ego network analysis, representation learning, temporal stability analysis, community detection, and network visualization methods tailored for internal migration data and made their software available.