social – poor housing conditions and much higher crime rates. economic – low wages or unemployment. environmental – polluted drinking water and a lack of sanitation.

In rural areas, less employment opportunities, low wages, drought, lack of basic amenities, landlessness, social factors act as push factors and more employment opportunities, higher income, better wages, better facilities activities as pull factors towards the rural to urban migration.

The migratory movement towards urban areas implies a transformation process that causes a decrease of income generation and employment in agriculture. This leads to less labor participation in the primary sector, which can cause a reduction in agricultural production and threaten food security in some territories.

The type of migration that we are principally interested in in this unit is Rural to urban migration, which is the movement of people from countryside to city areas. However, in many LEDCs cities are experience massive rural to urban migration, mainly of young males, into the major cities.

the provision of public services, which can be done at a much lower cost per person in urban areas due to economies of scale. degradation of land in rural areas – if the excess rural population left the land it would allow those who remained to increase their standard of living through more optimal farm sizes.

Rural-urban migration poses more challenges than the opportunities it seems to create for migrants and their families. These problems are of greater dimension and more severe in the African countries where the provision of public infrastructural facilities lags a thousand times behind the growth of the population.

Rural-urban migration may be reduced by interventions which increase cultivatable land, equalize land or income distribution, or decrease fertility.

Migration has its own positive and negative consequences on the place of departure and destination. Natural resource depletion, environmental pollution, earning disparities, redundancy, urban expansion, social unrest, population crowding were/are some of the negative effects of migration.

In fact, immigrants help grow the economy by filling labor needs, purchasing goods and paying taxes. When more people work, productivity increases. And as an increasing number of Americans retire in coming years, immigrants will help fill labor demand and maintain the social safety net.