ABSTRACT
Every person moves unless physiologically unable to do so. The freedom of the individual to move was enshrined internationally in Article 13, paragraph 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948 which states that ‘everyone has the right of freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state’ and that ‘everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’ (United Nations 1998: 11). A universal punishment for wrongdoing is to deny the right of people to move by imprisoning them. Although everyone and every human group moves, some move more frequently and farther than others. Those who study population migration and population mobility essentially attempt to explain how this comes about: why some people and some groups move more than others, and what the implications of these movements are. These implications range from the impact of migration on development or poverty, and the impact of development and poverty on migration, through to the relative participation of migrants in community or state institutions, to more abstract issues such as identity and sense of belonging. Migration in the current discourse has virtually come to signify movement across an international boundary (see Cohen 1995; Castles and Miller 2003; Weiner 1995, for example) with internal population movements known as ‘population redistribution’ and largely associated with urbanization. However, international migration is but a subset of total human population mobility and the discussion of moving, migration and mobility provides an opportunity to present all forms of population movement within a single framework.
