Fernando Riosmena

Various strands of scholarship in Migration Studies and Forced Migration Studies recognize that people migrate/stay due to various, mixed motivations.1 Conceptualizations of forced migration recognize that people hold a complexity of motives, even in more dire displacement situations (Betts 2013; Crawley and Skleparis 2018; Bloch and Donà 2018; Zetter 2018, but, for an argument on the limits of this idea, see Mandić 2022).

Introduction In many subfields of population studies, migration studies, and other disciplines, understanding of the forces driving (international, labor) migration has coalesced around a core set of theories either identical or fairly similar to those shown in Figure 1. These frameworks were originally developed separately across multiple fields (e.g., Bourdieu 1985; Harris and Todaro 1970; Massey 1990; Petras 1981; Piore 1979; Stark and Bloom 1985).

To recognize ethnoracial identities, assess minority populations, and address discrimination, nation-states are increasingly adding ethnoracial questions to their censuses, surveys, and administrative systems (Loveman 2014, 2021; Morning 2008). This has spawned new scholarship on how states construct or make “race” (Marx 1998) and racial categories via official classifications (Bailey, Fialho, and Loveman 2018; Kertzer and Arel 2002; Loveman 2014; Nobles 2000).