Despite huge improvements in migration data and research, ‘migration studies’ has remained a strikingly undertheorised field of academic inquiry, particularly when it comes to understanding the nature, drivers, and internal dynamics of migration processes. A number of research biases and the concomitant lack of adequate theorisation and a common scientific narrative limit the ability to synthesise scattered insights into broader, more generalised understandings and, hence, to have genuine influence on public debates.

To overcome the current theoretical impasse and misleading push-pull models, we need an entirely new vision, a new paradigm on human mobility. By necessity, this is a holistic, long-term view that understands migration as an intrinsic and therefore inseparable part of broader social transformation processes rather than a ‘problem to be solved’ or a sign of development failure. Conceptualising migration as endogenous to broader development processes will lead us to fundamentally different ways of understanding human mobility and migratory agency that belies mainstream public and also many academic narratives about migration. 

Hein de Haas is a sociologist and a geographer who has lived and worked in the Netherlands, Morocco and the United Kingdom. He is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Between 2006 and 2015, he was a founding member and co-director of the International Migration Institute (IMI) at the University of Oxford. He is also Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Maastricht. De Haas is the author of 'How Migration Really Works', published by Penguin in November 2023.