APHUG Chapter 3: Migration

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering fundamental terminology, migration theories, historical corridors, refugee policies, and national immigration laws from AP Human Geography Chapter 3.

Cyclic movement

A regular journey that involves leaving home for a defined period of time and returning to the same home base in a relatively short timeframe.

Activity spaces

The local areas and routes in which individuals conduct their daily rounds and routine activities, such as traveling between home, work, and errands.

Commuting

A form of cyclic movement within an individual's activity space, taking minutes to hours and frequently utilizing multiple transportation modes.

Snowbirds

Retired or semiretired persons from colder regions (such as northern U.S. states and Canada) who relocate to warm states like Florida, California, or Arizona for the winter and return in the spring.

Pastoralism

A sustainable dryland agricultural practice in which herders seasonally move livestock along established traditional routes to locate freshwater and naturally growing pastures.

Transhumance

A specialized mountain form of pastoralism characterized by moving livestock vertically between highland pastures in the summer and lowland valleys during the winter.

Migration

A movement of individuals, families, or groups from an original home to a new location with the permanent intention of changing where home is.

Relocation diffusion

The transmission and spread of cultural traits, ideas, and practices that occurs when migrants physically transport their cultural heritage and imprint it on a new landscape.

International migration

Human movement that involves permanently crossing recognized national or political boundaries from one sovereign state to another.

Emigrant

A person who departs their country of origin to establish residence abroad, thereby subtracting from that country's population count.

Immigrant

A person entering and taking up residence in a foreign sovereign country, thereby adding to that nation's population count.

Net migration

The mathematical difference between the total number of incoming immigrants and outgoing emigrants in a given country: $\text{net migration} = \text{immigrants} - \text{emigrants}$.

Remittances

Financial earnings or capital that international or domestic migrants transfer back to their relatives living in their country or community of origin.

Reverse remittances

Financial flows originating abroad and sent to family members within destination countries (such as money sent from Mexico to the U.S. during economic downturns).

Guest workers

Documented temporary migrants recruited into a nation on legal work visas to remedy specific labor shortages, with the formal expectation that they return home once the contract or visa lapses.

Islands of development

Specific urban or coastal centers within developing countries where private capital, public infrastructure, and modern employment disproportionately concentrate amid less-developed rural surroundings.

Overseas Chinese

Persons of Chinese birth or descent residing outside mainland China, particularly the contract-laborer diaspora in Southeast Asia who became prominent commercial and financial leaders.

Internal migration

Permanent movement and resettlement that takes place entirely within the established domestic borders of a single sovereign nation.

The Great Migration

The large-scale domestic movement from roughly 1900 to 1970 of 5 to 8 million African Americans from the rural, segregated South to industrial centers of the American North, Midwest, and West.

Rust Belt

The deindustrialized northern and midwestern region of the United States characterized by closed factories, abandoned industrial sites, and population losses following manufacturing declines.

Sun Belt

The rapidly growing southern and southwestern band of the United States spanning Virginia to California, spurred by warm climates, low business taxes, tech service jobs, and the advent of air conditioning.

Forced migration

Permanent human movement involuntary imposed upon an individual or population group through violence, coercion, or state power, leaving migrants with no meaningful personal choice.

Diaspora

The spatial dispersal and spreading of an entire population or ethnic group away from its ancestral or recognized geographical homeland.

Assimilation

A deliberate government policy or social process aimed at eliminating cultural distinctiveness and forcing an indigenous or minority culture to conform to the dominant population's norms.

Modern slavery

An umbrella designation encompassing severe labor exploitation, child soldiering, forced marriage, involuntary servitude, and human trafficking that a person cannot refuse or escape.

Human trafficking

The illicit recruitment, transport, or harbor of individuals through deception, force, coercion, or abduction for the explicit purpose of involuntary labor or commercial sexual exploitation.

Peonage

A form of involuntary servitude in which an individual is forced to provide labor or service to satisfy and repay an alleged financial obligation or debt.

Ravenstein's laws of migration

A set of five demographic principles formulated by Ernst Ravenstein explaining that most migrations are short-distance, follow step patterns, stimulate return flows, and primarily involve young adults.

Distance decay

The spatial principle holding that the degree of interaction, communication, or migrant volume between two geographical points decreases predictably as the distance separating them widens.

Gravity model

A mathematical formula stating that the interaction and migration intensity between two distinct places is directly related to the product of their population sizes and inversely proportional to their distance.

Push factors

Adverse local conditions, crises, or perceptions—including armed conflict, poverty, environmental hazards, and political persecution—that impel individuals to abandon their home location.

Pull factors

Positive perceptions, perceived economic opportunities, social liberties, or environmental attractions that draw prospective migrants toward a specific destination area.

Intervening opportunity

An accessible alternative or economic prospect encountered closer to a migrant's origin that diminishes the appeal and necessity of travelling all the way to an originally intended distant goal.

Step migration

A gradual, incremental migration pathway in which migrants move stepwise from a village to a small town, then a larger regional city, before finally settling in a major metropolis.

Unauthorized (undocumented) migrant

A foreign-born individual residing within a nation without holding valid travel, work, or residency documents, having entered without inspection or remained after a visa's expiration.

Coyotes

Professional smugglers contracted and paid financial sums to transport undocumented persons across international boundaries, especially along the border between Mexico and the United States.

Chain migration

The patterned migration process in which earlier settled migrants communicate with and assist family members and friends, leading successive waves of kin along identical migration corridors.

Refugee

A person who has fled their country of origin and holds recognized legal status due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group, or political belief.

1951 Refugee Convention

An international legal framework establishing the standardized definition of a refugee, enumerating their rights, and detailing the responsibilities of nations providing asylum.

Asylum seeker

A displaced individual seeking formal sanctuary and legal recognition as a refugee upon arriving at an international border or port of entry, pending an official administrative hearing.

Repatriation

The formal United Nations-supported process of returning refugees safely to their country of origin once armed conflict, political persecution, or emergency conditions have subsided.

Internally displaced person (IDP)

A person compelled to flee their residence because of war, human rights violations, or natural hazards, but who remains situated entirely within the political borders of their own homeland.

Zionism

A socio-political movement that advocated for the creation and sustained preservation of an autonomous Jewish national homeland in Palestine, situated between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

Genocide

Systematic actions perpetrated with deliberate intent to eliminate, in whole or in part, a distinct national, ethnic, racial, or religious community.

Isolationism

A government doctrine emphasizing geopolitical neutrality, avoidance of foreign entanglements, and strict restriction of external international influences and migration.

Oriental Exclusion Acts

A sequence of discriminatory U.S. federal legislative statutes (1882–1907) designed primarily to prohibit the entry and naturalization of Chinese contract workers.

National Origins Law (1929)

United States immigration legislation that capped total annual entries at 150,000 and tied national admissions quotas to the demographic origins of the 1920 population, limiting Asian and southern/eastern European immigration.

Bracero Program

A World War II-era bilateral pact (1942–1965) through which millions of Mexican seasonal farm hands were legally recruited to fulfill cyclical agricultural labor shortages in the United States.

Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)

A 1986 U.S. federal law that granted amnesty, legal permanent residency, and eventual paths to citizenship to approximately 2.6 million eligible undocumented residents.

Operation Liberty Shield

A post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security policy established in 2003 that automatically placed asylum seekers originating from 33 designated nations where terrorist networks operated into mandatory federal detention.