As recently as a decade ago, internal migration in general and rural-urban migration in particular were viewed favorably in the economic development literature. Rapid internal migration was thought to be a desirable process by which surplus rural labor was withdrawn from traditional agriculture to provide cheap manpower to fuel a growing modern industrial complex. Numerous studies have now documented the fact that throughout the developing world rates of rural-urban migration continue to exceed rates of urban job creation and to greatly surpass the capacity of both industry and urban social services to absorb this labor effectively.On the contrary, migration today is being increasingly viewed as the major contributing factor to the ubiquitous phenomenon of urban surplus labor and as a force that continues to exacerbate already serious urban unemployment. But the influence of migration on the development process is much more pervasive than its obvious accentuation of urban unemployment and underemployment. It is in the context of its implications for economic growth in general and for the "character" of that growth, particularly its distributional manifestations, that migration research has assumed growing importance in recent years.
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