Cumulative Causation Unbounded: Network Expansion in Rural and Urban Migration Centers

There is a tendency in the migration literature to see rural communities that send many migrants to the United States as closed communities. The theory of cumulative causation rests on the assumption of bounded communities and posits a saturation point at which no more migration from the community occurs. The implication that eventually there will be no further migration from a given community ignores the existence of networks that bind people from nearby or even distant communities which can be tapped by a potential migrant and the phenomenon of internal migration to dynamic rural centers. Migration networks also expand in urban centers through marriages of a family’s offspring that bring people without established ties in the US into intimate contact with people who do have these ties.