Net Cohort Migration in England and Wales: How Past Birth Trends May Influence Net Migration

An established role for statistical social science is to try to uncover the extent to which aggregate behaviour is conditioned by context as exemplified by the work of Durkheim. A decade prior to Durkheim's seminal work, eleven 'laws' of human migratory behaviour were proposed by Ravenstein. In this paper we suggest an extension to this work, that: migration balances the relative worth of people to places over the course of human lifetimes; not in days, month or years: people follow the tides of life. We explore the concept of net cohort migration to demonstrate this for England and Wales, for which long-term quality datasets are available.