| Term | Definition |
| Cyclic movement | Regular journey that begins at a home base and returns to the exact same place. A form of movement. |
| Activity spaces | Places within the rounds of daily activity. |
| Snowbirds | Retired or semiretired people who live in cold states and Canada for most of the year and move to warm states for the winter. |
| Pastoralism | a type of cyclic movement when herders move livestock through the year to continually find fresh water and green pastures. |
| Transhumance | Migration pattern in which livestock are led to highlands during summer months and lowlands during winter months to graze. |
| Relocation diffusion | Spread of an idea or innovation from its hearth by the act of people moving and taking the idea or innovation with them. |
| International migration | Purposeful movement of people from one country to another with a degree of permanence or intent to stay. |
| Emigrants | A person who permanently moves out of their home country. |
| Immigrants | A person who permanently moves into a new country. |
| Net migration | Difference between the number of immigrants (those coming into a country) and the number of emigrants (those leaving a country). |
| Refugees | Migrants who flee their country because of political persecution and seek asylum in another country. |
| Remittances | Money that migrants send back to families and friends in their home countries, often in cash, forming an important part of the economy in many lower income (peripheral) countries. |
| Reverse remittances | Money flowing from home countries to migrants in their destination countries. |
| Guest workers | Migrants who are invited into a country to work temporarily, are granted work visa status, and are expected to return to their home country at the end of the visa. |
| Islands of development | Cities in developing regions where foreign investment is concentrated and to which rural migrants are drawn. |
| Internal migration | Purposeful movement of people within a country from one location to another with a degree of permanence or intent to stay. |
| Diaspora | Dispersal of a people from their homeland to a new place, either voluntarily or by force. |
| Assimilation | When a minority group loses distinct cultural traits, such as dress, food, or speech, and adopts the customs of the dominant culture. Can happen voluntarily or by force. |
| Human trafficking | A form of forced migration where people are involuntary sold and traded for manual labor or as workers in the commercial sex trade. |
| Gulags | Forced labor or prison labor camps. Most often associated with authoritarian countries. |
| Distance decay | Decreasing likelihood of diffusion with greater distance from the hearth. |
| Gravity model | Urban geography model that mathematically predicts the degree of interaction and probability of migration (and other flows) between two places. |
| Push factors | Circumstances a migrant considers when deciding to leave the home country. |
| Pull factors | Circumstances a migrant considers when deciding where to migrate. |
| Intervening opportunity | Presence of an opportunity near a migrant’s current location that greatly diminishes the attractiveness of migrating to a site farther away. |
| Unauthorized or undocumented migrants | Immigrants who enter without proper documents. |
| Coyotes | People who smuggle people across the border for a sizable fee. |
| Chain migration | Permanent movement from one place to another that follows kinship links. For example, a group of migrants settles in a place and then communicates with family and friends at their former location to encourage migration along the same path. |
| Repatriation | A refugee or group of refugees returning to their home country, usually with the assistance of government or a non governmental organization. |
| Asylum seekers | Migrant who claims the right to protection as a refugee in a country other than their home country. |
| Internally displaced persons (IDP’s) | People who have been displaced within their home country and do not cross international boundaries. |
| Bracero Program | Laws and agreements passed in the U.S. and Mexico in 1942 to encourage Mexicans to migrate to the United States to work in agriculture. |
