There are four main causes for migration. They are:

1. Economic causes,
2. Social causes,
3. Political causes and
4. Environmental causes (Natural calamities)

1. Economic causes:

• For employment, occupation and business: A person migrates to another place for employment, occupation and business.
• Transfer: When a person employed by a company is transferred from one place to another distant place, he is forced to move to that place.
• Extant of natural resources: When a particular place has abundance of natural resources, but quite less population relatively, people migrate to that place.
  Example: Mines of gold and diamond, regions where petroleum is found, oil refineries, etc. are places that require technical staff in a huge number. Hence, people migrate to places like UAE, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc. where such opportunities are widely available.
• To attain better quality education: A person aspiring for better education migrates to places that offers such facilities and later settles their permanently.
• To get modern health services: When a person does not get required health services in his own region, he forcibly migrates either temporarily or even permanently to places that offers better health facilities.
• Planned migration: When a family sends one or more persons away from the native place for economic activity to a distant place it is called planned or organized migration.

2. Social causes:

• Marriage: After marriage when a woman leaves her native and migrates to live in a different place with her husband it is called social migration.
• To get respite from social rituals: The social set-up of villages is quite traditional compared to that of cities. Urban societies also have liberal thinking and modern life style. As a result, village youth get attracted to such a lifestyle and like to settle in urban areas.

3. Political reasons:

• War and unrest: A region which is war-prone witnesses several small and big wars time and again. This makes the area unrest and unsafe with unstable employment opportunities.
  Hence, people residing in those areas migrate to safe, peaceful and progressive areas that give ample amount of employment opportunities.
• Avoid friction: People migrate from places where riots and friction takes place frequently to safer and peaceful places.

4. Natural calamities or environmental factors: People tend to migrate to safer places from places where natural calamities such as flood, famine, earthquake, etc. occur frequently.

Developmental migration:

• In order to develop a particular region if people residing in that region are made to migrate to another region it is called developmental migration. For example, lots of people were made to migrate when Gujarat started Sardar Srovar Yojana.
• Similarly, when projects related to National Park or afforestation are executed, people residing in those areas are made to move to different areas.