Abstract

The world population is increasingly concentrated in urban areas, which experience complex migration flows. Past research on migration has traditionally focused on either the within-country (internal) or the between-country (international) movements. This distinction hampers our understanding of the migratory processes, as well as of their demographic and development impacts at the subnational level. We discuss interlinkages between internal and international migration from a theoretical perspective and analyse empirical patterns in different development contexts: post-communist Albania, the city of Zurich during its industrial revolution, and contemporary cities in developing countries. The results highlight the salience of contextual factors in shaping the interactions between internal and international migration and confirm the importance of those interactions for the spatial redistribution of populations and socioeconomic development.