GED Social Studies
Human Geography & Migration
Human geography asks why people are where they are. Migration questions reduce to push and pull: what drove people out, what drew them in. Population questions read the same logic off charts — growth, decline, and the movement from farm to city.
The words first
- push factors
- what drives people OUT: war, famine, persecution, no work
- pull factors
- what draws people IN: jobs, safety, freedom, family already there
- immigration / emigration
- moving IN to a country / OUT of one — the same person does both
- urbanization
- the long shift of population from countryside to cities
- refugee
- someone fleeing danger — pushed, not merely pulled
The method
THE PUSH–PULL LEDGER
PUSH (out of the old home) PULL (toward the new)
war and violence safety and stability
famine, drought farmland, food
persecution religious/political freedom
poverty, no jobs wages, open jobs
family already settled
CLASSIC CASES IN THIS FRAME
1840s Irish immigration: potato famine (push) +
US jobs and food (pull)
Great Migration (1910s–60s): Southern Jim Crow &
sharecropping (push) + Northern factory wages (pull)
URBANIZATION'S ENGINE
farm machinery needs fewer hands (push from countryside)
factories and services need many (pull to cities)
→ the same push–pull, aimed at cities
Worked all the way through
The problem
During the Great Migration, millions of Black Americans moved from the rural South to Northern cities. Analyze it with push and pull factors.
- Step 1 — List the pushes.Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement, racial violence, and sharecropping's dead-end poverty.
- Step 2 — List the pulls.Northern factories hiring (especially during the World Wars), better wages, the vote, and family and community already established there.
- Step 3 — Note the trigger timing.WWI cut European immigration just as war factories boomed — Northern labor demand spiked exactly when Southern conditions were harshest.
On the board
push: Jim Crow, violence, sharecropping
driving out
pull: factory wages, the vote, family
drawing north
WWI cuts immigrant labor supply
the timing trigger
millions move, 1910s–1960s
Answer
Pushed by segregation, violence, and rural poverty; pulled by wartime factory jobs, higher wages, and political rights in the North
A second one, in a different form
A population chart shows a country going from 80% rural in 1900 to 80% urban in 2000. What process is this, and what usually drives it?
countryside → cities over a century
urbanization
farm machines replace field labor
the push
factory and service jobs concentrate in cities
the pull
Answer
Urbanization — mechanized farms pushing labor out, city jobs pulling it in
The usual mistake
Labeling a benefit at the destination as a push factor. Push always describes the place left behind.
Check yourself
Answer every migration question with at least one push AND one pull — an answer with only one half is the planted incomplete choice. Refugees are the exception to balance: for them, push dominates by definition.
Practice it
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