ABSTRACT
Instead of thinking of migration and mobility merely as different terms for the same phenomenon, we can distinguish between them in three ways. First, patterns of human movement can be classified as either migration or mobility depending on their spatial and temporal properties. Second, in the international state system migration is defined as the crossing of borders. In this context mobility becomes associated with free movement within or across international borders. Third, the two concepts can be used as lenses through which we see the same phenomena in different ways. I call these the physical, the contextual, and the perspectival distinctions between migration and mobility. The second and third interpretations do not contradict the first but correct it in important ways: The contextual distinction warns against using overly abstract models for explaining human movement that ignore its historically ever-changing social contexts; the perspectival interpretation asks scholars to switch between a migration view that looks at people on the move from the perspective of territorially bounded societies and a mobility view that adopts the perspective of these people’s biographical experiences.
