Migration

Migration is the planned second way a province's population changes, alongside the natural growth described under Demographics. Each month it would move people from province to province: internal migration inside one country, a labour market drifting toward opportunity and away from hardship, and external migration across borders, driven by the pressure to leave and by how welcoming the receiving country is.

This system is not in the game yet. The design is settled and described below, but nothing currently moves people between provinces. The Internal Migration and Emigration laws can already be adopted under Policies, but today they grant only flat national effects; nothing reads them as instructions to move anyone. An Immigration law was withdrawn from the game so that no law ships without an effect, and is to return with this system.

Core principles

• Migration only moves people. It never creates or destroys them. Every migrant who leaves a province arrives in another the same month. There is no pool of displaced people waiting offstage: if no destination can take someone, that person stays where they are.
• Head-counts only. Migrants adopt the political leanings of their new home on arrival. Migration would not carry party support, culture or voting blocs with it.
• Internal movement dwarfs international. Historically far more people moved within their own country than across borders. External flows are designed at about a twentieth of internal ones.
• Distance matters. Most internal moves are short. Attraction fades steeply with distance, on a scale of roughly 400 km, so people ripple outward to neighbouring provinces rather than leaping across a continent.

Desirability

Every land province would have a desirability score, and people would move toward provinces that score higher than their own. The score would weigh:

• Income – GDP per capita relative to the country's average (see Economic Output).
• Unrest – unstable provinces push people away.
• Devastation – the strongest push of all apart from war; ruined provinces empty out.
• Education – better-schooled provinces are mildly attractive.
• Crowding – a province is never penalized for being popular up to its starting population, but beyond it resistance grows quickly. A province emptied by war therefore becomes a resettlement magnet once its economy recovers.
• Archetype and local modifiers – province archetypes and province modifiers would carry a Migration Attraction value, representing boomtowns, closed military zones and the like.
• The front line – a province with an active battle in it sheds people as fast as the monthly cap allows.

Only a limited share of a province's people would be "in play" in any month, and both outflow and inflow would be capped, so even a collapsing province loses population over months rather than overnight.

Laws

Internal Migration

The Internal Migration law sets how mobile the population is:

Emigration

The Emigration law would set how freely citizens may leave, from exit-visa regimes that allow almost no one to go, to open departure. Today its Closed Borders option gives +1% maximum Manpower and −1% Stability.

Immigration

The returning Immigration law would set how attractive a country is to newcomers, from closed borders through skilled-migration-only and majority-culture-only rules to refugee havens and open borders. A majority-culture-only policy would admit almost no one but carry a small domestic popularity bonus with nationalist and reactionary Factions.

Bottled-up emigration and unrest

Closing the door has a cost. Each country would have a desire to emigrate, rising with Unrest, poverty relative to the world and War Exhaustion. The share of that desire its emigration law blocks would turn into unrest, concentrated in its most restive provinces: the people most eager to leave are those most opposed to the regime.

Only a policy creates that unrest. People who cannot leave simply because no destination will take them are stuck, not caged, and do not grow angrier for it.

International flows

Emigrants would be drawn from a country's least desirable provinces and sent abroad according to each destination's attractiveness, its desirability, the distance between capitals and the state of the border between the two countries. A border closed from one side, as the Iron Curtain was, would stop movement toward the other regardless of either country's general laws.

Scripted historical pulls are content rather than system. The first to ship would be early emigration to Israel from a handful of countries before 1955; other postwar population movements are out of scope for now.

Planned stages

1. Internal migration: desirability, distance, the Internal Migration law.
2. Interface: net migration and its breakdown in the province and country views.
3. External migration: the Emigration and Immigration laws, blocked-emigration unrest and historical pulls.
4. Further flavour: brain drain and brain gain shifting Education, and sudden refugee waves when war breaks out or devastation passes a threshold.

None of these stages has been built yet.