Demographic distributions of a country inevitably define policymaking, elections and
development investments. Population subgroups and resources condense and disperse in
geographically-defined areas, either organically or by design, eliciting calculated responses by
the government. Therefore understanding the components of shifting population distributions
should be an integral part of our understanding of development in the social sciences. However,
the migration-development relationship is typically examined in terms of either international
migration or rural-urban migration. As such, the urbanizing trend tends to dominate discussions
of internal migration. Because the point of departure of many internal migration analyses is the
urban center, there remains an urban bias to the conclusions that are drawn in internal migration
studies, much like in many other development fields. Casual reference, at the most, is given to
the other types of movement such as rural to rural, urban to urban and urban to rural. Given that
people are more likely to move closer distances, and globally, there is a high correlation between
development and the percent rural, it is conceivable that a substantial amount of the movement
related to development remains within the rural areas. As such, in order to truly understand the
impact that changing societies has on the population distribution of a country, capturing only the
phenomenon of expanding cities, while important, is not sufficient. We must add to our stock
knowledge of the determinants of internal migration the local micro-responses starting from the
rural areas.