Understanding Push Factors: Why Conflict and Hardship Drive People to Emigrate

Push factors: why people leave their homes, and what that means for history

Migration isn’t just a modern buzzword. It’s a core thread in how societies shape themselves over time. When students study migration in the NYSTCE 115 Social Studies framework, a simple idea helps unlock a lot of big questions: people leave because life at home becomes unbearable, and they’re pulled toward something better somewhere else. That simple distinction—push factors vs. pull factors—lets us read maps, news, and history with sharper eyes.

What pushes people away?

Push factors are the tough stuff that makes staying feel impossible. Think of it as the weight on someone’s shoulders that keeps tipping the scales toward leaving. Here are the big categories you’ll see in social studies discussions, classroom sources, and real-world stories:

• Political instability and conflict: wars, coups, civil strife, or ongoing violence that threatens safety.

• Persecution and human rights abuses: discrimination, religious or ethnic persecution, or targeting of communities.

• Economic hardship and lack of opportunity: extreme poverty, failing markets, scarce jobs, or collapsing livelihoods.

• Environmental threats and disasters: droughts, floods, storms, or long-term environmental degradation that destroy homes and farming.

• Governance and safety failures: corruption, weak rule of law, or schooling and health systems that consistently fail people.

• Forced displacement within or across borders: internal displacement due to conflict, or seeking refuge elsewhere.

These factors aren’t just abstract ideas. They play out in families deciding whether to stay or go, in communities weighing the risks of staying, and in how governments respond to sudden surges in movement. They also sit at the heart of many historical episodes you’ll study—how a single drought can ripple into migration, or how a war reshapes who lives where for generations.

A quick look at the language helps, too. Push factors describe the “why leave” side of the story. They are about difficulties at home. Pull factors, by contrast, describe the allure of someplace else—better schools, safer streets, more jobs, or greener climates. It’s the classic two-sided coin of migration thinking.

Concrete examples help the ideas land

You don’t have to travel far in history or today’s headlines to see push factors at work. Here are a few snapshot kinds of cases that pop up in classrooms and sources:

• A community facing ongoing violence and political insecurity that makes day-to-day life feel unsafe. The decision to move is tied to the fear of harm more than any single event.

• An agricultural region hit by repeated droughts, where harvests fail year after year and families lose their income. Migration becomes a practical move toward livelihoods that still exist.

• A country where persecution of a religious or ethnic group reaches a tipping point—people fear for their children’s safety and future, so they seek protection elsewhere.

• A coastal town battered by climate-change–driven storms, where homes wash away and insurance becomes unaffordable. Still, the options at home shrink, and moving feels like the only sensible choice.

If you’re flipping through a map or a historical case study, these push factors show up as the underlying “why” behind outward movement. They aren’t guesses about people’s behavior; they’re rooted in real conditions people face every day.

Push vs. pull: two sides of the migration coin

It’s tempting to think of migration as simply people chasing opportunities, but the full story requires weighing both sides. Push factors push people away; pull factors attract people to a new place. Here’s the simple way to keep them straight in your notes and essays:

• Push: conditions at home worsen or become dangerous (war, poverty, persecution, disasters).

• Pull: conditions at the destination look better (jobs, safety, political stability, services, family ties).

The two sets aren’t random. They interact. A country with calm politics and strong schools (a pull) might still see people leave if climate shocks destroy crops (a push from home). The balance between these forces helps explain patterns in history—why certain regions become major sources of migrants, or why others become popular destinations for newcomers.

Historical and modern moments you’ll likely encounter

• The Irish Potato Famine (1840s): a tragic push from famine and poverty that sent millions overseas, shaping patterns of settlement in the United States and Britain.

• The Syrian refugee crisis (began 2011): violence and war pushed families from homes they had known for generations, reshaping demographics across the region and beyond.

• Economic crises in the Americas and beyond: when a country hits a wall of unemployment and inflation, you see people migrating in search of work and stability.

• Climate-driven moves today: communities facing rising seas or drought often plan gradual shifts in where they farm and where they go for education or work.

These aren’t isolated stories. They’re threads that tie together geography, economy, politics, and culture. When you study them, you’re building a toolkit for understanding why people move in the real world, not just in chart captions.

Why this matters for social studies learning

Understanding push factors isn’t only about naming bad things. It’s about developing a nuanced sense of cause and effect. Students learn to look at sources—newspaper articles, historical documents, maps, and data sets—and ask: What conditions might push people to leave? What would pull someone to a new place? How do these factors interact with governance, economic policy, or environmental change?

This kind of thinking also helps with critical reading. When you see a description of migration in a source, you can test whether the author is emphasizing push factors, pull factors, or a mix. You can ask whether the piece shows the lived experiences of migrants or focuses on abstract numbers. The more you practice this, the more you’ll see the connective tissue between personal stories and big-picture history.

A quick, practical prompt to sharpen the lens

Let me explain with a simple example that often appears in classroom materials and discussions. Suppose a paragraph notes that a group left their homeland because jobs disappeared and markets collapsed. The author may also mention a neighboring country offering work and a community of fellow migrants. If you’re looking at that snippet, you can test your understanding like this:

• What is the core push factor in this scenario? (Answer: economic hardship and the collapse of jobs.)

• What is the core pull factor? (Answer: presence of work opportunities in the other country and social networks.)

• How do these factors interact to explain migration? (Answer: People leave because of harsh conditions at home, and they go where there are better chances to earn a living and rebuild their lives.)

That kind of parsing is exactly the skill social studies asks you to demonstrate: reading for cause, comparing perspectives, and evaluating how both sides shape movement.

A classroom-friendly way to practice

If you’re helping someone else process these ideas, here are a few lightweight exercises that fit well into study notes without turning into cramming:

• Source sprint: Grab two sources about a migration story—one that emphasizes push factors and one that highlights pull factors. Try to summarize the main point of each in one sentence.

• Map the movement: Trace on a map where people came from and where they went in a historical case. Note the push factors on the origin side and the pull factors on the destination side.

• Cause-and-effect ladder: Create a short chain linking a push factor (like drought) to a concrete outcome (emigration) and then to a response (policy changes, resettlement, or aid).

These mini-activities keep the learning lively and connected to real-world patterns. They also mirror what you’ll see in sources and test items—patterns, cause-effect reasoning, and the ability to hold competing explanations in balance.

A tiny, useful reminder about the question you might see

Here’s the thing about that common migration question: it’s designed to distinguish understanding of the “emigrating due to difficulties” side of the story. In this framing, emigrating means leaving one’s home country or region. The phrase “due to difficulties” points to negative conditions at home that push people away. People might be described as emigrants when they depart, and as immigrants when they arrive somewhere new. In short, push factors relate to leaving because life is hard back home, while pull factors relate to arriving somewhere that looks more hopeful.

If you’re ever unsure, return to the core idea: push factors are about the struggles that force movement; pull factors are about the attractions that lure movement. Keeping that distinction straight helps you read any migration narrative with clarity.

Wrapping it up: migration as a lens, not just a list

Migration patterns are more than a catalog of reasons. They’re a window into how societies adapt to pressure—economic shifts, political upheaval, environmental change, and the human drive to seek safety and opportunity. In the study of history and civics, push factors remind us to ask hard questions about who bears the costs of a crisis and who benefits from new arrangements. They invite us to connect the dots between personal stories and larger structures: governments, markets, and ecosystems all playing a part.

If you walk away with one takeaway, let it be this: push factors explain the “why people leave” part of migration. The rest—where they go, what they find, and how communities respond—is where the real learning happens. And that learning happens best when you mix careful reading with curious thinking, a dash of real-world examples, and a willingness to see how history shows up in today’s news and tomorrow’s maps.

So next time you encounter a migration narrative, try this little test in your head: What at home pushed someone to leave? What about the destination pulled them toward it? As you connect those threads, you’ll find that the story isn’t just about movement—it’s about people, places, and the ongoing shape of our world.