Since the end of World War II, nations throughout the world have experienced increasing rates of internal migration, as people from less productive areas have relocated to areas with more cultivatable land in order to raise their standards of living. Some of this relocation has been spontaneous, but in many nations, "frontier migration" has been encouraged by national governmental policies. Research on resettlement from one rural area to another has focused on the costs and benefits of these policies, but little attention has been given to the impacts of migration on the ultimate disposition of the migrants themselves. Have migrants succeeded in acquiring land? How have they adapted to the new social, economic, and environmental settings in which they reside? This project will address these questions by developing a theoretical framework for assessing the impacts of frontier migration on migrants and by refining that theory through field research in Nepal on migration from the central hill regions to the Terai plains in the south. The project will combine qualitative and quantitative research methodologies in order to develop better understandings of the processes and outcomes of resettlement on migrants. Information will be gathered through traditional means of participant observation, oral history, and informal discussion with migrants and state officials and through collection of standardized data in interviews with more than 350 migrants. Those data will provide the basis for analysis by simultaneous solution of a set of equations assessing the relationship between different social, economic, demographic, and geographic variables. Refinements of the theoretical framework based on Nepalese field work will permit its use in other developing nations where frontier migration is occurring. The benefits of this research project will be threefold. At the theoretical level, it will develop a new framework for assessing how rural-to-rural migration affects the migrants themselves. At the empirical level, it will provide useful information on the way in which frontier migration has altered the ways of life of Nepalese who have resettled in the Terai region, and data collected in this project will be available to other scholars examining a variety of issues in this and similar locales. The research will also be beneficial to policy- makers, as it will provide a more comprehensive means of assessing the efficacy of various regional development policies and of determining the ways in which those policies affect the residential locations, economic activities, and agricultural practices of migrants.
