Why do people keep leaving home, even when the journey is dangerous, the outcome uncertain, and the risks well known? For years, the standard answer has been economic: people migrate because wages are higher elsewhere, because jobs are scarce at home, because hardship pushes them out. That answer isn’t wrong but it isn’t enough. After years of fieldwork across Nepal, from wealthy neighbourhoods emptied of young people to remote villages where families sell their land to send their young abroad, I became convinced that something else is doing at least as much of the work: culture. This post shares the central idea behind my doctoral research, that migration, in many parts of the world, has stopped being a purely economic decision and has become part of how a community imagines a good life.
Sometimes the most stubborn questions aren’t answered by better data, but by a different way of looking. I didn’t need more numbers on wages and remittances. I needed to understand what people felt when they talked about leaving.
Consider three places I visited during my fieldwork. In a prosperous hillside neighbourhood near Kathmandu, the houses were modern and freshly painted, yet an elderly man I met there told me plainly: there are no young people left here. In a busy industrial town of Hetauda, the main street was lined with consultancies selling language classes and the promise of study abroad. And in a remote village in the far west, I saw families had taken on crushing debt, sometimes the equivalent of forty thousand dollars, to send someone abroad through dangerous, unofficial routes. If migration were only about money, the poorest village and the wealthiest neighbourhood would not be emptying out at the same rate. Something was translating economic conditions into an almost irresistible pull to leave, and that something wasn’t showing up in the usual explanations.
That “something” is what I view as a culture of migration: a shared, generational understanding that leaving home is not just an option but an expected part of building a respectable adult life. In places where this culture takes hold, the question people ask isn’t whether to migrate, it’s when and where. It is carried forward through family stories, through the visible success of neighbours who left before, and through a quiet sense that staying behind might mean falling short. Crucially, it isn’t simply calculated. My research introduced two Nepali words, rahar (aspirational desire) and badhyata (felt obligation), to show that people often want to leave and feel they have no choice but to leave, at the very same time. The usual split between “voluntary” and “forced” migration collapses once you actually listen to how people describe their own decisions.
Geography plays its own quiet trick here, too. The countries people dream of moving to are rarely the real, complicated places they eventually experience. They are imagined versions, symbols of opportunity, dignity, and a stable future, built from social media, family stories, and comparison with peers. That gap between the imagined destination and the lived one doesn’t disappear once someone arrives; it reshapes how they see their new life, and it often travels back home in new stories that shape the next person’s decision to go. Migration culture, in other words, isn’t fixed. It’s a living system, constantly rebuilt by the people moving through it.
Wrapping Up with Key Insights
The core insight of this research is not that economics and hardship don’t matter as they clearly do, but that they never act alone. Structural conditions become reasons to migrate only after they pass through a cultural filter made of history, emotion, social expectation, and imagination. That has a real, practical consequence: policies aimed only at creating local jobs will always fall short if they ignore the deeper pull of dignity, belonging, and the images of a better life that make staying home feel like settling for less. If we want to understand or thoughtfully respond to why people migrate, we have to take their hopes and their imaginations as seriously as economic motivation. The next time you hear that someone “just wants a better life abroad,” it’s worth asking what that phrase is actually carrying: not just an economic calculation, but a whole culture’s idea of what a good life looks like.