Definition
Second migration is the subsequent move a migrant household makes within the destination region — out of the first-arrival neighborhood to somewhere better, larger, or quieter. It is distinct from return migration (going back to the origin) and from international or interregional re-migration.
For most settled migrants, the first destination is a beachhead, not a destination. They arrive in a kinship-dense, often crowded enclave because that is where they have someone to receive them. Years or decades later, when income, networks, and information allow, they move again — to a bungalow district, to a suburb, to a better school zone. The second migration is where the destination part of the migration story is actually completed.
Why it matters
How it works
The first destination of nearly any large migration is a dense enclave: Little Italy, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, Bronzeville, Watts. These neighborhoods provide cheap housing, kin and language networks, and culturally familiar institutions. They are also typically crowded, segregated, and undersupplied with public goods. The migrant who succeeds economically — accumulates savings, finds steady work, gets their children into better schools — eventually wants out.
The second migration usually proceeds along the path of least resistance: the next neighborhood over, just slightly better, with one or two of the same kin already established. In Chicago's South Side, the second migration corridor ran from Bronzeville south to Chatham; in Harlem, from central Harlem to Sugar Hill; in Los Angeles, from South Central to View Park and Baldwin Hills. Each of these neighborhoods was, in turn, the first destination for an earlier migrant cohort whose own second migration had emptied it for the new arrivals to fill.
For Black migrants in particular, the second migration was constrained by housing discrimination in ways the second migration of other groups was not. Restrictive covenants, redlining, and informal violence at the boundaries of white neighborhoods meant the second migration could move within Black housing markets but could not easily cross into integrated or white-majority neighborhoods. The result was that the second-migration destinations themselves remained segregated — better, but still constrained — and the gap between Black and white wealth accumulation that came from housing equity grew across generations.