Patterns of Migration Waves and Streams: Immigration to Israel, 1948–2016

The expression “waves of migration” is frequently used in migration research, but the wave phenomena of migration remain insufficiently appreciated. This paper examines the wave features of migration systems by detecting types of migration waves and describing the distribution of the types of migration waves. Migration waves in the immigration to Israel from 1948 were classified by types according to their length, skewness, and steepness. Migration streams were also put in sets according to the types of waves within them. Types of waves and streams in migration systems can provide hints about the character of the sets of migration mechanisms and determinants acting in the migration systems. Because the detection of the structure of the set of migration waves is simpler than discovering migration determinants, this approach can alleviate the study of migration by throwing knowledge from already studied systems to unexplored ones by using the information on the shapes of their waves. Keywords: migration systems, migration waves, migration streams