A Selective Migration Review: from public policy to public health

The contribution of Steinbeck in the late-1930’s concerning motives and decisionmaking for environmental migrations did much to influence research in social science. The Tiebout’s hypothesis and theoretical model of migration, published in 1956, permitted evaluation of urban public policy implications. The impact of these two pioneers in migration theory set the stage for new models and new methods in migration research having advantage of much more data from many more environmental, economic and social sectors applied to many more accumulating, often tragic, examples. This paper looks at the state of the science as these two influential authors left it and how the public health part of the 1930’s Dust Bowl migration to California contributes to our understanding of this complex human, decision-making system. Finally, Garfield's scientometric propagation of scientific thinking was utilized for migration theories.