Changing populations

Cambridge IGCSE Geography 0460 Current syllabus: 2027, 2028 and 2029 Official syllabus points: 6.1.1 to 6.3.5 Assessed on: Paper 2, Human Geography

Exam Essentials

1. What this topic asks of you

Topic 6 is the first of the five human topics on Paper 2. It has three parts and the exam works through them in order.

Two things run through the whole topic and decide your grade.

Place-specific detail. Across the 0460 archive, 177 extended answers carry the instruction "Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example", and 52 of them are population questions. That is a rule, not a preference. A correct, well argued, placeless answer is capped at 5 out of 7 before the examiner has finished reading it. The top mark is then reserved for "comprehensive and accurate statements ... including some place specific reference", which the mark schemes define as named parts or settlements of the chosen country, population data, or dates and specific features of a policy.

Two separate detailed examples. Point 6.2.3 needs a named country with reasons for its growth or decline plus the impacts of a population policy. Point 6.3.5 needs a named international migration with both countries named. These are different requirements. Learn them as two separate blocks, in sections 13 and 18 below.

A warning about past papers

The 2027 syllabus reorganised this topic heavily. Three things that fill the older papers have been removed from the content:

• population density and distribution, which was old point 1.4 and generated 125 questions in the archive
• over-population and under-population, which was old point 1.1
• settlement patterns, site, function and service hierarchy, which was old point 1.5 and has gone entirely

Old questions such as "For a named country you have studied, describe the causes and consequences of under-population" cannot now be set on Topic 6. If you are practising with pre-2027 papers, use those questions for writing technique only. Internal migration has moved: rural to urban migration is now examined in Topic 7 as a cause of urban growth, and Topic 6 is explicitly about international migration.

2. Patterns and trends in global population growth

Syllabus point 6.1.1 asks for patterns (where growth is happening) and trends (how it is changing through time). Answer both.

The trend through time

World population was roughly 1 billion around 1800. It took over a century to reach 2 billion, around 1927. It then reached 4 billion in 1974 and 8 billion on 15 November 2022, the date the United Nations marked as the Day of Eight Billion. Each doubling took less time than the one before, which is what produces the famous J-shaped or exponential curve.

The curve is now bending. The rate of growth peaked at about 2.1 per cent a year in the late 1960s and has fallen below 1 per cent a year since 2020. The absolute number of people added each year peaked in the late 1980s at around 93 million and is falling. The United Nations World Population Prospects 2024 revision projects the world population to peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s and then decline.

Exam trap: falling growth rate does not mean falling population. A smaller percentage of a much larger base still adds many millions. Say "the population is still growing, but more slowly" rather than "the population is falling".

1. death rates fall first as health care and clean water spread
2. birth rates stay high for a generation
3. the gap between them widens
4. natural increase accelerates
5. the J-curve steepens.

1. education and employment for women spread
2. later marriage and smaller desired family size
3. fertility rate falls towards replacement
4. the gap between birth and death rates narrows
5. the curve flattens.

The pattern across the world

Growth is now extremely uneven, and this is the point examiners want.

Replacement level fertility is about 2.1 births per woman. Below that, a population eventually shrinks unless immigration makes up the shortfall. The 2.1 rather than 2.0 allows for children who do not survive to have children of their own.

Global total fertility is now around 2.2 births per woman and is still falling, which is why the projections show a peak this century rather than endless growth.

3. The vocabulary you must define exactly

Syllabus point 6.1.2 lists five terms by name, which means the examiner can ask you to define any one of them for one mark. The mark schemes accept very little paraphrase, so learn the wording.

The population change formula. A one mark multiple choice item in March 2020 asked for it directly. The answer the mark scheme gives is:

population change = (birth rate − death rate) ± net migration

In words, and this is the phrasing a 3 mark calculation question rewarded in June 2022: natural increase is births minus deaths; net international migration is immigration minus emigration; total population growth is natural increase plus net international migration.

Worked calculation

Papers ask you to calculate a birth rate or a rate of natural increase and to show working. The method is always the same.

A country of 40 million people records 880 000 births and 360 000 deaths in a year.

• Birth rate = 880 000 ÷ 40 000 000 × 1000 = 22 per 1000
• Death rate = 360 000 ÷ 40 000 000 × 1000 = 9 per 1000
• Natural increase = 22 − 9 = 13 per 1000, which is 1.3 per cent a year

Exam trap: natural increase is often wanted as a percentage. Divide the per 1000 figure by 10. A rate of 13 per 1000 is 1.3 per cent, not 13 per cent.

4. Why birth rates and fertility rates are high

This is examined constantly, both as a 4 mark list and as a 7 mark extended answer. The November 2022 paper asked "For a named country you have studied, explain why birth rates are high." Group your reasons so that you are not just listing.

Economic reasons

• Children work on family farms or in family businesses from a young age, so they are an economic asset rather than a cost.
• There is no state pension, so children are the only security in old age.
• Where infant mortality is high, families have more children in the expectation that some will not survive.

Social and educational reasons

• Limited access to contraception, or contraception that families cannot afford.
• Limited education about family planning and about the effects of large families.
• Girls leave school early, marry young and begin having children in their teens.
• Few women in paid careers, so childbearing is not delayed by employment.

Cultural and religious reasons

• Tradition attaches status to a large family.
• Some religious teaching opposes contraception or abortion.
• A preference for a son means families continue having children until a boy is born.
• Polygamy in some societies raises the number of births per household.

1. girls stay in school to age 18
2. marriage and first birth are delayed by five years
3. fewer fertile years are used
4. completed family size falls
5. the birth rate falls a generation later.

Why birth rates are hard to bring down. A June 2022 question about The Gambia asked exactly this: contraception use is rising and yet natural growth is not falling much. The reasons are that a youthful structure means a very large number of women are entering childbearing age at once, so even a lower rate per woman still produces many births; that supply of contraception is useless without education and consent within the household; and that traditional attitudes change more slowly than laws do. This lag is called population momentum, and it is a strong Level 3 point.

5. Why death rates fall

Death rates fall earlier and faster than birth rates, and that gap is the engine of population growth.

• Clean piped water and sanitation reduce cholera, typhoid and diarrhoeal disease, which kill infants first.
• Vaccination programmes remove the childhood epidemics.
• More doctors, nurses, clinics and hospitals, and antibiotics.
• Better and more reliable food supply, so fewer people are weakened by malnutrition.
• Better housing, and improved maternal care during pregnancy and childbirth.
• Falling infant mortality, which is usually the single largest component of a falling death rate.

Exam trap: in a country with a very old population, the crude death rate can be higher than in a poorer country with a young population, because a larger share of the people are in the ages where death is likely. A November 2022 Paper 2 item asked what was unusual about a death rate for exactly this reason. Do not read a high death rate as poor health care without checking the age structure.

6. Pro-natalist and anti-natalist policies

Syllabus point 6.1.3 asks for an evaluation of the impacts of these policies on birth rates. Evaluation means judging how far each worked, at what cost, and what happened afterwards.

The mark schemes for 7 mark policy questions credit four separate strands within a single policy and award a Level 2 mark for each: incentives, penalties, exceptions and enforcement. If you are writing about a policy, make sure you cover all four rather than repeating one.

A critical mark scheme instruction. The examiners distinguish sharply between describing the policy and describing its impacts, and they mark them under different questions.

• On "describe a policy used to influence population growth", the mark scheme says development should refer to the policy itself, "NOT the impacts".
• On "describe the impacts of a policy", the mark scheme says "Description of policy only = 0" and "Do not credit method of enforcement such as punishments and rewards".

Read the command carefully. Writing the wrong one of the two can score zero on a 7 mark question even though every sentence is true.

Evaluating anti-natalist policy

What works. Birth rates fall fastest where a policy combines free contraception with education for girls and paid work for women, because those change what families want rather than only what they are allowed. Kerala in India and Thailand both achieved large falls in fertility with voluntary programmes.

What goes wrong. Coercive policy produces sex-selective abortion and abandonment where sons are preferred, an unbalanced sex ratio, undocumented children with no access to school or work, and a fertility rate that stays low long after the policy is lifted, leaving a shrinking workforce and a rapidly ageing population.

Evaluating pro-natalist policy

What works, partly. Cash and leave shift the timing of births more than the total number. Countries with generous childcare and strong support for mothers returning to work tend to keep fertility nearer replacement than countries with cash payments alone.

What goes wrong. Payments are expensive and are paid to families who would have had a child anyway. The reasons people have fewer children include housing cost, job insecurity, long working hours and the cost of raising a child to adulthood, and a one-off payment does not touch any of these. No high-income country has returned to replacement fertility through payments alone.

7. The demographic transition model

Syllabus point 6.1.4 is new for 2027. The demographic transition model was not named in the 2025 to 2026 syllabus, so past-paper coverage of it is thin. It appeared as a figure on one November 2020 paper and nowhere else in the archive, and the strengths and limitations have never been examined. Learn it properly rather than assuming past papers will show you the standard of answer wanted.

The DTM shows how birth rate, death rate and total population change as a country develops. Learn it as five stages.

Note two things carefully, because both have been asked. Population grows most rapidly at the end of Stage 2 and into Stage 3, where the gap between the two lines is widest, not in Stage 4. And the death rate falls before the birth rate, which is the whole reason the population explodes.

1. health care and clean water arrive
2. the death rate falls sharply
3. birth rates remain at traditional levels for a generation
4. a wide gap opens between the lines
5. rapid natural increase produces Stage 2.

A November 2020 mark scheme required candidates to link birth rate and death rate rather than describing each on its own, and refused credit for separate statements about one line. Always compare the two lines.

Strengths of the model

• It is simple and universal in shape, so it allows countries at different stages to be compared directly.
• It correctly identifies the sequence, that death rates fall before birth rates, which is what causes rapid growth.
• It links demographic change to economic development, which helps predict what will happen as a country industrialises.
• It has been extended with a fifth stage, which shows the model can be revised as evidence changes.

Limitations of the model

• It was built from the experience of nineteenth century industrialising Europe and may not fit countries developing under very different conditions.
• It ignores migration entirely. Many countries in Stage 4 or 5 are still growing because of immigration, and some Stage 2 countries lose people through emigration.
• It gives no timescale. Britain took around 200 years to pass through the transition; some Asian countries have done it in 40.
• It assumes development drives the change, but government policy and imported medicine can cut death rates without any industrialisation.
• It cannot predict shocks. War, famine and epidemics, including HIV and AIDS in southern Africa, have raised death rates and pushed countries backwards.
• Stage 5 was not in the original model at all, and there is no agreement about what follows it.

8. Population structure and how to read a pyramid

Syllabus point 6.2.1 names the two factors that shape a structure: natural increase and net migration. Everything about the shape follows from those two.

▶

A population pyramid, also called an age or sex pyramid, is a horizontal bar chart with age groups stacked in five year bands, males on the left and females on the right, and the bar length showing the number or percentage in each band. Population pyramids are named in the 2027 skills list, so they can appear on any question.

Read a pyramid in four steps.

1. The base. Wide means a high birth rate. Narrowing at the base means the birth rate has recently fallen.
2. The sides. Steeply tapering sides mean a high death rate at every age. Straight vertical sides mean most people survive into old age.
3. The apex. A broad top means a high life expectancy and a large old population. A very narrow point means few people reach old age.
4. Any bulge or notch. These are the interesting bits. A bulge in one sex only in the working ages is the signature of migration. A notch is a birth deficit from a war, famine or an economic crisis, and it moves up the pyramid over time.

Dependency. The population is normally divided into young dependents aged 0 to 14, the economically active aged 15 to 64, and old dependents aged 65 and over. The dependency ratio is the two dependent groups divided by the economically active group. Note that the 2027 syllabus does not use the phrase "dependent population" and instead speaks of youthful and ageing population structures, so use the syllabus wording in your answers even though the older mark schemes use the other.

A three mark mark scheme for describing an LEDC pyramid credited exactly these four points: pyramid or triangle or concave shape; wide base with a large percentage of young dependents; narrow apex with few old dependents; and bars decreasing in size through the economically active section. Write in that register.

9. Youthful population structures

Causes

• A high birth rate and a high fertility rate, for all the reasons in section 4.
• A falling death rate and falling infant mortality, so more of those children survive.
• Population momentum, because a large cohort of children becomes a large cohort of parents.
• In-migration of young adults of childbearing age, in some cities and regions.

Impacts, and the mark schemes want both sides

Negative

• Pressure on schools. Classrooms, teachers and materials cannot expand as fast as the cohort, so class sizes rise and quality falls.
• Pressure on maternal and child health services, and on vaccination programmes.
• High spending on services by a small taxpaying workforce, so little money is left for infrastructure or investment.
• High youth unemployment when the cohort reaches working age, and if there are no jobs the result is emigration, informal work or unrest.
• Pressure on housing, water, food and land, particularly in cities.
• Girls leaving school early to care for younger siblings, which perpetuates the high birth rate.

Positive

• A large future workforce and, in time, a large domestic market. If jobs and education are provided, a country can gain a demographic dividend, a period when the working age share is unusually large and the dependency burden is low. This is the point that lifts an evaluation into the top level.

1. a large cohort reaches 18 with too few jobs
2. underemployment and low incomes
3. emigration of the most educated
4. the origin country loses its investment in their schooling
5. the demographic dividend is not realised.

Evaluating the impacts. Judge by scale, timing and whether the impact is avoidable. Pressure on schools is immediate, national and very hard to avoid, so it is the most serious. Youth unemployment is delayed by fifteen years, which gives a government time to act, so it depends on policy rather than on demography. The demographic dividend is real but conditional: it only appears if the education and jobs exist to absorb the cohort.

10. Ageing population structures

Causes

• A long period of low birth rates, so each generation is smaller than the last. This is the main cause, and candidates usually miss it.
• Rising life expectancy from better health care, diet, housing and safer work.
• Emigration of young adults, in some regions.
• The passage through the age structure of a large earlier cohort, such as a post-war baby boom.

Impacts

Negative, and these are the ones the mark schemes list

• More care homes, home care and geriatric services are needed.
• A drain on health services, since older people use hospitals far more per person, and hospitals become understaffed.
• More money is needed for state pensions, paid from the taxes of a shrinking workforce.
• Labour force shortages, including a shortage of the carers the elderly themselves need.
• A burden on the economically active, who face rising taxes or a rising retirement age.
• A rise in the amount of chronic disease and long-term disability.
• Underuse and closure of facilities for the young, particularly rural schools.
• Difficulty recruiting into the armed forces and other physically demanding work.
• Possible loss of innovation and enterprise, and reduced economic growth.

Positive

• Older people are a large market for particular goods and services, sometimes called the grey pound, which sustains sectors such as travel, leisure and health.
• Many provide unpaid childcare and voluntary work, which allows their adult children to work.
• Experienced workers stay longer in employment, holding skills in the economy.
• Older people vote in high numbers and are politically active.

Note carefully that one 2020 mark scheme on the problems caused by a high dependent population states "Positive effects = 0". If a question asks only for problems, giving benefits earns nothing and wastes time. If the question asks for impacts, give both.

1. fertility stays below replacement for thirty years
2. each working generation is smaller than the one retiring
3. the tax base shrinks while pension and health costs rise
4. the government must raise the retirement age, raise taxes or accept immigration.

Government responses to ageing

• Raise the state pension age, which is the cheapest response and the most unpopular.
• Encourage immigration of workers of working age, which fills jobs quickly but does not change the long-term structure and can be politically contested.
• Pro-natalist policy, which works only over decades because a baby born today does not pay tax for twenty years.
• Encourage private pension saving, so the state carries less of the cost.
• Automate work where labour is short, particularly in manufacturing and in care.

11. Detailed specific example for 6.2.3: China

Point 6.2.3 requires one named country with two things: the reasons for its population growth or decline, and the impacts of a population policy. China gives you both in one country, and the archive mark schemes use it as their own worked example, which tells you the examiners expect it to be handled well.

Reasons for growth and then decline

China's population grew from around 540 million in 1949 to over 900 million by the mid-1970s. Death rates fell rapidly as rural health care, vaccination and clean water spread, while birth rates stayed at traditional levels. That is a textbook Stage 2 transition and it alarmed the government, which feared that food supply and employment could not keep pace.

Since 2015 the direction has reversed. China's population fell in 2022 for the first time since 1961, and it has continued to fall each year since. The reasons for the decline are the cost of housing and education in the cities, long working hours, later marriage, high female participation in higher education and employment, and a fertility rate that has stayed near 1.0 to 1.1 births per woman, far below replacement, even after every restriction was lifted.

The policy

The one-child policy ran from 1979 to the end of 2015. Its four strands were:

• Incentives. Families holding a single-child certificate received priority in housing, free or subsidised education and health care, and a wage supplement.
• Penalties. Fines described as a social maintenance fee, loss of employment for state employees, and withdrawal of benefits for a second child.
• Exceptions. Rural families whose first child was a girl, ethnic minorities, families whose first child had a disability, and parents of twins were not penalised.
• Enforcement. Local birth quotas, workplace and neighbourhood committees, the "granny police" who monitored whether couples were complying, and in the harshest periods forced sterilisation and forced abortion.

The policy was replaced by a two-child policy in January 2016 and a three-child policy in May 2021, and remaining birth restrictions and fines were removed after that.

Impacts of the policy

The government's case

• The fertility rate and the birth rate both fell after 1980, and the rate of natural increase declined.
• The Chinese government has estimated that around 400 million births were prevented, although analysts dispute the figure and point out that fertility was already falling sharply before 1979.
• Families that complied received real financial and employment benefits.

The costs

• A skewed sex ratio. Because sons were generally preferred, the sex ratio moved sharply towards males. The Cambridge mark scheme itself states that in 2016 there were 33.59 million more men than women in China. The consequence is millions of men unable to marry, and trafficking of women into rural areas.
• Sex-selective abortion, and a rise in female infants abandoned, killed or placed in orphanages.
• Undocumented children. Additional children born in violation of the policy were often unregistered, which left them unable to access education, health care or formal employment later in life.
• Coercion. Millions of parents experienced forced sterilisation or forced abortion.
• A rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce. This is the impact that matters most now. People aged 60 and over passed 20 per cent of the population in the early 2020s, and the working age population has been falling since about 2012.
• The policy could not be reversed. Birth and fertility rates stayed low after the restrictions were lifted, because the cost of raising a child and the expectation of a one-child family had become normal. This is the single strongest evaluation point available on this topic: an anti-natalist policy changed the culture, and culture did not change back when the law did.

1. the one-child policy plus a preference for sons
2. sex-selective abortion and abandonment of daughters
3. a shortage of women of childbearing age a generation later
4. fewer births even after the policy ends
5. decline accelerates rather than reverses.

An alternative example: Japan, pro-natalist

If you prefer a pro-natalist country, Japan is the strongest choice.

• Japan's population peaked at about 128 million in 2008 and has fallen every year since, to roughly 124 million by the mid-2020s.
• Around 29 per cent of the population is aged 65 or over, the highest share of any large country.
• The total fertility rate has been around 1.2 births per woman in recent years and annual births fell below 700 000 for the first time in 2024.
• Policy has included the Angel Plan of 1994 and its successors, expanded childcare places, paid parental leave for both parents, cash child allowances, and the creation of a Children and Families Agency in April 2023 to coordinate the effort.
• The evaluation. None of it has raised the fertility rate. The barriers are long working hours, the cost of education, small urban housing, and the expectation that a woman leaving work for a child will not regain her career. Japan has also been slow to use immigration, which is the one lever that changes the working age population quickly, though visa rules for foreign workers have been loosened since the late 2010s. Depopulation is now concentrated in rural prefectures, where schools close and villages are abandoned while Tokyo continues to grow.

12. Types of migrant

Syllabus point 6.3.1 names exactly three types, so learn exactly three definitions. All three are drawn from wording the mark schemes accept.

Supporting terms you still need, because the questions use them:

• Immigrant, a person entering a country. Emigrant, a person leaving one. Keep them the right way round.
• International migration, movement between countries. Internal migration, movement within one country. Topic 6 examines the international kind; internal movement belongs to Topic 7.
• Voluntary migration, a free choice, usually economic. Forced or involuntary migration, where the migrant has no realistic choice. Refugees and asylum seekers are forced migrants.
• Net migration, immigrants minus emigrants.

A November 2020 fieldwork paper set a matching exercise on exactly these terms, and a June 2020 paper asked candidates to classify three cases as forced international, voluntary international and voluntary internal. Practise the classification, because it is a cheap mark that candidates lose.

Exam trap: a person who has claimed asylum and is waiting is an asylum seeker, not yet a refugee. And an economic migrant is not a refugee however poor their circumstances, because economic hardship is not persecution.

13. Causes of migration: push and pull

Point 6.3.2 names push and pull factors explicitly, and several 7 mark questions instruct candidates to "refer to push and pull factors". If the question says that, you must cover both or you cannot reach Level 3, since the mark scheme reserves the top level for answers describing "pulls and pushes".

Two structural factors that mark schemes credit and candidates forget: countries that share a border have far higher migration between them, and colonial or language links channel migration along particular routes.

Exam trap: a push and a pull are not the same statement written twice. "There are no jobs in Mexico" and "there are jobs in the United States" is one idea, not two. Make them different: no jobs at home, and a specific employer or sector abroad.

14. Impacts of migration

Point 6.3.3 requires impacts on three groups: the migrant, the country of origin and the destination country. Questions usually specify which, and one 2023 mark scheme adds the warning "Answers should focus on the impact to the country and not the migrants". Read the question and answer only what it asks.

On the destination country

Positive

• A larger workforce, filling shortages in specific sectors such as construction, agriculture, hospitality and social care.
• Skilled workers, including doctors and nurses, whose training was paid for elsewhere.
• Migrants are usually of working age, so they pay taxes and reduce the dependency ratio.
• Cultural mix, and new services such as restaurants and food stores.
• Migrants raise the birth rate, which slows the ageing of the population.

Negative

• Pressure on housing, schools, health services and transport, particularly in the cities where migrants concentrate.
• Downward pressure on wages in low-skilled work, and resentment from existing workers.
• Costs of language teaching and integration.
• Racial tension or discrimination where integration is poor.
• Money leaving the country as remittances rather than being spent locally.

On the origin country

Positive

• Remittances, money sent home by migrants, which for some countries is a larger inflow than foreign aid or investment.
• Reduced pressure on employment, on food and water supply, and on housing and services.
• Some migrants return with skills, savings and business contacts.

Negative

• Loss of workers, and specifically loss of the young, educated and enterprising. This is the brain drain, and losing trained doctors is the standard illustration.
• Fewer people paying taxes.
• A distorted population structure left behind, with a greater proportion of elderly and children and a gender imbalance, and nobody to care for the elderly.
• Family and social breakdown when one parent is absent for years.
• Less food produced when farm labour leaves.
• Dependence on remittances, which stop if the destination country's economy weakens.

On the migrant

• Higher wages and better living conditions, education for their children, and safety if they were fleeing danger.
• Against that: the journey itself may be dangerous or fatal, the cost may involve debt to traffickers, documents and qualifications may not be recognised, they may work below their skill level for low pay, they face language barriers, discrimination and the loss of family and culture, and their legal status may be insecure.

1. young adults emigrate for work
2. remittances flow home and raise household incomes
3. but the origin region loses its farm labour and its teachers
4. services decline and more people leave
5. the outflow becomes self-sustaining.

15. Managing international migration

Point 6.3.4 asks for an evaluation of strategies and techniques used to manage international migration. This is entirely new for 2027. There is no question in the 0460 archive that asks candidates to evaluate migration management, and no mark scheme wording exists to guide the standard expected. Treat this as unexamined ground and prepare it thoroughly.

Remember the syllabus definition: strategies are action plans and agreements, techniques are the methods used.

How to reach a judgement. Control at the border addresses the symptom and works immediately. Integration addresses the consequence and works over years. Only development and conflict resolution address the cause, and only over decades. A sustainable answer, in the syllabus sense, is one that would still be working in fifty years and does not simply move the problem to another country, which points towards managed legal routes plus integration rather than towards walls.

16. Detailed specific example for 6.3.5: Mexico to the United States

Point 6.3.5 requires the country of origin and the destination country both named, push and pull factors, impacts on the migrants and on both countries, and how the migration is managed including sustainably. Mexico to the United States is the best documented economic migration in the world.

The migration

The land border is 3145 km long. The Mexican-born population of the United States rose through the 1990s and 2000s and peaked at about 12.8 million in 2007, then fell back to around 10.9 million by 2022 as Mexican fertility fell, the Mexican economy improved and enforcement tightened. Since about 2010, net migration from Mexico specifically has been close to zero or negative, while migration through Mexico from Central America, Venezuela and Haiti has grown.

Migrants have come disproportionately from central and southern states including Michoacán, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and Oaxaca, and have concentrated in California, Texas, Arizona and Illinois.

Push factors in Mexico

• Rural unemployment and underemployment, and small subsistence farms that cannot support a family.
• Low wages. Mexican manufacturing wages have historically been a small fraction of the American equivalent for the same work.
• Poorer schools, health care and services, particularly in rural southern states.
• Drug cartel violence and extortion in several states, which pushed some migration from economic into forced.

Pull factors in the United States

• Demand for labour in agriculture, construction, meat processing, hotels and restaurants, and domestic and care work.
• Much higher wages for the same work, enough to support a family at home as well as the migrant.
• Established Mexican communities in the border states, which provide housing, jobs and language support on arrival. This is chain migration and it is why migration follows fixed routes.
• Schooling and health care for children, and for some the possibility of legal status.
• A shared 3145 km border, which makes the journey physically possible.

Impacts

On the migrants. Higher earnings and better prospects for their children. Against that, a dangerous desert crossing with hundreds of deaths a year from heat and dehydration, debt to smugglers, families separated for years, wages below the legal minimum where status is irregular, no recourse against exploitative employers, and constant risk of detention and deportation.

On Mexico, the origin country. Remittances are the largest single benefit: Mexico received about 63.3 billion United States dollars in remittances in 2023, according to the Banco de México, which is among the largest remittance flows in the world and equivalent to a few per cent of Mexican GDP. Remittances pay for housing, schooling and small businesses in the sending villages, and they reduce pressure on Mexican jobs and services. The costs are the loss of young working age men in particular, villages with a distorted structure of women, children and the elderly, farmland going out of use, and family breakdown.

On the United States, the destination country. Migrant labour underpins Californian agriculture and much of the construction industry, keeps food prices down, and adds young workers and taxpayers to an ageing population. Mexican culture, food and language are woven into the south-western states. Against that, pressure on schools and health services in border counties, competition for low-paid work, the political conflict over irregular status, and money leaving as remittances.

How the migration is managed

• Physical barriers and enforcement. Around a third of the border carries fencing or wall, supported by cameras, sensors, aerial surveillance and Border Patrol staffing.
• Legal routes. Temporary agricultural and seasonal work visas allow employers to recruit legally for a fixed season.
• Bilateral cooperation. Agreements with Mexico on the processing and return of migrants, and on policing Mexico's own southern border.
• Development at source. Investment programmes in southern Mexico and Central America intended to create employment so that people are not pushed to leave.
• Evaluation. Barriers did not stop the migration, they redirected it into remote desert sections, which raised deaths without changing the total. The flow fell most sharply when Mexican fertility fell and Mexican wages rose, which is evidence that development at source is the effective lever. The sustainable conclusion is that legal seasonal routes plus investment in the sending regions do more than enforcement, because they address a labour demand that exists on one side of the border and a labour surplus on the other.

An alternative example: Syria to Türkiye and Germany, forced migration

If a question specifies forced migration, refugees or asylum seekers, use this instead.

• The Syrian civil war from 2011 displaced more people than any conflict in decades. Around 6.8 million Syrians were living outside Syria as refugees, with a similar number displaced inside the country.
• Push: aerial bombardment, siege, destruction of housing, hospitals and schools, conscription, persecution, and collapse of the economy and of food supply.
• Pull: safety, a shared border with Türkiye, Lebanon and Jordan, existing family networks, and in Germany the prospect of asylum, work and education.
• Distribution: Türkiye hosted by far the largest number, over three million, followed by Lebanon and Jordan. Germany received the largest number in Europe, after around a million asylum applications across 2015 and 2016, of which Syrians were the largest single group. Jordan's Za'atari camp grew into a settlement of tens of thousands with its own market street.
• Impacts on host countries: heavy pressure on housing, schools and health care in Turkish border provinces and in Lebanon; strain on water supply in Jordan; but also a new workforce, and in Germany a young population entering an ageing labour market, with a significant share in employment within five years.
• Management: the 1951 Refugee Convention framework; the EU and Türkiye statement of March 2016, under which the European Union provided funding for refugees in Türkiye in return for controls on onward movement; camp provision and cash assistance through the United Nations refugee agency; work permits and language and integration programmes in Germany; and resettlement quotas.
• Evaluation: the agreements reduced onward movement into Europe but left the great majority of the burden with three neighbouring middle-income countries, which is not a sustainable distribution. Integration into work has been the most durable strategy, because it turns a cost into a contribution. Camps are the least sustainable, because they are designed as temporary and end up housing people for a decade. After the change of government in Syria at the end of 2024, some returns began, but return depends on housing, jobs and security existing at home, and that is a slow rebuild.

17. Answering the 7 mark questions

Every extended answer in this topic is marked on the same ladder.

What counts as a developed statement. The June 2022 mark scheme gives the clearest illustration. "Jobs" is Level 1. "Availability of jobs and can send remittances home" is Level 2. The development is the second clause, which explains the consequence. Never leave a point as a bare noun.

What counts as place-specific reference. Named parts, regions or settlements within the chosen country; population data and other statistics; and dates or specific named features of a policy. "China" is a named example. "Michoacán", "1979 to 2015", "33.59 million more men than women" and "63.3 billion dollars in 2023" are place-specific.

A four-part plan for any 7 mark answer

1. Name the country or countries in the first sentence.
2. Make four to six separate points, each developed with a consequence.
3. Put a real figure, place name or date into at least three of them.
4. If the command word is evaluate, finish with a judgement that says which factor matters most and why.

Match the command word

18. Common exam mistakes

• Giving no named example on a 7 mark question. The mark scheme caps you at 5 by rule.
• Naming a country and then writing nothing specific about it. Level 3 needs figures, dates or places within the country.
• Describing a population policy when the question asked for its impacts. One mark scheme states "Description of policy only = 0".
• Describing the impacts when the question asked for the policy. That mark scheme says development should refer to the policy, not the impacts.
• Giving positive effects when the question asks only for problems. One mark scheme states "Positive effects = 0".
• Writing about the migrants when the question asks about the impacts on the countries.
• Covering only push factors, or only pull factors, when the question says to refer to both.
• Confusing immigrant and emigrant, and confusing refugee with economic migrant.
• Saying the world's population is falling. The growth rate is falling. The population is projected to keep rising until the 2080s.
• Saying growth is fastest in Stage 4 of the demographic transition model. It is fastest at the end of Stage 2 and into Stage 3.
• Describing the birth rate line and the death rate line separately on a DTM question. The mark scheme requires the two to be linked.
• Writing that a high death rate proves poor health care, without checking whether the population is simply old.
• Revising over-population, under-population, population density and settlement patterns for this topic. They were removed from the syllabus for 2027.
• Treating 6.2.3 and 6.3.5 as one example. They are two separate detailed examples with different requirements.

19. Quick revision

• Birth rate and death rate are per 1000 population per year. Fertility rate is children per woman. Replacement level is 2.1.
• Population change = (birth rate − death rate) ± net migration. Natural increase = births − deaths. Net migration = immigrants − emigrants.
• World population reached 8 billion in November 2022 and is projected to peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s.
• The growth rate peaked at about 2.1 per cent in the late 1960s and is now below 1 per cent.
• High birth rates: no contraception, no education about it, children work, no pensions, high infant mortality, early marriage, tradition, religion, few careers for women.
• Falling death rates: clean water, sanitation, vaccination, doctors and hospitals, antibiotics, better food, better housing.
• DTM: Stage 1 high and fluctuating, Stage 2 death rate falls, Stage 3 birth rate falls, Stage 4 both low, Stage 5 natural decrease. Growth is fastest at the end of Stage 2 into Stage 3.
• DTM limits: no migration, no timescale, built from European history, cannot predict war or epidemics, Stage 5 was added later.
• Pyramid: base means birth rate, sides mean death rate, apex means life expectancy, a one-sex bulge in the working ages means migration.
• Youthful structure: pressure on schools and health care, youth unemployment later, but a demographic dividend if jobs exist.
• Ageing structure: pensions, health and care costs, labour shortage, higher taxes, but a large consumer market and unpaid childcare.
• Anti-natalist tools: contraception, education, incentives, penalties, later marriage. Pro-natalist tools: child benefit, parental leave, childcare, tax breaks.
• Anti-natalist policies work. Pro-natalist policies mostly shift the timing of births, not the total.
• Three migrant types: economic migrant, asylum seeker, refugee.
• Push and pull each come in four kinds: economic, social, political, environmental.
• Origin country: gains remittances and less pressure on jobs, loses workers, skills and taxes to the brain drain.
• Destination country: gains workers, skills and taxes, faces pressure on housing and services.
• Migration management: points systems, quotas, border control, free movement, refugee agreements, integration, development at source. Only the last addresses the cause.
• Two detailed examples required. 6.2.3 a named country with growth or decline plus a policy. 6.3.5 a named migration with both countries.

Not the topic you were looking for? Describe what you are stuck on in your own words and we will take you to the notes that answer it.