Michael J. White, Tyler W. Myroniuk, Carren Ginsburg, and Chantel Pheiffer examine the question of whether migrants in the South African context (2018–2020, rural-to-urban migration) have more “grit”— perseverance in the face of adversity—than those who do not move. Policies narrowly tailored to more limited demographic and skill indicators may underestimate the contributions of highly motivated individuals who succeed despite modest origins.
According to recent UN estimates, some 304 million individuals (about 3.7 percent of the world’s population) are international migrants, defined as people who live outside of their country of birth (United Nations, 2025). While this is a significant number, the most common form of migration globally in fact takes place within countries (Niva et al. 2023) and is referred to as internal migration.
Discourses on migration, whether internal or international, are often framed similarly: “migrants seek a better life for themselves and their children”; “migrants lift themselves by their bootstraps”, etc. The need to understand what factors drive voluntary migration may be especially acute in transitioning economies (Bell et al 2015). In these societies, migration is likely to grow in importance as fertility and mortality rates stabilize at lower levels and economic and social transformation generate rural-to-urban relocation.
True grit
In a recent paper (White et al. 2024), we look at evidence on the question of whether migrants have more “grit”, i.e. motivation, wherewithal, and gumption than those who stay behind. This touches on an age-old demographic question of whether migrants are a select group of individuals, that is, whether those who migrate are different from those who do not in domains such as health, finances, and education.
In the last several years, demographic research on migration has expanded to include additional measures to shed light on migration motivation. Some of this work has suggested that aspects of personality may matter in taking the decision to migrate (Bernard 2022). Grit—irrespective of other seemingly success-linked characteristics such as education and occupational skills—may foreshadow who migrates and how well migrants do at destination. We argue that grit and its associated measures capture non-cognitive characteristics that affect motivation, risk assessment, and perseverance. With such measures in hand, multidisciplinary research can provide greater insight into migrant selectivity and subsequent socioeconomic outcomes.
Why do we care? Policy
This all matters because policies at the local, regional (provincial), and nation-state level often seek to attract or discourage migrants, even internal migrants. While much discourse focusses on international migrants (Lancet 2025), internal migration processes also face varying policy incentives and disincentives, ranging from distaste for rural influx in urban areas to programs subsidizing certain locations to make them more attractive to new arrivals. More tolerance toward migrants, even if not arriving from privileged geographic origins or social backgrounds, may make their arrival not such a bad gamble after all.
Empirical evidence
We seek evidence on the influence of grit—here a measure of perseverance in the face of adversity—on internal migration behavior in South Africa. Using two waves of data from a longitudinal survey of a rural-origin population in South Africa (the Migrant Health Follow-Up Study, MHFUS), we test whether a composite psychosocial index of grit (Duckworth, et al 2007) predicts internal migration, net of conventional measures such as age, sex, and education. Simple bivariate correlations point to a strong association between migration and grit for both males and females. The question remains whether this relationship holds when adjusting for other conventional predictor variables.
We examine whether young adults are more likely to move out of their rural-origin community (hence “migration”), a district-sized area of about 100,000 persons within a former Bantustan (homeland) occupied by xi-Tsonga-speaking Black South Africans. Most who migrate head for the heavily urbanized Gauteng Province (containing the major cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria) or for intermediate small to medium towns. Our statistical models consider two distinct dependent variables:
1) whether the individual is a “migrant” and, separately,
2) the number of reported places already lived.
Both dependent variables are made a function of fixed variables and other personal characteristics (including the “grit index”) measured at an earlier point. We employ sequential regression models, adding other covariates to see how much the apparent influence of grit is altered by their addition.
Figure 1 summarizes how well grit predicts migration for males and females separately across the two migration outcomes, using four progressively more comprehensive models. When grit is the only predictor in the equation, it is highly significant for both men and women, and for both migration indicators. It still shows through—albeit to a lesser extent—when age and education (model 2), then also health and origin community (model 3) are added. Most interestingly, the progressive inclusion of these variables serves to reduce the grit effect more for males than females, even pressing the former to non-significance, when prior migration experience (already a migrant two years prior, model 4) is added.
What differs here is the interplay of the mix of characteristics and individual histories. Age, education (especially completing secondary school in this rural-origin population), and prior migration predict migration for both males and females, as is generally the case in migration studies. Yet, the influence of grit shows through more powerfully for women, albeit reduced appreciably in magnitude, in the presence of these other factors.
Conclusion
Where does this leave us? While conventional demographic models of internal migration continue to capture key elements of (voluntary) movement, there is room to expand our portfolio of characteristics understood to influence migration. Measurement will be a challenge, given the difficulty of assessing these typically unobserved variables and their potential fluctuation over the lifetime. Nevertheless, the importance of migration in redistributing labor and enabling socioeconomic advancement for individuals and their families argues for pushing harder in depth and breadth to understand personal and societal factors that spur or deter geographic movement. Policies narrowly tailored to manifest demographic and skill indicators may underestimate the contributions of other highly motivated individuals.
The gender differential we find deserves particular consideration. While scholarship has often emphasized male migration, even arguing its normative nature in some regions, the increasing attention to female participation in labor markets and migration warrants further examination. Perhaps female migrants are more selective along characteristics such as grit, as they face greater structural barriers and constraints (e.g. employment practices and family expectations). Expanding the view of the migratory process may help explain why some move while others stay behind.
Acknowledgments
Funding for the underlying research was provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIH 1R01HD083374; NIH P2CHD041020). The MRC/Wits Rural Public Health and Health Transitions Research Unit (Agincourt) acknowledges funding from The Wellcome Trust, UK (grants 058893/Z/99/A, 069683/Z/02/Z, 085477/Z/08/Z, 085477/B/08/Z); the Medical Research Council, South Africa; and the South African Population Research Infrastructure Network hosted by the South African Medical Research Council.
References
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White, M. J., Myroniuk, T. W., Ginsburg, C., & Pheiffer, C. (2024). Do Migrants Exhibit More Grit? A Research Note. Demography, 61(5), 1309–1323. https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-11577556