There has been considerable interest in stage migration in the literature on European emigration, particularly in Scandinavia. Some of the emigrants from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland may have made frequent moves within the country before they went abroad although this is extremely difficult to test. Most research has concentrated on a special case of stage migration – how many of the urban emigrants had come originally from the rural areas. Rural-urban stage emigration appears to have been quite common in Scandinavia. For example, less than half of the emigrants from Bergen in the last quarter of the century had been born there. Emigration rates from many of the (larger) Scandinavian towns were higher than from the rural areas and a commonly expressed view is that the towns drew most of the migrants from the surrounding rural areas, some of whom emigrated. This raises the important question of where the decision to emigrate was taken. If the emigrants had decided to leave the country before they left the rural areas they can be considered to be rural emigrants who happened to emigrate via an urban area. But if they had lived in the towns for some years before emigrating they can reasonably be regarded as urban emigrants.

Very little is known about the extent of stage migration in England and Wales. The only published paper - by Ross Duncan - that traces nineteenth-century emigrants through a series of moves, shows thata group of assisted migrants to Australia from Gloucestershire and Cornwall had made many moves before emigration. But it is not known if the emigrants had been more mobile internally than non-emigrants.