Migration and Inequality in the Rural United States: Connecting Urban to Rural and Local to Global

This article draws from several overlapping literatures to frame urban-rural migration in the United States as the cause of emerging dimensions of inequality. To begin, the article reviews the amenity migration field of research, noting that scholars often underestimate or overlook inequality within rural destinations because common research lenses and methodological decisions inadvertently mask it. The article then describes a second thread of research that explicitly implicates migration as a driver of inequality and a third that draws connections to gentrification. Finally, the article reviews more recent research that characterizes inequality in rural destinations using a more global sociological perspective. The author draws attention to work, which recognizes that migration constitutes a material and theoretical connection between inequality experienced locally and societal inequality at the national and global scales.