The last few decades have seen the intensity of internal migration decline in Australia and other advanced economies including the United States. Recent evidence suggests that changes in the composition of the population alone do not account for this persistent downward trend. This has led migration scholars to suspect that more profound behavioural changes driven by social, economic, and technological transformations are at play and that shifts in migration behaviour are likely to be reflected in changes in reasons for migration. We use data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey to shed new light on the factors driving the decline in internal migration in Australia between 2002 and 2018. This is done by examining annual trends in self-reported reasons for intrastate and interstate migration and applying a series of pooled logistic regressions. Results reveal a decline across all reasons for migration, and not only employment-related migration contrary to explanations proposed in the extant literature. The decline in employment-related migration does not appear to be the result of a rise in alternative forms of mobility such as teleworking or substitution with inter-industry or occupation mobility. Furthermore, we also find that the negative effect of duration of residence has increased for family-related migration. Collectively, these findings suggest that behavioural change, particularly increased place attachment, may have contributed to the decline in internal migration.

过去几十年来，澳大利亚和包括美国在内的其他发达经济体的内部移民强度有所下降。最近的证据表明，人口构成的变化本身并不能解释这种持续下降的趋势。这使得移民学者怀疑，由社会、经济和技术变革驱动的更深刻的行为变化正在发挥作用，移民行为的变化很可能反映在移民原因的变化上。我们利用澳大利亚家庭、收入和劳动力动态调查的数据，对 2002 年至 2018 年间推动澳大利亚境内移民下降的因素进行了新的了解。这是通过检查州内和州际自我报告原因的年度趋势来实现的。迁移并应用一系列汇总逻辑回归。结果显示，所有移民原因都在下降，而不仅仅是与就业相关的移民，这与现有文献中提出的解释相反。与就业相关的移民数量的下降似乎并不是远程办公或行业间或职业流动性替代等替代形式流动性增加的结果。此外，我们还发现，居住期限对家庭移民的负面影响有所加大。总的来说，这些发现表明，行为改变，特别是地方依恋的增加，可能导致了内部移民的减少。