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The dust bowl migration was a period of time in the 1930s that was caused by millions of acres of grasslands being plowed in the midwest followed by a drought. It rendered around 35 million acres of land useless, which only worsened the great depression. The first huge dust storms started in 1931. Its estimated that during the worst dust storm, over 3 million tons of topsoil were blown off the great plans.

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The Dust Bowl managed to create as many as 400,000 American migrants heading West to escape the drought ridden Midwest and Great Plains. This is an example of internal migration, for these people were not leaving the country, but instead only heading to California. These migrants were forced to leave their homes and livelihoods behind due to the push factor of severe drought and winds lifting top soil that would no longer allow them to make a living farming and support their families. More people escaping the drought ravaged plains settled in Los Angeles than in the San Joaquin valley and other agricultural areas in CA; supporting the gravity model of migration since these people moving a long distance decided to settle in a big city. Some state legislators made it illegal to bring in poor migrants into the state and allowed local officials to deport migrants to neighboring states. During the winter of 1935-1936, states like Florida, Colorado and California went as far as establishing border blockades to prevent poor migrants from entering their states- sending the message that they were not welcomed their and they ought to go back to where they came from. Many of these migrants had followed the harvest scene on the West coast for decades. The agricultural hot spot of the West Coast during the 1930s was seen as ‘promised land’. This pull factor that attracted them to California created an immense supply of migrants asking to be employed as guest workers. When they had successfully fled the Plains and Midwest, families stopped at farms and asked if they needed workers, and picked everything these farms had to offer for them; from grapes to tomatoes- something that doesn't require an immense knowledge or education on how to do it, which can be classified as migrant labor.

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A total of about 2.5 million people left the states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. A large portion of people, especially from Oklahoma, migrated to California.

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History Brief: Okies During the Great Depression

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Every migration flow generates a return or counter migration, and in the 1940s population did in fact return to the midwest.

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The majority of migrants moved as short a distance as they possibly could, which ended up being California

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People migrated to the cities of Los Angeles, San Fransisco, Sacramento, and Portland

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The majority of people who had to leave their homes were that of rural farming areas where the dust bowl was most extreme.

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As most of the people living in rural Oklahoma areas were families, it was cheaper and easier to move the shortest distance possible which was most definitely not international.