This thread should have been titled Poverty causes migration. Duh! Of course it does. Why live in a sewer when there's some stairs to the street? Why live in the street when there's some doors to houses to walk through? Being an opportunistic ape, mankind will always try to migrate from worse conditions to better conditions if they see advantage in it and see a way of taking that advantage.

Or more accurately titled. "Poverty can cause some migration"

I earn about 4x what I was making in Ireland back in 2009. But I didn't migrate because of poverty. Because I wasn't in poverty.

I used an Irishman as an example because I was thinking of my Irish mate Gerald from (London) Derry. I called him „Jerry“. We played football for some years, each Thursday from 20:00 to 22:00 and we always enjoyed a couple of beers afterwards, he was a midfielder. He made his way to Germany because he fell in love with a German woman. He opened up an Irish pub, which is not a bad idea, because every German town has at least one Irish pub. He went bankrupt with the pub and then he became a public service bus driver wearing a bus driver uniform.
He lost this job because he was barred from driving of any kind of vehicles for one year for illegaly leaving the scene of an accident. Must have been a language problem. Anyway, he had learned carpenter and because the payments in Germany were 6 €/hour at that time working with a firm on a temporary basis, he said „screw you“, I am going back to Ireland where they pay 16€/hour for carpenters.
So he left us (the football team), but showed up again half a year later to play football with us again , sniff, sniff. He told us that he has been working as a bus driver for a company in Ireland which went bankrupt and that had not seen any payments for two months because his boss took all the cash and went mia.

I have lost contact to Jerry and I don't know what he is doing, but I still miss him.

Heh. The only English word with six silent letters :arrgh!:

:har:


But to explore further on the angle you and Dan D opened and show the OP to be completely false.
Take your average townland in a village on the West Coast.
Removing of course all the French Germans and Americans who fled their local poverty in their homeland to move to the bleak wastelands of the Connemara Gaeltacht, looking only at the locals you see that some have local wealth, others have local poverty, then you have the variety of locals wealth which came from Nairobi, Aberdeen, Jedda, Singapore, Sydney, Osaka, Dusseldorf, Utrecht, Boston, NY, Toronto, Wellington, London, Cardiff, Durban, Alexandria, Mumbai.......
Migration is a two way street and has about as many reasons as there are migrants.