  Existing theories of migration either focus on micro- or macroscopic behavior
of populations; that is, either the average behavior of entire population is
modeled directly, or decisions of individuals are modeled directly. In this
work, we seek to bridge these two perspectives by modeling individual agents
decisions to migrate while accounting for the social network structure that
binds individuals into a population. Pecuniary considerations combined with the
decisions of peers are the primary elements of the model, being the main
driving forces of migration. People of the home country are modeled as nodes on
a small-world network. A dichotomous state is associated with each node,
indicating whether it emigrates to the destination country or it stays in the
home country. We characterize the emigration rate in terms of the relative
welfare and population of the home and destination countries. The time
evolution and the steady-state fraction of emigrants are also derived.
