Industrial-era migrants were pulled by opportunity, not only pushed by displacement.

Evidence

Cities had always received the excess population of the countryside. Persons who, for whatever reason (laws of inheritance, enclosure laws, and so forth), had been without a place in the traditional order of an agricultural world, had migrated to the cities. Many of them became a part of the organizationally unaffiliated mass, the “floating population” of the preindustrial city. But in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they came not only because they were pushed but because they were pulled. The disintegration of the feudal order, which, in England, had been proceeding for centuries, gave them the freedom to go. The “opportunities” of the developing industrial order gave them the desire to go. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 318

Categorization

• XREF: Qualifies the standard push story and informs why urban newcomers arrived ignorant of city meanings—supporting why civil inattention became necessary.