Abstract. The human movements across borders, societies and cultures are not running in an “empty space”: the structural characteristics of the economic systems, the institutional architecture of societies, the cultural paradigm and the power relations between different social groups, all define the magnitude and the limits of such movements. If the “hard” economic migration determinants are extensively explained in an abundant literature, the “soft” psychological/cultural determinants of “leave your old life” decision are less analyzed. This paper advances a model for the interactions between these factors and the economic ones and tries to explain their influences. The main output consists in the thesis that the “soft” variables matters in an extended explanation of migration and that their exclusion pictures a too abstract analysis of intrinsic migration motifs.

Keywords: labor net migration; factors; cultural paradigm.