choose to migrate to cities out of social norms – demonstrating leadership and self-respect. With this societal encouragement combined with depressed rural economies, rural youth form a large proportion of the migrants moving to urban areas. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a study conducted by Touray in 2006 indicated that about 15% (26 million) of urban migrants were youth. Lastly, natural disasters can often be single-point events that lead to temporarily massive rural-urban migration flows. The 1930s Dust Bowl in the United States, for example, led to the flight of 2.5 million people from the Plains by 1940, many to the new cities in the West. It is estimated that as many as one out of every four residents in the Plains States left during the 1930s. More recently, drought in Syria from 2006 to 2011 has prompted a rural exodus to major urban centers. Massive influxes in urban areas, combined with difficult living conditions, have prompted some scholars to link the drought to the arrival of the Arab Spring in Syria. Examples United States and Canada The terms are used in the United States and Canada to describe the flight of people from rural areas in the Great Plains and Midwest regions, and to a lesser extent rural areas of the northeast and southeast and Appalachia. It is also particularly noticeable in parts of Atlantic Canada (especially Newfoundland), since the collapse of Atlantic cod fishing fields in 1992. Rural counties in the United States make up about 70 percent of the nation's land mass. Historically, population increase from births in rural areas more than compensated for the number of people moving from rural areas to urban areas, but from 2010 to 2016, rural areas lost population in absolute numbers for the first time. China China, like many other currently industrializing countries, has had a relatively late start to rural flight. Until 1983, the Chinese government, through the hukou system, greatly restricted the ability of their citizens to internally migrate. Since 1983, the Chinese government has progressively lifted the restrictions on internal migration. This has led to a great increase in the number of people migrating to urban areas. However, even today, the hukou system limits the ability of rural migrants to receive full access to urban social services at the urban subsidized costs.As with most examples of rural flight, several factors have led towards China's massive urbanization. Income disparity, family pressure,