This paper shows how rural-urban migrations can affect trade policy determination in the presence of a government that places special emphasis on the welfare of urban workers, thus generating increasing political returns in moving to the urban sector, and how the distribution of land and the associated rural workers' productivity can affect workers' decisions to migrate. Allowing for endogenous timing of moves and incomplete information about other workers' types, peasants will employ bandwagon strategies whereby those with little or no land migrate at once, while those who own more sizable land plots either migrate only if others migrated first, or never migrate. This mechanism predicts massive migrations, migration waves, coordination failures, or strong opposition to migration, depending on the distribution of land ownership. It sheds light on the contrasting experience of highly unequal Latin America, where vast migration waves lent support to the adoption of a harsh anti-rural bias at the outset of World War II, and highly egalitarian East Asia, where small migrations led to a politically weak urban labor force and much lighter discrimination against agriculture during that period.