Parts of my mother's family were from various shtetls in Tarnopol- Chorostkow, Skalat, Kopychynsti etc. Many of them migrated to Vienna in the 1880s through the early 1900s and then on to other places in many cases. In my family's case it was because they wanted better education, business and financial opportunities, medical care, maybe more religious tolerance, etc.- pretty much the same reasons people move now. My great grandfather moved because, he wanted a less religious more "modern" life and because, as I understand it, he was not happy with his father's second marriage. Many of them viewed the Galician shtetls as a dead end and in many cases as dangerous.
Some of the chapters in the various Yizkor books cover these issues. For example in Kopychnysti and Choroskow there was an almost 50% decline in Jewish population over the period begining in the 1880s until WWI for many of these reasons.
