Migration
One of the largest forces reshaping politics in nearly every receiving country. The data on who moves where and why, and how policy shifts are changing the flows.
(3.7% of the world's population, up from 2.9% in 1990; UN estimates)
(World Bank estimate; roughly four times global foreign aid)
(a record 15.8% in January 2025 on Census Bureau survey data, above the 1890 peak of 14.8%; lower since)
A note on framing. Migration is one of the most politically charged topics in modern politics, and one where the slogans on every side obscure what the data shows. This page sets out how many people move, where they go, why, and what the trade-offs are. There are real benefits and real costs; pretending only the benefits or only the costs are real is the failure of every loud framing of this topic.
The actual size and shape of global migration
By 2024, the UN estimates, about 304 million people lived outside the country they were born in, nearly twice the 154 million of 1990. Their share of the world's population has risen steadily but not dramatically: about 2.3% in 1970, 2.9% by 1990, and 3.7% in 2024. The bigger change has been in where migrants go and how visible the flows are in receiving-country politics.
Where the migrants are (UN estimates for 2024). About 52 million in the United States, the largest single concentration. About 17 million in Germany. About 14 million in Saudi Arabia (mostly temporary labor migrants). About 12 million in the UK and 9 million each in France and Spain. About 8 to 9 million each in Canada, the UAE, Australia, and Russia, and about 7 million each in Turkey and Italy. The receiving countries are concentrated in the rich world, the Gulf states, and a few middle-income hubs.
Where the migrants come from. India sends the largest single number: about 18 million Indian-born people live abroad (over 35 million counting people of Indian origin, India's foreign ministry says). Mexico has about 12 million abroad, nearly all in the United States. Russia, China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan all send several million, and since 2022 so has Ukraine. Smaller countries send proportionally larger shares - 1.7 million Salvadorans (about 25% of the country's population) live abroad, similar shares for several Caribbean countries, smaller central Asian states, and a long list of others. The "diaspora as a share of the home country" measure tells the human-scale story better than absolute numbers do.
The flows are not all the same. About one international migrant in six - 51.7 million people in 2024, the highest share since the 1950s - had been forced across a border (UN). The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) counted 41.6 million refugees at the end of 2025, down 3%, the first fall in a decade, as 4.4 million went home. Most of the rest moved to work or join family, with a long tail of students, retirees, and professionals on assignment. Most migrants are working-age adults, and slightly more are men than women (women and girls are 48%). Corridors differ sharply: women are under a quarter of migrants in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, while Filipino domestic workers are mostly women.
Why people move
Most contemporary migration is driven by a small set of factors that operate fairly consistently across most flows. Understanding them helps cut through the political conversation, which often emphasizes whichever specific factor is rhetorically convenient.
Wage gaps. The single largest driver. A working-age person who can earn five to ten times as much in another country as at home has powerful incentives to move. The gap has been the largest variable in nearly every major migration corridor of the last 40 years - Mexico-US, Turkey-Germany, Bangladesh-Gulf, Philippines-everywhere, Eastern Europe-Western Europe.
Family reunification. Once a migrant establishes themselves in a destination country, family members tend to follow. Spouses, children, parents, siblings. This compounds initial migration into substantially larger long-run flows. Family visas are a large share of permanent migration in most rich countries, less so where selection for skills dominates: Canada plans about 22% of its 2026-28 permanent admissions in the family class.
Conflict and persecution. The forced-migration drivers. The Syrian war alone displaced about 13 million people internally and across borders, though fewer Syrians have sought asylum in Europe since Assad's fall in December 2024. The Russia-Ukraine war has left about 4.4 million people who fled Ukraine under temporary protection in the EU. The Venezuelan crisis has produced roughly 8 million emigrants. Sudan's war is what the UN calls the world's worst displacement crisis, with 8.6 million people displaced inside the country. Earlier waves from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Eritrea, Myanmar, and many others have produced cumulatively tens of millions of refugees over the post-WWII period. These flows are sharper, more visible, and more politically contentious than slow economic migration but are typically a smaller share of total movement.
Education and opportunity. Several million students study abroad each year. Many stay for at least part of their working lives. The "brain drain" from developing countries to developed ones is real but the returning-home flows ("brain circulation") have been growing as developing economies have become more attractive employers.
Climate stress. A growing factor that has not yet shown up at scale in most data but is starting to. Drought in Central America's Dry Corridor, Sahel desertification, sea-level pressure on small island states, and other climate-driven displacement are producing internal-displacement flows that mostly stay within borders; whether they spill across borders is taken up below.
The political economics of remittances
Migrants sent home about $905 billion through formal channels in 2024, $685 billion of it to low- and middle-income countries (World Bank estimates), plus more sent informally. For developing countries this is more than foreign direct investment and aid combined. In 2025 India received about $151 billion, the most of any country; Mexico about $62 billion on its central bank's count, down 4.6%; and the Philippines, Egypt, and Pakistan about $40 billion each. Bangladesh, Nigeria, and several others each received over $20 billion. For some smaller countries (Tonga, Tajikistan, Lebanon, El Salvador, Honduras, Nepal), remittances exceed 20% of GDP; in Tajikistan, 58% in 2025.
What this means. Remittances are larger and more stable than foreign aid for almost every country that receives them in significant amounts. They go directly to families rather than through governments, which is both an efficiency advantage (less corruption loss) and a development concern (less coordination on broader programs). Many smaller economies depend on emigrants' wages earned in richer countries, which leaves them exposed to receiving-country policy: since January 2026, for example, the United States has taxed remittances sent with cash or money orders at 1%.
For receiving countries, the picture is more complicated than the political conversation admits. The wages migrants earn are largely spent locally (rent, food, transport, taxes); the remitted portion is the savings that go home, typically a smaller share than total earnings. The argument that migrants "send all their money home" is consistently wrong on the data. The argument that migrants are pure economic gain is also wrong; they use public services, compete for housing, and add to specific labor-market segments. Both effects are real and need to be priced honestly.
The receiving-country political dynamics
Migration produces political opposition in nearly every receiving country once flows reach a level that makes the changes visible to native-born populations. The pattern has been remarkably consistent across very different countries: fairly liberal policy, then rising public concern as composition change becomes visible, then political mobilization and tightened policy. Then either flows fall or the politics escalates further. The cycle has played out in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, and increasingly across most of the rich world. Opinion can also swing back quickly: the share of Americans wanting less immigration dropped from 55% in 2024 to 29% in June 2026 (Gallup).
What drives the opposition. Partly concerns about labor-market competition, housing pressure, public-service strain, and cultural change. Partly political competition - migration is one of the easier issues on which to mobilize voters, whether or not the specific concerns are well-founded. Partly integration outcomes, which vary widely by group and by place. The mix varies country by country and within countries by region, with support for restriction typically strongest among working-class and lower-middle-class voters.
What the data says about the economic effects. The professional consensus across most rich countries is that migration is a net positive for the receiving economy in aggregate, though the gains are uneven. Migrants fill labor shortages in agriculture, hospitality, construction, healthcare, and skilled-technical fields; they are more entrepreneurial than native-born populations on average and fill demographic gaps in aging societies. The US National Academies (2017) found immigration's long-run effect on growth positive and on native-born wages and employment overall "very small". Britain's Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimates that a migrant arriving at 25 on average pay contributes more to the public finances over a lifetime than a UK-born worker on the same salary.
What the data also says. The benefits are not evenly distributed. The same National Academies report found that any negative wage effects fall mostly on earlier immigrants and native-born high-school dropouts, and that first-generation immigrants cost governments more than the native-born, though their children are among the strongest fiscal contributors. The OBR finds that a low-wage migrant is a net cost to UK public finances over a lifetime. Specific neighborhoods absorb most of the integration costs while the benefits diffuse to broader populations. Housing markets in receiving cities tighten, and public services in some localities are strained.
Climate-driven migration
The relationship between climate change and migration is one of the most contested questions in migration studies. The simple story - rising temperatures and rising seas force mass migration - turns out to be considerably more complicated when examined carefully. Most climate displacement so far has been internal rather than international (people moving within their country to less-affected areas). The World Bank's Groundswell projections estimate up to 216 million internal climate migrants in just the largest affected regions by 2050. International climate migration is harder to project because it depends on political conditions in receiving countries that are themselves climate-stressed.
What is actually happening. Sub-Saharan African migration patterns are increasingly affected by Sahel desertification and East African drought. Central American migration to the US has been documented to track precipitation patterns in the Dry Corridor (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador). South Asian internal migration responds to monsoon variability and coastal flooding. Pacific small island states face existential threats from sea-level rise, which is expected to force migration as parts of the islands become uninhabitable. Mediterranean crossings include people fleeing both conflict and increasingly severe drought.
What the projections suggest. Most careful migration researchers expect climate to increase migration meaningfully but not catastrophically. The largest flows will probably continue to be driven by economic and conflict factors with climate as a contributor rather than the dominant cause. Adaptation in vulnerable countries can reduce displacement substantially. Climate-driven international migration to the rich world is real and growing, but the headline numbers in apocalyptic projections often confuse internal-displacement totals with international flows. Climate migration is a serious problem; it is not yet the demographic catastrophe some framings suggest.
How countries compare
Migration patterns vary dramatically across countries, both in scale and in policy. Foreign-born shares below are UN estimates for 2024; the notes use the latest national data.
The takeaway: high-migration receiving countries have produced very different policy approaches with different outcomes. The Australian-Canadian model (active selection, high per-capita rates) long enjoyed broad acceptance, though both countries are now cutting intakes. The Gulf model (temporary labor with no settlement) supplies most of those economies' workforce while tying residence to employers. The European model (a mix of asylum, family reunification, and labor) has produced more political conflict than the selection-based systems. Japan's very low migration is changing as its working-age population shrinks.
The paths from here
Migration is one of the topics where the next decade is likely to look meaningfully different from the last. Dated September 2026, with net migration to the United States, Britain, and Germany sharply lower, asylum applications in the EU, Norway, and Switzerland down 19% in 2025, and the EU's new asylum rules applied since June. Each path below is one realistic shape the period could take.
Continued politically managed flows
Most rich democracies maintain mid-level migration with periodic adjustments based on political conditions. Asylum and refugee processing continues. Family reunification continues. Skilled-worker visas continue. Total flows fluctuate around current levels with country-specific variation. The political conversation stays loud without producing major changes in actual numbers.
Will it happen? Still the base case for much of the world: Japan's foreign population grew 9.5% in 2025, and the Gulf economies still run on imported labor. It no longer fits the largest Western destinations (see path 2). The underlying drivers (wage gaps, family ties, demand for labor in aging societies) have not weakened.
Significant tightening in major receiving countries
Political pressure produces real reductions in legal migration channels in the US, UK, several European countries, and elsewhere. Asylum processing tightens. Skilled-worker visas become harder. Family reunification slows. Total inflows fall meaningfully for the first time in 30 years. The countries pay measurable demographic and labor-market costs.
Will it happen? Under way in the three largest Western destinations (see the table above). In 2025 net migration fell by about half in the United States and Germany, and in Britain to less than a fifth of its 2023 peak. The US also cut its refugee ceiling to 7,500 for fiscal 2026 (raised in May to 17,500, the extra places for Afrikaners). Whether the tightening lasts depends on how voters weigh its labor-market and demographic costs as they appear.
Climate-driven flows scale up substantially
Drought in the Dry Corridor, Sahel, parts of South Asia, and elsewhere intensifies. Sea-level pressure on small island states becomes unavoidable. Internal displacement spills into international migration as receiving regions within affected countries themselves come under stress. The number of climate-driven migrants reaches the tens of millions annually in the second half of the 2030s.
Will it happen? The scale is uncertain. The lower-bound projections (climate as a contributor to existing migration) are likely; the higher-bound projections (mass climate migration as the dominant flow) are less likely but cannot be ruled out. Adaptation investment in vulnerable countries is the variable that most affects which way the projections come out, and aid is moving the other way: official development assistance fell 23% in 2025 (OECD).
More countries adopt active-selection policies
The Australian-Canadian points-based model spreads. Receiving countries shift from passively accepting whoever arrives to actively selecting for skills, language, education, and likely integration outcomes. Public acceptance rises with active selection. Total migration may stay roughly the same or rise; the composition changes.
Will it happen? Some movement is visible. The UK's post-Brexit points system was an attempt at this, and several European countries have introduced more selection. Canada, the model's exemplar, is cutting temporary arrivals under its 2026-28 plan. Whether selection becomes the dominant model depends partly on labor-market conditions (selection is easier when there is excess applicant demand) and on political conditions in each country.
A serious crisis (climate, conflict, pandemic) reshapes the picture
A specific shock - a major climate event, a regional war, a global pandemic, a financial crisis - produces a migration response that strains receiving countries' capacities. The political response shapes the next decade of migration policy in ways that pre-crisis politics did not predict.
Will it happen? Historically, large migration shifts have been crisis-driven more than gradual. The 2015 European migration crisis from Syria reshaped European politics, and the 2022 Ukrainian refugee flow reshaped Polish and broader European responses. Sudan's war has not so far produced a comparable movement toward Europe: irregular crossings into the EU fell by about a third in January-August 2026 (Frontex). Whether and what the next major shock looks like is unpredictable, but some such event in the next decade is more likely than not.
The base case is continued politically managed flows, with sharp tightening in some countries and growth in others. Climate-driven flows intensify gradually, and active selection spreads in some countries. The EU's Pact on Migration and Asylum, applied since June 12, 2026, is the main test of shared rules; wider international coordination remains unlikely without a forcing crisis.
Where serious analysts disagree
Migration is one of the topics where careful researchers can produce dramatically different conclusions from similar data, partly because the underlying value questions are real. Each reading below is held by named scholars.
Migration is broadly economically positive and the case for more is stronger than the politics admits
The economic gains from migration to receiving countries are large and well-documented. The gains to migrants themselves are enormous - their lifetime earnings can rise by factors of five or ten by moving from low-income to high-income countries. The aggregate effects on receiving economies are positive in most careful studies. The political opposition reflects distributional concerns about specific impacts that real policy can address; what is sometimes missed is how much of the rich world's prosperity depends on the labor migrants provide.
Held by: Michael Clemens (George Mason, previously the Center for Global Development), and a substantial fraction of the economics-of-migration field. Their evidence includes the size of migrants' own gains and findings such as the National Academies' on long-run growth. Critics say the case is weakened by economists' reluctance to engage with the distributional costs, which the same studies also document.
Migration produces real costs to social cohesion that are under-counted
The aggregate economic gains from migration miss what matters most to many receiving-country citizens: the cultural and social cohesion that builds slowly over generations. Rapid composition change can disrupt it. The "we are all economic units" framing of pro-migration economics fails to engage with the value people place on national identity, shared language, common cultural reference points, and the sense that their country is recognizably theirs. Pretending these concerns are illegitimate produces the political backlash that more honest engagement would have avoided.
Held by: David Goodhart ("The Road to Somewhere"), and a tradition of communitarian political theory; the view is widely shared by working-class and lower-middle-class voters in many receiving countries. Their evidence includes a 2020 review of 87 studies that found a consistent negative link between ethnic diversity and social trust, strongest for trust in neighbors. Critics note that the link is correlational and weaker for trust in people generally.
Climate migration will dwarf current flows in the long run
The next 50 years will see migration flows substantially larger than the post-WWII period as climate stress reshapes which parts of the world are habitable. Receiving countries that prepare for this in advance will manage it better; receiving countries that pretend it will not happen will be overwhelmed. The current migration politics is largely irrelevant to what is coming and is wasting political capital on smaller versions of the same conversations.
Held by: Gaia Vince ("Nomad Century"), Parag Khanna ("Move"), and a school of climate-migration analysts. The case is uncertain in its quantitative form but is increasingly mainstream as a long-run scenario. The argument is most relevant for European, North American, and Australian planning.
The "migration crisis" framing is mostly a political construct
The actual numbers of migrants moving each year are not unprecedented and are not catastrophic in any objective sense. What has changed is the political salience - migration has become the issue that ambitious politicians on both left and right find easiest to mobilize on. The "crisis" framing reflects the politics rather than the underlying data. More careful policy and less politicized conversation could produce substantially better outcomes than the current cycle of moral panic and counter-moral-panic.
Held by: Hein de Haas (Amsterdam, "How Migration Really Works"), and a tradition of empirical migration studies that emphasizes how stable the underlying flows have been compared to the political volume. Critics see real breaks in pattern in the post-2015 European inflows. They also point to the US surge that took net migration to 2.7 million in 2024.
Active selection is the only durable political solution
Receiving democracies maintain political support for migration only when voters perceive that their government chooses who comes. The chaos of asylum systems where people simply arrive and apply produces backlash regardless of the migrants' actual characteristics. The Australian-Canadian model of explicit selection by skills, language, and likely integration is the only model that has sustained relatively high migration with relatively low political backlash. Other countries should learn from it rather than from each other's failures.
Held by: parts of the Australian and Canadian policy communities, and an increasingly mainstream pragmatic view in European center-right parties. The argument is that the politics of migration matters as much as its economics, and selection-based systems handle the politics better. Critics note that both model countries cut intakes in 2024-26 after surges of temporary migrants.
What the evidence supports firmly: migrants themselves gain a great deal; long-run effects on receiving economies are small and usually positive; and costs and benefits fall unevenly, with fiscal results that depend on migrants' age and earnings. Climate-driven flows are real and growing. Still contested: how large the cohesion costs are, whether the politics is louder than the data warrants, and whether selection keeps public consent, a claim now being tested in Canada and Australia. How to weigh these is partly a question of values.
What this means for you
Migration touches everyday life through labor markets, housing markets, public services, the cultural texture of places, and (for many readers) through family or migration history of one's own. A few practical observations:
If you are a citizen of a receiving country
Your country's migration policy is one of its most consequential long-term decisions and is being made through a political conversation that is often disconnected from the data. Voting on specific policy details (selection criteria, asylum process design, integration support, deportation rules) on the merits is more useful than voting on slogans about migration generally.
If you are a migrant or have recent migration history in your family
The political environment for migrants in many receiving countries has hardened over the last decade. Protections have narrowed in several; since March 2026, for example, refugees in Britain receive status that must be renewed every 30 months. The legal complexity of immigration status is higher. Maintaining current legal advice on your specific status, citizenship options, and rights matters more now than it did 15 years ago.
If you are considering migrating
The receiving-country options have narrowed somewhat in the last decade and may narrow further. The countries with active-selection systems (Canada, Australia, parts of Europe) are the most predictable paths if you have the skills and credentials they prioritize. Family-reunification routes remain available where eligible. Asylum succeeds for a minority of applicants: in the EU, Norway, and Switzerland, 31% of first decisions granted protection in the first half of 2026. Specific countries (Portugal, Greece, the Gulf states for skilled workers, Mexico for retirees) offer specific pathways, though their rules change often and are highly country-dependent.
If you live in a sending country
Your country is exposed to receiving-country migration policy in ways that affect remittance flows, family reunification options, and the long-term return-or-stay choices of your diaspora. Government policy that engages thoughtfully with the diaspora (recognizing dual citizenship, supporting economic ties, maintaining political channels) tends to produce better outcomes than treating emigrants as having abandoned the country.
If you are thinking about long-term planning
Migration is one of the variables most likely to reshape the world over the next 30 years. Countries that integrate migrants successfully are likely to gain workers and growth relative to those that admit few, though with the costs described above. The places where climate stress drives outflows will change, and diaspora networks will grow in significance. Anyone planning a long career, business, or family decision benefits from taking these shifts seriously rather than assuming the current pattern continues. The world of 2055 will probably look meaningfully more migration-shaped than the world of 2025.
The mechanics behind this
The migration story sits on top of three deeper mechanisms covered elsewhere on this site. If the analysis above depends on ideas you want to understand first, these fundamentals make the conversation more legible:
