If you pick 2023/2024 and the UK, you can see the disaster that is the Boris Wave.
3stacks•Jun 11, 2026
Thoughts and prayers friend.
jtbayly•Jun 11, 2026
That tool could be interesting if there was a way to stop the rendered globe from spinning. As is, it is unusable
sss111•Jun 11, 2026
if you click and hold on a country, it stops spinning :)
photochemsyn•Jun 11, 2026
Select the more options pulldown menu, click on projection, select ‘natural Earth’, no spinning.
3stacks•Jun 11, 2026
and it accurately displays the Earth (flat) globecels btfo
dang•Jun 11, 2026
Thanks! We'll put that link in the toptext as well.
curiousObject•Jun 11, 2026
People who believe they are financially secure may move from regions which are considered “wealthy” to regions which are seen to be “poorer” (and cheaper). This outflow can influence this data.
Influence how? Migrations from wealthy to poor regions are still migrations, no?
AnimalMuppet•Jun 11, 2026
They are... but the interpretation is different. They aren't looking for opportunity, at least not in the normal sense. And they aren't fleeing oppression in the normal sense either.
firesteelrain•Jun 11, 2026
Can someone explain the graphic?
blondie9x•Jun 11, 2026
The graphic seems vague and not particularly revealing.
firesteelrain•Jun 11, 2026
I was trying to figure out the inflow and outflow. It looks bidirectional.
FrustratedMonky•Jun 11, 2026
Left to Right.
Leaving, Arriving.
firesteelrain•Jun 11, 2026
In that case the observation is that North America is getting a more diverse set of immigrants
FrustratedMonky•Jun 11, 2026
Is that not happening? I think up till 2026, it was diverse. The diagram doesn't seem incorrect.
firesteelrain•Jun 11, 2026
I don’t think I was saying the diagram was incorrect
rawgabbit•Jun 11, 2026
Europe and Central Asia added people. So did North America.
Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan was flat.
Other regions lost people.
Supernaut•Jun 11, 2026
Further down the page, there's a link to an article from a couple of years ago, titled "Migration isn’t increasing".
So which is it?
swiftcoder•Jun 11, 2026
There's a quote from one of the study authors:
"Because previous estimation methods relied on coarse five-year snapshots,
they yielded very few data points and created the impression that the rate
of global migration flows was stable," adds co-author Guy Abel, a research
scholar in the Migration and Sustainable Development Research Group of the
IIASA Population and Just Societies Program and professor at the University
of Hong Kong. "Our annual data provides a clearer picture, revealing that
this rate has actually risen since 2000. This upward trend appears to be
driven by long-term demographic shifts and economic development rather than
sudden, isolated crises."
So if I'm following correctly, when you look at coarse data, you miss a lot of the smaller-scale migration, and that small-scale migration pushes the totals up a lot?
bcjdjsndon•Jun 11, 2026
Their dataset is so pathetically small you can't infer anything from it. There are still people alive from the India/Pakistan migration in 48 and that would be number one on this list
swiftcoder•Jun 11, 2026
Fascinating to see that MENA is a net positive on migration. There's often a lot of rhetoric around MENA migration to Europe and North America, but you hear much less about migration to MENA countries.
Cthulhu_•Jun 11, 2026
I think people underestimate how many people move back to their home country once they have a better chance (through e.g. education or money) and / or when the situation there improves (e.g. stability). It's why I don't understand why the anti-immigration parties don't do more internationally to help other countries.
expedition32•Jun 11, 2026
Because we, correctly, assume that some countries are simply beyond saving. Throwing good money after bad.
AnimalMuppet•Jun 11, 2026
Less cynically, perhaps we correctly realize that some countries are beyond our saving by us throwing money at them.
jimkleiber•Jun 11, 2026
Why "correctly"? Who says that a country or a group of humans or even an individual human is beyond saving?
graphime•Jun 11, 2026
> Who says that a country or a group of humans or even an individual human is beyond saving?
The one doing the saving.
Surely the one needing help should not be the to decide. They will always say “I’m worth saving”.
readthenotes1•Jun 11, 2026
The reason why pouring money into countries that source immigrants is a questionable solution is graft.
jimkleiber•Jun 11, 2026
Yes, pouring money may not be a very efficient solution and graft can certainly happen. For me it's a combination of how much graft do we allow if we take the long perspective and see it shrinking over time (maybe we dont allow any, cold turkey)? And what are ways we can help change the environments that may not be directly tied to money? From my perspective, we often need (and graft) money the most when we don't trust ourselves and others to help us. So are there ways we can help build deeper relationships so money is not the only focus or way people think they can get help?
carlosjobim•Jun 11, 2026
Or move back to your home country once you've gained a beneficial citizenship and can have foreign government benefits paid out every month while you don't even live in that country anymore.
jimkleiber•Jun 11, 2026
Perhaps. I think it's more about the passport ranking so one can travel and also the salary bump. But even if more of the other government services, try living in a country where if you get into a serious car accident you have to pay cash at the ER before they treat you. Scrambling to find multiple thousands of dollars in cash at 3am sometimes. (This happened to my friend in Kenya)
Im not sure if I can blame people for wanting to have more financial or medical security.
pjc50•Jun 11, 2026
The Gulf states take in a lot of migrant workers, who have basically no labour rights there.
"The UAE hosts some 8.7 million migrant workers – equivalent to over 80 per cent of the country’s resident population – making it one of the largest foreign labour-receiving countries in the world. With Emirati nationals mainly employed in the public sector, migrant workers constitute the bulk of private sector employment"
nirav72•Jun 11, 2026
Isn't migration to MENA - specifically migration to North Africa mainly from Sub-Saharan part of Africa?
somenameforme•Jun 11, 2026
Saudi Arabia has one of the highest immigration populations on Earth, somewhere around 42% contrasted against 15.8% in the US (which is an all-time high). They offer huge wages for pretty much everything, have dirt cheap living costs, and like many Mideast countries - there's no taxes for individuals.
profsummergig•Jun 11, 2026
These are expats, not immigrants. They aren't welcome to become citizens in Saudi Arabia.
swiftcoder•Jun 11, 2026
I'm not entirely clear that the migration dataset actually distinguishes between those cases?
toasty228•Jun 11, 2026
> Fascinating to see that MENA is a net positive on migration.
Really? it's a big economical hub now, the bulk of it migrate to a few countries, and in these countries just a few cities. It's a very different type of migration too.
Why has , recently, Pakistan been seen added more and more to a new category "MENAP" and separate from South Asia (i.e. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh) ?
These classifications should be geographic and could even racial, but it seems this new classification (MENAP) seems more "religious"
kdheiwns•Jun 11, 2026
In America at least, all the hot deserty places between Europe and India=Middle East. I only started hearing the term "South Asia" to refer to places like Pakistan after encountering more non-Americans online. Afghanistan is also considered as part of the Middle East to basically every average American (hence why it's lumped in with all those "Middle Eastern wars"), but I'm not sure if it's seen that way in other areas.
ricardobeat•Jun 11, 2026
Pakistan being “south asia” makes about as much sense as Turkey and Saudi Arabia being labeled “west asia”. Technically correct, odd choice for modern communication.
t0lo•Jun 11, 2026
Pedantic response that makes light of a real issue. In case you haven't noticed, not every "western" country is actually in the western hemisphere.
bcjdjsndon•Jun 11, 2026
Bangladesh is Muslim though
nomilk•Jun 11, 2026
Only 1.7m people left North America in 2023 (4.4m arrivals). Would be interesting to compare to figures from 2025.
gcanyon•Jun 11, 2026
> interesting
You have a funny way of spelling "sad" my friend.
arrowsmith•Jun 11, 2026
US had net negative migration in 2025 for the first time in decades:
That’s great, hopefully this accelerates. Too much migration just drives up living costs, stresses medical capacity, and drives wages down for many.
ricardobeat•Jun 11, 2026
Interesting how South America, with several countries made up majorly of immigrants, receives almost no new migrants now.
Meanwhile the middle-east population is fleeing and being replaced with asians?
Cthulhu_•Jun 11, 2026
"fleeing" and "replaced" are loaded terms, I don't think you can derive that from this data. That said, there's a lot of workers being imported from Asia to the middle-east for their ambitious construction projects, could that explain it?
bcjdjsndon•Jun 11, 2026
> Meanwhile the middle-east population is fleeing and being replaced with asians?
Persians brought Hinduism to India, so maybe they're returning the favour
rnoises•Jun 11, 2026
Eh? Persians gave the name "Hindus" to the people living in that area. But they had their own religion, Zoroastrianism. They didn't bring Hinduism because they didn't have Hinduism.
bcjdjsndon•Jun 11, 2026
Indians called it hinduism, but it came from iran.
joseda-hg•Jun 11, 2026
Internal migration has mostly saturated capacity all accross the region in South America
It'll take a while until anyone relaxes
igleria•Jun 11, 2026
At least in Argentina that is because it's not the land of opportunities it used to be in the late 19th/early 20th century.
eloisius•Jun 11, 2026
None of these regions have homogeneous conditions that mean anyone needs to be replacing fleeing locals to explain these stats. Millions of migrant workers are in the Gulf, and many of them come from the Philippines. Millions of people have fled conflicts in other parts of the Middle East.
somelamer567•Jun 11, 2026
The year 2000 also happens to coincide with the rise of the Putin regime. One of their favourite methods of statecraft is to spitefully lash out at perceived "enemies" by using their enormous information-warfare capability to stoke irregular immigration in ways to maximise chaos in countries that Russia hates and resents.
3stacks•Jun 11, 2026
I hope you aren't suggesting Russia is uniquely to blame in this when the United States has displaced tens of millions of people in the last 20 years
somelamer567•Jun 11, 2026
> Whataboutery (also known as whataboutism) is a debating tactic used to evade accountability. Instead of directly addressing a criticism, the accused responds with a counter-accusation or brings up a different, usually unrelated issue (often starting with "What about...?") to distract from the original argument.
I do see this a lot from pro-Russian trolls arguing in bad faith -- and using dirty rhetorical tricks to do so. Please don't stoop to their level.
sosomoxie•Jun 11, 2026
You posted a highly inflammatory claim without evidence. We have plenty of documentation of the US displacing people. Happy to read about Russia doing the same if you post it.
gaiagraphia•Jun 11, 2026
Here's the actual graph/data in question. The article is a dense academic snooooooozefest:
Ffs, trying to click on a country and the globe keeps rotating, hahah. When i click on nations, it doesn't tell me the numbers either, there's just these blobby lines :/
Not very usable.
Milpotel•Jun 11, 2026
Options -> change projection helps a little bit.
bcjdjsndon•Jun 11, 2026
*data doesn't go back beyond 2000, safe to ignore
pjc50•Jun 11, 2026
???
Data quality issues usually get worse the further back you go.
WillAdams•Jun 11, 2026
Yes, but there are (in)famous examples such as the partition of Bengal (the tiger which Britain feared) being divided into Pakistan and India, which when included would provide a useful metric for the scale of human suffering involved.
nomorehere•Jun 11, 2026
That’s true, but very few countries in the world are willing to accept people as readily as they used to. Migration has become much more difficult since 2022, and I can say that as a migrant myself.
13 Comments
[1] https://www.socsc.hku.hk/rhps/global-migration/
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/american-...
Influence how? Migrations from wealthy to poor regions are still migrations, no?
Leaving, Arriving.
Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan was flat.
Other regions lost people.
So which is it?
The one doing the saving.
Surely the one needing help should not be the to decide. They will always say “I’m worth saving”.
Im not sure if I can blame people for wanting to have more financial or medical security.
https://www.ilo.org/regions-and-countries/arab-states/united...
"The UAE hosts some 8.7 million migrant workers – equivalent to over 80 per cent of the country’s resident population – making it one of the largest foreign labour-receiving countries in the world. With Emirati nationals mainly employed in the public sector, migrant workers constitute the bulk of private sector employment"
Really? it's a big economical hub now, the bulk of it migrate to a few countries, and in these countries just a few cities. It's a very different type of migration too.
https://www.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl2616/files/2018-07/M...
These classifications should be geographic and could even racial, but it seems this new classification (MENAP) seems more "religious"
You have a funny way of spelling "sad" my friend.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/14/immigra...
Meanwhile the middle-east population is fleeing and being replaced with asians?
Persians brought Hinduism to India, so maybe they're returning the favour
It'll take a while until anyone relaxes
I do see this a lot from pro-Russian trolls arguing in bad faith -- and using dirty rhetorical tricks to do so. Please don't stoop to their level.
https://www.socsc.hku.hk/rhps/global-migration/
Ffs, trying to click on a country and the globe keeps rotating, hahah. When i click on nations, it doesn't tell me the numbers either, there's just these blobby lines :/
Not very usable.
Data quality issues usually get worse the further back you go.