Human migration has surged since 2000 – these maps reveal where people are going

54 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by tzury

54 Comments

mettamage

3 hours ago

As the article points out. The researcher’s site has an exploratory tool to view the data [1].

[1] https://www.socsc.hku.hk/rhps/global-migration/

gadders

2 hours ago

If you pick 2023/2024 and the UK, you can see the disaster that is the Boris Wave.

3stacks

an hour ago

Thoughts and prayers friend.

jtbayly

an hour ago

That tool could be interesting if there was a way to stop the rendered globe from spinning. As is, it is unusable

photochemsyn

an hour ago

Select the more options pulldown menu, click on projection, select ‘natural Earth’, no spinning.

3stacks

43 minutes ago

and it accurately displays the Earth (flat) globecels btfo

sss111

an hour ago

if you click and hold on a country, it stops spinning :)

swiftcoder

2 hours ago

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.

pjc50

2 hours ago

The Gulf states take in a lot of migrant workers, who have basically no labour rights there.

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"

somenameforme

19 minutes ago

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.

Cthulhu_

2 hours ago

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

an hour ago

Because we, correctly, assume that some countries are simply beyond saving. Throwing good money after bad.

AnimalMuppet

14 minutes ago

Less cynically, perhaps we correctly realize that some countries are beyond our saving by us throwing money at them.

nirav72

2 hours ago

Isn't migration to MENA - specifically migration to North Africa mainly from Sub-Saharan part of Africa?

nomorehere

40 minutes ago

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.

Supernaut

3 hours ago

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

2 hours ago

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

2 hours ago

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

ricardobeat

2 hours ago

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_

2 hours ago

"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?

eloisius

an hour ago

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.

igleria

an hour ago

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.

joseda-hg

an hour ago

Internal migration has mostly saturated capacity all accross the region in South America

It'll take a while until anyone relaxes

bcjdjsndon

2 hours ago

> 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

an hour ago

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

24 minutes ago

Indians called it hinduism, but it came from iran.

nobrains

2 hours ago

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"

ricardobeat

2 hours ago

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

an hour ago

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.

kdheiwns

2 hours ago

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.

user

2 hours ago

[deleted]

shomp

27 minutes ago

Where are the maps?

bcjdjsndon

2 hours ago

*data doesn't go back beyond 2000, safe to ignore

pjc50

2 hours ago

???

Data quality issues usually get worse the further back you go.

WillAdams

an hour ago

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.

firesteelrain

3 hours ago

Can someone explain the graphic?

blondie9x

2 hours ago

The graphic seems vague and not particularly revealing.

firesteelrain

2 hours ago

I was trying to figure out the inflow and outflow. It looks bidirectional.

rawgabbit

an hour ago

Europe and Central Asia added people. So did North America.

Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan was flat.

Other regions lost people.

FrustratedMonky

2 hours ago

Left to Right.

Leaving, Arriving.

firesteelrain

an hour ago

In that case the observation is that North America is getting a more diverse set of immigrants

gaiagraphia

2 hours ago

Here's the actual graph/data in question. The article is a dense academic snooooooozefest:

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.

Milpotel

2 hours ago

Options -> change projection helps a little bit.

somelamer567

2 hours ago

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

an hour ago

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

31 minutes ago

> 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.

curiousObject

3 hours ago

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.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/american-...

swiftcoder

2 hours ago

> This outflow can influence this data

Influence how? Migrations from wealthy to poor regions are still migrations, no?

AnimalMuppet

10 minutes ago

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.