That subheadline is more misleading than the actual headline.

The average worldwide is down but that downward trend is largely due to the US. Canada and Japan are up and most other countries are about the same. UK is the only other own with a notable downward trend

Did you look at the charts? The U.S. dropped precipitously, while other countries mostly stayed in the same range.

I wonder how much the global population getting older influences the desire to migrate.

The decline seems to be much sharper for the US than other countries. Given the way that the current government has been arbitrarily revoking student visas, making it more difficult to get work visas, blocking green card application, etc., it seems reasonable that fewer people would want to immigrate to the US.

Yes, but the US is bigger. Now do US vs rest of the world for example. Or take Europe as a continent and not many countries. We can draw arbitrary lines on maps and the bigger area will tend to have more migrants within it just because it is bigger. To make a fair assessment we probably need to do migrants per capita or migrants per square kilometers.

I did the math on the latter. Higher numbers mean more migration per km² of land, I made US 100% to allow easy relative comparison:

  United Kingdom 1076
  Germany 918
  Japan 694
  Italy 653
  Spain 519
  France 407
  United States 100
  Saudi Arabia 91
  Canada 59
  Australia 34
  

  Canada 494
  Australia 333
  Saudi Arabia 193
  Spain 186
  Germany 136
  France 132
  United Kingdom 131
  Italy 115
  United States 100
  Japan 73
  

Now if we wanted to make that even fairer it would probably be good to have a metric of migrants per km of built-on or habitable land or something to avoid skewing results for countries with a whole lot of inhabitable nothing in some areas. Canada and Australia are on the bottom in the first list (big countries with little population in comparison to their size) while they are on top in the per capita list.

As you can see it isn't as easy as it seems at first. What do we want to look at? Is it about land use? Is it about how big of a fraction is migrants? Or do we want to look at migrant per USD of GDP to see who would have the best/worst capacity to support migrants? Maybe we want to look at job markets?

All of that changes as you want to change the story, but what does not make sense is to just use absolute numbers based on national borders.

Let's skip the exceptionalism and go straight to the numbers next time.

> Part of the decline is attributable to a global drop in desire to migrate at all.

That's not what the article suggests at all.

The drop is calculated only from those who want to move.

Yes, it's still #1, but the drop that isn't a result of people not wanting to move. Instead, people that want to move are picking the US as the destination a lot less.

Other countries are cracking down which makes desire to migrate less.

If you live in a shithole the US will obviously be an improvement by comparison. But that's not news and ultimately meaningless.

The concern is that smart, productive, capable people now have better alternatives.

> The U.S. remains the most desired destination for people who would like to leave their own countries permanently, but Gallup's latest data show it is less attractive than it once was

If you look at the charts, it seems that if the US is a shithole, then Canada is twice the shit hole, and France and Germany are twice that.

In fact, it doesn’t appear that there are any non-shitholes using this metric.

I think the US should facilitate immigration by probably expanding the H1B 10x and reducing the period for a green card and also overturn Euclid v Amber and NEPA (with state level CEQA style to follow) but the reality is that even an immigration-resistant US administration is far more popular than any other country as a destination; and that’s probably simply due to the fact that it’s the one Western economy that is still dynamic despite everything.

The biggest drop is from SE Asia which is rapidly developing. I assume many more people wanna stay in their home countries or move to China instead

You don't even really need to have the military policing the capital and national police force shooting people in the streets. A significant economic downturn is enough to reduce immigration legal and otherwise.

From the graphs, it seems that knowledge of our non-dairy pavement is filtering through to other countries. But a longer term graph would be nice; I'd like to see how the indicator reacted over more economic cycles, but I know some visa categories that had been oversubscribed on opening day for years started staying open for most of the year when the mortgage crisis hit, and I'd love to see data from previous downturns, too.

Excuse me, Hole of America.

Also, these things work reciprocally. The more difficult the US is in admitting immigrants, the more pressure their citizens get too.

I remember when I went to Australia, I could stay a year but American backpackers only 6 months because that's what Australians got in the US.

Canada, on the other hand, favours high skill immigration right now,

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/canada-adding-new-ex...

> Especially the toxic manosphere culture at the moment.

The experience of living/traveling in the US is very different from what can be seen on social medias and forums. At least in big cities in blue states.

I wouldn't recommend visiting the U.S. right now. There isn't the concept of fairness or due process. You don't have rights here. It is now extremely important to be a U.S. citizen. Everyone else is at the mercy of the Trump administration.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/03/ice-german-t...

It's what a huge proportion of the US population wants, yes. And many of the people who are in the US and who are counted in the number of people in the US are themselves immigrants or closely socially connected to recent immigrants - one of the justifications for blanket immigration restrictionism is precisely that once an immigrant is physically in the country, they start affecting the democratic political process that decides what policies will be, including further immigration policy.

The current admin definitely wants to look tough on immigration.

Opinions among actual Americans vary. Some blue states even issue driver licenses to unauthorized immigrants on the basis that it's better for them to pass the driving test than to drive without taking the test.

I mean, there is a big grey area between immigrants here who are:

undocumented and here temporarily (most people oppose this),

undocumented and here permanently (the left is split on this, the right is mostly against it),

documented and here temporarily (most people are fine with this, especially tourists),

documented and here temporarily with an option to become permanently (many oppose this because it's impacting employment, especially with H-1B abuse),

documented and here permanently with no intention of becoming citizens (many people on the right don't like this for assimilation reasons),

documented and here permanently an a path to citizenship (most people support this except the extreme right),

former immigrants who are now citizens (nearly everyone supports these people).

The problem is that all of this is put under a single umbrella called "immigration," but it includes so many sub-issue like rule of law and assimilation preferences that you can't have a serious debate on it.

It's absolutely what some powerful and well-funded people are actively pursuing.

https://www.project2025.observer/

They want a Autocratic Theocracy AKA God's Chosen One-ocracy (and take a wild guess at which demographic gets to decide who the chosen one is...)

The ICE stuff is extremely unpopular. Most of the people who voted for it did not understand they were doing so. If "the US" is the people, then no, they mostly do not want this. If "the US" is Trump, then yes, it is.

This is also the most important political question in the US right now. Are the people still sovereign?

I'm a naturalized US citizen who came here on a work visa originally so I get it.

We are however in very different times. In the 2010s, they couldn't employ enough software engineers. Now? There's permanent layoffs. Every year all these companies now lay off 5-10% of their employees. It's become the "up or out" culture of Corporate America.

The only reason they do this is to suppress wages. They want to claw back the gains of the 2010s. Every sufficiently sized company reaches a point where the only way they can continue to grow profits is to cut costs and raise prices. Labor is a huge cost.

Despite supposed protections, it's clear that people on work visas get paid less. There's an inherent lack of mobility and the consequences of getting fired or laid off and not being able to find a job are extreme: depending on what type of visa you have you may have to leave the country within as little as 10 days (but typically 60).

So I think companies should lose their ability to not only sponsor green cards but also hire nonresidents if they engage in layoffs for a certain period. I'm thinking 2-3 years.

The employment situation for software engineers is now dire, unlike a decade ago, so it actually makes sense to curtail foreign employment.

1/4 of my building complex in Miami is Brazilian, the rest is from other LatAm countries and Russians and Ukrainians. Barely any natives. Tower(s) of Babel. I guess our favelas are a bit safer... yet.

oh no what is usa going to do now.

The Canadians that I know who have been living in the USA are all making plans to or have already returned to Canada. Some of them have been here for 20+ years, became American Citizens, the whole deal. And now they just want to get off the crazy train.

I have to imagine that their sentiment is not unique.

All of the Canadians that I know that moved to the US have moved back. I'm sure there are still plenty that live there but in my circle that's pretty much over.

"1 billion Americans" is different than "filling America with 1 billion people." Decades from now, people like Yglesias will be living in the wreckage of their idealistic beliefs about nationhood and they'll be like "but true mass immigration has never been tried."

Anglophone and still capable economy with pretty strong mobility for knowledge workers. It’s a no-brainer. No other place offers this. China is more dynamic an economy but you’ll be pretty second-class there as a S. Asian based on the experiences of my friends who work there.

The European Union desire to migrate to the US went from 7% to 6%. The article mentions two countries were ranked higher:

> Within the European Union, Spain, at 11%, and Switzerland, at 8%, rank ahead of the U.S., at 6%.

So I think this really shows that EU members don’t have a lot of desire to migrate anywhere. The drop from 7% to 6% is inline with the global decrease in migration desire. I don’t think there’s as much to read into this about sentiment change toward the US.

they all want to be here or there would be no issue and no news every time the government tried to make entry and visas more difficult

It’s not, however immigrating legally is very hard due to the high demand.

The sample size was 100.

Yes, I could easily get into the USA (or indeed practically anywhere in the world) but I live in Scotland because that's what I prefer.

You fire ahead and take my spot.

Depends, how long are you willing to stay in detainment?

Gallup's question is: "Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move permanently to another country?"

Skilled immigrants are so often loyal to immigrants as a class, or to other people from their specific foreign religious or ethnic group, that keeping them out of the country even though they have high value on paper is still worthwhile so that they don't have the opportunity to advocate for immigration policies that are more friendly to further low-quality immigrants.

It's clear that US has no interest in educating its citizens properly. At least not the masses. The wealthy will continue to privately educate their children while the rest of country has to be kept ignorant enough to keep voting against their own interests.

Multi-polar something something

Its actually down slightly from its peak in 2024 according to the article.

Rosie O'Donnell hasn't been missed by anyone. Feel free to follow her.