Where do migrants live, and where were they born?

In 2024, around 280 million people lived in a different country from the one in which they were born. That’s around 3.5% of the global population.

Where were these international migrants born, and where did they move to?

At Our World in Data, we built a graphing tool called the Grapher, designed to be flexible enough to visualize thousands of very different metrics. Unfortunately, it isn’t able to show flows between countries.

My colleague Sophia Mersmann has now built a specific interactive visualization that is optimized for this country-to-country data. It’s shown below.[1]

On the left-hand side, you can see the total number of people living in that country who were born elsewhere, and where they were born. On the right-hand side, you can see the number of people born in that country who have moved away, and where they moved to.

By default, you see the data for Malaysia, but you can select any country you are interested in.

A couple of additional options

If you want to dig in deeper, here are a few other ways you can explore the data:

• Look at the migrant data by sex to see where men or women are moving.
• Use the time slider to see how things have changed over time.
• Click on “immigrants” or “emigrants” to focus only on those views of the data, rather than migration in and out of a country.

Correction note

This visualization was updated and corrected on June 16 to include a category in the underlying UN data — “Other countries” — which reflects immigrants for whom the origin country is not known. This increased the total number of immigrants for some countries.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Marcel Gerber for his help in building this interactive visualization.

Thanks also to Max Roser and Edouard Mathieu for their comments and suggestions on this article.

Endnotes

1] This data comes from the United Nations [Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA). It shows the total number of people living in another country, which is not the flow of migrants each year. Unfortunately, UN DESA does not have this data in annual flows; otherwise, we would also show it.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “Where do migrants live, and where were they born?” by Hannah Ritchie, Sophia Mersmann, Tuna Acisu, Marwa Boukarim, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.