About 281 million people, or 3.6% of the world’s population, were living outside their country of birth in 2020, according to the International Organization for Migration’s World Migration Report 2024. Today’s migration patterns are dominated by a handful of destinations and routes: the United States hosts by far the most migrants (about 52.4 million in 2024, UN DESA), followed by Germany, Saudi Arabia, France and the United Kingdom; India and Mexico send the most people abroad; Mexico to the United States is the largest single corridor; and the Gulf states run on imported labour from South Asia. People move mainly for work, family and safety, and the money they send home, about $125 billion to India alone in 2023, ties origin and destination together.
From 84 Million in 1970 to 281 Million in 2020
The absolute number of international migrants has more than tripled in half a century, but the share of humanity on the move has changed far less. The IOM series, built on United Nations population data, counted 84.5 million migrants in 1970, when they made up 2.3% of the world’s population. By 1990 the total had reached 152.6 million (2.9%), the biggest five-year jump in the series: from 113.2 million in 1985 to 152.6 million in 1990.
Growth then accelerated again in the 2000s: 172.7 million in 2000, 221.7 million in 2010 and 243.7 million in 2015. The 2020 figure of 280.6 million equals 3.6% of the global population. In other words, roughly 96 people in every 100 still live in the country where they were born. Almost half of all migrants are women, which the UN Population Fund counts among the most significant changes in migration over the last half-century. Migration is a large flow in absolute terms and a small one in relative terms, which is why the destinations where it concentrates matter so much.
The United States, Germany and Saudi Arabia Lead the UN’s 2024 Count
The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) International Migrant Stock for 2024 puts the United States far ahead of any other destination with 52.4 million foreign-born residents, 15.3% of its population. Germany follows with 17.8 million (21.3%), then Saudi Arabia with 13.7 million (38.8%), France with 13.0 million (18.8%) and the United Kingdom with 11.8 million (17.1%). Spain (9.5 million), Canada (8.8 million), the United Arab Emirates (8.2 million), Russia (7.6 million) and Australia (7.1 million) complete a group of rich economies that together absorb a large slice of the world’s movers.
Shares tell a different story from totals. Canada (21.2%), Germany (21.3%) and Australia (25.8%) all have proportionally more immigrants than the United States, and in some small territories migrants are a majority: 62.2% in Macau and 54.4% in Andorra. At the other end, the UN lists Cuba, Madagascar and China as the countries with the lowest immigrant shares; China’s 1.6 million foreign-born residents amount to just 0.12% of its population.
Mexico–United States, the Busiest Corridor on Earth
When the World Bank’s Migration and Remittances Factbook 2016 ranked origin–destination pairs, Mexico to the United States came first, ahead of Russia–Ukraine, Bangladesh–India, Ukraine–Russia and Kazakhstan–Russia. The UN’s 2019 estimates counted 11.8 million Mexican-born people living abroad, and the United States outweighs the second destination, Canada, by a factor of more than 150 to one.
The corridor was built over a century. More than 1.3 million Mexicans moved north between the 1910s and the 1930s, many escaping the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution. During the Second World War Washington actively recruited Mexican farm labour through the Bracero Program (1942–1964), which issued about 4.6 million work contracts and laid down family networks that later migrants followed. Today about 90% of green cards issued to Mexican nationals come through family sponsorship, and in 2023 about 1.2 million Mexicans were waiting for an immigrant visa, more than any other nationality.
Money flows the other way. Mexico received about $34 billion in remittances in 2018 according to the World Bank, the fourth-highest total in the world. Most emigrants come from nine states, among them Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Oaxaca and Jalisco, and many source communities, mostly indigenous villages, depend on these transfers.
Gulf States Where Migrants Outnumber Citizens
The second great pattern of modern migration runs from South and Southeast Asia to the Arabian Peninsula. Oil wealth and construction booms created labour demand that small national populations could not meet, and the result is a group of countries where foreign-born residents form a majority. In the UN’s 2024 figures migrants make up 72.7% of Qatar’s population, 72.2% of the United Arab Emirates’, 68.1% of Kuwait’s and 52.7% of Bahrain’s. Saudi Arabia’s 13.7 million migrants are 38.8% of its residents.
These flows are heavily male: women are only 22.7% of Qatar’s migrants and 22.3% of Saudi Arabia’s, against roughly half in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. In Qatar, foreign workers made up around 95% of the labour force in 2025, most of them from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines. India–United Arab Emirates and India–Saudi Arabia were both among the World Bank’s 15 largest corridors in 2013.
Employment is governed by the kafala, or sponsorship, system, which ties a worker’s residency to a specific employer who must approve a change of job or permission to leave the country. Human rights organisations have long criticised it. Qatar announced a series of reforms between 2014 and 2021, including declaring the system abolished, but in their reports covering 2025 both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found that foreign workers there still faced widespread abuses, and Human Rights Watch said the reforms had had limited impact.
India, Mexico, China and the Largest Diasporas
On the sending side, the UN’s 2019 origin table puts India first with 17.5 million emigrants, followed by Mexico (11.8 million), China (10.7 million), Russia (10.5 million) and Syria (8.2 million). The IOM’s 2024 ranking of origin countries keeps India and Mexico in the top two, then Russia, China, Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ukraine, the Philippines and Afghanistan.
The destinations of each diaspora reflect history as much as economics. Indians are spread across the United States, the United Kingdom, the Gulf, Canada and older indenture-era communities in Fiji, Guyana and Mauritius. Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan appear in several of the largest corridors in both directions, between states that were all part of the Soviet Union until 1991. Filipino workers are concentrated in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Canada, the UAE and Hong Kong, plus Japan and Italy.
$125 Billion to India: Remittances as a Map of Migration
Remittances, the money migrants send to their families, are the clearest measure of what migration means to sending countries. In 2021 about $780 billion was sent to some 800 million people, more than three times the $200 billion of global foreign aid that year. India is the largest recipient by a wide margin: $125 billion in 2023, up from $69 billion in 2017.
The World Bank’s 2018 ranking shows how closely the remittance table mirrors the diaspora table: India ($80 billion), China ($67 billion), the Philippines ($34 billion), Mexico ($34 billion), France ($25 billion), Nigeria ($22 billion), Egypt ($20 billion), Pakistan ($20 billion), Bangladesh ($18 billion) and Vietnam ($14 billion). For smaller economies the share of GDP matters more than the total. Remittances equalled 9.1% of GDP in the Philippines in 2018 and 48% of GDP in Tajikistan in 2024, most of it earned by Tajik labourers in Russia. The United States has been the largest source of remittances every year since the early 1980s, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland next.
Refugee Flows from Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela
Forced migration accounts for a minority of migrants but has driven the sharpest recent changes. The Syrian civil war that began in 2011 produced 8.2 million Syrian emigrants by the UN’s 2019 count; Turkey still hosts up to 2.3 million registered Syrian refugees as of 2026, with Istanbul alone home to more than 400,000.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 set off what the UNHCR called Europe’s fastest-growing refugee crisis since the Second World War. By September 2025 the UNHCR recorded 5.7 million Ukrainian refugees worldwide, 90% of them in Europe, while the UN’s 2024 stock still counts 5.1 million foreign-born residents inside Ukraine itself.
Because Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 were barred from leaving under martial law, about 90% of those who fled were women and children. In the Americas the largest movement is from Venezuela: a July 2019 poll by Consultores 21 estimated that between 4.7 and 6 million Venezuelans had left the country, and by then the crisis was considered the second-worst in the world after Syria’s. Colombia, its neighbour, has received the largest number. The emigration of Venezuelans is the largest recorded refugee crisis in the Americas and, as with Syria, it has made a middle-income region a major host.
Taken together, these numbers describe a world in which a few rich economies and oil states attract workers, a few populous countries supply them, and wars periodically push millions across the nearest border. The country-by-country picture is set out in our ranking of the countries with the most immigrants, the hosts of forced migrants are compared in the countries with the most refugees, and the routes people take to reach them are traced in our guide to refugee routes around the world.