What is Migration?

Introduction to Migration

Human migration is an age-old phenomenon that stretches back to the earliest periods of human history. Migration is the movement of persons away from their place of usual residence, either across an international border or within a State In the modern era, emigration and immigration continue to provide States, societies and migrants with many opportunities. At the same time, migration has emerged in the last few years as a critical political and policy challenge in matters such as integration, displacement, safe migration and border management. In most discussions on migration, the starting point is usually numbers. Understanding changes in scale, emerging trends and shifting demographics related to global social and economic transformations, such as migration, help us make sense of the changing world we live in and plan for the future. The current global estimate is that there were around 281 million international migrants in the world in 2020, which equates to 3.6 per cent of the global population. A first important point to note is that this is a very small minority of the world’s population, meaning that staying within one’s country of birth overwhelmingly remains the norm. The great majority of people do not migrate across borders; much larger numbers migrate within countries (an estimated 740 million internal migrants in 2009). That said, the increase in international migrants has been evident over time – both numerically and proportionally – and at a slightly faster rate than previously anticipated.

International migration and long-term population trends

In some parts of the world, international migration has become a major component of population change. For high-income countries between 2000 and 2020, the contribution of international migration to population growth (net inflow of 80.5 million) exceeded the balance of births over deaths (66.2 million). Over the next few decades, migration will be the sole driver of population growth in high-income countries. By contrast, for the foreseeable future, population increase in low-income and lower-middle-income countries will continue to be driven by an excess of births over deaths. Between 2010 and 2021, 40 countries or areas experienced a net inflow of more than 200,000 migrants each; in 17 of them, the net inflow over this period exceeded 1 million people. For several of the top receiving countries, including Jordan, Lebanon and Türkiye, high levels of immigration in this period were driven mostly by refugee movements, in particular from the Syrian Arab Republic. For 10 countries, the estimated net outflow of migrants exceeded 1 million over the period from 2010 through 2021. In many of these countries, the outflows were due to temporary labour movements, such as for Pakistan (net flow of −16.5 million), India (−3.5 million), Bangladesh (−2.9 million), Nepal (−1.6 million) and Sri Lanka (−1.0 million). In other countries, including the Syrian Arab Republic (−4.6 million), the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (−4.8 million) and Myanmar (−1.0 million), insecurity and conflict drove the outflow of migrants over this period.

Source: Abridged extract of the United Nations World Population Prospects 2022 (UN DESA, 2022a)

— Excerpt from WMR 2024, Ch.2