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.
replyThe Gulf states take in a lot of migrant workers, who have basically no labour rights there.
replyhttps://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"
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.
replyThe reason why pouring money into countries that source immigrants is a questionable solution is graft.
replyYes, pouring money may not be a very efficient solution and graft can certainly happen. For me it's a combination of how much graft do we allow if we take the long perspective and see it shrinking over time (maybe we dont allow any, cold turkey)? And what are ways we can help change the environments that may not be directly tied to money? From my perspective, we often need (and graft) money the most when we don't trust ourselves and others to help us. So are there ways we can help build deeper relationships so money is not the only focus or way people think they can get help?
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replyOr move back to your home country once you've gained a beneficial citizenship and can have foreign government benefits paid out every month while you don't even live in that country anymore.
replyPerhaps. I think it's more about the passport ranking so one can travel and also the salary bump. But even if more of the other government services, try living in a country where if you get into a serious car accident you have to pay cash at the ER before they treat you. Scrambling to find multiple thousands of dollars in cash at 3am sometimes. (This happened to my friend in Kenya)
replyIm not sure if I can blame people for wanting to have more financial or medical security.
Because we, correctly, assume that some countries are simply beyond saving. Throwing good money after bad.
replyWhy "correctly"? Who says that a country or a group of humans or even an individual human is beyond saving?
replyLess cynically, perhaps we correctly realize that some countries are beyond our saving by us throwing money at them.
replySaudi 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.
replyThese are expats, not immigrants. They aren't welcome to become citizens in Saudi Arabia.
replyI'm not entirely clear that the migration dataset actually distinguishes between those cases?
reply> Fascinating to see that MENA is a net positive on migration.
replyReally? it's a big economical hub now, the bulk of it migrate to a few countries, and in these countries just a few cities. It's a very different type of migration too.
https://www.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl2616/files/2018-07/M...
Isn't migration to MENA - specifically migration to North Africa mainly from Sub-Saharan part of Africa?
replyAs the article points out. The researcher’s site has an exploratory tool to view the data [1].
replyIf you pick 2023/2024 and the UK, you can see the disaster that is the Boris Wave.
replyThoughts and prayers friend.
replyThanks! We'll put that link in the toptext as well.
replyThat tool could be interesting if there was a way to stop the rendered globe from spinning. As is, it is unusable
replySelect the more options pulldown menu, click on projection, select ‘natural Earth’, no spinning.
replyand it accurately displays the Earth (flat) globecels btfo
replyif you click and hold on a country, it stops spinning :)
replyFurther down the page, there's a link to an article from a couple of years ago, titled "Migration isn’t increasing".
replySo which is it?
There's a quote from one of the study authors:
reply "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."
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
replyOnly 1.7m people left North America in 2023 (4.4m arrivals). Would be interesting to compare to figures from 2025.
replyUS had net negative migration in 2025 for the first time in decades:
replyhttps://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/14/immigra...
That’s great, hopefully this accelerates. Too much migration just drives up living costs, stresses medical capacity, and drives wages down for many.
reply> interesting
replyYou have a funny way of spelling "sad" my friend.
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) ?
replyThese classifications should be geographic and could even racial, but it seems this new classification (MENAP) seems more "religious"
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.
replyPedantic response that makes light of a real issue. In case you haven't noticed, not every "western" country is actually in the western hemisphere.
replyIn 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.
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replyBangladesh is Muslim though
replyCan someone explain the graphic?
replyThe graphic seems vague and not particularly revealing.
replyI was trying to figure out the inflow and outflow. It looks bidirectional.
replyEurope and Central Asia added people. So did North America.
replyMiddle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan was flat.
Other regions lost people.
Left to Right.
replyLeaving, Arriving.
In that case the observation is that North America is getting a more diverse set of immigrants
replyIs that not happening? I think up till 2026, it was diverse. The diagram doesn't seem incorrect.
replyI don’t think I was saying the diagram was incorrect
reply*data doesn't go back beyond 2000, safe to ignore
reply???
replyData quality issues usually get worse the further back you go.
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.
replyInteresting how South America, with several countries made up majorly of immigrants, receives almost no new migrants now.
replyMeanwhile the middle-east population is fleeing and being replaced with asians?
"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?
reply> Meanwhile the middle-east population is fleeing and being replaced with asians?
replyPersians brought Hinduism to India, so maybe they're returning the favour
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.
replyIndians called it hinduism, but it came from iran.
replyNone 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.
replyAt least in Argentina that is because it's not the land of opportunities it used to be in the late 19th/early 20th century.
replyInternal migration has mostly saturated capacity all accross the region in South America
replyIt'll take a while until anyone relaxes
Where are the maps?
replyThat’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.
replyHere's the actual graph/data in question. The article is a dense academic snooooooozefest:
replyhttps://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.
Options -> change projection helps a little bit.
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replyThe 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.
replyI 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
reply> 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.
replyI 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.
You posted a highly inflammatory claim without evidence. We have plenty of documentation of the US displacing people. Happy to read about Russia doing the same if you post it.
replyPeople 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.
replyhttps://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/american-...
> This outflow can influence this data
replyInfluence how? Migrations from wealthy to poor regions are still migrations, no?
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.
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