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.

The Gulf states take in a lot of migrant workers, who have basically no labour rights there.

https://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.

The reason why pouring money into countries that source immigrants is a questionable solution is graft.

Yes, 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?

Perhaps. 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)

Im not sure if I can blame people for wanting to have more financial or medical security.

Why "correctly"? Who says that a country or a group of humans or even an individual human is beyond saving?

Less cynically, perhaps we correctly realize that some countries are beyond our saving by us throwing money at them.

Saudi 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.

These are expats, not immigrants. They aren't welcome to become citizens in Saudi Arabia.

I'm not entirely clear that the migration dataset actually distinguishes between those cases?

> Fascinating to see that MENA is a net positive on migration.

Really? 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?

As the article points out. The researcher’s site has an exploratory tool to view the data [1].

[1] https://www.socsc.hku.hk/rhps/global-migration/

If you pick 2023/2024 and the UK, you can see the disaster that is the Boris Wave.

Thoughts and prayers friend.

Thanks! We'll put that link in the toptext as well.

That tool could be interesting if there was a way to stop the rendered globe from spinning. As is, it is unusable

Select the more options pulldown menu, click on projection, select ‘natural Earth’, no spinning.

and it accurately displays the Earth (flat) globecels btfo

if you click and hold on a country, it stops spinning :)

Further down the page, there's a link to an article from a couple of years ago, titled "Migration isn’t increasing".

So which is it?

There's a quote from one of the study authors:

  "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."

So if I'm following correctly, when you look at coarse data, you miss a lot of the smaller-scale migration, and that small-scale migration pushes the totals up a lot?

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

Only 1.7m people left North America in 2023 (4.4m arrivals). Would be interesting to compare to figures from 2025.

US had net negative migration in 2025 for the first time in decades:

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/14/immigra...

> interesting

You 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) ?

These 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.

In 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.

Bangladesh is Muslim though

Can someone explain the graphic?

The graphic seems vague and not particularly revealing.

I was trying to figure out the inflow and outflow. It looks bidirectional.

Europe and Central Asia added people. So did North America.

Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan was flat.

Other regions lost people.

Left to Right.

Leaving, Arriving.

In that case the observation is that North America is getting a more diverse set of immigrants

Is that not happening? I think up till 2026, it was diverse. The diagram doesn't seem incorrect.

I don’t think I was saying the diagram was incorrect

*data doesn't go back beyond 2000, safe to ignore

???

Data 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.

"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?

> Meanwhile the middle-east population is fleeing and being replaced with asians?

Persians 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.

Indians called it hinduism, but it came from iran.

None 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.

At least in Argentina that is because it's not the land of opportunities it used to be in the late 19th/early 20th century.

Internal migration has mostly saturated capacity all accross the region in South America

It'll take a while until anyone relaxes

Where are the maps?

That’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.

Options -> change projection helps a little bit.

The 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.

I 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

> 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.

I 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.

People 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.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/american-...

> This outflow can influence this data

Influence 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.