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Opinion

To Understand
Global Migration,
You Have to
See It First

New estimates based on
location data from Meta
reveal a picture of
humanity in motion.

By Kathleen Kingsbury

Opinion Editor

April 17, 2025

The human species is on the move. Last year there were more people living outside of their birth countries than at any other time in modern history, according to the United Nations. It’s a sea change that will reshape politics, economics and civil societies for generations.

It’s no coincidence that 2024 was also a year of defeat for incumbent political parties, as leader after leader was voted out of power in democracies at the center of the human storm.

This great global migration is a staggeringly complex phenomenon with countless causes and implications. Yet perhaps no other issue is as pressing and as little understood by the average citizen and policymaker alike. Government records differ wildly from country to country, surges in illegal immigration are often only evident in retrospect and information isn’t collected at all in some corners of the world. As is the case with so many other things, we don’t even know what we don’t know.

Until now. In the maps below, Times Opinion can provide the clearest picture to date of how people move across the globe: a record of permanent migration to and from 181 countries based on a single, consistent source of information, for every month from the beginning of 2019 through the end of 2022. These estimates are drawn not from government records but from the location data of three billion anonymized Facebook users all over the world.

The analysis — the result of new research published on Wednesday from Meta, the University of Hong Kong and Harvard University — reveals migration’s true global sweep. And yes, it excludes business travelers and tourists: Only people who remain in their destination country for more than a year are counted as migrants here.

The data comes with some limitations. Migration to and from certain countries that have banned or restricted the use of Facebook, including China, Iran and Cuba, is not included in this data set, and it’s impossible to know each migrant’s legal status. Nevertheless, this is the first time that estimates of global migration flows have been made publicly available at this scale. The researchers found that from 2019 to 2022, an annual average of 30 million people — approximately one-third of a percent of the world’s population — migrated each year.

If you would like to see the data behind this analysis for yourself, we made an interactive tool that you can use to explore the full data set.

Instead of arguing over immigration with shocking anecdotes and exceptional incidents, our debates should start with a resource like this one — quality information, gathered with a consistent procedure across the world — a source that allows us to take a step back and see the big picture.

Explore the full interactive map

Immigration to the United
States is exceptional

The United States was the most popular destination for migrants in the world, according to the analysis. In 2022, a staggering 4.1 million people immigrated to the country. Meanwhile, 840,000 people chose to emigrate, making the nation the largest overall recipient of people in the world, with a net increase of over 3.2 million people.

No other country came close.

Since its founding, the United States has been a beacon for immigrants seeking refuge from persecution, war and poverty, and the country’s prosperity and growth have always been powered by the energy these newcomers bring. That promise of opportunity, as the data shows, places the United States far ahead of the rest of the world as a desired destination.

After the initial shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic wore off, the biggest shift in global migration was the redoubling of movement from Latin America to the United States. In 2022, these flows formed the largest migration corridor in the world.

Violence and political and economic instability back home, coupled with strong demand for labor in the United States, compelled millions to make the journey, enduring terrible conditions over many borders along the way. (In this data, Latin Americans passing through Mexico en route to the United States are not counted as Mexican migrants.)

Latin America accounted for almost two-thirds of U.S. immigration in 2022. The rest came from all across the world.

India — the third-largest source of immigrants to the United States in 2022, according to the Meta data — sent more than a quarter-million people that year.

Other big sources include Asian countries, such as Japan, the Philippines and South Korea …

… as well as European countries, like Britain, Germany and Spain.

Sudden migration is an adaptation
to intolerable conditions

Rapid shifts in migration are nearly always driven by an enormous shock, such as war, political upheaval, natural disaster or economic collapse. There is reason to believe such shocks will become more frequent as the world faces more geopolitical instability and ever-increasing climate risk.

A clear example is Ukraine, where, despite the simmering war in the Donbas region, there were fewer than 80,000 more emigrants than immigrants in 2019.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukrainians fled to countries all over the world, as some 2.4 million people left the nation in 2022.

But the invasion also had an impact on Russia. In 2019, before the war and the pandemic, migration here was relatively balanced.

The year Russia invaded Ukraine, nearly a million people left Russia, abandoning it for places with cultural ties, such as Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Israel (for departing Russian Jews).

In Myanmar, a military coup in 2021 kicked off a slowly escalating civil war. Nearly a million people fled the following year, mainly to Thailand and Malaysia. This estimate may be low because the data from Meta does not include migrants crossing Myanmar’s northeast border into China.

In Afghanistan, as the Taliban swept toward the capital in the summer of 2021, the United States scrambled to withdraw troops. In this data, we can see departures from Afghanistan spike in September, October and November of that year, with the largest numbers leaving for Pakistan, the United States and Turkey.

Most migration is regular and legal

The debate around global migration is fueled by stories of treacherous hikes, death and misery at sea and invasion at the border. But the majority of immigrants will likely arrive at a port of entry, luggage in tow, with a valid visa or work permit. Most migration is orderly.

The reason is quite simple: People tend to migrate to places where they are welcome. To immigrate to another country is already hard and expensive. An illegal crossing is many times harder and more expensive. In most corners of the world, the majority of people do not have the resources or appetite to endure such an ordeal.

As Diego Acosta Arcarazo, a professor of European and migration law at the University of Bristol, put it, “When you create legal channels for people to move, people use those legal channels.”

One of the most famous legal frameworks for immigration is the right of free movement within the European Union, which allows E.U. citizens to live, work, study and retire in any member nation. Around 1.3 million people migrated within the region in 2022.

Another is in South America, where citizens in member countries of the Mercosur trade bloc (in 2022, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) have free movement.

Africa has the fastest-growing population in the world, and the African Union has upheld the free movement of people within the continent as a long-term goal since the early 1990s.

However, progress has been halting, with the broad rollout of an African Union passport derailed by the pandemic and three West African countries withdrawing last year from a regional group of countries that had allowed free trade and free movement.

Higher wages in foreign lands are a primary driver behind orderly migration flows.

Look at the United Arab Emirates, home of Dubai and Abu Dhabi and an economic powerhouse of the Middle East. It is also a country that is profoundly reliant on foreign labor.

There are roughly one million Emirati citizens, yet according to the data from Meta, the country received more than 2.1 million immigrants in 2022, making this tiny nation the third-largest recipient of migrants in the world.

Many come from South Asia, which has been a source of labor for the Gulf States since the 1970s. Most live there on a semi-permanent basis, with few pathways to citizenship, often under severe working conditions.

The country is also a growing destination for highly skilled workers from all over the global south.

The Philippines, by contrast, has an economy that relies heavily on sending workers abroad.

What began as a short-term solution 50 years ago, when the country designed an economic program to send workers to the Gulf, has now morphed into a permanent feature of the economy.

Filipinos, particularly Filipina women, are now a major source of domestic labor for countries in the West.

One-tenth of the citizens of the Philippines live abroad, and 9 percent of the country’s gross domestic product comes from remittances — money sent home from workers overseas. These funds are essential for developing countries, which receive more from remittances than foreign direct investment and aid combined.

Migration is a ladder

Migration does not flow strictly from poor to rich countries. To leave for another country, particularly a distant one, requires a considerable amount of money, social capital and time — resources that the world’s very poor don’t have.

This is why migration often occurs in steps on an economic ladder: People from less affluent countries tend to go to slightly more affluent countries, and residents of those countries will then go to wealthy countries.

Chile demonstrates this in vivid detail.

People from poorer nearby countries, such as Ecuador and Venezuela, can be seen moving to Chile in the Meta data …

… while Chileans migrate in smaller numbers to countries in Western Europe and North America.

In the Middle East, Turkey serves as an important gateway between the East and the West.

It is a net recipient of people from the Middle East and Africa …

… and a source of migrants to European countries, particularly Germany, France and the Netherlands.

Migration patterns are
rooted in colonial history

During the colonial age, Western European empires, like Britain, Portugal and France, sent thousands abroad to establish footholds for conquest and industry, often bringing workers held in slavery from Africa to new settlements in the Americas in an act of forced migration. Some of the colonized lands, including India, Brazil and Nigeria, are now said to belong to the global south.

Over the past century, the overall direction of that human flow has reversed, with people from former colonies moving to Western countries in search of better opportunities. While most migration within the global south is regional, the countries that buck that trend with strong links across oceans usually have lingering colonial ties of language and culture, as well as easier access to visas.

Like Britain, where a large portion of its 1.3 million immigrants in 2022 came from former colonies such as India, Nigeria and Hong Kong.

And Portugal, where many of the largest inflows were from former colonies like Brazil, Angola and Cabo Verde.

In France, aside from refugees from the war in Ukraine, the largest inflows in 2022 were from the former colonies of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Spain struggled with a dwindling work force and low levels of economic growth. The country developed a policy to attract workers from Latin America to bolster its tourism, construction and agricultural business sectors.

The gamble paid off. The Spanish economy grew at more than triple the eurozone average last year.

Migration has two faces

Every immigrant to a country is also an emigrant from somewhere. When movement between countries is relatively open, people who migrate often eventually choose to return home. But in government records, movement in one direction across a border is often treated very differently from travel the other way.

At the U.S. Southern border, for example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection records and reports entries into the United States — both at legal ports of entry and border patrol encounters in the desert wilderness — but does not similarly track people who choose to walk across the border into Mexico.

This new data from Meta tracks migration in a uniform way regardless of direction, and what it shows us is that these reverse flows are not small.

The cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are usually powerful magnets for global migration. But in 2020, with the Covid pandemic raging, the data shows us that more people left the United Arab Emirates than arrived between April and November of that year, returning to their homes in places like India, Pakistan and the Philippines.

A similar inversion in flows can be seen in Japan, which placed strict limitations on border entries during most of 2020 and 2021 …

… and between the United States and Latin America. With jobs evaporating as lockdowns shut down American cities, the normal flows came into a rough balance, before reversing in May, June and July of 2020. (They rebounded strongly before the end of the year.) The data from Meta allows us to see these fluctuations clearly for the first time.

Just last week, the Trump administration used a new tactic to encourage some people who were allowed into the country during President Joe Biden’s term in office to make this reverse migration and “self-deport”: effectively canceling the Social Security numbers migrants had received from the federal government by placing them in Social Security’s “death master file.”

Research suggests that tightening border controls can increase permanent immigration because it disrupts the natural circular pattern of human migration by locking people onto one side of the border.

As these maps demonstrate, if we look closely enough, so many of our assumptions about the grand shape of global migration are incomplete. No doubt there is something uncomfortable about the fact that a handful of tech companies — Meta, Google and TikTok — may have more data about human migration than the United Nations or any individual government. Yet, if these companies are going to continue to collect this data, then at the very least the public should also benefit from it. Meta has taken a laudable step with this initial public release, and we should expect researchers to build on it.

When disruption hits a country — an economic crash or boom, a civil war, a contagious virus, a natural disaster amplified by climate change — a natural response is migration. Our moment demands better tools to help us more clearly see these ripples in the currents of humanity.

The choice isn’t simply between open and closed borders, asylum and amnesty or disappearances and deportations. This picture of migration is one in which all nations, rich and poor, participate in a great network of human movement, linked by cultural, economic, historical and family ties, and put into constant motion by fears and dreams, one life at a time.

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Curious to learn more? Explore the data yourself.

Try the interactive map

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Kathleen Kingsbury is the Opinion editor of The New York Times, overseeing the editorial board and the Opinion section. Previously she was the deputy editorial page editor. She joined The Times in 2017 from The Boston Globe, where she served as managing editor for digital. She received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing. @katiekings

Methodology

The estimates come from the Social Capital Research Team at Meta and are based on data from three billion anonymized active Facebook users. They do not include data from other Meta products like Instagram or Whatsapp.

The data includes estimates aggregated at the country level for 181 countries, which account for 79 percent of the global population. There are some countries not included in the estimates, such as China, Cuba and Iran.

A person is considered to have migrated if he or she resided in a country for one year, then migrated to another country for another year, allowing for 60 days of travel. Facebook usage is not randomly distributed, so estimates are reweighted with per-capita national income and Facebook penetration rates.

The researchers also added noise to these statistics to ensure privacy in country pairs with a small number of migrants. The amount of noise added to each observation was small; in 95 percent of cases, the estimated level of migration in a month changed by fewer than seven people.

Estimates have been lightly rounded. Summed totals may be slightly different from the raw data set.

Produced by Jeremy Ashkenas, Quoctrung Bui, Sara Chodosh, Aileen Clarke, Nathan Gordon and Jessia Ma. Additional reporting by Spencer Cohen.

Produced by Jeremy Ashkenas, Quoctrung Bui, Sara Chodosh, Aileen Clarke, Nathan Gordon and Jessia Ma.

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