Roughly 304 million people, close to 3.7 percent of humanity, currently live in a country other than the one where they were born, according to the United Nations International Migrant Stock 2024 dataset, which tracks migration across 233 countries and areas from 1990 through 2024. That figure has more than doubled since 1990, when the global number of international migrants stood closer to 153 million, but it still means the vast majority of the world’s population, more than 96 percent, lives in their country of birth.
Understanding where the remaining migrant population comes from and where it settles requires separating two concepts that get routinely conflated in casual conversation: birthplace and citizenship.
What Does Country of Birth Tell Us About the World Population?
Country of birth is a fixed, unchangeable demographic fact recorded at the moment someone is born; it never changes over a person’s lifetime regardless of where they later move, which citizenship they acquire, or how long they live abroad. Citizenship and nationality, by contrast, are legal statuses that can change through naturalization, descent, marriage, or birthright provisions, and a person can hold citizenship in a country entirely different from where they were born, or hold citizenship in their country of birth despite having lived elsewhere for decades.
This distinction matters enormously for demographic accuracy, because a “foreign-born” population figure and a “foreign citizen” population figure for the same country can differ by millions of people, particularly in countries with generous naturalization pathways.
How Many People Live Outside Their Country of Birth?
Growth in Global International Migrant Stock, 1990 to 2024
| Year | International Migrants (approx.) | Share of World Population |
|---|---|---|
| 1990 | 153 million | 2.9% |
| 2000 | 173 million | 2.8% |
| 2010 | 221 million | 3.2% |
| 2019 | 272 million | 3.5% |
| 2020 | 281 million | 3.6% |
| 2024 | 304 million | approximately 3.7% |
Source: United Nations Population Division, International Migrant Stock 2024, and preceding editions (2019, 2020). Figures are estimates of stock, meaning the total number of people currently residing outside their country of birth, not annual flows.
The near doubling of the global migrant stock between 1990 and 2024, from 153 million to 304 million, has consistently outpaced growth in the world’s total population over the same period, meaning the migrant share of humanity has been rising steadily rather than merely tracking overall population growth.
The World’s Largest Foreign-Born Populations
The United States has been the world’s leading migration destination by absolute numbers continuously since 1970, according to the International Organization for Migration’s World Migration Report 2022, and that position has only strengthened over time. The foreign-born population of the United States grew more than fourfold between 1970 and 2020, from fewer than 12 million to more than 50 million people, driven primarily by migration from Mexico, India, China, the Philippines, and El Salvador.
Top Destination Countries by Foreign-Born Population, 2020 (Most Recent Detailed Country-Level Breakdown)
| Rank | Country | Foreign-Born Population |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | approximately 50.6 million |
| 2 | Germany | approximately 15.8 million |
| 3 | Saudi Arabia | approximately 13.5 million |
| 4 | Russia | approximately 11.6 million |
| 5 | United Kingdom | approximately 9.4 million |
Source: UN DESA International Migration 2020 Highlights, as compiled by Statista; more recent aggregate totals come from the UN’s 2024 revision, but detailed country rankings are most fully documented for the 2020 dataset.
Two-thirds of all international migrants globally live in just 20 countries, a level of concentration that has held roughly steady across successive UN migration reports even as the total number of migrants worldwide has grown.
Germany’s foreign-born population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2020, from about 8.9 million to 16 million, with the largest source countries being Poland, Turkey, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Syria, the last reflecting the large refugee inflows following the Syrian civil war.
Saudi Arabia’s migrant population is overwhelmingly composed of labor migrants from South and Southeast Asia, with India, Indonesia, and Pakistan supplying the largest shares, reflecting the kingdom’s reliance on foreign labor across its construction, domestic service, and oil sectors.
The World’s Largest Migrant Origin Populations
India holds the distinction of being the single largest country of origin for international migrants worldwide, with approximately 18 million India-born people living outside the country as of the most recent detailed UN accounting, ahead of Mexico at roughly 11.2 million and Russia at approximately 10.8 million.
China follows closely, with an estimated 10.5 million people born there now living abroad, and Syria, at roughly 8.5 million people living outside the country, reflects the scale of displacement caused by its prolonged civil conflict rather than the voluntary economic migration that characterizes most of the other top origin countries.
Top Origin Countries for International Migrants (Most Recent Detailed Data)
| Rank | Country of Birth | Population Living Abroad |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | India | approximately 18 million |
| 2 | Mexico | approximately 11.2 million |
| 3 | Russia | approximately 10.8 million |
| 4 | China | approximately 10.5 million |
| 5 | Syria | approximately 8.5 million |
Source: UN DESA and IOM compilations, most recently detailed for 2020; figures continue to rise modestly in the 2024 revision for most origin countries except where conflict-driven displacement has since shifted patterns.
Major Origin and Destination Corridors
Individual country totals only partially capture the geography of global migration; specific bilateral corridors, pairs of origin and destination countries connected by especially large migrant flows, reveal more about the underlying drivers. The Mexico-to-United States corridor remains the single largest migration corridor in the world by volume, a pattern the UN has documented consistently across multiple editions of its migration reporting and one rooted in decades of labor demand, family networks, and geographic proximity.
The India-to-Gulf states corridor, spanning Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries, represents another exceptionally large flow, driven almost entirely by labor migration rather than permanent settlement, since most Gulf states offer limited pathways to long-term residency or citizenship for migrant workers.
Within Europe, corridors from Poland, Turkey, and more recently Syria and Ukraine into Germany reflect a mix of historical labor migration agreements, European Union free movement provisions, and conflict-driven displacement.
How Country of Birth Varies by Age and Sex
Migrant populations are not a demographic cross-section of either their origin or destination countries; they skew heavily toward working ages, because the dominant driver of migration worldwide remains employment. Migrants are disproportionately concentrated in the 20-to-64 age range relative to the general population of both their home and host countries, reflecting the reality that migration, whether for economic opportunity, family reunification following an initial economic migrant, or education, is most commonly undertaken by adults of working age rather than children or older adults.
Sex composition of migrant populations varies enormously by corridor and is one of the clearest signals of what is driving a particular flow. Labor migration corridors into the Gulf states are overwhelmingly male, since the construction, domestic service, and manual labor sectors that draw the largest numbers of migrant workers there recruit predominantly men, while certain care-work and domestic labor migration corridors, such as flows from the Philippines and Indonesia into parts of Asia and the Middle East, skew heavily female. Family reunification migration, by contrast, tends to be more balanced by sex, since it follows an initial migrant of either sex and subsequently brings spouses and children of both sexes.
Why People Live Outside Their Birth Country
Migration drivers fall broadly into voluntary and forced categories, though real-world cases often blend elements of both. Employment and economic opportunity remain the dominant drivers of voluntary migration worldwide, accounting for the large labor corridors into the Gulf states, Western Europe, and North America.
Family reunification represents a substantial secondary driver, as migrants who have established residency in a destination country subsequently sponsor spouses, children, and sometimes parents to join them.
Education draws a smaller but demographically distinct population, concentrated in specific age bands and often temporary in nature, though a meaningful share of international students subsequently transition to longer-term residency in their host country.
Forced migration, driven by conflict, persecution, and increasingly by disaster and environmental pressure, accounts for a smaller absolute share of total global migrant stock than economic migration, but it is responsible for some of the most dramatic and rapid population shifts recorded in recent migration data, as seen in Syria’s migrant outflow following its civil war and more recent large-scale displacement from Ukraine and Venezuela.
How Migration Has Changed Over Time
The clearest long-term trend in the international migrant stock data is one of sustained growth that has consistently outpaced global population growth: the migrant share of the world’s population rose from 2.9 percent in 1990 to approximately 3.7 percent in 2024.
Regional destination patterns have also shifted meaningfully over this period. Asia recorded the fastest growth in migrant hosting between 2000 and 2013, adding roughly 20 million migrants in just over a decade, driven primarily by labor demand in the oil-producing states of Western Asia and in rapidly growing Southeast Asian economies such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Europe and Northern America, however, have remained the two largest migrant-hosting regions overall across the full 1990-to-2024 period tracked by the UN dataset.
Country of Birth Versus Citizenship
This distinction deserves explicit treatment because the two measures answer genuinely different questions and are frequently, incorrectly, used interchangeably in casual reporting. Country of birth answers “where was this person born,” a fact fixed at birth. Citizenship answers “which country’s legal nationality does this person currently hold,” a status that can and does change over a lifetime through naturalization, and one that is entirely disconnected from birthplace for the large and growing population of naturalized citizens worldwide.
A country with a very open naturalization system, such as the United States or Canada, will show a substantially smaller “foreign citizen” population than “foreign-born” population, because a large share of its foreign-born residents have since naturalized.
Countries with restrictive naturalization systems, common across much of the Gulf region, show the opposite pattern: their foreign-born and foreign-citizen populations remain nearly identical because migrant workers rarely gain a pathway to citizenship regardless of how many years they reside in the country.
Conclusion
The dominant story in global country-of-birth data is not any single dramatic migration event but a slow, sustained, decades-long climb: the share of humanity living outside its country of birth has risen from 2.9 percent in 1990 to roughly 3.7 percent in 2024, even as the concentration of that migration into a relatively small number of destination countries, just 20 nations host two-thirds of the total, has remained remarkably stable.
India’s position as the world’s largest origin country and the United States’ position as its largest destination have both held for decades, evidence that the underlying structural drivers of global migration, labor demand, family networks, and geographic and historical ties, change far more slowly than headlines about any single year’s migration numbers might suggest.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What country has the most immigrants?
The United States hosts the largest foreign-born population in the world, at approximately 50.6 million people as of 2020, equal to roughly 18 to 19 percent of the entire global migrant stock, a position it has held continuously since 1970.
2. Which country has the most people living abroad?
India has the largest diaspora by country of birth, with approximately 18 million India-born people living outside the country, more than any other single origin country.
3. What is the difference between foreign-born and foreign citizen?
Foreign-born refers to a person’s birthplace, which never changes. Foreign citizen refers to current legal nationality, which can change through naturalization. A country with high naturalization rates, like the United States, has a foreign-citizen population smaller than its foreign-born population; a country with low naturalization access, like most Gulf states, has the two figures nearly matching.
4. How many people live outside their birth country?
Approximately 304 million people globally, or about 3.7 percent of the world’s population, lived outside their country of birth as of the UN’s 2024 estimate, up from roughly 153 million, or 2.9 percent, in 1990.
5. What is the largest migration corridor in the world?
The Mexico-to-United States corridor is widely documented as the single largest bilateral migration corridor globally by volume, though the India-to-Gulf states corridor represents an equally significant flow for labor migration specifically.
6. Why do so many migrants go to Gulf states?
Gulf Cooperation Council countries, especially Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, rely heavily on foreign labor for construction, domestic service, and other sectors, drawing extremely large numbers of migrant workers, predominantly from India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, though these countries generally offer limited or no pathway to permanent residency or citizenship.
7. What share of migrants are forced to leave versus choosing to migrate?
Most global migration is voluntary and economically driven, but forced migration due to conflict and persecution accounts for some of the fastest and most concentrated population shifts in recent data, as seen with Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela.
8. Is migration increasing faster than population growth?
Yes. The global migrant stock grew from 2.9 percent of world population in 1990 to approximately 3.7 percent in 2024, meaning international migration has consistently outpaced overall population growth over this period.
9. How many countries host most of the world’s migrants?
Roughly two-thirds of all international migrants live in just 20 countries, a concentration that has remained fairly stable across successive UN migration reports despite substantial growth in the total number of migrants worldwide.
10. Does country of birth data include refugees?
Yes, refugees and other forcibly displaced people are generally included in UN international migrant stock figures when they are residing outside their country of birth, though the UN also publishes separate, more detailed refugee-specific statistics through UNHCR that track displacement status in addition to birthplace.
Sources
- United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, International Migrant Stock 2024
- United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Migration 2020 Highlights
- United Nations, International Migrant Stock 2019 press release
- International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2022
- United Nations Global Migration Database, Population Division
