Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 14th of October 2017 to The Sounding Line.

Ever wonder who is immigrating from which countries and to where? Today’s interactive ‘Map of the Day’ shows you exactly that. From Metrocosm’s Max Galka comes the following interactive chart of global migration. As Metrocosm notes:

“This map shows the estimated net immigration (inflows minus outflows) by origin and destination country between 2010 and 2015.”

“Blue circles = positive net migration (more inflows). Red circles = negative net migration (more outflows). Each yellow dot represents 1,000 people.”

“Hover over a circle to see that country’s total net migration between 2010 and 2015. Click a circle (or tap the circle twice on mobile) to view only the migration flows in and out of that country.”

If you have trouble viewing the map click here

Clicking on the various countries reveals a few interesting trends. There is only a small collection of countries which are net receivers of immigrants from nearly every other county on Earth, with few or no exceptions. These countries are the US, Canada, Australia, Norway, Sweden, and to a lesser degree the UK. It should come as little surprise that there are heated debates in these countries about this very subject. More so than elsewhere, these countries appear to be ‘universal receivers’ of immigrants. Beyond that, South Africa appears to be a major recipient of migration from the rest of Africa and Europe. Not too surprisingly, Syria, Pakistan, India, and China are the largest source of migrants in the world. Somewhat more surprising, both Iraq and Afghanistan are net receivers of immigrants with Iraq receiving large inflows from Syria and Jordan and Afghanistan receiving large inflows from Pakistan.

As for exactly what defines a immigrant for this dataset:

“The data for this map comes from the UN Population Division’s estimates for Total Migrant Stock — the number of global migrants, broken down by country of residence and country of origin. The numbers are not fully consistent. In some cases, they represent foreign citizens and in others they represent foreign born. See the dataset itself for the full set of footnotes”

Although not stated explicitly, I’ll assume that this data excludes undocumented/illegal immigration, so keep that in mind.

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