Why migration tells the real story of human freedom
Our resident Stats Guy digs through the latest UN data on the world’s population.
This week I’ve been beside myself with joy because one of my favourite global datasets was finally updated.
The UN Population Division finally released its 2024 international migrant stock data.
I will milk this dataset for future columns, but today we simply look at the top-level distribution of migrants around the world and philosophise about freedom.
We start with a simple question about migrants to, and migrants from, Australia.
We have the 9th largest migrant cohort of all countries, despite only being the 54th largest country in terms of population.
More than eight million Australian residents were born overseas. This means over 30 per cent of residents in Australia are first generation migrants.
Very few sizeable countries have a similarly high, or higher, share of its population born overseas (dozens of small island nations technically have migrant populations of over 50 per cent).
Considering, how often we talk about migrants in Australia, these figures were probably not a surprise to you. Let’s play a little guessing game. How many Australian-born people live outside of Australia?
The correct answer is 431,000. For every Australian that we send to London, New York or Singapore we compensate by taking in 19 migrants.
The closest opposite of Australia in this respect is Nicaragua which loses 21 locally born people for every migrant it takes in.
Migration-induced population growth tends to be an easier problem to handle than migration-induced population loss. That’s especially the case if you are an island nation with easily to control borders.
This leads us to the question of who the top immigration and emigration nations are.
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The most popular migration destination is easy to guess. The US is the global economic superpower par excellence and attracts orders of magnitude more migrants than any other country – over 52 million of its 345 million residents were born abroad.
But would you have guessed the countries with the second and third largest migrant populations? That’s Germany (17 million migrants) and Saudi Arabia (14 million migrants).
Don’t be confused by Russia’s strong migrant cohort (eight million) as this is largely comprised by older people born in former Soviet satellite states who moved to what today is called Russia.
Within the EU three factors drove up migrant stock in recent years – conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and Ukraine led to an increase in asylum seekers.
Open borders within Europe allowed for a fluent population exchange (and cross marriages) between member countries.
Growing labour market needs in Germany, the UK, Italy, and Spain attracted highly skilled and low-skilled workers from poorer countries.
According to my beloved UN data, the world counted 304 million international migrants in 2024 – just 3.7 per cent of the global population.
Put differently, 96.3 per cent of us live in the country they were born in. While the number of migrants has doubled since 1990, the share of the global population that are migrants remained stable.
Despite frequent headlines about refugees and global wars, the vast majority of these migrants moved by choice, not compulsion. Only around 17 per cent (roughly one in six) were forcibly displaced by war, violence or persecution. The rest migrated voluntarily, often seeking better work, education, or family opportunities.
International migration remains a regional affair. About half (45 per cent) of all international migrants stayed within their region of origin.
In Europe and Oceania, more than 70 per cent of migrants moved between neighbouring countries, typically chasing economic or lifestyle improvements.
Our Kiwi cousins moving to Australia whenever their unemployment rate is higher than the Australian one is a great example for this interregional migration phenomenon – migrants are mostly pragmatic in their choices.
Even in the poorest regions, like Sub-Saharan Africa, 64 per cent stayed within the region.
Where people did migrate longer distances – such as from Latin America to North America or from Central Asia to Western Asia – most were still driven by opportunity rather than crisis.
Migration, it turns out, remains largely a story of human ambition and freedom, not human tragedy.
Where do migrants come from?
The biggest source country remains India. Over 18 million people born in India have by now moved to a different nation. China and Mexico both saw close to 12 million locally born people move abroad.
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The emigrants from these three nations are largely seeking better economic opportunities abroad.
Mexicans moved to the US in search of higher wages, a passport, and remittances. China and India feature relatively highly educated young populations, but also experience high youth unemployment.
Local knowledge economies didn’t emerge as quickly as new university-level graduates were produced. Sending young university-trained workers abroad doesn’t necessarily lead to a local painful brain drain but rather keeps unemployment related problems (costs and social dissatisfaction) down.
War also pushes people out of their country of birth. In Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, and even Russia (potential conscripts leaving Russia to avoid being thrown into the meat grinder that is the Russian war machine) war was the main reason for huge population outflows.
Mobility is a form of freedom. When migration is discussed in the public sphere, often refugees fleeing war or disaster are the topic. Maybe we discuss economic migrants that come to Australia against the will of the general public.
These two descriptions have one thing in common as they link migration with a lack of choice, a lack of freedom (either on the end of the migrants or on the end of the host nation’s public).
The real lack of freedom might, however, be the lack of mobility in a nation’s migration data.
In countries where few people leave and few arrive, mobility isn’t constrained by a happy and satisfied population but by a lack of opportunity, economic barriers, or restrictive policies.
True freedom involves the option to move, not the compulsion to escape, nor the paralysis of being unable to pursue better economic opportunities elsewhere. In that sense, international mobility is not just a demographic statistic it’s a barometer of freedom itself. A lack of international mobility might indicate an unfree nation.
For readers interested in the deeper meaning of freedom and its absence, Timothy Snyder’s excellent book On Freedom offers a powerful introduction to the concept of ‘unfreedom’.
Snyder explains how modern societies can appear outwardly free while constraining people’s choices through fear, disinformation, inequality, and other structural barriers – limitations and options to move freely being one of these barriers.
The sizeable countries that see shockingly low numbers of migrant inflow and outflow are places like Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Madagascar, or Turkmenistan.
These countries all have large populations and very small numbers (and proportions) of emigrants and immigrants.
Take Ethiopia and its huge population of 132 million people. Less than one per cent of the Ethiopian population was born abroad (1.2 million) and relatively few Ethiopians live outside of the country (1.2 million). International mobility in Ethiopia is the exception, not the norm.
My earlier labelling of migration as a story of human ambition and freedom also suggests that the lack of migration is a story of unfreedom.
The traditional views of the US as The Land of the Free and its status as the predominant destination for global migration go hand in hand.
Massively curbing migration inflow or migration outflow arguably makes a nation less free. That doesn’t mean that a nation like Australia should give up sovereignty over its borders, but it means should be grateful for the freedom of mobility that has been granted to us.
In case you thought you got through a whole column of mine without reading about the Australian housing market, I am terribly sorry.
Extremely unaffordable housing limits mobility within Australia massively.
Young adults stay in the family home for longer as they can’t afford to live elsewhere. Low-income earners desperately cling to their –at least somewhat affordable – dwelling if they have one. Ageing Baby Boomers stay in their oversized family home because no suitable and desirable smaller homes are available locally, stamp duty makes rightsizing the home difficult for all homeowners.
Expensive housing makes us less free as a nation even though rising house prices are sold to homeowners and investors as a path to financial freedom.
Simon Kuestenmacher is a co-founder of The Demographics Group. His columns, media commentary and public speaking focus on current socio-demographic trends and how these impact Australia. His podcast, Demographics Decoded, explores the world through the demographic lens. Follow Simon on Twitter (X), Facebook, or LinkedIn.
