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7 facts about world migration

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Since humans first left Africa 60,000 years ago, they have been migrating around the planet in great numbers – and the advent of international borders certainly did not stop global migration. Although the percentage of the world’s people living outside of their birth countries has remained steady in recent decades, the world’s increasing population means that the sheer number of international migrants has never been higher.

This interactive map, which uses United Nations Population Division data, lets you view the total number of people living outside their birth countries. It also shows migrants in both directions – as emigrants, who have left their origin country, or as immigrants, who have entered a destination country. The U.N. defines an international migrant as a person who has been living for one year or longer in a country other than the one in which he or she was born.

Here are seven interesting global migration patterns we found using the map.

11The United Kingdom is home to the most diverse immigrant community in the world. It used to be said that the sun never set on the British Empire. Now, people from the many countries the British once ruled live inside the U.K.’s borders. Based on the Herfindahl-Hirschman index – which is widely used by biologists, ecologists, linguists, economists, sociologists and demographers to measure the degree of concentration of human or biological populations – the diversity of immigrant birth countries in the U.K. on a 0 to 100 scale is 97. For immigrants living in the U.S., it is 91.

22The French like to live all over the world – emigrants from France live in more countries than emigrants from any other nationUsing the Herfindahl index, the destination diversity of emigrants born in France is 95 on a 0 to 100 scale. It is 89 for American-born people living outside of the U.S. There are at least 1,000 French-born people living in each of 83 different countries and territories; the most popular destinations are Spain (220,000) and the United States (180,000).

33The Mexico-to-U.S. link is the most popular bilateral migration path in the world. As of 2013, more Mexican immigrants (13 million) were living in the U.S. than all immigrants to Russia combined (11 million). Russia has the second largest number of total foreign-born residents, after the United States, which has a total foreign-born population of about 46 million.

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