Where do migrants live, and where were they born?
An interactive tool that helps us see where migrants were born, and where they live now.
June 15, 2026
In 2024, around 280 million people lived in a different country from the one in which they were born. That’s around 3.5% of the global population.
Where were these international migrants born, and where did they move to?
This interactive visualization allows you to see this country-to-country data across the world.1
Using the dropdown, you can select any country you’re interested in.
On the left-hand side, you can see the total number of people living in that country who were born elsewhere, and where they were born. On the right-hand side, you can see the number of people born in that country who have moved away, and where they moved to.
If you want to dig deeper, you can also look at this data by sex, or use the time slider to see how things have changed over time. Clicking on “immigrants” or “emigrants” will focus only on those views of the data, rather than migration in and out of a country.
Correction note
This visualization was updated and corrected on June 16 to include a category in the underlying UN data — “Other countries” — which reflects immigrants for whom the origin country is not known. This increased the total number of immigrants for some countries.
Migration
Migration has been an important source of economic development and poverty reduction. Explore data on global migration.
How do countries measure immigration, and how accurate is this data?
Countries estimate how many people move in and out using censuses, surveys, and border records. How accurate are these numbers, and can they account for illegal migration?
Most international migrants don’t move very far from their home countries
Long-distance moves are becoming more common, but they remain the exception. For most, international migration still means crossing a nearby border, not an ocean.
Contributors & acknowledgements
By Hannah Ritchie, Tuna Acisu, and Sophia Mersmann.
With contributions from Marwa Boukarim and Marcel Gerber.
Hannah Ritchie did the initial concept of this project and wrote the text. Tuna Acisu prepared the data. Sophia Mersmann built the visualization.
Marwa Boukarim and Marcel Gerber contributed to the design and development of this visualization.
Thanks also to Max Roser and Edouard Mathieu for their comments and suggestions on this article.
Endnotes
This data comes from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA). It shows the total number of people living in another country, which is not the flow of migrants each year. Unfortunately, UN DESA does not have this data in annual flows; otherwise, we would also show it.
Cite this work
Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This page can be cited as:
Hannah Ritchie, Tuna Acisu, and Sophia Mersmann (2026) - “Where do migrants live, and where were they born?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/featured-viz/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-were-they-born' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-where-do-migrants-live-and-where-were-they-born,
author = {Hannah Ritchie and Tuna Acisu and Sophia Mersmann},
title = {Where do migrants live, and where were they born?},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2026},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/featured-viz/where-do-migrants-live-and-where-were-they-born}
}
Reuse this work freely
All visualizations, data, and articles produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.
All of our charts can be embedded in any site.