The human species is in motion. Last year, there were more people living outside their countries of birth than any other moment in modern history, according to the United Nations. It is a sea change that will reshape politics, economics and civil societies for generations.
It is not a coincidence that 2024 was also a year of defeat for outgoing political parties, as a leader after the leader was elected power in democracies at the center of the human storm.
This great world migration is an incredibly complex phenomenon with countless causes and implications. However, no other problem is also urgent and as little understood by the citizen and the average decision maker. Government files differ madly from one country to another, the overvoltages of illegal immigration are often only obvious that retrospectively and information is not at all collected in certain corners of the world. As is the case with so many other things, we don’t even know what we don’t know.
So far. In the cards below, Times Opinion can provide the clearest image to this day the way people are moving around the world: a permanent migration recording to and since 181 countries on the basis of a single source of coherent information, for each month of the beginning of 2019 at the end of 2022. These estimates are not drawn from government recordings but location data of three billion world.
The analysis – The result of new research published Wednesday from Meta, the University of Hong Kong and the Harvard University – reveals the real world migration sweeping. And yes, it excludes business travelers and tourists: only people who stay in their country of destination for more than a year are considered migrants here.
The data is delivered with certain limits. Migration to and from certain countries which have prohibited or restricted the use of Facebook, including China, Iran and Cuba, is not included in this set of data, and it is impossible to know the legal status of each migrant. However, this is the first time that estimates of world migration flows have been made public on this scale. Researchers found that from 2019 to 2022, an annual average of 30 million people – approximately one third of one percent of the world’s population – has migrated each year.
If you want to see the data behind this analysis for yourself, we have made an interactive tool that you can use to explore the full data set.
Instead of arguing on immigration with shocking anecdotes and exceptional incidents, our debates should start with a resource like this – quality information, collected with a coherent procedure around the world – a source that allows us to step back and see the overview.
As these cards demonstrate, if we look quite closely, so much of our hypotheses on the large form of world migration are incomplete. There is undoubtedly something uncomfortable in the fact that a handful of technological companies – Meta, Google and Tiktok – can have more data on human migration than the United Nations or any individual government. However, if these companies will continue to collect this data, the public should also benefit from it. Meta has taken a commendable step with this initial public version, and we must expect the researchers to rely on it.
When the disturbances strike a country – an accident or an economic boom, a civil war, a contagious virus, a natural disaster amplified by climate change – a natural response is migration. Our moment requires better tools to help us more clearly see these undulations in the currents of humanity.
The choice is not simply between open and closed borders, asylum and amnesty or disappearances and deportations. This image of migration is that in which all the rich and poor nations participate in a large network of human movements, linked by cultural, economic, historical and family ties, and set in motion by fears and dreams, a life at the same time.
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Kathleen Kingsbury is the New York Times opinion editor, supervising the editorial committee and the opinion section. Previously, she was the editor of the assistant editorial page. She joined the Times in 2017 since the Boston Globe, where she was editor -in -chief of Digital. She received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing. @katiekings
Methodology
The estimates come from the Meta share capital research team and are based on data of three billion anonymized active Facebook users. They do not include data from other meta-products such as Instagram or WhatsApp.
Data includes approved estimates at the country level for 181 countries, which represent 79% of the world’s population. Some countries are not included in estimates, such as China, Cuba and Iran.
One person is considered to have migrated if he lived in a country for a year, then migrated to another country for another year, allowing 60 days of travel. The use of Facebook is not distributed at random, so estimates are used with national rate per capita and Facebook penetration rates.
The researchers also added noise to these statistics to ensure the confidentiality of country pairs with a small number of migrants. The amount of noise added to each observation was small; In 95% of cases, the level of migration estimated in one month changed less than seven people.
The estimates were slightly rounded. Somed totals can be slightly different from the raw data set.
Produced by Jeremy Ashkenas, Quocrtrung Bui, Sara Chodosh, Aileen Clarke, Nathan Gordon and Jessia Ma. Additional report by Spencer Cohen.
