24% of all global migrants actually originate from Europe and Northern America. While these two areas do attract the highest number of migrants, they also send the highest number of migrants abroad. From the table, you can see that next on this list is Central and Southern Asia, which make up 18% of the migrant community. After this is Latin America and the Caribbean, which account for 15% of migrants (and attract only 5%). Despite some areas showing higher on this table than the last one, the two tables aren’t that dissimilar, with Oceania accounting for 0% of migrants and Australia/New Zealand making up only 1%, both taking the bottom places on the table again.
Some of this migration is due to labour, others are due to family migration, and in some cases, the migration is for students who have decided to study abroad. Sometimes this is temporary and the student returns to their country of origin, in some cases a student will remain to continue studying or gain work experience, and other students will choose to make their move to another country more permanent. What future statistics will look like, therefore, we don’t know. But we can see the trend of international students currently.
In 2019 almost 6.1 million students were studying outside of their country of origin. In 2015 this figure was just 4.8 million and in 2020 it was 2 million, so we can see that studying abroad is becoming more popular.
The five most attractive destinations for international students were the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Russian Federation, which combined, attracted 43% of global students. In 2019, most international students originated from one of these five countries: China, India, Vietnam, Germany, and France.
The UN has reported an increase of migrants across all of its countries, particularly Europe and Asia. As you can see from the graph, other areas of the world have seen a steady incline, whereas both Europe and Asia have seen a massive and sharp increase in the number of migrants choosing to live there. With the curves of both of these countries being far steeper than the others, it is likely that the number of migrants moving to these areas will continue to rise.
