Quote:
Originally Posted by Capsicum
Despite the popular perception that globalization and increased mobility has ramped up immigration to unprecedented levels, the relative percentage share of the world's population that are currently immigrants (ie. person living outside their birth country) is not that much higher than in the past half century or so.
From http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...and-the-world/
"Is international migration increasing?
It has increased substantially in terms of absolute numbers, but less so as a share of the world’s current population. The absolute number of international migrants has grown considerably over the past 50 years, from about 79 million in 1960 to nearly 250 million in 2015, a 200% increase. So by population size, there are far more international migrants today.
But the world’s population has also grown during that time, rising nearly 150% from about 3 billion to 7.3 billion. As a result, the share of the world’s population living outside their countries of birth has increased some during the past 50 or so years. In 1960, 2.6% of the world’s population did not live in their birth countries. In 2015, that share was 3.3%. As a share of the world’s population, the 0.7-percentage-point increase in the world’s migrant share is hardly insignificant. Nonetheless, the vast majority (nearly 97%) of the world’s population has not moved across international borders."
Additionally, a lot of this is within regions (eg. Asians to other Asian countries, Africans to other African countries), so only a small subset of the world's population is someone who has come from the developing world to Europe or North America. |
2.6% of 2.5 billion people is a lot fewer people than 3.3% of 7 billion people, especially when you consider that a lot of that migration was to a part of the world (Europe ) whose absolute population remains more or less the same since 1960.
Also many of those 1960 migrants likely were people of the same culture displaced across postwar border changes, such as German-speaking Silesians who were forced out of Poland, Holocaust survivors in Israel or Mainland Chinese in Taiwan or Hong Kong.