Worldwide migration: those actively planning to migrate

Gallup analyzed in 2012 how many people who wanted to migrate were in fact actively planning to migrate. It found that among those who say that they want to migrate permanently, 8% plan to do so in the next 12 months and of those 39% were actually preparing to move.

Gallup’s published figures are worldwide, but let’s assume that they apply to specific countries. Take Honduras, where one fifth of the GDP comes from remittances from outside the country, and where per Gallup 47% of adults want to out migrate. (See Gallup here.)

Honduras has about 9 million residents. Thus, about 4.5 million residents (in total families) would be candidates for migration.  Of these 39% of 8% of the 4.5 million, 140,000 would be actively arranging to move.

Take the U.S. with a population of 320 million, of which 16% of adults want to migrate.  About 10 million would be actively arranging to move.

Worldwide in-migration: the most desired countries

 

According to Gallup, although the image of U.S. leadership took a beating between 2016 and 2017, the U.S. continues to be the most desired destination country for potential migrants, as it has since Gallup started tracking these patterns a decade ago.

One in five potential migrants (21%) — or about 158 million adults worldwide — name the U.S. as their desired future residence. Canada (6%), Germany (6%), France (5%), Australia (5%) and the United Kingdom (4%) each appeal to more than 30 million adults.

Among large countries, China, Russia and Brazil are at 1%.

Worldwide out-migration: the hardest impacted areas

Gallup’s surveys throughout 2015- 2017 found 15% of the world’s adults — or more than 750 million people — saying they would like to move to another country if they had the opportunity. This is up from 14% between 2013 and 2016 and 13% between 2010 and 2012, but still lower than the 16% between 2007 and 2009.

Desire to migrate:

Sub-Saharan Africa 33%
Latin America and Caribbean 27% (was 18% in 2010)
Non-EU Europe 26%
Middle East and North Africa 24%
European Union 21%
North America 14% (was 10% in 2010)

In all areas, the desire to migrate rose in the past ten years. The rise was largest in the two areas noted above. The one in six Americans (16%) in 2017 who said they would like to move to another country is the highest measure to date.

At least half of adults want to leave in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Haiti, Albania, El Salvador and Democratic Republic of Congo. The largest country with a very high migration desire is Nigeria, with 49%. Next to El Salvador, the next highest rates in Latin America is the Dominican Republic (49%) and Honduras (47%).

A migration researcher on the proposal for The Wall

Wayne Cornelius, a researcher on Mexican migration weighed in on the Wall idea in early 2017:

Construction of the wall will inevitably be plagued by a swarm of daunting engineering, environmental and legal obstacles. And even if Trump succeeds somehow in pouring concrete from sea to shining sea, such a physical barrier would not prevent undocumented migrants from entering the United States, as decades of fieldwork-based research have demonstrated.

A formidable obstacle course of pedestrian and vehicle barriers covering about 700 miles of the border has already been built during the last 24 years. Ten surveys conducted by me and my field research team in Mexico and California from 2005 to 2015 found that these existing fortifications prevent fewer than one in 10 would-be unauthorized migrants from gaining entry into the U.S.

Inevitably, people-smugglers would take clients over, around or under Trump’s new wall, or guide them through legal ports-of-entry using false documents or concealed in vehicles, charging higher fees for their trouble.

Independent estimates from MIT researchers and others of initial construction costs run from US$25 billion to $40 billion – a far cry from the $12 billion to $15 billion claimed by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell – plus $500 million to $750 million per year to keep the barrier repaired.

Most of these estimates, however, also exclude the costs of land acquisition (nearly all of the affected land is in private or state hands), technological upgrades like seismic sensors to detect tunneling, temporary housing for a construction crew of 1,000 workers (if the project is to be completed in Trump’s first term) and litigation to resolve suits brought by landowners, environmental groups, Indian tribes and others affected by the project.

Immigration pressures on Europe vs U.S.

Europe is under much greater immigration pressure from Africa than is the U.S. from Latin America. The pressure will increase:

The European immigration context today looks much like the United States did three decades ago. In Europe, which long ago made its demographic transition to low birth rates, declines in fertility in the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for a situation in which the number of working-age residents is in absolute decline.

Countries in the North Africa and Middle East region, in contrast, have had continued high fertility, creating bulging populations of young people looking for gainful employment in labor markets plagued by low wages and the scarcity of steady work. Further to the south, population growth rates in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with still lower relative earnings, remain among the highest in the world…

As an example, we predict the number of African-born first-generation migrants aged 15 to 64 outside of sub-Saharan Africa to grow from 4.6 million to 13.4 million between 2010 and 2050. During this same period, the number of working-age adults born in the region will expand from under half a billion to more than 1.3 billion, meaning that international migration would only absorb 1 percent of the overall population growth. … The coming half century will see absolute population growth in sub-Saharan Africa five times as large as Latin America’s growth over the past half century.

If Americans want to imagine the political tensions over immigration in the European Union, imagine try to imagine the current US political climate if instead of having the total number of unauthorized immigrants falling during the last 10 years, the total had instead been increasing strongly over the last 10 years–and was predicted to keep doing so into the future.

Drawn from Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh, Is the Mediterranean the New Rio Grande? US and EU Immigration Pressures in the Long Run.  Fall 2016 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.