There are twenty metropolises in the world with at least one million non transient foreign born residents. The United States has more cities with foreign born populations of at least one million than any other country: eight. Asia has only two! This according to a study on migration available on the website of the Migration Policy Institute.
The study pinpoints the cities serving as magnets and ports of entry for huge waves of migration in the past several decades. Old magnets, such as Latin American cities, have become exporters of populations. And the study locates “hyper-diverse” cities, where a large share of the population is foreign born without dominance from one or two countries.
The authors did not address cities with large internally generated in-migration, such as cities in China.
The one million plus foreign born cities are:
Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore
Australia: Melbourne, Sydney
Europe: London, Paris, Moscow
Middle East: Dubai, Medina, Mecca, Riyadh
North America: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington DC.
The United States has 14 cities with between 100,000 and 249,000 foreign born, and 15 cities with between 250,000 and 999,000 foreign born. They are scattered all across the United States.
The authors of this study write that “….answering the question “What are the world’s top urban immigrant destinations?” required drilling down into existing census data from countries on every continent — data that never before had been gathered. Ultimately, data on the foreign born in 150 cities was compiled.
“The data are from a range of years, as country censuses are conducted in different years. Most of the data, however, are from the years 2000 to 2005…The cities mapped in this report are metropolitan areas of 1 million or more people with at least 100,000 foreign-born residents. Data were constructed by examining information on the foreign born for 150 cities in 52 countries.”
The authors explain why there are no Latin American or African cities in this list of twenty:
Latin American and African cities are absent from Figure 1, although they are destinations for internal and international migrants. This reflects the fact that most countries in these regions have a negative rate of net migration, meaning more emigrants leaving then immigrants arriving. Buenos Aires, a long-established immigrant destination, had fewer than 1 million foreign-born residents according to the 2001 Argentine census (approximately 920,000 foreign born), a decrease from earlier censuses. Other megacities in Latin America, such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City, attract far fewer foreign-born residents. If anything, these localities tend to be sources for immigrants to other regions of the world, including North America, Europe, and Japan. For many African countries, the data are simply not available at the urban scale. Even if the data were available, there is little evidence that African cities are attracting large numbers of foreign-born residents, with the exception of some cities in South Africa.
The one million plus cities in the middle east are there because of very large foreign worker populations. The population of Dubai is 80% foreign born.
There are “hyper-diverse cities” where one country is not dominant in the supply of foreign born residents. “Cities that meet this definition include established gateways such as New York, London, and Toronto, which together have approximately 9 million foreign-born residents. Other hyper-diverse cities include Sydney; Amsterdam; Copenhagen; Washington, DC; Hamburg; Munich; San Francisco; and Seattle. Such cities are a product of the globalization of labor that has both economic and cultural implications…..With over two million foreign-born residents, no one group dominates Toronto’s immigrant stock. Nine countries account for half of the foreign-born population, while the rest of the foreign born come from nearly every country in the world.