The human species is moving. According to the United Nations, there were more people living outside the birth country last year than at any other time. It is a sea change that reconstructs politics, economics and civil society for generations.
It is no coincidence that 2024 was a year of defeat for incumbent political parties as leaders were voted from democratic powers at the heart of the human storm.
This huge global transition is an incredibly complex phenomenon with countless causes and meanings. But perhaps other issues are not imminent and hardly understood by both the average citizen and the policymakers. Government records vary widely from country to country, and the surge in illegal immigration is only evident in retrospect, with no information collected at all in some corners of the world. Like many other things, we don't even know what we don't know.
Until now. In the map below, Times' opinions can provide the clearest photos of how people travel around the world. It provides a record of a permanent transition to 181 countries every month from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2022, based on a single, consistent source. These estimates are drawn from location data for 300 million anonymous Facebook users, not from government records.
Analysis – results from a new study published on Wednesday from the University of Hong Kong and Harvard University meta – reveals the true global sweep of Migration. And yes, it excludes business travelers and tourists. Here, only those who have been in the destination country for more than a year are counted as immigrants.
There are some limitations to the data. Migration with certain countries that have banned or restricted the use of Facebook, including China, Iran and Cuba, is not included in this dataset, and it is impossible to know the legal status of each migrant. Nevertheless, this is the first time that global mobility flow estimates have been published at this scale. Researchers found that between 2019 and 2022, an average of 30 million people (about a third of the world's population) migrates each year.
If you want to see the data behind this analysis yourself, we have created an interactive tool that you can use to explore the complete dataset.
Instead of discussing immigration with shocking anecdotes and exceptional cases, our discussion should begin with such resources – quality information gathered through consistent procedures from around the world.
As these maps show, when we fully see, many of our assumptions about the grand form of global movement are incomplete. It is undoubtedly unfortunate that a small number of high-tech companies in Meta, Google and Tiktok may have more data on human migration than the UN or individual governments. But if these companies continue to collect this data, at least the public should benefit from it. Meta took a laudable step in this first public release. We should expect researchers to build on it.
When chaos hits a country, natural responses are shifted, including economic crashes, booms, civil wars, infectious viruses, and natural disasters amplified by climate change. Our moments demand better tools that will help us to see these ripples more clearly in the flow of humanity.
The choices aren't just between open borders and closed borders, asylum and pardons, loss and deportation. This picture of migration involves all countries of rich and poor joining in a wonderful network of human movements connected by cultural, economic, historical and family ties, putting fear and dreams on constant movements by one life at a time.
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Kathleen Kingsbury is the New York Times opinion editor and oversees the editorial board and opinion section. Previously, she was the editor of the Associate Editor's Page. She joined The Times from the Boston Globe in 2017, where she served as the digital managing editor. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Best Editorial Writing. @katiekings
Methodology
The estimates are from META's Social Capital Research team and are based on data from 3 billion anonymous Active Facebook users. It does not include data from other meta products such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
The data includes aggregated estimates at the national level of 181 countries, accounting for 79% of the world's population. Some countries are not included in the estimate, such as China, Cuba and Iran.
If a person has lived in a country for a year, they are thought to have migrated, then they will move to another country and allow 60 days of travel. Because Facebook usage is not randomly distributed, estimates are rediscarded with national income per CAPITA and Facebook penetration rate.
Researchers also added noise to these statistics to ensure the country's privacy with a small number of immigrants. There was little noise added to each observation. In 95% of cases, the estimated mobility level for one month was varied by fewer than seven people.
The estimate is lightly rounded. The total total may differ slightly from the raw dataset.
Produced by Jeremy Ashkenas, Quoctrung Bui, Sara Chodosh, Aileen Clarke, Nathan Gordon and Jessia MA. Additional report by Spencer Cohen.
