The human species is on the move. Last year there were more people living outside of their birth countries than at any other time in modern history, according to the United Nations. It’s a sea change that will reshape politics, economics and civil societies for generations.
It’s no coincidence that 2024 was also a year of defeat for incumbent political parties, as leader after leader was voted out of power in democracies at the center of the human storm.
This great global migration is a staggeringly complex phenomenon with countless causes and implications. Yet perhaps no other issue is as pressing and as little understood by the average citizen and policymaker alike. Government records differ wildly from country to country, surges in illegal immigration are often only evident in retrospect and information isn’t collected at all in some corners of the world. As is the case with so many other things, we don’t even know what we don’t know.
Until now. In the maps below, Times Opinion can provide the clearest picture to date of how people move across the globe: a record of permanent migration to and from 181 countries based on a single, consistent source of information, for every month from the beginning of 2019 through the end of 2022. These estimates are drawn not from government records but from the location data of three billion anonymized Facebook users all over the world.
The analysis — the result of new research published on Wednesday from Meta, the University of Hong Kong and Harvard University — reveals migration’s true global sweep. And yes, it excludes business travelers and tourists: Only people who remain in their destination country for more than a year are counted as migrants here.
The data comes with some limitations. Migration to and from certain countries that have banned or restricted the use of Facebook, including China, Iran and Cuba, is not included in this data set, and it’s impossible to know each migrant’s legal status. Nevertheless, this is the first time that estimates of global migration flows have been made publicly available at this scale. The researchers found that from 2019 to 2022, an annual average of 30 million people — approximately one-third of a percent of the world’s population — migrated each year.
If you would like to see the data behind this analysis for yourself, we made an interactive tool that you can use to explore the full data set.
Instead of arguing over immigration with shocking anecdotes and exceptional incidents, our debates should start with a resource like this one — quality information, gathered with a consistent procedure across the world — a source that allows us to take a step back and see the big picture.
As these maps demonstrate, if we look closely enough, so many of our assumptions about the grand shape of global migration are incomplete. No doubt there is something uncomfortable about the fact that a handful of tech companies — Meta, Google and TikTok — may have more data about human migration than the United Nations or any individual government. Yet, if these companies are going to continue to collect this data, then at the very least the public should also benefit from it. Meta has taken a laudable step with this initial public release, and we should expect researchers to build on it.
When disruption hits a country — an economic crash or boom, a civil war, a contagious virus, a natural disaster amplified by climate change — a natural response is migration. Our moment demands better tools to help us more clearly see these ripples in the currents of humanity.
The choice isn’t simply between open and closed borders, asylum and amnesty or disappearances and deportations. This picture of migration is one in which all nations, rich and poor, participate in a great network of human movement, linked by cultural, economic, historical and family ties, and put into constant motion by fears and dreams, one life at a time.
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Kathleen Kingsbury is the Opinion editor of The New York Times, overseeing the editorial board and the Opinion section. Previously she was the deputy editorial page editor. She joined The Times in 2017 from The Boston Globe, where she served as managing editor for digital. She received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing. @katiekings
Methodology
The estimates come from the Social Capital Research Team at Meta and are based on data from three billion anonymized active Facebook users. They do not include data from other Meta products like Instagram or Whatsapp.
The data includes estimates aggregated at the country level for 181 countries, which account for 79 percent of the global population. There are some countries not included in the estimates, such as China, Cuba and Iran.
A person is considered to have migrated if he or she resided in a country for one year, then migrated to another country for another year, allowing for 60 days of travel. Facebook usage is not randomly distributed, so estimates are reweighted with per-capita national income and Facebook penetration rates.
The researchers also added noise to these statistics to ensure privacy in country pairs with a small number of migrants. The amount of noise added to each observation was small; in 95 percent of cases, the estimated level of migration in a month changed by fewer than seven people.
Estimates have been lightly rounded. Summed totals may be slightly different from the raw data set.
Produced by Jeremy Ashkenas, Quoctrung Bui, Sara Chodosh, Aileen Clarke, Nathan Gordon and Jessia Ma. Additional reporting by Spencer Cohen.
