Global Migration Trends Add Tensions: Asia Sentinel

People migrate for wealthy nations for many reasons, economic and security, including poverty, disasters and conflict. Numerous businesses and families seek low-cost workers for household services, construction, farming and more, yet opposition to undocumented and even legal immigration is on the rise, suggests a new report on world immigration. The report warns that immigration is “weaponized” as a political tool, and hard feelings about immigration are spreading around the world. More than half of the world’s migrants, more than 140 million, live in two continents – Europe and North America. The United States remains the top destination; India has the largest diaspora. “The inflammatory rhetoric of the US president, Viktor Orban in Hungary and regimes in Poland, Austria, and Italy is stoking an irrational fear of immigrants, contradicting research that concludes conclusively that immigration is generally beneficial to the host countries,” explains John Berthelsen for the Asia Sentinel. “Despite that, regional population pressure, war, climate change-caused weather disaster, famine, and disease have combined with extraordinarily cheap mobility to push millions onto the road to what they hope will be a better life but which all too often ends in tragedy.” – YaleGlobal

Global Migration Trends Add Tensions: Asia Sentinel

Despite many efforts to weaponize migration as a political tool, about 3.5 percent of the world's population is on the move due to disasters, war, poverty
John Berthelsen
Monday, December 16, 2019

Read the article from the Asia Sentinel about global migration on the rise.

John Berthelsen is the editor of Asia Sentinel.

Read World Migration Report 2020 from the UN-related International Organization for Migration.

  1970, 84.5; 1975, 90.4 1980, 102; 1985 113.2; 1990, 153; 1995, 161.3; 2000, 173.6; 2005, 191.6; 2010, 220.8; 2015, 248.9; 2019, 271.6

(Source: World Migration Report 2020)

 US, Germany, Saudi Arabia Migrant workers on decline in high-income nations  Remittances total +US$680 billion

(Source: World Migration Report 2020)

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