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Migration Inflows by Country: Where the Data Comes From

2026-10-22

Migration data title card with hand-drawn map motifs

Migration inflows count the people who enter a country to live there during a set period, usually a year. Net migration subtracts the people who leave. The most reliable figures come from national statistical offices, collected by the OECD, Eurostat, the UN and the World Bank. They are not directly comparable from one country to the next, and most of the ranking tables you find online hide that fact. This guide gives you the headline numbers, the sources to use and the traps to avoid.

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TL;DR

Table of Contents

Inflows, outflows and net migration: the definitions

Migration flow data capture the number of migrants entering and leaving a country over a specific period, such as one year. Three terms matter:

A flow is not a stock. The stock is the total number of foreign-born residents at a point in time, which is what the popular “immigration by country” tables usually show. A country can have a huge migrant stock built over decades and a modest inflow today, or the reverse. If you are asking where people are moving now, you want flows. If you are asking how many foreign-born people live somewhere, you want stocks.

The second distinction is between rates and absolute numbers. A million arrivals mean something very different for a country of 340 million people than for one of 5 million. When you compare countries, divide by population, which is why net migration is often quoted per 1,000 residents.

What the latest official figures show

OECD countries

The OECD’s International Migration Outlook 2025 reports that permanent migration to OECD countries declined by 4% in 2024, after three years of sharp post-pandemic increases. The total of 6.2 million new permanent immigrants is still 15% above 2019. The United States was the top destination with 1.4 million new permanent immigrants, roughly a quarter of the OECD total. In most OECD countries, notably in the European Union, permanent migration was lower in 2024 than in 2023.

The European Union

Eurostat’s Migration to and from the EU page, updated in February 2026, reports that 4.2 million people migrated to the EU from non-EU countries in 2024, down from an estimated 4.4 million in 2023. Within the EU, Spain reported the highest absolute number of immigrants in 2024, at about 1,288,600, followed by Germany at about 1,078,500.

The same Eurostat page notes that 1.5 million people moved from one EU country to another in 2024, and 1.6 million emigrated from an EU country to a country outside the bloc. So the EU’s net picture from outside the bloc depends on both halves of the data, which is where measurement gets harder.

Three measured directions of EU migration flows

International students

Student flows are a large temporary component. The OECD reports that new international tertiary-education student inflows to OECD countries fell by 13% in 2024 compared with 2023. Among the top four receiving countries, the declines were 12% in the United States, 14% in the United Kingdom, 39% in Canada and 22% in Australia. If your question is about housing demand in university cities, these numbers matter more than the permanent-migration total.

A quick reference table

Measure Figure Year Source
New permanent immigrants, OECD total About 6.2 million (-4% vs 2023) 2024 OECD
New permanent immigrants, United States 1.4 million 2024 OECD, same report
Non-EU arrivals to the EU 4.2 million (4.4 million in 2023) 2024 Eurostat
Immigrants to Spain About 1,288,600 2024 Eurostat, same page
Immigrants to Germany About 1,078,500 2024 Eurostat, same page

Notice that these figures do not line up neatly. The OECD number counts permanent migration under OECD definitions. The Eurostat number counts people establishing residence in an EU country, a broader concept. Putting them in one ranking would be comparing different things.

Why rankings of inflows mislead

Every country counts differently

Migration flow statistics are notoriously inconsistent across borders. Some countries count anyone granted a residence permit, others track physical border crossings, and many rely on a stated intention to stay at least 12 months. That makes a raw comparison between, say, Japan and Canada unreliable until you adjust for the method.

Events are not people

Administrative systems often count events rather than individuals. A single person who renews a temporary work permit, changes status or registers a visa change may show up as a new inflow in some systems. The OECD’s guidance points analysts toward permanent or long-term classifications to avoid over-counting circular or seasonal movement.

Permanent and temporary flows tell different stories

The OECD stresses that analysts must separate permanent from temporary migration, because the rights, legal pathways and prospects of long-term residence differ. Temporary flows, such as seasonal workers, students and asylum seekers, are often much larger in volume but do not bring the same long-term stability. A country with a large temporary inflow may not see the same effect on housing or tax revenue as one with fewer but permanent arrivals.

Humanitarian shocks distort the trend

The 2022 and 2023 figures were heavily affected by the war in Ukraine, which created temporary protection statuses often reported separately from standard permanent or managed migration. Before you read a trend, check whether the dataset includes or excludes those protection figures. If you are looking at Ukraine’s own economy, our page on taxes in Ukraine gives the fiscal side of that context.

Net migration inherits the weakness of emigration data

Emigration is much harder to measure than immigration. Countries focus on who enters and often have no robust system for tracking when residents leave, which produces “mirror statistics” gaps, where the origin country’s count of leavers does not match the destination country’s count of arrivals. Eurostat’s discussion of the EU data reflects this. The practical lesson: treat net migration as an estimate with a wide error band, particularly for countries with weak population registers.

Where to find migration inflow data by country

Use primary or near-primary sources, and read the notes on each.

  1. OECD International Migration Database and the annual Outlook. The best source for flows into OECD members, with permanent and temporary categories. The 2025 Outlook PDF is the full report.
  2. Eurostat. Immigration and emigration for EU member states and the bloc as a whole, on the page cited above.
  3. UN Population Division. International Migration Flows holds annual data on migrants as recorded by destination countries, with both inflows and outflows for selected countries. The UN Statistics Division hosts datasets on migration inflows and outflows as reported by national authorities.
  4. World Bank. Net migration by country, useful for a single consistent series across most of the world.
  5. Migration Policy Institute. Its net number of migrants tool, built on UN Population Division data, shows whether each country has net in-migration or out-migration from 1950 to 2023.
  6. Bilateral estimates. If you need to know where migrants come from, not just how many arrive, the Zenodo bilateral flow dataset estimates annual flows between all countries since 1990, by country of birth. These are modeled estimates, not registers.

For US internal moves, such as state-to-state inflows, the IRS publishes migration data built from tax returns. That is a different question from international arrivals, so keep the two apart.

How to read an inflow table: a short method

A table of numbers is only the start. These steps keep the analysis honest.

  1. Name the measure. Is it inflow, outflow, net, or stock? Write it at the top of your notes.
  2. Name the category. Permanent, temporary, humanitarian, student, or all of them? Do not mix.
  3. Check the definition. Residence permit, border crossing or intent to stay 12 months or more?
  4. Scale it. Divide by population to get a rate per 1,000 residents before comparing countries of different size.
  5. Look for breaks. Policy changes, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine all produce discontinuities. A one-year jump is not a trend.
  6. Cross-check. If the origin country reports departures, compare them with the destination’s arrivals. A large gap tells you something about data quality.

Policy is the leading indicator

Migration data lags. Policy does not. The OECD attributes part of the 2024 drop in permanent migration to tighter immigration rules in major destinations, among them the UK, Canada and New Zealand, after the post-pandemic surge. For an analyst or investor, changes to visa rules and residence permit requirements are therefore early signals for inflow trends in the following year or two.

If you are modeling labor supply, that signal links directly to hiring conditions. A look at labour market trends in Australia and New Zealand shows how workforce conditions in two migration-reliant economies are read on the ground. If instead you are weighing how a destination’s rules shape practical routes for foreign workers, the work permit rules for non-EU workers in Bulgaria are one example of the type of national requirement that moves inflow numbers at the margin.

Policy is the leading indicator — overview diagram

What to pair migration data with

Inflows alone do not tell you whether a country is an attractive or a stressed destination. Pair them with economic indicators:

Don’t assume cause and effect from any one pairing. These are context, and migration is only one of many forces behind prices and wages.

Our perspective

We built Fiatmap around one rule: use official statistics only. Migration is the topic where that rule is hardest to apply cleanly, because the official sources do not agree on definitions and a clean global league table does not exist.

So we would rather you distrust a tidy ranking than trust a misleading one. When someone hands you a list of inflows by country, ask three things: which agency counted, what counted as a migrant, and whether the year includes one-off events. If those answers are missing, the table is decoration.

For most decisions, the more useful question is not “who received the most people” but “how does the inflow compare with the size of the economy, the housing market and the labor force.” That is a comparison across datasets, which is what a financial atlas is for. We would use official inflow data from the OECD, Eurostat or the UN as one layer, and put prices, wages, growth and borrowing costs beside it.

— Torstein

Put the economic side next to the migration numbers

Fiatmap covers more than 35 macroeconomic metrics across 128 countries, all drawn from official sources, with comparison tools and downloadable CSV and JSON. If you are checking what a destination costs and how its economy is performing, start from the Fiatmap world money map, or take the numbers straight into your own spreadsheet from the free, sourced dataset. Our data stories show how to read the numbers in context.

FAQ

What is the difference between migration inflows and net migration?

Inflows count only the people arriving in a given period. Net migration subtracts the people who left, so it can be negative. Because countries measure departures poorly, net figures are usually less certain than inflow figures.

Which country receives the most permanent immigrants?

Among OECD countries, the United States did, with 1.4 million new permanent immigrants in 2024, about a quarter of the OECD total, according to the OECD. That figure covers OECD members and permanent migration only, so it does not rank the whole world. Within the EU, Spain reported the most immigrants in 2024.

Why do different sources give different numbers for the same country?

They define migrants differently. One may count residence permits, another border crossings, another people intending to stay a year. Some also include temporary protection or student flows and others do not. Always compare series from the same source and category.

Is migration data comparable between the US and Europe?

Only roughly. OECD permanent-migration figures and Eurostat’s immigration counts use different concepts, so putting them in one table mixes measures. Use one source’s methodology for both regions when you can, and state the caveat when you can’t.

Sources

The figures on this site are collected from official statistics and each carries its own source and date — see /sources and the dataset. Where this article states a number, the country and ranking pages are what it should agree with.