Where Migrants Concentrate: Global Migration Patterns by the Numbers (2026)
Migration is one of the great structural forces behind the global financial system. The people who move across borders — roughly 281 million international migrants worldwide, according to the latest UN estimates — do not just change where they live; they reshape flows of labour, savings, and remittances across continents. The World Bank’s World Development Indicators track the migrant population as a share of total population for 216 economies, offering a detailed picture of which countries are shaped most deeply by immigration.
This report ranks those economies and examines what the numbers reveal about the relationship between migrant stocks and the financial flows they generate.
Every figure comes from FinStatGlobe’s derived country datasets. All values are the latest available observation, which is 2024 for the overwhelming majority of countries. Ranks reflect global positioning among all 216 economies with data.
The global extremes: from 77% to 0%
The range is extraordinary. At one end, Qatar stands at 76.7% foreign-born — nearly four of every five residents are international migrants. At the other, China and the Philippines sit at 0.1%.
The gap is not random. The top of the table is dominated by Gulf oil economies, small European financial centres, and microstates whose labour markets are too small to function without imported workers. The bottom is populated by large, populous developing economies where emigration far exceeds immigration.
The top 25: where migrants are the majority
| Rank | Country | Migrant share | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qatar | 76.7% | 2024 |
| 2 | United Arab Emirates | 74.0% | 2024 |
| 3 | Monaco | 70.2% | 2024 |
| 4 | Sint Maarten | 69.5% | 2024 |
| 5 | Liechtenstein | 69.4% | 2024 |
| 6 | Aruba | 68.0% | 2024 |
| 7 | Kuwait | 67.3% | 2024 |
| 8 | US Virgin Islands | 66.9% | 2024 |
| 9 | British Virgin Islands | 62.1% | 2024 |
| 10 | Turks and Caicos Islands | 61.1% | 2024 |
| 11 | Macau | 59.3% | 2024 |
| 12 | Andorra | 59.1% | 2024 |
| 13 | Bahrain | 52.3% | 2024 |
| 14 | Isle of Man | 51.9% | 2024 |
| 15 | Luxembourg | 51.2% | 2024 |
| 16 | Channel Islands | 50.9% | 2024 |
| 17 | American Samoa | 50.6% | 2024 |
| 18 | Guam | 50.2% | 2024 |
| 19 | Northern Mariana Islands | 49.7% | 2024 |
| 20 | Singapore | 48.7% | 2024 |
| 21 | Jordan | 45.7% | 2024 |
| 22 | Oman | 43.2% | 2024 |
| 23 | Curacao | 43.1% | 2024 |
| 24 | Cayman Islands | 42.9% | 2024 |
| 25 | Hong Kong | 41.3% | 2024 |
Fourteen of the top twenty-five economies have foreign-born populations exceeding 50%. The Gulf states in this group — Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman — average 59% foreign-born across the five. These are not immigrant societies in the traditional sense: the migrant populations are overwhelmingly temporary labour, predominantly male, and concentrated in construction, domestic work, and services.
The Gulf remittance engine
The migrant populations in the Gulf do not just reshape demography — they generate enormous financial flows. The UAE sent $58.5 billion in personal remittances in 2024. Kuwait sent $14.2 billion, Qatar sent $11.5 billion, and Saudi Arabia sent $46.6 billion. For context, see our companion piece on the countries that send the most remittances.
This is what a high-migrant-share economy with an oil-financed wage premium looks like in the financial data: a large, temporary workforce sending a substantial fraction of earnings home. The same pattern, as we explore in our article on how migration shapes financial flows, repeats — though usually at smaller scale — wherever high wages and labour shortages converge.
The other extreme: where migrants are rare
At the opposite end of the ranking, the economies with the smallest migrant shares are almost all large, populous nations with high internal labour supply:
| Rank | Country | Migrant share | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 215 | Cuba | 0.0% | 2024 |
| 215 | Saint Martin | 0.0% | 2024 |
| 211 | Philippines | 0.1% | 2024 |
| 211 | Myanmar | 0.1% | 2024 |
| 211 | Madagascar | 0.1% | 2024 |
| 211 | China | 0.1% | 2024 |
| 206 | Sri Lanka | 0.2% | 2024 |
| 206 | Indonesia | 0.2% | 2024 |
| 206 | Haiti | 0.2% | 2024 |
| 206 | Afghanistan | 0.2% | 2024 |
| 206 | North Korea | 0.2% | 2024 |
| 201 | Vietnam | 0.3% | 2024 |
| 201 | India | 0.3% | 2024 |
| 201 | Morocco | 0.3% | 2024 |
| 201 | Papua New Guinea | 0.3% | 2024 |
| 201 | Solomon Islands | 0.3% | 2024 |
A critical nuance: a low migrant share does not mean a small diaspora. India has only 0.3% foreign-born residents, yet its diaspora of roughly 18 million citizens abroad generated $137.7 billion in remittance inflows in 2024 — the largest of any country. The same pattern holds for the Philippines (0.1% migrant share, $40.3 billion inflows) and Mexico (1.3% migrant share, $67.6 billion inflows). As our article on where remittances matter most explains, remittance dependence depends not on how many migrants a country hosts, but on how many of its own citizens work abroad.
Regional patterns
The World Bank data reveals clear regional clusters:
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The six GCC states average roughly 59% foreign-born. These are the world’s most migrant-dependent labour markets, and they account for a disproportionate share of global remittance outflows. For more on this, see our companion piece on the global remittance outflows.
Western Europe. Countries like Luxembourg (51.2%), Switzerland (31.1%), Austria (25.5%), and Germany (19.8%) have high migrant shares driven by EU free movement, financial-sector labour demand, and humanitarian admissions. The Western European average is around 29%.
Large developing economies. Brazil (0.7%), Nigeria (0.6%), Bangladesh (1.7%), and Indonesia (0.2%) all sit near the bottom. These economies have large domestic labour forces and are primarily countries of emigration rather than immigration.
What the data does not tell us
The World Bank’s migrant-stock data counts foreign-born residents, but it has important limitations. It does not distinguish between temporary labour migrants, permanent settlers, refugees, or undocumented migrants. It captures stock, not flow — so it tells us how many migrants are present, not how many arrive or leave each year. And it does not capture the legal status or occupation profile of migrants, which are crucial for understanding financial behaviour (a construction worker in Qatar and a tech executive in Singapore are both “migrants” in this data, but their earnings, savings behaviour, and remittance patterns are very different).
For a deeper dive into how migrant populations connect to remittance flows, see our companion article on migration and remittance flows. For the financial-inclusion dimension — how migrants access and use financial services — see our report on the state of financial inclusion and our article on how mobile wages drive inclusion.
Sources & method
All migrant-population figures come from the World Bank World Development Indicators, indicator SM.POP.TOTL.ZS (International migrant stock as a share of total population). This indicator defines international migrants as people born in a country other than the one in which they live, including refugees. Data coverage runs to 2024 for the vast majority of economies; a small number have their latest observation from 2023.
Remittance outflow and inflow figures cited in context come from the same WDI source, indicators BM.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT (remittances paid) and BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT (remittances received), both in current USD.
216 economies have at least one year of migrant-stock data on FinStatGlobe. Ranks in the tables above reflect global positioning among those 216 economies. Where multiple economies share the same value, they share a rank.
For a full explanation of how FinStatGlobe constructs and validates its derived datasets, see the methodology page.