International migration remains a rare exception compared to internal migration

Evidence

The UN figures show that the global migrant stock (the number of people resident outside their country of birth) grew from 75 million in 1965 to 120 million in 1990. The latter figure was roughly equal to 2 percent of the world’s population at the time. Although the number of migrants grew slightly faster than the population as a whole, the annual growth rate (1.9 percent for the whole period but increasing to 2.6 percent from 1985 to 1990) was not dramatic if taken as a global average. By the late 1990s, the number of international migrants was estimated to be 135-40 million, including some 13 million UNHCR-recognized refugees. International migration thus remains an exception, with most of the world’s people remaining in their country of origin. Internal migration by contrast is much larger: for instance, the number of internal migrants in India in 1981 was some 200 million, more than double the number of international migrants in the whole world at the time (Zlotnik, 1998). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3816

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how do the 1990s-era 2% figures compare to current (2020s) migration statistics?
• CANDY: A punchy stat: India’s internal migrants in 1981 outnumbered all international migrants worldwide by more than two to one.