Here's a fascinating Gallup poll of over a quarter million people worldwide. The survey asked people “If you could live in any country you wanted to, which country would that be?”
The results from this poll lead to several interesting results, such as “What's the most popular country people want to move to?” (the U.S.) and “What countries do people most want to leave?” (basically anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa). But it also leads to some interesting results on net immigration. By summing up all the people who want to move into a country, then subtracting from that all the people who want to leave that same country, then dividing that result by the number of people currently in the country, you get net migration figures. The larger the positive net migration, the more people (on a percentage basis) want to move there.
These numbers get distorted a bit by the current population. For example, tops on this metric is little Singapore, at 260%. This means that if everyone who wanted to move into or out of Singapore could magically do so, Singapore's population would almost quadruple. Now Singapore's population is less than 2% of the U.S. population, so this means that roughly 10 million more people would like to move into Singapore than out of it.
The U.S. is 12th from the top on this metric, at 60%. Because the U.S. population is so much larger, that means that about 180 million more people would like to move into the U.S. than out of it. Yikes! That's a lot of people!!
Also very telling are the country-to-country net immigration numbers, where the U.S. is set against other developed countries. It turns out that in every case, more people want to move to the U.S. from another developed country (the U.K., France, Sweden, Norway, Canada, etc.) than vice versa.
It would be very interesting to see these data trended plotted over the years, to see the trends...
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