On one of my periodic expeditions in the land of the internet, I came across two datasets on immigration, and I decided to have a look at what the numbers say. The data is sourced from the UN and the OECD. Here is what I found.
The first two maps are made using UN data and an ingenious choropleth solution for excel. If you want to know more, visit this blog.
The redder the country, the more people are…running away. It looks like Eastern Europeans don’t really want to stay home, while people from the US, China and Japan for example, tend to not emigrate as much.
Let’s now look at the other side of the coin: what percentage of the resident population is made up of people born abroad? The redder the country is, the higher the proportion of immigrant population. We can immediately see that the US, Canada and Australia have quite a high proportion of foreigners living within their borders.
Analysing the data from the OECD, I focused on the relationship between immigration and education levels. Let’s take a country. We can divide its population in three big buckets: people born and living in that country (Italians living in Italy for example), those born in the country and living abroad (Italians living in the UK) and foreigners living in the country (French living in Italy). We can then look at what percentage of “remainers”, emigrants and immigrants have tertiary education.
The first chart depicts the relationship between the percentage of “remainers” with higher education and the percentage of emigrants with higher education. The size of the bubbles shows how many people are leaving their countries. We can immediately see that emigrants tend to be higher educated then their compatriots who remain at home. Take the UK for example. About 22% of the population has a degree, however more than 40% of the Brits living abroad has completed higher education. Here are some hypothesis as to why:
- more educated people tend to want to find work abroad,
- more educated people are more mobile,
- younger people are generally more educated and also tend to be more willing to move abroad
The data only covers OECD countries, which are generally considered more developed. That is, we are only looking at people born in more affluent countries who decide to leave and live abroad. If data was available for developing countries and emerging markets, I have the suspicion that we would see quite a different relationship. It may as well be that educated people born in emerging markets will emigrate, however they would represent a smaller proportion of the total emigrant population (simply because tertiary education is not as prevalent in EMs as it is in developed nations).
Lets now focus on the other side. We can look at the percentage of people coming to a country from abroad. In this case, the OECD data captures all migrants moving into the OECD countries, therefore the numbers also reflect citizens of emerging markets and developing countries moving to the US for example. The analisys is very different. As we can see, countries are more clustered together and there doesn’t seem to be a strong difference between education levels between immigrants and born residents. It is interesting to note that if the country takes in more immigrants, that is, the side of a the bubble is larger, the immigrant population seems to be less qualified. I divided the sample into two buckets, one where countries have less immigrants than the median and one where countries have more immigrants than the median. The former group has an average of 30% of the immigrant population with a degree, the latter only 25%. Granted, the difference is not very large, but still statistically significant. The most striking example is Japan. I suspect this may be due to restrictive immigration policy: countries that do not let people in have more stringent rules that favor qualified immigrants.
A couple of caveats on these two charts:
- Immigrant population is measured using resident population, so does not take into account temporary workers
- I have narrowed down the population under study to people of working age (25-64 years old). This is because it is unlikely many 15 year olds will have completed higher education. However it is usually true that younger people tend to be more educated (it wasn’t very common 50 years ago to go to university) so countries with younger populations (for example New Zealand) may appear more “educated” compared to countries with older populations (for example Italy).
Opinionated 