New Delhi, Jun 11 (PTI) A study has estimated that about 19 million people, averaging 1.35 million per year, have migrated from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates since 2010.
The data compares to 13.6 million movements from Mexico to the US over the entire period since 1990, researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and the University of Hong Kong said.
Globally, the Middle East experienced the highest total inflow of migrants, chiefly from South Asia and the Philippines, with immigration from Bangladesh to Saudi Arabia alone averaging around 3,00,000 people per year from 2010 onwards, according to a global migration map published in the journal Nature.
“Our annual data provides a clearer picture, revealing that this (migration) rate has actually risen since 2000,” co-author Guy Abel, a research scholar in the migration and sustainable development research group of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) Population and Just Societies Program, said.
“This upward trend appears to be driven by long-term demographic shifts and economic development rather than sudden, isolated crises,” Abel added.
The researchers have built the first dataset of migration flows between all countries for the period 1990-2023, offering a more detailed picture of global movement than traditional data, which is highly fragmented, they said.
“We estimate that, since 2010, a total of 19 million people, averaging 1.35 million per year, migrated from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE,” according to the study.
The authors said the current analyses on migration rely heavily on migrant population data published at five-year intervals by the United Nations and at 10-year intervals by the World Bank.
However, the information provides a snapshot at a fixed point in time. As a result, big events — wars, recessions, pandemics, or climate shocks — have sometimes been missed in the data capture, the researchers said.
More detailed migration data helps policymakers respond to crises, plan services, and understand global trends, they said.
The dataset can be particularly useful in unravelling trends in migration movements in the Global South, where data have traditionally been less plentiful and detailed than in the Global North, the team said.
The researchers used deep learning algorithms to combine official statistics, census data, among other sources, with geographic and economic factors.
Migration has become more common overall since 2000, with dips only during the 2008-09 financial crisis and the Covid pandemic, the migration map shows.
Europe was found to consistently rank as the region with the highest volume of intra-regional migration, surpassed only once by Sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s during the Rwandan civil war.
