Every five years, the United Nations Population Division publishes datasets estimating international migrant numbers.
The three countries with the largest emigrant population increases in each five-year period since the UN began records are below, with emigrant population increase in brackets (in millions):
1990-1995: Mexico (2.6 m), Rwanda (1.5 m), China (0.8 m)
1995-2000: Mexico (2.6 m), China (0.9 m), India (0.8 m)
2000-2005: India (1.6 m), China (1.5 mil), Mexico (1.3 m)
2005-2010: India (3.6 m), Mexico (1.6 m), China (1.4 m)
2010-2015: Syria (5.4 m), India (2.7 m), China (1.5 m)
2015-2020: Venezuela (4.7 m), Syria (2 m), India (2 m)
Which country will have the largest increase in its emigrant population between 2020 and 2025, according to UN data?
Feel free to add other countries.
The UN data for emigration can be downloaded from their webpage, see [Total, origin] under the header Data. To obtain the five-year difference, one will need to manipulate the data by deducting the more recent year (e.g. 2020) from the previous year (e.g. 2015) for each entry in the tab named Table 1. For example, this is the top 20 countries by 5-year change after I manipulated the data in this way and sorted by largest 5-year change between 2015-2020:
See Our World In Data for the data in a user-friendly form.
Update 2026-01-01 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The market close date has been extended to end of January 2026 to allow time for the UN 2025 migrant data to be published, which is expected in early 2026 based on historical publication patterns.
Update 2026-02-09 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator is now leaning towards resolving in approximately one week based on current 2024 data (rather than waiting until 2027 for 2025 data), unless participants provide strong arguments that waiting would likely change the outcome. This represents a change from the original plan to wait for 2025 data potentially until early 2027.
Update 2026-02-11 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): The creator plans to resolve the market on Monday next week (approximately one week from the comment date of 2026-02-09) based on 2020 to 2024 UN data rather than waiting for 2025 data. Based on current UN population data, Ukraine has the highest emigrant population increase from 2020 to 2024 by a substantial margin and would be the resolution unless participants provide strong arguments for why waiting might change the outcome.
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(cross post from this other market using the same data source) Hi folks. Been waiting around on this one hoping that the UN would publish new data for 2025. Currently their data is only up-to-date for 2024. Since they normally do intervals ending e.g. 2010, 2015, 2020, I'd definitely prefer to get 2024 data. After some email correspondence, I understand that the UN Population Division's plan is to publish data for 2025 possibly as late as early 2027. They seem to be not publishing Jan-Feb this year (2026) because they intend to update their entire process to populate data for every year (2024, 2025, 2026, and ongoingly).
Anyway, what that means for this market is we can either:
(A) resolve to 2024 data, or
(B) wait for 2025 data, possibly released in 2027
The downsides of waiting a whole year is (i) that's a long time to wait, (ii) it probably won't change the outcome, and (iii) it's entirely possible the UN could delay further or change their plans here.
Since I'd be very surprised if the UN never published data for 2025, and there is meaningful chances that this question could resolve differently by waiting, I'm leaning right now to committing to the following idea: Allow the market to continue into early 2027, and check back in with the UN and see if they are expecting to release 2025 data. If for whatever reason prospects of that are looking quite unlikely, then I'll resolve to 2024 data whenever it seems like that's the case (e.g. mid 2027),
Happy to hear other thoughts though on this. Will keep the question closed for a week and if generally people think this approach is fine I'll extend the question and proceed with this plan.
@cash I don't think it's likely to impact the outcome, so I support resolving with 4/5 years of data. With that said, you might want to publish your numbers (I assume it's just most recent datapoint minus 2020 datapoint from the linked site) and give people a chance to make a case for why something might have changed in 2025. Seems unlikely anyone would bother though
@cash consider alternate data sources? IMF/WB/OECD/individual country data? Or infer emigration from immigration target countries data.
@Gen I also don't think waiting is likely to impact the numbers. If there's a clean way to resolve with information we already have, I'm open to that. I'm also open to your suggestion that what I do is give folks a week to make the argument that there is strong reason to expect a different result, and if not, then resolve with the data we have.
@Hakari Would you know of any linked sources I could use to figure it out?
I think I'm now leaning, on Genzy's argument, towards resolving in a week based on current information, but leaving time for folks to argue otherwise before then.
@cash what is the likely resolution based on current information? If that resolution damages my positions a lot I may spend the time to dig up other credible sources.
hmm if this question resolves 'Ukraine' and this other question resolves 'NO' then that would mark a rare instance where I hedged properly 😂
@Hakari Feel free to point me to resources if you'd like.
The main source I'd use is just the 2024 UN population data. (see image) The 2020 to 2024 change was highest in Ukraine by a pretty substantial margin, so I would resolve to Ukraine on Monday next week per my current plan after Genzy's suggestion to resolve to current information.
Regarding the other market using the same resolution mechanism, yes, it would resolve YES based on the UN data we have on India and other countries.
Reviewing past publication dates for UN migrant data, it seems like we should expect 2025 data to come out sometime in early 2026. I see that UN 2024 data has a report corresponding to it dated for January 2025, and that the 2015 report is also dated for 2016. I'll therefore be extending the timeframe for this market to end of January and will revisit if new data has been released.
Cool market, I have boosted it because I want more traders!
Two things to clarify for my benefit:
is it total emigration or net emigration?
if 5m Ukrainians move to Russia and 5m Russians move to Ukraine, will this be +0 or +5m for both?
if all of the people moving are Russian origin, would it be +0 for Russia and +5m for Ukraine?
More concisely, do migrants count as -1? Do returning emigrants count as -1?
is it the largest increase in real terms? Or percentage
if one country goes from 1m to 2m, is that a “larger increase” for this market than another going from 500k to 1.4m?
@Gen Short answer: (1) Net, but only with respect to nationals (non-nationals don't count), and (2) real terms/total, not percentage.
Long answer:
(1) As I understand this UN data product, they count every national who resides outside their country of origin (expats) to establish an emigrant population number (e.g. think about all the American citizens living abroad, added up). To resolve this question, I would take the 2020 emigrant population and deduct it form the 2025 emigrant population to get an increase (or decrease) in nationals living abroad. So if 5 million Ukrainians left Ukraine (to Russia, or anywhere), and 0 Ukrainians moved back to Ukraine, Ukraine's emigrant population would be +5 million (regardless of how many Russians moved to Ukraine, since Russian emigration would count towards the Russian emigrant population). If 5 million Ukrainians left Ukraine, but also, 5 million returned, then the emigrant population total would be the same in 2020 and 2025, and therefore the difference would be zero.
(2) Real terms/total, not percentage. So if everyone from a lightly populated country (e.g. a small island nation) were to be evacuated, this proportionally large exodus would be unlikely to outdo the absolute exoduses from other more populous countries (though Syria, Venezuela, Rwanda, and other countries with larger exoduses in the past have not necessarily had especially large populations). So in the 2015-2020 period, Venezuela had the largest total increase in their emigrant population (~4.7 million more people outside of Venezuela between 2015-2020). For the purposes of the "largest exodus," this question had been asked about 2015-2020 numbers, Venezuela would have resolved YES.