India top originator of migrants: Pew Research

India is the top country of origin of international migrants, with 15.6 million Indians living abroad, according to a Pew Research, which said international migrants make up 3.3 per cent of the world's population.

The top origins of international migrants are India (15.6 million), followed by Mexico (12.3 million), Russia (10.6 million), China (9.5 million) and Bangladesh (7.2 million), according to PEW Research.

Among destination countries, the US has more international migrants than any other country.

It is home to about one-in-five international migrants (46.6 million), it said.

Other top destinations of migrants include Germany (12.0 million), Russia (11.6 million), Saudi Arabia (10.2 million) and the United Kingdom (8.5 million), Pew said.

In absolute terms, the number of international migrants has grown considerably over the past 50 years, from about 79 million in 1960 to nearly 250 million in 2015, a 200 per cent increase. So by population size, there are far more international migrants today, the report says.

But the world's population has also grown during that time, rising nearly 150 per cent from about 3 billion to 7.3 billion. As a result, the share of the world's population living outside their countries of birth has increased some during the past 50 or so years, says PEW Research.

While in 1960, 2.6 per cent of the world's population lived away from their birth countries, in 2015 that share was 3.3 per cent.

As a share of the world's population, the 0.7-percentage-point increase in the world's migrant share is hardly insignificant. Nonetheless, the vast majority (nearly 97 per cent) of the world's population has not moved across international borders.

The impact of migration has been large for counties that are part of some of the world's most-used migrant corridors, particularly when it comes to pathways between a single origin country and a single destination country.

The Mexico-US migration corridor has been one of the world's most heavily travelled in recent decades. Today, about 12 million people born in Mexico are living in the US.

This number has declined in recent years as net flows have reversed, with more Mexican immigrants leaving the US than entering it.

Also, the number of unauthorised Mexican immigrants in the US has declined by 1 million between 2007 and 2014, even as the total number of unauthorised immigrants has stabilised at about 11.1 million.

While migration of Mexicans to the US has been decreasing, Mexico is an important transit country for other US-bound Latin Americans.

US border apprehensions of families and unaccompanied children have more than doubled between fiscal years 2015 and 2016, with most coming from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. A rising number of Cubans have also entered the US via Mexico.

As of 2015, nearly 3.5 million Indians lived in the UAE, the world's second-largest migration corridor. Unlike the Mexico-U.S. corridor, the number of Indians living in the UAE and other Persian Gulf countries has increased substantially during the past decade, from 2 million in 1990 to more than 8 million in 2015. Most have migrated for economic opportunities in these oil-rich countries.

The Middle East has the fastest-growing migrant population. When counting both international migrants and displaced migrants within their own countries (internally displaced persons), the number of migrants in the Middle East doubled during the past decade, from 25 million in 2005 to 54 million in 2015.

The total number of refugee population has also increased from 50 years ago. Not including Palestinian refugees, there were about 1.7 million refugees worldwide in 1960, and about 16 million in 2015, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The number of refugees in 2015, however, is slightly less than the early 1990s following the fall of the Berlin Wall. As of 2015, refugees account for only about 8 per cent of all international migrants.

Refugees are a subset of displaced persons worldwide. The latest UN estimates suggest that more than 60 million, or nearly 1 in 100 people worldwide, are forcibly displaced from their homes, the highest number and share of the world's population since World War II.

As of 2015, nearly two-thirds (63 per cent) of the world's displaced population still lived in their birth countries.

The Syrian conflict has dramatically increased the number of displaced people since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011.

About one-fifth of the world's displaced, or 12.5 million, were born in Syria. Colombia, meanwhile, has more displaced people than any other country: nearly 7 million, most of whom are internally displaced because of the country's decades-long conflict.