Which countries are people abandoning? Emigration rates around the world

Data source. I had to do the math myself in creating this map by adding the country's resident population to its diaspora population, dividing the sum by its diaspora population, and finally dividing 100 by that number.

The most interesting data maps, in my opinion, are those where you can't predict the results based on income. Maps of things like life expectancy, literacy, press freedom, crime, and a whole host of other indicators correspond relatively neatly to a map of GDP per capita. But a map of emigration rates has a much more complicated set of factors predicting it.

One might expect to be the poorest countries to also be the countries people are most likely to leave, but this is not at all the case. In extremely poor societes, people often lack the means to travel, both physically and fiscally. Besides, the disruption of traditional agricultural life by industrialization has not taken place yet, so people are still deeply rooted in their close-knit villages. 

In fact, many of the poorest countries in the world also have some of the lowest emigration rates, including Tanzania, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, and North Korea. In the last country, this can simply be explained by the fact that people are not allowed to leave. The fact that Papua New Guinea has an extremely low rate (less than one-tenth of one percent) is likely because it's one of the few remaining countries where the majority of the population still lives a pre-agricultural revolution lifestyle. Hunter-gatherers moving to modern cities would make a good comedy movie, but it's a pretty unlikely scenario in real life.

The only poor countries that have high emigration rates are those where people are forced to leave by war. For this reason, Somalia, Eritrea, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic stand out from their African neighbors, as does Laos in Southeast Asia. Many of the largest diasporas are countries that have been stricken by war--notably, Bosnia and Syria have two of the highest emigration rates in the world. Ukraine's already huge diaspora is likely to swell further now that it's at war. Palestine would probably also be extremely high on this list for the same reason, but it's not shown in the data source I used.

It's worth noting, however, that Syria's rate is orders of magnitude higher than those of other war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen, or Niger. In a way, Syrians refugees were lucky that they have an easier route into Europe due to geography and that they came earlier on in the refugee crisis. By the time large numbers of refugees from other countries began arriving, European governments had become much less welcoming in the face of a right-wing backlash.

There are two regions that stand out very clearly on this map--Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. Though their small populations certainly skew the data, Caribbean nations dominate the list of highest emigration rates, including Dominica (51.9%), St. Kitts & Nevis (48.8%), Grenada (40.4%), and Antigua and Barbuda (36.4%). I would attribute this to the fact that both are middle-income regions in close proximity to much wealthier regions. West Indians have an advantage migrating to the USA due to their knowledge of English, while Eastern Europeans can migrate freely into Western Europe due to the European Union and other free-movement agreements. 

The Caribbean is part of a general pattern I've noticed: island nations tend to have much larger diasporas. The seven countries with the highest emigration rates are all Caribbean or Pacific islands, and other island countries such as Cyprus or Cabo Verde stand out as well. Even prosperous island nations like Iceland, Ireland, and New Zealand have surprisingly high rates of emigration.

High rates in the former Soviet Union are probably because prior to 1991, people could move around freely between its member states, and many simply never bothered to return after the USSR collapsed. For this reason, there are millions of Russians in Ukraine and Kazakhstan despite almost no recent Russian immigration to those countries.