China Versus U.S. on Immigration

14 August 2026, posted by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Immigration policies don’t exist in a vacuum — they are part of a broader national strategy.

As I’ve documented many times, China’s economy has, on an annualized basis, been growing at least twice as fast, each and every year since 1998, as America’s economy has. This caused the U.S. Government to allege (for example, six times in one of its 2025 reports to Congress) that China’s Government views America’s Government as an “adversary” not merely a “competitor,” and so to propagandize for America’s spending more on its military than all other countries combined do — actually 65% of all of the world’s military costs, in order to defeat China, Russia, Iran, and the U.S. regime’s other ‘adversaries’.

Propaganda works like that — by attributing the aggression to the opposite side, such as by attributing its own hostility to a country to that other country’s ‘evil’ Government’s falsely alleged hostility towards itself. The propaganda’s claim is that the other country is the aggressor; thus, that the other country must be defeated. (Anybody who doubts that the U.S. imperial regime is this evil should read Robert McConnell’s 2022 masterpiece book, American Heart of Darkness Volume I Second Edition, which supersedes both Volume I and Volume II of his earlier editions, and documents that ever since at least the Vietnam war, the U.S. Government has been stuffing selected corpses of its soldiers with containers of heroin to ultimately be sold on U.S. streets to help fund the U.S. Government’s off-the-books operations — the “Black Ops” — of the CIA, etc.) Similarly, the White House’s 2025 National Security Strategy referred to Russia as an implied U.S. enemy by saying “Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory. We will need a strong Europe to help us successfully compete, and to work in concert with us to prevent any adversary from dominating Europe.” In other words: only America ‘should’ “dominate” Europe. (Of course, the U.S. Government pressures European Governments to continue buying most of their weaponry from U.S. firms, because the regime’s controlling billionaires invest heavily in its armaments-producers.) Regarding China, it said: “President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China: namely, that by opening our markets to China, encouraging American business to invest in China, and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called ‘rules-based international order.’ This did not happen. China got rich and powerful, and used its wealth and power to its considerable advantage. American elites — over four successive administrations of both political parties — were either willing enablers of China’s strategy or in denial.” In other words: prior U.S. Presidents hadn’t been sufficiently hostile toward China, though China has refused to replace the U.N.’s international laws by America’s international rules — which America’s Democratic Party requires all countries to do. Trump rejects even that — those ‘rules’. He demands alone to set the ‘rules’.

Propaganda presents as being international aggressors the main countries that the U.S. Government intends ultimately to conquer: China, Russia, and Iran. This is one reason why America — the world’s main aggressor-nation — remains, even today, the nation that more people want to emigrate to than any other.

So, recently, I took China as an example to probe into, regarding immigration, and used the best of the current AIs, ChatGPT, for assistance in that research. Here was the conversation:

——

“ARE  MORE CHINESE MOVING TO AMERICA, OR ARE MORE AMERICANS MOVING TO CHINA?”

More Chinese are moving to the United States than Americans are moving to China — by a very large margin.

The comparison is harder than it sounds because the two governments do not publish perfectly symmetrical statistics. U.S. immigration statistics give fairly good counts of Chinese nationals acquiring permanent residence, while China generally publishes statistics for foreigners as a whole rather than a clean annual count of Americans who relocate there.

The underlying populations make the imbalance clear. There are millions of China-born people living in the United States, whereas the American population residing in mainland China is only in the tens of thousands to perhaps low hundreds of thousands, depending on how “resident” is defined. China is unusual among large economies in having an extremely small foreign-born population.

Moreover, recent movement doesn’t appear to be reversing that relationship. China has dramatically increased foreign visits: in 2025 it recorded 82.04 million foreign-national border crossings, up 26.4%, and foreign entries continued rising rapidly in the first half of 2026. But those figures are border crossings, not immigration; tourists and business travelers can be counted repeatedly. China issued about 2.02 million visas and residence permits to foreigners of all nationalities combined in 2025.

There is another revealing indication: China still does not function as an immigrant society comparable with the United States. It has relatively restrictive pathways to permanent residence and, especially, citizenship. An American moving to China for work ordinarily remains an American citizen on a renewable Chinese residence permit rather than becoming a Chinese immigrant in the American sense.

So, if your question is specifically about people actually relocating their residence, rather than tourists, students making temporary stays, or business travelers:

China → United States migration is substantially larger than United States → China migration.

If you’d like, I can go one step further and try to put actual annual numbers on the two flows — Chinese who moved to the U.S. versus Americans who moved to China — for 2015–2025, which would show whether the direction of the trend has recently been changing.

“PLEASE DO THAT, AND ALSO CALCULATE THE PERCENTAGE OF AMERICANS THAT ARE MOVING TO CHINA,  VERSUS THE PERCENTAGE THAT ARE MOVING TO AMERICA”

Worked for 1m 2s

Yes. After checking the underlying statistics more carefully, there is an important qualification to my previous answer: there is no Chinese government series that lets us construct a genuinely symmetrical year-by-year “Americans moving to China” series. So I can give you a very good measurement of the China→U.S. side, but only indirect measurements of the U.S.→China side.

For China→U.S., DHS reports the following numbers of China-born persons obtaining U.S. lawful-permanent-resident status:

Fiscal year	China-born new U.S. LPRs
2015	74,558
2016	81,772
2017	71,565
2018	65,214
2019	62,248
2020	41,483
2021	49,847
2022	67,950
2023	59,260

The DHS yearbooks directly confirm the 2015–2022 sequence, and the 2023 report gives 59,260.

One caution: obtaining a green card is not identical to physically moving to America that year. Some recipients are already in the United States and “adjust status.” For example, of the 41,483 China-born people becoming LPRs in FY2020, only 12,103 were classified as new arrivals; 29,380 were already in America when their status was adjusted. So the table is best described as permanent-immigration incorporation, not literal border-to-border relocation.

Percentage of the Chinese population

China had roughly 1.41 billion people during this period. Using that denominator, the annual percentage becoming U.S. permanent residents is remarkably small in absolute terms:

Year	Chinese becoming U.S. LPRs	Approx. % of China’s population
2015	74,558	0.0054%
2016	81,772	0.0059%
2017	71,565	0.0051%
2018	65,214	0.0047%
2019	62,248	0.0044%
2020	41,483	0.0029%
2021	49,847	0.0035%
2022	67,950	0.0048%
2023	59,260	about 0.0042%

Thus, in a typical recent year, something on the order of four or five one-thousandths of one percent of China’s population obtains U.S. permanent residence.

Now look in the other direction.

China’s 2010 census counted 71,493 U.S. nationals living in mainland China. By the 2020 census, the corresponding figure was approximately 55,226. In other words, instead of the American-resident population in China increasing during those ten years, it fell by about 16,267 people, or 22.8%.

That works out to a net decrease of about 1,627 American residents per year over 2010–2020. It does not mean that −1,627 Americans “moved to China”; undoubtedly thousands arrived while still more left. China simply does not publish the nationality-specific annual inflow data necessary to calculate the gross number reliably.

There is, however, another useful percentage comparison that is much more defensible: what percentage of each country’s population is actually resident in the other country?

In 2020, about 55,226 Americans were resident in mainland China. With a U.S. population of roughly 331 million:

55,226 ÷ 331,000,000 ≈ 0.0167%.

So approximately 0.017% of Americans were living in China — about 1 American in every 6,000.

For the reverse direction, the U.S. Census/ACS estimates approximately 2.19 million U.S. residents born in China in recent data. Relative to China’s approximately 1.41 billion population:

2,190,000 ÷ 1,410,000,000 ≈ 0.155%.

So roughly 0.155% of China’s population is represented by China-born residents living in the United States — about 1 in 645.

That produces a striking population-adjusted comparison:

Chinese living in America as a percentage of China’s population: ~0.155%
Americans living in China as a percentage of America’s population: ~0.017%

Thus, even after correcting for China’s much larger population, the proportion is approximately 9 times greater in the China→America direction.

And the trend strengthens the conclusion rather than weakening it. China’s official census found 845,697 foreigners of all nationalities living in mainland China in 2020 — not merely Americans — and explicitly excluded short-term tourists and business visitors. China’s entire foreign-resident population was therefore extraordinarily small relative to its 1.4-billion population. Meanwhile, DHS estimates that 830,000 China-born people were lawful permanent residents of the United States in January 2024 alone, excluding naturalized U.S. citizens and many other China-born U.S. residents.

So I would sharpen my original answer to:

Not only are more Chinese relocating to America than Americans are relocating to China in absolute numbers; the available evidence indicates that this remains true even after adjusting for the fact that China has about four times America’s population. On the resident-population measure, the China→U.S. propensity is roughly nine times the U.S.→China propensity.

There is an additional comparison that I think may be even more revealing: Chinese who leave China for America versus Americans who leave America for any foreign country. That would tell us whether China is unusually unattractive to American emigrants, or whether Americans simply emigrate much less than Chinese do generally.

“PLEASE DO.”

Yes. The broader comparison changes the picture in an interesting way.

There are two different ways to measure Americans abroad, and they produce substantially different answers. The Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) estimated 4.4 million U.S. citizens living overseas in 2022, up from about 3.1 million in 2010. The UN uses a different concept — primarily people living outside their country of birth — and therefore should not be mixed casually with citizenship-based figures. The FVAP figure is the better one for your question about “Americans.”

Using roughly 333 million Americans in 2022:

4.4 million ÷ 333 million = 1.32%.

So approximately 1.3% of U.S. citizens were living abroad — about 1 American in 76.

Now compare China

The UN estimated that in 2020 approximately 10 million people originating in China lived outside China. China was the world’s fourth-largest origin of international migrants, behind India, Mexico, and Russia.

With China’s population then approximately 1.41 billion:

10 million ÷ 1.41 billion ≈ 0.71%.

So approximately 0.7% of China’s population lived abroad — roughly 1 Chinese person in 141.

That produces this comparison:

Measure	Americans	Chinese
Origin-country population	~333 million	~1.41 billion
Living abroad	~4.4 million	~10 million
Percentage living abroad	~1.32%	~0.71%
Approximately 1 in…	76	141

These aren’t perfectly apples-to-apples because FVAP counts U.S. citizens, whereas the UN international-migrant-stock concept generally uses country of birth/country of origin. But the difference is sufficiently large that it establishes an important point:

Americans appear to be considerably more likely than Chinese, per capita, to live outside their home country.

That means my suggestion at the end of the previous answer turns out to be important. The enormous imbalance between Chinese living in America and Americans living in China is not because Americans generally don’t move abroad.

Quite the contrary.

Where Chinese emigrants go

The United States is exceptionally important as a destination for Chinese emigrants. Using UN 2020 estimates, the Migration Policy Institute reports that approximately 8.6 million Chinese migrants lived outside mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, distributed principally as follows:

Destination	Chinese immigrants	Share of Chinese emigrants
United States	~2.4 million	~28%
Canada	~930,000	~11%
South Korea	~803,000	~9%
Japan	~776,000	~9%
Australia	~764,000	~9%
Singapore	~514,000	~6%
Other countries	~2.4 million	~28%

The United States by itself therefore contained about 28% of the entire Chinese emigrant population under that definition.

And the Chinese immigrant population in America has continued to be enormous: the 2023 American Community Survey puts it at slightly over 2.4 million, including mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. It had increased about 35% since 2010, notwithstanding the temporary COVID-era decline.

China is an extraordinarily uncommon destination for Americans

Now return to the figure we established previously: approximately 55,000 Americans lived in mainland China in the 2020 Chinese census.

Against approximately 4.4 million Americans living abroad, that suggests only roughly:

55,000 ÷ 4,400,000 ≈ 1.25%.

In other words, only around 1¼% of Americans living overseas were living in China.

Compare the two migration systems:

Of Chinese emigrants, roughly 28% chose the United States.

Of American expatriates, roughly 1–1½% lived in China.

The difference is approximately 20-to-1.

The exact ratio shouldn’t be taken literally because we’re combining different statistical definitions and years. But its magnitude is too large to be explained by those technical differences.

The more interesting conclusion

We can therefore separate two propositions that initially looked like one:

1. “Chinese people are much more prone than Americans to emigrate.”  —  Apparently false.

On the best available population-wide estimates, Americans actually appear more likely per capita to live abroad: roughly 1.3% versus roughly 0.7%.

2. “Chinese people are much more prone to move to America than Americans are to move to China.”  —  Definitely true.

And by a very large margin.

That means the asymmetry is principally destination-specific.

America attracts an unusually large proportion of China’s emigrants. China attracts an unusually small proportion of America’s emigrants.

There is another statistic that makes this even more striking. In 2020 China counted only 845,697 foreign nationals of all nationalities combined living on the mainland. The United States had about 51 million international migrants.

China’s population was about four times America’s, yet America contained roughly 60 times as many international migrants.

Population-adjusted, therefore, the difference in the two countries’ roles as immigrant destinations was on the order of 240-to-1.

That last comparison is probably the clearest answer to the larger question underlying your original question: China produces plenty of emigrants, but China itself remains extraordinarily unusual among major economies in how few immigrants it absorbs.

“ISN’T IT THE CASE THAT CHINA’S GOVERNMENT MAKES IMMIGRATION FAR MORE DIFFICULT THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER COUNTRY DOES, WHEREAS AMERICA’S  GOVERNMENT IS RELATIVELY OPEN TO IMMIGRATION FROM COUNTRIES THAT AREN’T POOR?” 

Yes — with one important correction to the way I framed the comparison earlier. China’s extraordinarily small immigrant population is substantially a product of Chinese government policy, not simply evidence that foreigners do not want to live there. I should have made that distinction explicit.

China is among the world’s more restrictive major countries for permanent immigration. Merely finding a job and living in China for years does not normally put a foreigner on an automatic path comparable to the U.S. green-card system. China’s permanent-residence rules restrict eligibility to specified classes — for example, qualifying investors, relatively senior/high-level employees, people deemed to have made outstanding contributions or to be specially needed by China, and certain close relatives.

The spousal rule illustrates the difference particularly well. Being married to a Chinese citizen does not itself immediately qualify a foreigner for permanent residence. Ordinarily the marriage must have lasted five years, the foreign spouse must have resided continuously in China for five years, spent at least nine months of each year there, and have stable means of support and housing.

And Chinese citizenship is considerably more restrictive still. China’s Nationality Law says that a foreigner may be naturalized, subject to government approval, if the person is a close relative of a Chinese national, has settled in China, or has another legitimate reason. There is no U.S.-style statutory entitlement whereby an ordinary permanent resident who meets a specified residence period and other objective requirements thereby has a conventional route to naturalization. Moreover, China does not recognize dual nationality: a foreigner approved for Chinese naturalization must relinquish the foreign nationality.

But I would modify your characterization of the United States

You said America is relatively open to immigration “from countries that aren’t poor.” The first half is certainly right relative to China: the United States has a vastly more developed system for accepting permanent immigrants.

But the second half isn’t quite how American immigration law works.

The United States does not generally divide potential immigrants into people from poor countries versus non-poor countries. Its principal permanent-immigration channels are based instead on family relationships, employment, humanitarian categories, and the diversity-visa program. There are numerical limits on many categories, and most family- and employment-preference immigration is also subject to a 7% per-country ceiling.

That actually creates an interesting consequence: a person from a populous country such as China or India can face a disadvantage because so many people from that country are competing for the limited number of preference visas.

Nevertheless, your larger comparison is correct:

United States: Immigration is an established institution of the state. There are legal mechanisms expressly intended to turn large numbers of foreigners into permanent residents and, eventually, citizens.

China: Foreigners can work, study, conduct business, marry Chinese citizens, etc., but the government has historically maintained a much sharper distinction between foreigners residing temporarily in China and people admitted permanently into the Chinese population. Permanent residence is selective, and naturalization is rarer and discretionary.

And that changes the interpretation of the statistics we were discussing.

The fact that approximately 2+ million China-born people live in America while only ~55,000 Americans were living in mainland China in China’s 2020 census cannot legitimately be interpreted simply as revealing that Chinese people prefer America much more strongly than Americans prefer China.

It reflects at least two separate variables:

desire to migrate × ability to immigrate legally.

The United States provides Chinese nationals with a large institutional pathway for permanent immigration. China provides Americans with a much narrower one.

Consequently, our earlier 9-to-1 population-adjusted resident ratio is real as a demographic fact, but it cannot be used as a 9-to-1 measurement of migration preference. Chinese immigration policy is an important confounding variable.

In fact, this raises a much better question than the one I proposed previously: How many Americans actually want to immigrate permanently to China but cannot, versus how many Chinese want to immigrate permanently to America but cannot? That would separate demand for migration from government immigration policy — and I can investigate whether Gallup, Pew, Chinese surveys, visa applications, or other datasets give us enough evidence to estimate those two populations.

“PLEASE DO.”

Worked for 42s

I looked for exactly that comparison, and the evidence supports a more careful conclusion than I gave before.

There is strong evidence that the latent Chinese demand to migrate permanently to the United States is very large. But I cannot find a credible survey that directly measures the reciprocal quantity — how many ordinary Americans would move permanently to China if immigration restrictions were removed. So an exact “X Chinese versus Y Americans” ratio would be fabricated.

Gallup provides the strongest evidence on the Chinese side. In its 2010–2012 surveys, Gallup estimated that about 19 million adults in China wanted to move permanently to the United States if they had the opportunity. An earlier Gallup estimate put the figure at about 22 million.

That corresponds roughly to around 2% of Chinese adults at the time, not merely 2% of those who wanted to emigrate. So even though most Chinese did not want to emigrate, the enormous Chinese population translated that minority preference into something like 20 million prospective U.S. immigrants.

Gallup’s methodology is particularly useful for your question because it asks:

“Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move PERMANENTLY to another country…?”

Those answering yes are then asked which country they would choose. Thus it deliberately measures desire unconstrained by whether the respondent presently possesses a visa or qualifies under immigration law.

Gallup continued surveying China through 2023, although its current public article does not publish the China→U.S. cross-tabulation for 2023. Gallup says explicitly that 2023 is the latest Chinese observation incorporated into its current migration estimates.

What can we say about Americans wanting China?

Here the data become surprisingly thin.

Gallup reports that 20% of Americans in 2025 said they would like to move permanently to another country if they had the opportunity. That is a substantial emigration desire — roughly one American adult in five.

But Gallup does not publicly disclose which percentage of those Americans selected China.

There is nevertheless an important clue. When Gallup ranked destinations worldwide in 2015–2017, China attracted only about 1% of all prospective international migrants, approximately 9 million people worldwide. The U.S. attracted 21%, or about 158 million.

So China certainly was not globally a migration destination remotely comparable with the United States.

And there is a remarkable American subgroup for which Pew actually did ask something close to our question: Chinese Americans. They should, if anything, be much more predisposed toward China than Americans generally because of ancestry, language, family and cultural familiarity.

Yet only 16% of Chinese Americans said they would ever move to China; approximately eight in ten said they would not. Among English-dominant Chinese Americans, willingness was only 7%.

Notice that this is a considerably less demanding question than Gallup’s “where would you move permanently?” question. Pew essentially asks whether they would ever consider moving there, so 16% should not be treated as 16% intending permanent Chinese immigration.

Therefore I would expect the percentage among the entire American population choosing China as its preferred country for permanent emigration to be far below 16%, probably dramatically below it. But there isn’t enough evidence to attach a defensible numerical percentage.

And this is where immigration policy becomes crucial

China’s permanent-residence system really is extraordinarily restrictive by American standards.

The Chinese National Immigration Administration explicitly states that foreigners who do not fall within its qualifying categories will not even have a permanent-residence application accepted. Qualifying routes include specified investors, certain qualifying employees/high-level personnel, specially recognized contributors, and particular family categories.

The scale illustrates what this meant historically. In 2016, China granted permanent residence to only 1,576 foreigners of all nationalities combined. That represented a 163% increase over the previous year — which means the previous year’s number had been only about 600.

Compare that with the numbers we discussed for just one nationality entering America:

74,558 China-born persons became U.S. lawful permanent residents in 2015.

Thus, around that period, the United States was granting permanent residence to roughly 100 Chinese-born people for every one foreigner of any nationality to whom China was granting permanent residence.

That is an astonishing policy asymmetry.

China has liberalized some rules since then, particularly for highly skilled personnel and certain long-established foreign residents, and it introduced its new permanent-resident identification card in December 2023. But even the government’s description of the first recipients emphasizes high-level managers, professional and technical personnel, distinguished scholars and people who had made notable contributions.

So I would revise our earlier interpretation substantially.

What the evidence actually permits us to conclude

There are three different phenomena, and we shouldn’t confuse them:

Question	China → U.S.	U.S. → China
Do people express interest?	Demonstrably substantial: historically ~19–22 million Chinese adults wanted the U.S.	Unknown, but China appears a relatively uncommon desired destination
Can an ordinary person obtain permanent immigration status?	Difficult and numerically restricted, but there are large established family/employment immigration systems	Much more restrictive; many ordinary foreigners have no qualifying permanent-residence category
How many actually become permanent residents?	Tens of thousands of Chinese annually	Historically tiny numbers of foreigners of all nationalities

So the observed migration imbalance exaggerates the underlying preference imbalance, because American law admits permanent immigrants on a vastly larger scale than Chinese law does.

But the available preference evidence indicates that the imbalance is not merely created by immigration law either.

We know that approximately 19–22 million Chinese adults have told Gallup they would choose America if they could migrate permanently. There is no evidence of anything remotely comparable in the opposite direction, and China has historically attracted only about 1% of the world’s prospective migrants, versus approximately 20% for the United States.

Therefore the most defensible statement is:

Both effects are operating simultaneously. America appears genuinely much more attractive to Chinese prospective emigrants than China is to American prospective emigrants; but the enormous disparity in actual migration substantially overstates that difference in preferences because China makes permanent immigration vastly harder.

And this corrects something important in my earlier answer: I initially used the approximately 9-to-1 resident-population ratio as evidence about relative migration propensity. That ratio cannot by itself establish preference.China’s immigration restrictions make it impossible to infer preference directly from realized residency numbers.

What we can establish independently is that Chinese demand for America is enormous — historically around 20 million people — while China ranks quite low as an international migration destination. That makes the preference asymmetry real, while leaving its exact magnitude unmeasurable from the currently published data.

“THANKS. AS USUAL, CHATGPT ANSWERED — AND ON A THOROUGHLY CREDIBLE BASIS — ALL OF MY QUESTIONS.”

You’re very welcome. I’m glad the sequence of questions got us from the superficially striking migration numbers to the more defensible conclusion — especially the distinction between revealed migration, desire to migrate, and governments’ willingness to admit immigrants. Without separating those three, the raw U.S.–China comparison can be seriously misleading.

“IS AMERICA STILL THE IMMIGRATION-CAPITAL OF THE WORLD — THE NATION THAT MORE PEOPLE WANT TO EMIGRATE TO THAN ANY OTHER?”

Yes. As of the newest worldwide survey data available in 2026, the United States is still the world’s #1 desired immigration destination. But its lead has narrowed substantially.

Gallup’s latest worldwide results, published April 23, 2026 and based principally on 2025 surveys of more than 144,000 adults in 140 countries, found that among people who say they would like to move permanently to another country:

Desired destination	Share of prospective migrants
United States	15%
Canada	9%
Germany	~5%
Spain	~5%
United Kingdom	~4%
Australia	~4%
France	~4%
Japan	~4%
Italy	~3%
Saudi Arabia	~3%

Gallup estimates that approximately 134 million adults worldwide currently would like to move permanently to the United States if they had the opportunity.

So the answer to your precise question is unequivocally yes: more people still want to immigrate to America than to any other individual country.

But America’s lead has declined

This is particularly interesting historically.

When Gallup began measuring this systematically in 2007–2009, 24% of the world’s prospective migrants selected the United States.

That became approximately:

24% (2007–09) → ~20–22% (2011–16) → 18% (2023) → 15% (2025).

The current 15% is the lowest percentage Gallup has recorded in nearly two decades of measuring it. Nevertheless, second-place Canada attracts only 9%, so the United States still attracts roughly 67% more prospective migrants than its nearest competitor.

There’s another way in which “immigration capital of the world” is literally accurate.

The United Nations estimates that in 2024 the United States contained 52.4 million international migrants, by far the largest immigrant population of any country:

Country	International migrants, 2024
United States	52.4 million
Germany	16.8 million
Saudi Arabia	13.7 million
United Kingdom	11.8 million
France	9.2 million
Spain	8.9 million
Canada	8.8 million
UAE	8.2 million
Australia	8.1 million
Russia	7.6 million

So America has more than three times the immigrant population of second-place Germany.

That gives us two independent answers pointing in the same direction:

Desired immigration: United States #1  —  about 134 million people would choose it.

Actual immigrant population: United States #1  —  about 52.4 million international migrants live there.

There is an especially interesting qualification, however. America’s #1 position is global, not universal region by region. In Southeast Asia, prospective migrants now prefer Japan (23%) over America (12%). In the Middle East/North Africa, Germany (13%) and Saudi Arabia (12%) outrank America (9%). Within the EU, Spain (11%) and Switzerland (8%) outrank America (6%). But America’s very broad appeal across many different regions keeps it comfortably #1 worldwide.

So I think “the immigration capital of the world” remains a defensible description of the United States, provided we define it as the single country that more prospective international migrants want to move to than any other country. On that specific empirical question, the latest Gallup evidence says yes — still America, though by a considerably smaller margin than twenty years ago.

——

——

I then asked WHAT ARE THE TOP TEN NATIONAL SOURCES OF IMMIGRATION INTO THE U.S.?” and got a number of different breakdowns, such as, for the year 2024:

Rank	Country	Share of new U.S. permanent immigrants
1	Mexico	15%
2	Cuba	13%
3	China (mainland)	5%
4	Dominican Republic	5%
5	India	5%
6	Afghanistan	4%
7	Philippines	4%
8	Vietnam	3%
9	El Salvador	2%
10	Colombia	2%

and

MPI’s estimate of the 2023 unauthorized immigrant population gives:

Rank	Country	Estimated unauthorized population
1	Mexico	5.5 million
2	Guatemala	1.4 million
3	Honduras	1.1 million
4	El Salvador	1.1 million
5	Venezuela	486,000

Those five countries alone accounted for roughly 70% of the estimated unauthorized population. Mexico alone represented about 40%.

——

The U.S. Government trained and funded death squads and other means to make life hard or impossible for poor people in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Venezuela; so, this U.S. Government policy became a huge driver for emigration from there. It was really U.S. terrorism; it incentivized drug-trafficking and murderous gangs, which further terrorized the poor there, and drove millions of them to flee into America. (Similarly, America’s wars against Libya’s Government and Syria’s Government caused millions to flee into Europe. And the U.S.-coup-generated war in Ukraine also has caused millions of Ukrainians to flee into Europe.)

I should also point out that very unlike the U.S. Government, China’s Government had a “one child” policy per family during 1980-2015. It was trying to prevent overpopulation. (Obviously, limiting immigration is another way to do that.) Whether this policy did more harm than good is much debated, even today. But it shows that immigration and emigration numbers are part of a much broader demographic policy by the Government, and largely reflect cultural values.

To some extent, a nation’s abortion policies also reflect the Government’s demographic objective to increase or decrease its population. Abortion is legal throughout China at all stages of pregnancy. By contrast, the U.S. federal Government discourages abortion, and some of its states prohibit abortions under many or all circumstances.

Whereas China’s Government is not seeking to increase its 1.4 million population, America’s Government is seeking to increase its 343 million population.

—  —  —  —

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’  —  duping the public.