Gallup: 800 Million People Want to Migrate to U.S. Or Europe

Roughly 800 million people worldwide want to migrate into homes and jobs in America or Europe, according to a Gallup survey announced on January 31.

“In 2021, 16% of adults worldwide — which projects to almost 900 million people — said they would like to leave their own country permanently,” Gallup reported.

“Just under one in five potential migrants (18%) — or about 160 million adults worldwide — named the U.S. as their desired future residence,” the report said. That inflow would add one migrant for every employee in the United States.

Their migration would spike investor profits — but would also slash wages and spike housing costs for hundreds of millions of Americans and Europeans. That huge wealth shift would also make it much harder for U.S. and European families to buy homes and have children.

The 16 percent who want to migrate has jumped up from 12 percent — or 750 million — in 2018.

The new figures are based on 2021 interviews with nearly 127,000 adults in 122 countries, Gallup reported.

The highest share of would-be migrants now lives in southern Africa and the countries south of Mexico, according to the Gallup report.

Thirty-seven percent of those huge populations — or one in three — want to quit their countries — mostly for the United States.

The leading edge of those global migrants is being welcomed into the United States by President Joe Biden. Once welcomed, the migrants use cell phones to display their success to their left-behind home-country peers.

The young populations of these poor countries are growing rapidly, likely growing the number of would-be migrants over the next few years.

For example, roughly 40 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa are aged between 0 and 14, according to Statista.com.

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