That subheadline is more misleading than the actual headline.
The average worldwide is down but that downward trend is largely due to the US. Canada and Japan are up and most other countries are about the same. UK is the only other own with a notable downward trend
The UK also dropped precipitously if we’re looking at relative decreases.
Most other countries on the chart didn’t change much because going from 4% to 5% is in the noise.
The US started at a whopping 24% and ended at a number that’s still significantly higher than other countries.
As I said, politics played a role for sure, but when I read the comments before the article I expected to read about the US falling out of favor relative to other countries, which it has not.
The point is that "desire to migrate worldwide is down" is misleading because that downward trend is almost entirely due to the US. Most other countries are the same and Canada and Japan are even up.
This. Wanting to migrate isn’t a universal binary desire, it’s conditional. There is a cohort of people that wanted to migrate to the US and when that desire changes they do not wish to migrate at all. They don’t look for alternatives migration points, so the US and UK are moving the average downward.
If you look at the charts, the UK fell sharply around 2010, a bit more around 1026 - 2020 or so, and then recovered slightly. Lots of other countries had had sharp drops at some point (e.g. Japan around 2010) but the US drop seems more significant given its a far greater number to start with. France going from 5 to 4 is not really comparable with the US going from 24 to 15 over the same period.
If you look at the chart most of the decline happened before the Brexit vote, let alone Brexit. Since the brexit vote it has dropped from 5% to 4% which is not precipitous.
No, it makes sense to get into an EU country because it gives you access to so many more countries.
My niece was thinking of working in Ireland for a while and I told her that if she happened to stay for 5 years she could get an EU passport. It's a valuable thing.
On the other hand the UK speaks English and has strong ties with a lot of ex-colonies. Very few of those people would want to learn another language (maybe their third) to move to the EU (Ireland being the possible exception).
As a first generation (just - I was six years old!) immigrant I am quite happy my parents (my dad's employer gave him a choice) picked the UK over the US, and I cannot think of anywhere that would be better for me.
Moving countries has hard - having done it a few times. Even going to places where you known people and know the system.
> Part of the decline is attributable to a global drop in desire to migrate at all.
That's not what the article suggests at all.
The drop is calculated only from those who want to move.
Yes, it's still #1, but the drop that isn't a result of people not wanting to move. Instead, people that want to move are picking the US as the destination a lot less.
I parsed it as daishi man, and looked up daishi on Wikipedia instead. Daishi could be his own Japanese surname, a DJ, a rugby player, a sumo wrestler, or could represent the fact that he went on the Shikoku Pilgrimage of 88 temples like the monk Kobo Daishi.
I'm quite happy where I live. Colleagues that are in academics are going to Europe and some are going to China. Software guys are staying home and getting the opportunities to come to them through offshoring.
I can name quite a few in South America alone. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, etc.
"Accepting" is different from "tolerating with a few instances of hate crimes and likelihood of incarceration". You have to include non-white people in the acceptance criteria.
That depends on what you mean by accepting. Culturally or legally? Legally the immigration process to the US has always been one of the hardest and the bureaucracy around it is a nightmare.
> The U.S. remains the most desired destination for people who would like to leave their own countries permanently, but Gallup's latest data show it is less attractive than it once was
If you look at the charts, it seems that if the US is a shithole, then Canada is twice the shit hole, and France and Germany are twice that.
In fact, it doesn’t appear that there are any non-shitholes using this metric.
I think the US should facilitate immigration by probably expanding the H1B 10x and reducing the period for a green card and also overturn Euclid v Amber and NEPA (with state level CEQA style to follow) but the reality is that even an immigration-resistant US administration is far more popular than any other country as a destination; and that’s probably simply due to the fact that it’s the one Western economy that is still dynamic despite everything.
People are moving to the states not because it's a great country, it's because they're able to make money there. More money than in their home country. This of course is not an indicator of *general* attractiveness but it still makes the country itself attractive as most of the people are seeing more money as a way to have a better life.
I'm not sure that logic is solid. Expats move to Saudi Arabia because they can make huge amounts of money in a short time. Is, therefore, Saudi Arabia "a great country"?
This is an issue of trajectories. Perception of Canada and France has not shifted significantly in the observation period; the US dropped by an unambiguous 38%. So it's not about what the US was, it's about what it's become/becoming. An example of Newton's first law, if you will.
Or at least that's how I am interpreting the parent post...
Ah yes, just what we need, more H1Bs running around taking the jobs for which there are plenty of qualified unemployed Americans. That'll do wonders for us, I'm sure!
You don't even really need to have the military policing the capital and national police force shooting people in the streets. A significant economic downturn is enough to reduce immigration legal and otherwise.
From the graphs, it seems that knowledge of our non-dairy pavement is filtering through to other countries. But a longer term graph would be nice; I'd like to see how the indicator reacted over more economic cycles, but I know some visa categories that had been oversubscribed on opening day for years started staying open for most of the year when the mortgage crisis hit, and I'd love to see data from previous downturns, too.
You could sell that as a red hat to orange guy fans. You can have it made in China with a Sold in USA sticker and charge 2x. They’ll never notice the irony.
It's what a huge proportion of the US population wants, yes. And many of the people who are in the US and who are counted in the number of people in the US are themselves immigrants or closely socially connected to recent immigrants - one of the justifications for blanket immigration restrictionism is precisely that once an immigrant is physically in the country, they start affecting the democratic political process that decides what policies will be, including further immigration policy.
The current admin definitely wants to look tough on immigration.
Opinions among actual Americans vary. Some blue states even issue driver licenses to unauthorized immigrants on the basis that it's better for them to pass the driving test than to drive without taking the test.
The ICE stuff is extremely unpopular. Most of the people who voted for it did not understand they were doing so. If "the US" is the people, then no, they mostly do not want this. If "the US" is Trump, then yes, it is.
This is also the most important political question in the US right now. Are the people still sovereign?
The issue is that people's idea of illegal immigrants are hardened criminals living a lift of crime, whereas in reality the majority of people that are being deported are normal people that overstayed their visa, ie. the low hanging fruit. So people can be both supportive of the policy but dismayed at the implementation, which is what we are broadly seeing here.
Deporting illegal aliens might be popular as an abstract concept but as soon as the question is about deporting actual people that they know, their opinion changes. It’s great politics to say you’re going to do it, but bad politics and a moral atrocity to _actually_ do it.
The only ethical way to do it is better security at the border and making legal immigration and visits much easier. You can’t just snatch people who are established in communities and put them into camps without leading to a thoroughly justified moral outrage.
I think that it's possible to deport people while still treating them with dignity and respect, without keeping them in horrific conditions, without sending them to random dangerous countries they've never been to, without murdering innocent citizens and non-citizens, and while affording the people you remove legal due process.
Our current president has intentionally created a system designed to be cruel, brutal, and unfair because his supporters get off on it and because every abuse of power makes his next abuse easier, but even though some people will inevitability be upset when the illegal immigrants in their lives are removed from the country, it doesn't have to be a complete moral atrocity to enforce immigration law. The way it's being done today is a choice.
Yeah I would never ever move there. I had an offer just before Corona but naaah. The only reason I applied is that they advertised it as a local job at first.
While this administration is in place I don't even want to visit, even for work purposes I refuse. Especially the toxic manosphere culture at the moment.
I've lived in 4 countries but the US is not one that appeals to me. They pay the most but cost of living is also huge and besides that money isn't the most important to me. I'm making about 60% of what I would make in the same role in my home country. But that's ok because I enjoy living here a lot more.
What matters to me is quality of life, and a good social welfare system so I don't have to worry.
I wouldn't recommend visiting the U.S. right now. There isn't the concept of fairness or due process. You don't have rights here. It is now extremely important to be a U.S. citizen. Everyone else is at the mercy of the Trump administration.
Even as a US citizen you can have major issues at the border, like that guy with the grapheneos and his duress code.
In fact I think it would have worked out better if he hadn't been a US Citizen because they would have just sent him back and given him a lifetime entry ban or something.
I don't like how citizens are allowed to have their constitutional rights violated at border crossings, but that guy should have known better. The duress PIN feature is made for extreme situations where i.e. the owner of the phone is suddenly arrested and there's information on the phone that could get people they care about arrested or killed. It's for when the owner considers getting themselves criminally charged, killed, or disappeared to be a better option than giving up what's on the phone. For something routine like a border crossing, the better option is to wipe your devices prior to the crossing and throw them away if they get searched. If the guy had either done that or not given a PIN to CBP and left the phone with them, he would have gotten off scot free. Giving a duress PIN is a big choice and you have to be reasonably informed about the legal consequences of doing so in whatever jurisdiction you're in.
Gallup does this survey regularly, and I think perhaps the most interesting thing on the chart is how few people in south and east asia (around 10%) want to leave even if they had the opportunity to do so. I think that says something about the psychology of people who do leave their countries.
I’d say majority of the population that this is looking at falls into 3 categories : developing to developed nation, developed to developed, developing to developing.
Most people from developing to developed probably still are interested. Their interests may have shifted to better visa opportunities.
But those from developed to developed has probably decreased cause of job security problems globally in developed countries. People probably don’t want to leave their current state in this market.
The developing to developing is probably the same.
I'm surprised that "Northern America" was only 4% in 2024. It feels like a huge percentage of Canadians used to move to America. Maybe everybody who wanted to move already has?
The Canadians that I know who have been living in the USA are all making plans to or have already returned to Canada. Some of them have been here for 20+ years, became American Citizens, the whole deal. And now they just want to get off the crazy train.
I have to imagine that their sentiment is not unique.
All of the Canadians that I know that moved to the US have moved back. I'm sure there are still plenty that live there but in my circle that's pretty much over.
"1 billion Americans" is different than "filling America with 1 billion people." Decades from now, people like Yglesias will be living in the wreckage of their idealistic beliefs about nationhood and they'll be like "but true mass immigration has never been tried."
Shows a lot what Europe thinks of the US. I'm surprised though that people from South Asia who would like to move permanently to another country also have a low vote for the US.
The European Union desire to migrate to the US went from 7% to 6%. The article mentions two countries were ranked higher:
> Within the European Union, Spain, at 11%, and Switzerland, at 8%, rank ahead of the U.S., at 6%.
So I think this really shows that EU members don’t have a lot of desire to migrate anywhere. The drop from 7% to 6% is inline with the global decrease in migration desire. I don’t think there’s as much to read into this about sentiment change toward the US.
And in other regions the desire to migrate to the US went down a lot more than in Europe. So this is not about what Europeans think about the US at all.
Although recent US international politics did stain the US image in Europe substantually. Just the most recent betrayal against Ukraine is a good example of why.
Anglophone and still capable economy with pretty strong mobility for knowledge workers. It’s a no-brainer. No other place offers this. China is more dynamic an economy but you’ll be pretty second-class there as a S. Asian based on the experiences of my friends who work there.
just as much thought that has gone into people who positioned the opposite in the comments like that we suck and we should feel bad. it's just the opposite, we are great and we do great things, and people wish to participate in our greatness.
there is good and bad, i believe we are much more good and it's exactly why there is a wait list for entry longer than anyone's list of political grievances that boil down to mostly hyperbole with a short list of few real concerns
I'm a "they", and no we don't all want to be in the USA.
In fact, many of us are exactly as hubristic about our nations' popularity as you seem to be about the popularity of the US.
Before I left the UK (for Germany), I encountered people who seemed absolutely convinced that all 8 billion humans would move to the small, moist, sheep-filled rock if not for even stronger enforcement of immigration policies.
The US may be physically larger than the UK, but no, the world doesn't want to move to you. We don't want to regularly share the road with what are, by our standards, monster trucks; nor do we want the 2nd; nor strip malls; nor the nuclear arsenal. Many of us have our own alternatives to Mount Rushmore, to the Statue of Liberty, etc., and don't really care about yours.
Quite a lot don't care for the language as spoken and written in the USA, and for a long time that has even included British people, "two nations divided by a common language".
1. The US is still the top desired place to move by a large margin
2. There a variety of evidence to suggest that this also splits by tier of talent. For the best of the best the desire to move to the US remains strong. What has clearly attenuated is the lower tiers, with the crackdown on H1Bs and other areas there’s clearly fewer lower tier talent folks flooding in. That’s impacting tech masters degree mill type folks. but ultimately not a terrible thing as that system has been broken for a while.
> U.S. still top destination as desire to migrate falls worldwide
> But despite these changes, many people worldwide — an estimated 900 million — would like to move, including about 134 million who would prefer to move to the U.S.
How can people today even think they can "move to the U.S. permanently"? U.S. is even considering stripping citizenship from its own citizens. It's very impermanent.
I moved recently. I previously moved to the UK fifteen years ago. It's great here, people are very welcoming to immigrants and have been kind all over NY, Georgia, and Miami.
- NY has a great tech scene, it feels slightly healthier than SF but FAR more ambitious and supportive than London does. Also London investors are incredibly flaky.
- Street violence is an issue (in NYC), but phone theft and terrorism are not.
- My gym has a good out-of-the-gym social scene which has made it easy to meet people.
It’s always good when we all don’t want the same things. I expect to see a lot more doom and gloom headlines of the midterm elections go as predicted, but anticipate quality of life increasing for us non billionaires as well.
USA makes it very hard to immigrate legally so probably many people don't express "desire" to immigrate there because that's not even an option for them.
Having dealt with the us immigration system, and even in an easy case, it’s not an easy thing to do.
Hopefully people get more informed on how hard it is to apply and don’t waste their lives on it, as a lot of them won’t get legal residency, or it might take several long years.
And this applies in general to most countries, specialized educated professionals are wanted, not poor people.
The irony is that restrictive immigration policies designed to keep out "low quality" immigrants are only going to stop the flow of skilled ones who have better options at home or elsewhere. People who are desperate will continue to immigrate no matter what.
Skilled immigrants are so often loyal to immigrants as a class, or to other people from their specific foreign religious or ethnic group, that keeping them out of the country even though they have high value on paper is still worthwhile so that they don't have the opportunity to advocate for immigration policies that are more friendly to further low-quality immigrants.
and when the world's richest country, that built the very liberal democratic order of The West, turns around and tells all of its friends, "you've been ripping us off!"
> U.S. still top destination as desire to migrate falls worldwide
So the US is still the top destination by a wide margin. Part of the decline is attributable to a global drop in desire to migrate at all.
Recent politics is undoubtedly part of it, but if you assumed the US had fallen behind other countries you should probably read the article.
The average worldwide is down but that downward trend is largely due to the US. Canada and Japan are up and most other countries are about the same. UK is the only other own with a notable downward trend
US market share of global desire to migrate
2007 - 24%
2016 - 20%
2017 - 18%
2025 - 15%
Canada is #2 and moved up from 7% to 9%
2025 per capita, Est. Would-Be Migrants / Country Population, top 4 + US and UK:
Canada: 2.18
Australia: 1.47
Saudi Arabia: 1.17
Spain: 0.82
UK: 0.58
USA: 0.44
2025 per GDP, Est. Would-Be Migrants / Nominal GDP, top 5:
USA: $85.4k
Australia: $65.8k
Germany: $55.7k
Canada: $54.2k
UK: $52.6k
Most other countries on the chart didn’t change much because going from 4% to 5% is in the noise.
The US started at a whopping 24% and ended at a number that’s still significantly higher than other countries.
As I said, politics played a role for sure, but when I read the comments before the article I expected to read about the US falling out of favor relative to other countries, which it has not.
If you look at the chart most of the decline happened before the Brexit vote, let alone Brexit. Since the brexit vote it has dropped from 5% to 4% which is not precipitous.
My niece was thinking of working in Ireland for a while and I told her that if she happened to stay for 5 years she could get an EU passport. It's a valuable thing.
As a first generation (just - I was six years old!) immigrant I am quite happy my parents (my dad's employer gave him a choice) picked the UK over the US, and I cannot think of anywhere that would be better for me.
Moving countries has hard - having done it a few times. Even going to places where you known people and know the system.
Looking at the rise of parties like AfD, National Rally, PVV etc. the EU is far more hostile to non-white immigrants.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/24/nearly-quar...
That's not what the article suggests at all.
The drop is calculated only from those who want to move.
Yes, it's still #1, but the drop that isn't a result of people not wanting to move. Instead, people that want to move are picking the US as the destination a lot less.
A drop in the desire to emigrate might have had a higher impact on groups who would have preferred the US, for example.
The concern is that smart, productive, capable people now have better alternatives.
Iman = pride.
Daish = Daesh. You can Google what that means.
You are clearly trying to suggest a much more specific, scurrilous interpretation.
I remember when I went to Australia, I could stay a year but American backpackers only 6 months because that's what Australians got in the US.
"Accepting" is different from "tolerating with a few instances of hate crimes and likelihood of incarceration". You have to include non-white people in the acceptance criteria.
If you look at the charts, it seems that if the US is a shithole, then Canada is twice the shit hole, and France and Germany are twice that.
In fact, it doesn’t appear that there are any non-shitholes using this metric.
I think the US should facilitate immigration by probably expanding the H1B 10x and reducing the period for a green card and also overturn Euclid v Amber and NEPA (with state level CEQA style to follow) but the reality is that even an immigration-resistant US administration is far more popular than any other country as a destination; and that’s probably simply due to the fact that it’s the one Western economy that is still dynamic despite everything.
How are people with that mentality--here for the money, but don't buy into the underlying concepts--going to affect the civic structure of the U.S.?
Or at least that's how I am interpreting the parent post...
One of the worst ideas I've ever seen, and completely out of touch with American workers.
From the graphs, it seems that knowledge of our non-dairy pavement is filtering through to other countries. But a longer term graph would be nice; I'd like to see how the indicator reacted over more economic cycles, but I know some visa categories that had been oversubscribed on opening day for years started staying open for most of the year when the mortgage crisis hit, and I'd love to see data from previous downturns, too.
Opinions among actual Americans vary. Some blue states even issue driver licenses to unauthorized immigrants on the basis that it's better for them to pass the driving test than to drive without taking the test.
This is also the most important political question in the US right now. Are the people still sovereign?
"Deporting all immigrants who are here illegally" was polling at 55% approve/45% disapprove as recently as July.
You'd be surprised to learn that ICE is quite popular. For example 73% of Republicans approve of the job ICE is doing --- see page 14 of this NPR/PBS/Marist poll: https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR...
The only ethical way to do it is better security at the border and making legal immigration and visits much easier. You can’t just snatch people who are established in communities and put them into camps without leading to a thoroughly justified moral outrage.
Our current president has intentionally created a system designed to be cruel, brutal, and unfair because his supporters get off on it and because every abuse of power makes his next abuse easier, but even though some people will inevitability be upset when the illegal immigrants in their lives are removed from the country, it doesn't have to be a complete moral atrocity to enforce immigration law. The way it's being done today is a choice.
While this administration is in place I don't even want to visit, even for work purposes I refuse. Especially the toxic manosphere culture at the moment.
I've lived in 4 countries but the US is not one that appeals to me. They pay the most but cost of living is also huge and besides that money isn't the most important to me. I'm making about 60% of what I would make in the same role in my home country. But that's ok because I enjoy living here a lot more.
What matters to me is quality of life, and a good social welfare system so I don't have to worry.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/03/ice-german-t...
In fact I think it would have worked out better if he hadn't been a US Citizen because they would have just sent him back and given him a lifetime entry ban or something.
Most people from developing to developed probably still are interested. Their interests may have shifted to better visa opportunities.
But those from developed to developed has probably decreased cause of job security problems globally in developed countries. People probably don’t want to leave their current state in this market.
The developing to developing is probably the same.
I have to imagine that their sentiment is not unique.
> Within the European Union, Spain, at 11%, and Switzerland, at 8%, rank ahead of the U.S., at 6%.
So I think this really shows that EU members don’t have a lot of desire to migrate anywhere. The drop from 7% to 6% is inline with the global decrease in migration desire. I don’t think there’s as much to read into this about sentiment change toward the US.
Although recent US international politics did stain the US image in Europe substantually. Just the most recent betrayal against Ukraine is a good example of why.
there is good and bad, i believe we are much more good and it's exactly why there is a wait list for entry longer than anyone's list of political grievances that boil down to mostly hyperbole with a short list of few real concerns
such an interesting perspective.
In fact, many of us are exactly as hubristic about our nations' popularity as you seem to be about the popularity of the US.
Before I left the UK (for Germany), I encountered people who seemed absolutely convinced that all 8 billion humans would move to the small, moist, sheep-filled rock if not for even stronger enforcement of immigration policies.
The US may be physically larger than the UK, but no, the world doesn't want to move to you. We don't want to regularly share the road with what are, by our standards, monster trucks; nor do we want the 2nd; nor strip malls; nor the nuclear arsenal. Many of us have our own alternatives to Mount Rushmore, to the Statue of Liberty, etc., and don't really care about yours.
Quite a lot don't care for the language as spoken and written in the USA, and for a long time that has even included British people, "two nations divided by a common language".
1. The US is still the top desired place to move by a large margin
2. There a variety of evidence to suggest that this also splits by tier of talent. For the best of the best the desire to move to the US remains strong. What has clearly attenuated is the lower tiers, with the crackdown on H1Bs and other areas there’s clearly fewer lower tier talent folks flooding in. That’s impacting tech masters degree mill type folks. but ultimately not a terrible thing as that system has been broken for a while.
> But despite these changes, many people worldwide — an estimated 900 million — would like to move, including about 134 million who would prefer to move to the U.S.
Important caveats.
- NY has a great tech scene, it feels slightly healthier than SF but FAR more ambitious and supportive than London does. Also London investors are incredibly flaky.
- Street violence is an issue (in NYC), but phone theft and terrorism are not.
- My gym has a good out-of-the-gym social scene which has made it easy to meet people.
imaging what's going down just before/during the Olympics which I am 99% certain will be boycotted by then
You fire ahead and take my spot.
That used to be a joke about the Soviet Union. Perhaps before your time.
Hopefully people get more informed on how hard it is to apply and don’t waste their lives on it, as a lot of them won’t get legal residency, or it might take several long years.
And this applies in general to most countries, specialized educated professionals are wanted, not poor people.
they got their wish.
and when the world's richest country, that built the very liberal democratic order of The West, turns around and tells all of its friends, "you've been ripping us off!"