Opinion Today: Mapping global migration like never before

New data from Meta could add context to the global immigration debate.

View in browser|nytimes.com April 17, 2025 The New York Times By Quoctrung Bui Deputy Editor, Opinion Graphics Debates on immigration often feel like a living example of the parable of the blind men and the elephant: Each person can speak only from the perspective of his or her country, and no one has a grasp of the whole story. To be fair, the scale is monumental. To really see migration worldwide, you'd need the collective agreement of hundreds of nations to track and share movements of people across their borders. In today's geopolitical climate, that level of coordination is a pipe dream. But there's another way. New research, based on anonymized location data from three billion Facebook users that Meta has shared — for the first time — with Times Opinion, gives us an unprecedented opportunity to map global migration using a consistent method for a majority of countries. The resulting project, which we're publishing today, is a picture of migration that is mesmerizing. We can see in detail the huge, and much discussed, migration corridors of the world: South Asia to the Middle East, Latin America to the United States and North Africa to Europe. But we also can see others, like the flow of Brazilians to Ireland, South Koreans to Mongolia and Vietnamese to Japan. Each of these flows has a complex story behind it — rooted in culture, history and economics — and serves as a reminder of the nuance that often gets lost in our seemingly intractable arguments over immigration. Read the article, which takes you on a guided tour of the big picture of human migration today, and then use our interactive tool to explore the full data set for yourself. Read more: The New York Times To Understand Global Migration, You Have to See It First These estimates, drawn from the location data of three billion Facebook users, provide a view of human migration in extraordinary detail. 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