Migration means leaving your home country and living or working somewhere else. Some countries, like the USA, have a population that is made up mainly of immigrants or their descendants who have arrived there in the past 200 years.

Today, about 150 million people live outside their native countries. The biggest movements of people are from

  • Central and South America to North America
  • Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union to Western Europe
  • Africa and Asia to Europe
  • the Middle East to Europe



People leave their home countries for many reasons. Sometimes they think they can get better jobs and more money in richer countries. Sometimes they leave their own country for political reasons or because of their religion.

During the course of history people have left their homes because of unemployment, wars in their country or because of a famine. Thousands of Irish men and women left the island in the middle of the 19th century because there was a potato crisis and many of them didn’t have enough to eat.

The Balkan wars in the 1990s left millions of people homeless. They became refugees and went to neighboring countries to the north and west. Conflicts in the Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan brought over 1.5 million people to Western Europe in 2015 alone.

Some countries depend on immigrants to keep their economy running or because they have low birth rates and need foreigners to work. Today, governments in many countries face illegal immigration. Especially the USA and countries in Western Europe are sending back more and more people to their home countries.



Refugees at the Slovenian - Austrian border in 2015
Image:Borut Podgoršek, MORS, CC BY 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons