Bangladesh 6th largest migrant sending country: IOM

Bangladesh is the 6th largest migrant-sending country and the eighth largest remittance-receiving country in the world, according to the World Migration Report 2022.

The UN agency for International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Wednesday launched its flagship World Migration Report 2022 which reveals a dramatic increase in internal displacement due to disaster, conflict, and violence at a time when global mobility ground to a halt due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.

According to the report, there were around 281 million international migrants in the world in 2020.

The report highlights that in 2020, 7.40 million Bangladeshi migrants lived abroad. Despite living beyond the country’s borders, Bangladesh’s diaspora has continued to play a key role in the country’s development.

The World Bank estimates that the Bangladeshi population abroad sent home over US$18 billion in 2019, with 73 percent coming from those working in Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

These remittances account for over 6.0 percent of GDP, representing the country’s second-largest source of foreign income.

According to the report, the number of international migrants has grown from 84 million globally in 1970 to 281 million in 2020, although when global population growth is factored in, the proportion of international migrants has only inched up from 2.3 percent to 3.6 percent of the world’s population.

The vast majority of people globally reside in the country in which they were born. Due to COVID-19, the number of international migrants in 2020 was lower, by around 2 million, than it otherwise would have been, the report added.

ARR