Earlier this month the Pew Research Center released an article by Christopher Inkpen with 7 critical facts about world migration and an interactive map that shows the source countries for migrants around the world. The site is a valuable resource worth checking out: http://pewrsr.ch/1qXZRr5.
My biggest takeaway was something I’ve been teaching my students for years: In the poorest countries of Sub-Saharan few if any people are making it out. Their reality is that they live in extreme poverty and are only surrounded by other countries with similar conditions. They have almost no options for reaching the rich world. I even make my students memorize the following phrase about the limited amount of migration from Africa to the developed countries, “if they could, they would, but they can’t, so they don’t.”