2023-10-23 21:52:50
A historic situation, unprecedented flows. In 2022, immigration to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries reached “unprecedented levels”, underlines the institution in a report made public Monday October 23. This phenomenon is mainly explained by the increase in immigration for humanitarian and professional reasons and, in certain countries, by the catch-up effects of post-Covid 19 family immigration. “Not counting Ukrainians, who represented 7 million refugees, we will reach 6.1 million more permanent immigrants in 2022”underlines Jean-Christophe Dumont, OECD expert on international migration, an increase of 26% over one year.
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These volumes are to be compared to the OECD population, estimated at 1.26 billion people. “Preliminary figures for 2023 suggest a further increase”, anticipates the organization. India and China are the leading nationalities of new arrivals. And the first destination countries are, in order, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain. France comes in sixth place with more than 300,000 new entries, ahead of Italy (+272,000 entries) and behind Canada (+437,000 entries).
If family immigration continues to constitute the first category of new immigrants in the countries concerned with 41% of arrivals, its share is fairly stable over time, the increase in flows being driven by other mobility factors.
Explosion of asylum requests in the United States
Thus, the number of new refugees increased from 425,000 in 2021 to nearly 625,000 in 2022. This dynamic is not in the process of drying up if we consider the increase in asylum requests: more than 2 million new requests were recorded in the countries of the region in 2022, well beyond the 1.7 million requests recorded in 2015 and 2016.
The top origins of asylum seekers are Venezuela (221,000), Cuba (180,000), Afghanistan (170,000) and Nicaragua (165,000). “This increase is largely explained by the explosion in applications in the United States, which amounted to 730,000”, underlines the report. Germany comes in second place with nearly 220,000 asylum requests in 2022, a figure however lower than those of 2015 and 2016. France recorded nearly 140,000 requests in 2022.
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Permanent immigration for professional reasons is also experiencing significant growth, driven by labor shortages. It represents 21% of new immigrants in 2022, compared to only 16% in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic. The increases in some countries are “spectacular”, notes the report. In the United Kingdom, labor immigration doubled over one year, it increased by 59% in Germany, by 39% in the United States and even by 26% in France.
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