India-UAE, India-US among top 10 migration corridors in 2024

• The World Migration Report 2026, released by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), showed that India-UAE and India-US were among the top 10 international country-to-country migration corridors in 2024.

• Migration corridors represent an accumulation of migratory movements over time and provide a snapshot of how migration patterns have evolved into significant foreign-born populations in specific destination countries.

• The Mexico to United States country-to-country corridor remains the largest in the world, with around 11 million people.

• The second largest is Afghanistan to Iran with more than 3.7 million migrants.

• It is followed by Syria to Turkey (over 3.5 million), comprising mainly refugees displaced by the civil war. 

• The corridor between Russia and Ukraine takes up the fourth spot.

• The fifth-largest corridor, India to the United Arab Emirates, comprises mainly migrant workers. More than 8 million international migrants lived in the United Arab Emirates (comprising 74 per cent of the population),

with Indians (more than 3 million) being the top nationality. 

• At the sixth spot is India to US migration corridor. The report said that around 3.2 million Indian migrants were living in the United States in 2024, the second largest foreign-born group after Mexicans. 

• The number of international migrants from India has increased continuously and significantly over the last several decades, with many arriving in the US as highly skilled workers or international students.

• The number of Indians in the US is followed by migrant numbers from two other Asian countries, China and the Philippines, which had nearly 2.5 million and about 2.3 million migrants, respectively, living in the US in 2024.

• Venezuela-Colombia, Ukraine-Russia, China-United States and Bangladesh-Saudi Arabia are the other country-to-country migration corridors among the top 10.