3.5% of People in South Korea Were Born Abroad — In 1990 It Was 0.04%

In 1990, 18,499 people living in South Korea had been born outside it — 0.04% of that year’s population of 42,869,283. The World Bank publishes this indicator to one decimal place, so the headline figure reads 0.0%, but that is rounding, not absence. In 2024 the figure is 1,811,507, or 3.5%: 98 times as many people, and 81 times the share, in 34 years.

Over the same period Japan went from 1.05 million to 3.41 million, a 3.2-fold increase. In 1990 Japan was already hosting 57 times as many foreign-born residents as Korea, and in 2024 it still hosts 1.9 times as many in absolute terms. By share, though, Japan sits at 2.8% — below Korea's 3.5% — because its denominator is 123.4 million people. The same two countries swap places depending on which measure you pick.

Every figure here comes from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ international migrant stock estimates for 2024, published through the World Bank. The criterion is place of birth, not citizenship: if the country you live in is not the country you were born in, you are counted. All 53 countries this site covers have values with no gaps, so every ranking below is a rank within those 53.

That makes the net wide. Students, posted employees, spouses who migrated to marry, refugees, and people who have already naturalized are all included. South Korea’s 1.81 million is not a count of permanent residents or naturalized citizens — it is everyone living in Korea in 2024 who was born somewhere else. It is broader than what the word immigrant usually conveys in everyday Korean.

Counting by citizenship would change some cases substantially. Germany’s 16.75 million includes not only arrivals since the 1990s but ethnic German returnees from the former Soviet Union — people who, by citizenship, were German all along. It cuts the other way too: second- and third-generation ethnic Koreans who settle in Korea and take citizenship remain foreign-born in this statistic permanently, because they were born abroad.

And the indicator counts only arrivals. How many of a country’s own people are living abroad is an entirely separate statistic, and within a single country the two can move in opposite directions.

Sort by share and five of the top six are on the Arabian Peninsula: Qatar at 76.7%, the United Arab Emirates at 74.0%, Bahrain at 52.3%, Jordan at 45.7%, and Saudi Arabia at 40.3%. In Qatar, three out of every four people you pass on the street were born in another country.

One non-Gulf country breaks into the top three: Andorra, at 59.1%. By head count, though, that is 48,408 people — second-lowest of the 53. In a country of 82,904 residents, the share climbs easily. Iceland (25.1%, 98,818 people) and Cyprus (14.9%, 202,062) work the same way. In a microstate, the percentage measures sensitivity rather than scale.

From seventh place the names get familiar. Switzerland 31.1%, Australia 30.4%, Austria 25.5%, Ireland 23.1%, Canada 22.2%, Sweden 21.4%, Germany 19.8%, Spain 18.5%, the United Kingdom 17.1%, the Netherlands 16.2%. The classic settlement countries — Australia and Canada — cluster with open-border Western Europe in the 15–30% band. Greece at 14.2%, France at 13.8%, Italy at 11.0%, and Portugal at 10.8% close out the double digits.

Sort the same data by head count instead and even first place changes. The United States hosts 52,375,047 foreign-born residents — 3.1 times as many as second-place Germany (16.75 million), and 17.2% of the 304 million international migrants worldwide. Roughly one in six migrants on Earth lives in the U.S. By share, though, it ranks 18th at 15.2%.

The top ten by count run: the United States, Germany, Saudi Arabia (13.68M), the United Kingdom (11.85M), France (9.19M), Spain (8.87M), Canada (8.81M), the United Arab Emirates (8.16M), Australia (8.11M), and Turkey (7.08M). Some names overlap with the ratio list, but the order is very different. Italy (6.55M), Jordan (5.28M), India (4.80M), Iran (3.84M), and Malaysia (3.81M) follow.

Pull out the countries where the two rankings diverge most and you get two groups pointing in opposite directions. One has a small denominator, so the share spikes: Andorra is 3rd by share but 52nd by count, a 49-place gap; Iceland is 10th and 45th, a 35-place gap; Bahrain is 4th and 37th, 33 places. The other has a large denominator, so the share is suppressed: India by 34 places (47th versus 13th), Japan and China by 23 each.

South Korea sits near the middle of this axis — 37th by share, 26th by count, an 11-place gap. With 51.68 million people, the denominator is neither small enough nor large enough to pull the two measures far apart.

India hosts 4,796,255 foreign-born residents — the 13th largest count among these 53 countries. But with a population of 1.46 billion, that works out to 0.3%, ranking 47th. Both numbers describe India accurately. Neither describes Indian migration.

The indicator counts only arrivals. By UN estimates, the country with the most people living outside it in 2024 is India, at 18.5 million — 6% of all international migrants worldwide, and nearly triple the 6.5 million of 1990. China is second at 11.7 million and Mexico third at 11.6 million.

Those three countries sit together near the bottom of the share ranking: China 0.1% (52nd), India 0.3% (47th), Mexico 1.3% (42nd). The world's three largest sources of emigrants all fall within the bottom twelve of 53 by the share of residents they receive.

Their neighbours on the list tell similar stories: the Philippines at 0.1% (87,212 people), Indonesia 0.2%, Vietnam 0.3%, Morocco 0.3%, Tunisia 0.5%, Cambodia 0.5%, Brazil 0.7%, Egypt 1.0%. The Philippines sends millions of workers abroad — a pillar of its economy — yet ranks second from last here. North Korea's 0.2% is a different matter again: with the border effectively closed, neither direction generates much of a statistic.

A low number in this table does not mean a country is untouched by migration. More often it means the table is not showing the direction that matters.

Near the top of the share ranking, Jordan (45.7%) sits shoulder to shoulder with the Gulf states. By the indicator alone, both are 'countries where roughly half the population was born elsewhere.' The causes are close to opposite.

Qatar's and the UAE's figures are migrant workers in construction, services, and domestic work, mostly from South and Southeast Asia. Their residency is tied to an employment contract, and it rarely converts into permanent settlement or citizenship. Three-quarters of the population is foreign-born, yet the composition of the citizenry barely moves. Saudi Arabia's 13.68 million and Bahrain's 840,000 follow the same structure.

Jordan's 5.28 million is something else. It consists largely of refugees from Palestine and Syria, and their descendants — people pushed out by conflict next door rather than pulled in by labour demand. The stays are far longer, too: arrivals from 1948 and 1967 are still in these counts. Both are 45%, but one rises and falls with the construction cycle and the other does not.

Turkey's 7.08 million (8.1%) and Iran's 3.84 million (4.2%) belong closer to this refugee axis, dominated by Syrian and Afghan populations respectively. By share alone Turkey lands between Portugal and Chile, but the histories behind those numbers have nothing in common.

The Gulf population structure distorts other statistics too. A previous report noted that these countries’ population pyramids bulge at the working ages because of labour migration rather than low fertility. This is what that bulge is made of: 76.7% of Qatar’s population, and 74.0% of the UAE’s.

The middle of the share ranking is crowded with South American countries: Chile 7.8%, the Dominican Republic 6.5%, Guyana 6.5%, Colombia 5.8%, Peru 5.4%, Uruguay 4.7%, Argentina 4.3%. Interleaved with Hungary (7.1%) and Poland (4.5%), they look unremarkable.

The time series says otherwise. Colombia's foreign-born population went from 145,504 in 2015 to 3,063,518 in 2024 — 21-fold in nine years. Peru went from 152,562 to 1,837,219, a twelvefold rise; Chile from 598,039 to 1,538,324. For contrast, across the 25 years from 1990 to 2015, Colombia's figure barely moved, from about 100,000 to 145,000.

Almost all of that increase is Venezuelan. More than seven million people have left Venezuela since 2015, and many crossed into neighbouring Colombia and onward south. Where the European and Gulf figures at the top of the table accumulated over decades, these were built inside a single one.

On the ranking, Colombia's 5.8% and Poland's 4.5% are two places apart. But one is a snapshot of a movement still underway and the other is closer to a decades-long average — a difference the rank order cannot show.

There were 304 million international migrants worldwide in 2024, or 3.7% of humanity. South Korea's 3.5% falls 0.2 points short of that. Within the 53 countries this site covers it ranks 37th, in the lower third — but measured against the world as a whole it is close to average. The 53-country sample leans heavily on Europe and the Gulf, which is worth keeping in mind.

What differs is how it got there. Korea's share ran 0.04% in 1990, 0.1% in 1995, 0.3% in 2000, 0.5% in 2005, 1.2% in 2010, 2.6% in 2015, 3.3% in 2020, and 3.5% in 2024. Between 2005 and 2015 it quintupled from 0.5% to 2.6%, and that decade accounts for most of the total rise.

Since 2020 it has moved just 0.2 points in four years, against 0.7 points over the preceding five. The years the border was closed are still visible in the series.

Nine countries in Asia have a higher share than Korea: the four Gulf states plus Jordan, then Malaysia (10.7%), Turkey (8.1%), Thailand (4.4%), and Iran (4.2%). Malaysia and Thailand draw labour migration from immediate neighbours; Turkey and Iran are refugee-driven. Korea, Japan, and Uzbekistan (3.2%) form yet another type on this list — labour migration is the main channel, but the scale is still small.

The Gulf figures carry more raw uncertainty than most. Migrant worker registration and actual residence diverge easily, and collection cycles and methods differ by country. UN estimation corrects for some of this, but it is safer to assume a wider error band there than elsewhere.

And these ranks are only ranks within 53 countries. Several countries this site does not yet cover have higher shares: Kuwait at 67.3%, Luxembourg at 51.2%, Singapore at 48.7%, and Oman at 43.2% would all slot in around Andorra and Bahrain. By head count, Russia's 7.6 million would land between Turkey and Italy. Move to a full global ranking and the upper reaches shift considerably.

Finally, this is a stock at one moment, not a flow. It does not show how many people arrive or leave each year. That Korea's 3.5% has barely moved in four years does not mean nobody came — it means the gap between arrivals and departures was small enough to disappear into ordinary population change.