America Takes Most Migrants but Ranks 21st Per Capita

The chart everyone shares measures the size of the economy, not how open a country is. Divide by population and the ranking reshuffles entirely.¹

Correction, 5 October 2026: an earlier version said the United States leads the world on absolute intake (the data cover 29 OECD countries) and described Australia's program as having an explicit annual cap, which we have not sourced. A source note about national definitions that no longer applied to this data has been removed, and the intake chart now includes the United Kingdom. Correction, 3 October 2026: a chart title now describes only what that chart shows. The finding is unchanged.

The United States admitted 1.425 million permanent migrants in 2024,¹ more than any other OECD country. By that measure, it leads the OECD. By almost every other measure of openness, it does not.

Divide each country's intake by its population and the ranking reshuffles completely. The United States scores 4.19 permanent arrivals per 1,000 residents,¹ placing it 21st among the 29 OECD countries for which standardised 2024 data are held.¹

Luxembourg tops that adjusted list at 38.99 per 1,000,¹ followed by Switzerland at 15.06 and Ireland at 13.33.¹ The chart that circulates every time migration enters the news cycle is, in effect, a ranking of national population size.

The absolute numbers are not wrong. They reflect a real fact: the United States is a very large country. Germany admitted the second-largest intake among OECD members in 2024 (partly an OECD estimate),¹ followed by Canada, the United Kingdom and Spain.¹

Those figures are also driven, in part, by population. Germany has more than 83 million people;² Switzerland has more than nine million,² yet Switzerland admitted 135.6 thousand migrants¹ and scored the second-highest per-capita rate in the OECD.¹

The per-capita gap between the United States and the OECD's most open economies is not narrow. Canada, whose immigration policy is often cited alongside America's, scores 11.72 per 1,000 residents,¹ nearly three times the US rate of 4.19.¹

Australia scores 8.80.¹ Belgium scores 8.96.¹

The OECD tracks permanent migration inflows for its member countries using a standardised concept intended to make cross-country comparison possible.¹ The database covers 29 countries for 2024.¹

That standardisation matters: a student who converts to permanent residence counts the same way in Auckland and Amsterdam. Without it, national definitions of permanent differ enough to make raw comparisons misleading.

Germany's and Japan's 2024 figures are partly OECD estimates rather than published national statistics.¹

To be sure, per-capita rankings carry their own distortions. Small, wealthy states such as Luxembourg and Switzerland sit near the top of every per-capita list partly because their denominators are tiny.¹

A single large employer relocating staff from outside the OECD can move a small country's rate by a measurable fraction of a point. Critics of per-capita measures also note that absolute numbers carry political weight for a reason: a country of more than 341 million people² absorbing 1.425 million migrants¹ in one year is managing a logistical task that Switzerland's intake at scale would not require.

The OECD updates its International Migration Database annually.¹

The chart will keep circulating. The United States will keep topping it. Whether that makes America the world's most open economy for migrants depends entirely on which axis you choose to read.

Just saying.

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