According to a report on Migration in the World 2022, the IOM explained that some 108,000 travel restrictions were introduced, while the number of air passengers globally plunged 60% to 1.8 billion, down from 4.5 billion in 2019.

Some 40.5 million people were living as internally displaced at the end of 2020, up from 31.5 million a year earlier.

“While billions of people have been effectively grounded by Covid-19, tens of millions of others have been displaced within their own countries. We are witnessing a paradox not seen before in human history,” IOM Chief Antonio Vitorino said in a statement.

According to the report, the number of migrants crossing international borders has risen from 84 million worldwide in 1970 to 281 million in 2020.

However, if global population growth is taken into account, the proportion of international migrants has only jumped from 2.3% to 3.6% of global population in those five decades. This figure means that nearly all the world’s inhabitants (96.4%) live in the country in which they were born.

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