I looked at 2024 data on visa applications around China to Schengen zone countries. Supposedly, some consulates/European countries are easier to get visas for, so the visa app might not be the real destination and you can't say this reflects actual popularity of EU countries. But...

MIPEX has published updated ratings of EU countries' migrant integration policies for the first time since 2019: www.migpolgroup.com/wp-content/u.... Not much change in the last few years, but considering the way things have deteriorated in the US, maybe that counts as a win.

So first thing is just a dead simple map. UN data as of 2024, which is imperfect--just take the numbers as a rough approximation. Greenland at the low end with 10 Chinese nationals, US up top with 2.49 million, then Japan, Canada, S. Korea, Australia, and Singapore. Italy leads EU with 241,000.

Countries clustered by how similar their immigrant populations are based on where they come from. Note this ignores population size and just looks at the relative proportions. Also, I used UN data for this, which isn't perfect by any means (but it's the best you can do).

Latest World Happiness Report has some chapters on ties between life satisfaction, populism, and declining social trust that're very timely. But there's also a chapter on meal sharing and happiness that's worth thinking about. happiness-report.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/2025/WHR+25....

Pulled the numbers on US visas issued in FY2023. The thing that gets me is that, for all the talk about H-1B worker visas, they're only about 2% of all visas issued. travel.state.gov/content/trav...

Despite a certain narrative in the media (and often boasted over by those on the right) migration to the Sunbelt has slowed over the decades (www.frbsf.org/wp-content/u...), and post-pandemic there might even be some reversal of it--too soon to tell. But also...

Only way I can make sense of this is that when 32+51% of Americans think of "illegals" they're just imagining some scary, abstract fiction of a hardened criminal ginned up by TV. But for the 51%, sanity starts to kick in when they're made to think beyond that. www.pewresearch.org/race-and-eth...

US Census population projections from 2023 said that population growth slows down no matter what, but whether and when US population starts to shrink basically all comes down to immigration. But the thing is...

Google searches in the US for "cozy fiction" up dramatically this past month. Can't imagine why.

Population aging, depopulation, labor shortages—there’s this hugely complicated/entangled demographic change going on in the industrialized world. What’s interesting is how it’s refracted into different sub-issues (and talked about differently?) in different EU countries.
europa.eu/eurobaromete...

Some days...

At this point, I just really don't even know what to do with this mess.