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SMALL COUNTRIES HAVE HIGHER PROPORTION OF IMMIGRANTS With 29 percent immigrants, Switzerland is ahead of the United States, while the proportion in Luxembourg is even higher (46 percent).
Both the attractiveness and size of the country play a role. The smaller the country, the higher its probable proportion of foreign-born residents. Conversely, the larger the country, the
smaller this proportion is likely to be. In 2015, India had 0.4 percent of immigrants and China 0.07 percent. However, if each Chinese province were an independent country – a dozen
provinces have more than 50 million inhabitants, and three of them (Guangdong, Shandong, and Henan) have about 100 million – the proportion of immigrants would be much higher, given that
migration from province to province, which has increased in scale over recent years, would be counted as international and not internal migration. Conversely, if the European Union formed a
single country, the share of immigrants would decrease considerably, since citizens of one EU country living in another would no longer be counted. The relative scale of the two types of
migration – internal and international – is thus strongly linked to the way the territory is divided into separate nations.