Migration Trends (April 2021)

Email (opens new window)Links

Data is available from National Records of Scotland (NRS) on migration to and from Glasgow. Due to restrictions in travel as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown there is certain to be an impact on these trends for 2019/20 and 2020/21.

The information set out below, however, shows the existing trends and patterns of movement.

Existing Trends

Table 1: Glasgow In-Migration and Out-Migration

Source: NRS

The data can be summarised as follows:

• Out-migration from Glasgow to the rest of Scotland is consistently greater than in-migration from the rest of Scotland;
• In-migration from the rest of the UK (excluding Scotland) tends to be greater than out-migration to the rest of the UK;
• In-migration from overseas origins is consistently greater than out-migration to overseas destinations, with the general trend that in recent years there has been than more than twice the number of in-migrants compared to out-migrants in this category; and
• The overall pattern is that in-migration from all sources is greater than out-migration to all destinations, and this has had a significant impact on the population of the city, and in particular on the working-age population.

The data is not able to show how much if any of the out-migrants to overseas destinations were themselves in-migrants from overseas origin in previous years.

In addition, there is not a great deal of information available as to the long-term residential choices of recent in-Migrants and how this may change as a result of COVID-19 and Brexit.

It is however certain that the scale of in-migration in Glasgow is contributing to an increasingly diverse population within the city.

Patterns of Movement

The 2018/19 data shows that of the 16,226 moves into the city from the rest of Scotland 7,227 (44.5%) were from the Non-Glasgow Conurbation (NGC).  While of the 19,355 moves out 12,163 (62.8%) were to the NGC.

It is extremely likely that a large proportion of these moves are within the contiguous built-up part of the Glasgow conurbation, and that these moves are the result of the arbitrary drawing of local authority boundaries.

At this local authority level, the table shows a consistent trend for Glasgow to lose population to the rest of Scotland, only for this to be more than offset by population gains from the rest of the UK, and from overseas.

Age of Migrants

Data is also available from NRS on the age of migrants; the most recent is for 2019 (not 2018/19 as in the table above) and shows the net change between in- and out-migrants by age group (which is not the same as the total number of in- and out-migrants).

In other words, the information only shows the difference between the stock of in-migrants and out-migrants for each age group; it does not relate to the size of the stock.

This is consistent with population moves into Glasgow as a result of access to higher education and younger entrants into employment.