An illegal immigrant is a person who moves to a country without following the legal rules or procedures for entering or staying there. Either they enter without permission, stay after their visas have expired, or avoid the legal process altogether.
Which are the countries with the highest percentage of illegal immigrants in 2024? World Population Review has the statistics.
United States
The US has the highest number of illegal immigrants, with estimates -- there are no hard numbers and the estimates are vastly, vastly imprecise -- suggesting the numbers to be 10.9 million and 11.4 million immigrants. Most are from Mexico.
Russia is neck to neck with the US, claiming to have between 10 million and 12 million illegal immigrants, although most reports suggest that America's illegal immigrant problem is a lot bigger. Russia's undocumented immigrants are from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Moldova, Kazakhstan.
Anywhere between 1.4 million to 10 million illegal immigrants have entered India and made our country their home, without permission. They have come from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Pakistan.
Bangladeshi illegal immigrants might show up in India and elsewhere by the droves, but the country has its own immigrant issues with between 500,000 and 1.2 million illegals living on its soil, many from Myanmar.
France's illegal immigrant problem is of a fairly large size -- between 890,000 and 1.2 million illegals or sans-papiers roam within its borders unaccounted for. They mainly come across the Mediterranean from countries of Africa, like Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia.
Germany, which has the second largest number (after the US) of legal immigrants in the world, also has between 100,000 and 1 million illegal immigrant, mainly coming from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey.