Here's a list that we aren't number one on: the countries with the highest proportions of foreign-born people residing in them.

With all our complaints about the number of foreigners we've been letting in over the past decade or so, it's worth seeing how we stack up against the rest of the world on this front.

Thankfully, the UN did estimates of the world's population and where it resides from 2013 data, and the great folks at FiveThirtyEight.com put it into a handy table, which you'll see below:

Where do we stand? We're at number 22, with a proportion of 42.9 per cent of our resident population being foreign-born (in 2013).

It's worth pointing out, at this point, that the data here probably captures people who have gone on to become naturalised citizens (i.e. have lived here for ages, like perhaps your Malaysian or Indonesian friends whom you went to school with from primary level, for instance), or who have otherwise been here for many years now.

It should also be noted that the numbers captured above are from varying sources, from country to country — for some, like Singapore, the UN used our foreign-born population numbers only, while for others, like Indonesia, the estimate was derived from the number of people who are citizens of another country, as well as the number of refugees known to be resident there, according to UNHCR.

The Vatican (called "the Holy See") has an interesting case: none of its residents were born there. But other countries thought to have many foreigners living there, like the US, ranked surprisingly low in this list — America came in at number 68, with 14.9 per cent of its population being foreign-born. The UK and France came in even further down, with 12.4 and 11.6 per cent foreign-borns living there in 2013 respectively.

That said, our numbers are pretty stark compared to the rest of Asia, especially in terms of their growth.

Apart from Middle Eastern countries like Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — which, by the way, have managed to either stabilise or reduce their proportion of foreign-born residents — our numbers, as well as those of Brunei, see the most significant change from 1990 to 2013, the period where all the world's countries were measured (If you enjoy crunching numbers more than we do, you can sink your teeth into the UN's figures here).

Something to chew on for the coming week.

Top photo: Screengrab from IPS video.

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