Who's Most Likely to Emigrate? South Africa's Employed and Qualified

There’s a persistent assumption that emigration is mostly a response to hardship — that the people leaving are the ones with the fewest options at home. The data says the opposite. Who is most likely to emigrate from South Africa, according to the country’s most methodologically solid survey on the question, is the settled and successful, not the struggling.

What the numbers actually show

Afrobarometer’s Dispatch AD914, a nationally representative survey published in December 2024, found that 27% of South Africans overall have considered emigrating. Broken down by group, that overall figure hides a clear pattern in emigration intention by income and education south africa:

• Among the wealthiest respondents, the figure rises to 42%.
• Among the most educated, it’s 38%.
• Among people in full-time jobs, it’s 36%.
• Among youth, it’s 32%.

Every one of those subgroups sits above the 27% national average.

The pattern worth naming plainly

Wealthiest south africans considering emigration at nearly double the general population’s rate is the clearest signal in the data: emigration intent rises with income, education and employment, not the reverse. It is the employed, the qualified and the comparatively well-off who report thinking seriously about leaving — precisely the group with the resources, the credentials and the options to actually act on it if they choose to.

Why this matters for how the conversation gets framed

This is a genuinely different story from the one often told about emigration as an act of desperation. These afrobarometer emigration findings suggest something closer to a rational calculation being made by people who have already achieved a measure of success in South Africa, and are weighing whether opportunities elsewhere outweigh what they’ve built at home. It isn’t that things are unbearable for this group — it’s that they have both the means and the qualifications to make the comparison meaningfully, and enough is going right for them personally that a move is genuinely an option rather than a fantasy.

What this means if this describes your household

If your family fits this profile — employed, qualified, weighing a move rather than fleeing one — you’re not an outlier in this data, you’re squarely in the group it describes. That doesn’t make any individual decision easier, but it’s worth knowing the underlying pattern isn’t unusual: the people most likely to actually go through with emigration are, statistically, the ones who least “need” to on paper. The choice is aspirational for most of this group, not a last resort.

Why the source matters here

Afrobarometer’s survey draws its strength from being nationally representative rather than a self-selected online panel — respondents weren’t recruited from people who had already made up their minds to leave, which is exactly what makes the income, education and employment pattern credible rather than a product of who happened to answer. A survey built the other way around would struggle to say anything meaningful about who considers leaving in the first place, only about who already has. This one measures intention across the whole population, and the well-off and qualified still come out on top.