For Burkina Faso, as with its neighbors in the region, migration has been a way of life for over 1,000 years as people followed livestock and crops on a seasonal basis. In the last 50 years, more traditional migration patterns have been reestablished, though these have retained important colonial characteristics. Overall, one Burkinabè in five now lives abroad. Yet, between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of people living in Burkina Faso who were born outside the country tripled, from 438,000 in 1990 to over a million a decade later, almost 10 percent of the population. Thus, while a net exporter of people, Burkina Faso itself is rapidly becoming a country of migrants.