These regions are among the world's most densely populated, containing an average of over 1,540 people per km2, as compared to 96 persons per km2 for the country as a whole.

Small communities spread throughout the desert regions of Egypt are clustered around historic trade and transportation routes.

The government has tried with mixed success to encourage migration to newly irrigated land reclaimed from the desert.

According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics and other proponents of demographic structural approach (cliodynamics), the basic problem Egypt has is an unemployment rate driven by a demographic youth bulge: with the number of new people entering the job force at about 4% a year, unemployment in Egypt is almost 10 times as high for college graduates as it is for people who have gone through elementary school, particularly educated urban youth, who comprised most of the people that were seen out in the streets during the Egyptian revolution of 2011.

The country was also host to many different communities during the European occupation period, including Greeks, Italians, and also from war-torn areas; the Lebanese, Syro-Lebanese, and other minority groups like Jews, Armenians, Turks and Albanians, though most either left or were compelled to leave after political developments in the 1950s.

[a] [33][34][26] Egyptians have a long history of mobility, primarily across the Arab world, but emigration became much more popular once it was recognised as a right in the 1971 Constitution.

[35] According to the International Organization for Migration, an estimated 2.7 million Egyptians live abroad and contribute actively to the development of their country through remittances (US$7.8 billion in 2009), circulation of human and social capital, as well as investment.

They modelled the components of a sample from Egypt as being made up of four ancient populations: 45% Levant Neolithic/Natufian, 33% Iran Neolithic, 15% Mota, and 8% Eastern Hunter Gatherer.

The results showed that 20.6% of the Egyptian mtDNA chromosomes were of Sub-Saharan African origin, while 79.4% were of West Eurasian.

[38] Listed here are some of the human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups in Egypt, according to Bekada, Asmahan et al.