Migration Far and Away
A visualization of global migration and its relationship with the United States.
Global migration, as defined by the Cambridge dictionary, is a situation in which people go to live in foreign countries, especially to find work. While the primary and ideal reason for immigration is to search for work opportunities, people also migrate to escape conflict, violence, and harsh climates. Data gathered by Kapur 2014 reveals that total global migration stock increased from 92 million in 1960 to 215 million in 2010. A migrant stock refers to the total number of international migrants present in a given country at a particular point in time; While a migrant flow refers to the number of people arriving or departing from a given country over a specific period (Abel 2013).
The USA has been at the center of global migration since as far back as the 1800s. The American government initially had a Laissez-Faire approach to immigration, until 1920 when stricter policies were introduced. Despite this, the US remains the prime destination of international migrants globally. According to Migration Policy Institute records, in 2019 the US had over 50 million migrants making up about 15% of its total population.
In this article, we explore the development of visualizations from available data on global migration, particularly data relating to the US’ influence on global migration. We will discuss the process of developing the visualizations, the concepts and design that needs to consider, the executed visualizations, and the possible insights that can be gained from them.
The project’s goal is to produce a tool for exploring and gaining insights on migration data. As stated by Stu Card and his colleagues, the goal of data visualization is to amplify human cognition so that users can discover patterns, trends, relationships, and anomalies in the data that can lead to new insights and discoveries (Card et al., 1999).
Project Design
In this section, we will explore the project design process which covers the datasets referenced, findings and insights from data, and the design considerations resulting in our visualizations.
Datasets
For this project, I referenced several datasets from sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau, United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reports, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports, https://www.infoplease.com, and the Migration Policy Institute.
These sources provided comma-separated versions (.csv) and spreadsheet files of data detailing
- Global migration populations grouped by countries and years
- Migration sources and numbers for each country
- Number of children migrants and refugees per country origins
- Global migration male and female migrant breakdowns
- US migration highlights with timelines
Findings and Insights
Some of the interesting insights from the data sources were
- The origins of immigrants and possible travel paths into countries, particularly the US
- The number of migrants globally and per country, and how those figures have changed over time
- Notable dates in US migration history and how they influenced migration numbers in the US
- The breakdown of migrant statistics such as by gender, children, or refugees.
Design Considerations
As mentioned in the introduction, the purpose of this tool is to provide a visual representation of the data findings on global migration. This visual storytelling tool will provide a means to uncover more insights, share details with others, and answer common questions about migration. To achieve this, we will take into account several design considerations.
- Providing an overview of the system. Data visualization tools can help users explore data flexibly, allowing them to optionally see an overview or see it in detail. Ben Shneiderman (1996) describes this in his matra, “overview first, zoom and filter, and then details on demand”. To achieve this, traditional visualization tools like bar charts and line charts were used to present the data available.
2. Presenting a migration network map. With migration, there is always a source and a destination. One of the data sources reveals the different countries that feed each country migrants and the populations from different origins. In sheet form, it is tedious to explore and gain any insights. Based on this, I decided to represent the origin/destination relationships between countries as a network of nodes where the countries are the nodes with additional encodings of size and color to represent the number of migrants from the origin.
3. Presenting migration history as an interactive time series. One of the insights from the data was that there are several notable migration events in the US’ history. I considered presenting this in a more interactive and visually appealing format where users can click through to find specific points in the timeline of events.
Limitations, Conclusion, and Future work
In this project, I created a visual analytics tool for understanding exploring migration trends, key points, and relationships over several years. Based on the design considerations, I created an overview of migration numbers and trends using traditional visualizations of bar and line charts. I also created a visual time series of the notable US migration events and a country to country network map of the relationships between countries during migration as origins and destinations.
One limitation worthy to mention is the exploration of available data. This refers to both finding relevant data and parsing available data into forms that can be used for visualizations.
Plans for this project would include
- Exploring migrant preferences within the US. As our data revealed, the US is rich in ethnicity as it has several migrant sources and is the preferred migration destination. It would be useful to develop the tool to help in predicting preferred destinations and regions of migrants of different ethnicities.
- Implementing a drill down into migrations within the US such as inter-state migrations.
References
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/global-migration
Shneiderman, B. (1996, September). The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations. In Proceedings 1996 IEEE symposium on visual languages (pp. 336–343). IEEE.
Card, S., Mackinlay, J. D., & Shneiderman, B. (2009). Information visualization. Human-computer interaction: Design issues, solutions, and applications, 181.
Kapur, D. (2014). Political effects of international migration. Annual Review of Political Science, 17, 479–502.
Abel, G. (2013). Estimating global migration flow tables using place of birth data. Demographic Research, 28, 505–546. Retrieved October 11, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/26349961
