Explore new estimates of migration flows between and within regions for five-year periods, 1990 to 2010. Click on a region to discover flows country-by-country.

ABOUT THE DATA

The bilateral flows between 196 countries are estimated from sequential stock tables. They are comparable across countries and capture the number of people who changed their country of residence over five-year periods. The estimates reflect migration transitions and thus cannot be compared to annual movements flow data published by United Nations and Eurostat.

 

ABOUT THE PLOT

The circular plot shows the estimates of directional flows between 123 countries that recorded a migration volume (immigration + emigration) of more than 100,000 people in at least two of the four time periods. Only flows containing at least 50,000 migrants are shown. The window that pops up when hovering over the plot indicates the absolute number of immigrants (total in) and emigrants (total out) over the five-year period.

 

ESTIMATING GLOBAL BILATERAL MIGRATION FLOWS

“As migration flow data are often incomplete and not comparable across nations, we estimate the number of movements by linking changes in migrant stock data over time. Using statistical missing data methods, we estimate the five-year migrant flows that are required to meet differences in migrant stock totals. For example, if the number of foreign-born in the United States increases between two time periods, we estimate the minimum migrant flows between the US and all other countries in the world that are required to meet this increase.

For each country of birth, we estimate the minimum number of migrant flows required to match differences in stocks by assuming that people are more likely to stay than to move. This estimation procedure is replicated simultaneously for all 196 countries to estimate birthplace specific flow tables, resulting in a comparable set of global migration flows. Alterations are made to the migrant stock counts to control for births and deaths during the period. This allows our country-specific net migration flows to closely match the net migration estimates published by the United Nations.”

Contact

About the circular plots:
[email protected]

About the data:
[email protected]

Provided by
 

Coded by 

Screendesign by Elvira Stein

Inspired by Martin Krzywinski’s Circos and Mike Bostock’s D3.js library.

 

The interactive infographic was posted originally on http://www.global-migration.info/ and is generously shared through a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

I suggest going to the www.global-migration.info site if you are interested in downloading the PDF version of the visulization, along with deeper written analysis of the data. The bonus there is you will also be able to download the original code for the full visualization, besides the few links I have shared here.

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