Saturday, September 8, 2012
People Moving--a Visual
I'm in London right now on my way to the annual meeting of the British Society for Population Studies being held in Nottingham. As is true in so many of the more developed countries, service jobs here in London are increasingly held by people for whom English was not their first language. At lunch today, I couldn't place the accent of our waiter and so I asked him about it--Slovakia, he said, "although I often tell people I'm from Hungary, because I speak Hungarian and more people know where Hungary is than where Slovakia is." So, I was primed to be impressed by a website pointed to me by others called peoplemov.in. This is a very cool visualization of migration patterns from all sending countries in the world to the countries that have received immigrants from each country. The data refer to 2010 and sources of data are provided, but the visualization actually includes raw numbers, not simply the graphics.
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Wow what a great website, it really puts the volume of migrations into perspective when you see them visually on a graph. By looking at the data, one can conclude that the majority of the immigrants adding to America's population are coming from Mexico. What I found amusing was that the amount of emigrants leaving the Ukraine for Russia was nearly the same as the amount of emigrants leaving Russia for the Ukraine, and thus the migration patterns between these two countries virtually cancelled each other out. The same can be said between Russia and Kazakhstan. It's astounding how many people are leaving European countries, and it leads me to believe that their population sizes are not just effected by fertility rates, but also migration patterns. Countries like India and China have some of the highest emigration patterns, but also have high birth rates, and therefore still have rapid population growth. Additionally, it was interesting to see how many people were moving to India despite many of the demographic issues the country will be facing in the next several decades. I would have liked this website to have a slightly better navigation and search system however. I was frustrated when it took me over 15 minutes to find Israel, only to find that there was no data for it. I think that this site only has the major countries' data listed. It's still worth just checking out to play around with. A great video to watch after using this website is one called "7 Billion, National Geographic Magazine" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc4HxPxNrZ0) It does a great job explaining the demography of our planet, and its less than three minutes. You can learn a lot.
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