Visualizing Global Migration: A Graphic Representation of International Migration Flows

Created by a team of researchers at the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna, this visualization explores bilateral migration fows between 196 countries. The project used stock data from the United Nations (the number of people living in a country other than where they were born) to estimate these flows over five-year blocks of time. Rather than calculating the net flow, the color of the line represents the country that the migrants left, and it points to the new country where they settled. The thickness of the line represent how many people followed that path of migration. "Thinking beyond a simple geographic representation allowed the large data set that came out of this analysis to be more easily represented," said Nikola Sander, a research scholar who worked on the project. "This approach to examining migration through flows also offers a more contemporary look at population changes," she adds.