The New York Times has created one of the most comprehensive public visualizations of global migration to date, drawing on anonymized human mobility data from Facebook and research from Meta, Harvard University, and the University of Hong Kong. Unlike government records, which vary in scope, timing, and definitions, the researchers used a consistent method to track movement between 181 countries from 2019 to 2022. The resulting visualizations offer a level of global comparability that is rarely possible, showing how mobility shifts in response to both sudden disruptions such as war and climate shocks and long-term drivers like labor demand and income inequality. One striking example is the United Arab Emirates, which in 2022 saw an influx of people more than twice the size of its citizen population, highlighting the scale of labor-driven movement.
Visualizing Global Migration
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