Migration flows across the world (opens in new tab)

If you know more recent data, I would be interested (I made the map).

Thats really slick-love the HTML5 offline cache

This is a good point and perhaps the reverse case: e.g. immigrants who have become citizens, would be even more interesting. For example the % of Americans foreign born is higher than this (I believe) but many have already received citizenship and are presumably not counted here.

>10% of the Kiwi population went to their culturally-similar neighbour with a much better economy. Similar story with >15% of the Irish emigrating, mostly to less-economically-dire Britain (although there's a long established Irish exodus tradition), and for that matter the >1.2 million Brits off to Australia.

I expect most of these migrations won't be permanent, and these stats probably include a large proportion on 1 year working visas.

The figures for palestine are insane. Population: 2,514,845 Immigrants: 1,923,808 Emigrants: 3,017,140

In Russia's case there's no real anomaly: it's one of the most populous countries in the world anyway and has a lot of ex-USSR family and historic ties to the surrounding countries. Throw in the sort of political problems and business opportunities on both sides of the borders that might further incentivise migration.

The UK has strong historic connections with the rest of the world that are reflected in relatively generous reciprocal visa arrangements, strong family ties and dreams to move here. Europeans can easily move backwards and forwards as job opportunities come and go, and usually speak good English these days. People from South Asian and Caribbean have strong family connections as well as economic incentives to migrate here. On the other hand, we have a strong economic incentive to take higher paying jobs in Australia (with young people getting automatic work visas for a year in advance of any attempts to secure a job) or the US, which is probably a little less unsympathetic towards Anglophone countries and qualifications when it comes to handing the visas out.

Not sure about the permanence of the moves being tracked by the site, but the Eastern Ukraine has a lot of cultural overlap with Russia (see: Yanukovych's base of support) and has a booming natural gas economy that is fairly dominated by Gazprom. As a result, there's a lot of back and forth travel for extended periods of time by mid-level execs and families.

Probably similar to the way many New Yorkers move to Pennsylvania and many Pennsylvanians move to NY each year.

But perhaps in the UK case: we'd probably see that those leaving tend to be retirees whereas those coming are coming to work!

I have no idea if this is related, but I remember reading something a while back about how hard this type of data is to interpret.

A poignant example was given, describing how an entire city might switch countries, for example from Ukraine to Russia (and maybe back again?), and how that is a difficult situation to deal with.

Do the entire occupants of that city count as emigrants? What if they then decide to move back across the border? What happens if the city moves back a year later?

In any case, I don't know if there are issue like that here, but I would not be surprised if there were.

It appears that in the UK people come for the posperity/jobs and people born in the UK leave because of the weather - or at least that's what the press here in the UK say.

Why the Mercator projection specifically? It's a map projection for navigation purposes. What makes sense is for the right/left column to re-arrange itself by size once you click on a corresponding country.

I'd argue that the Mercator projection is not the right projection if you want to show the entire world. The distortion introduced over large areas is fairly extreme, and I think relative geographical sizes are fairly important for displaying that kind of graphic.

"but sorry, the "right" graphic to use here is the Mercator projection."

Maybe I'm just not understanding you, but this doesn't make sense to me. The site doesn't even show a map, what does the Mercator projection have to do with it?

another alternative (easier to program, but not the "natural" representation) would be to put the data in a circle and use the same location for both arrival and departure. i did something similar for package dependencies - the code is offline now, but you can see a screenshot at http://acooke.org/portfolio/practicl/