Emigration and immigration: comings and goings of the Irish...and everyone else

Over 215 million people today are considered migrants, 3.15 percent of a world population nudging seven billion, data beautifully visualized on a website called peoplemovin, which tracks on one dynamic page all the population outflows and inflows for every county on the planet.

So, naturally we turn first to Ireland, where one click traces the emigrations of 736,889 of Ireland's 4,622,917 people. For 422,569 the journey wasn't too far, just to the U.K. Another 137,537 Irish went to the USA, the world's top destination for world migration. Australia drew over 63,000 from Ireland, Canada just over 26,000. The rest of the top ten destinations from Ireland were in western Europe, plus New Zealand. But the Irish also found their way to new lives in Bolivia, Iceland, Japan, Turkey and so many other lands around the globe.

Click the icon on the parallel column of nations, however, to see that more people actually moved to Ireland--898,630, with almost 400,000 coming from the UK, over 93,000 from Poland, and just shy of 37,000 from the USA. The rest of that top ten list is completed by Lithuania, Nigeria, Latvia, Germany, China, Philippines and India. they were joined by people who had been living in Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Vietnam many more global outposts.

 And that's just Ireland.

The website provides a similar look at migration patterns for every country in the world, based on data from a variety of sources, current for 2010.  UK-based data visualization specialist Carlo Zapponi, describes his online experiment this way: "peoplemovin shows the flows of migrants as of 2010 through the use of open data. The data are presented as a slopegraph that shows the connections between countries. The chart is split in two columns, the emigration countries on the left and the destination countries on the right. The thickness of the lines connecting the countries represents the amount of immigrated people."

Follow Carlo on Twitter at https://twitter.com/littleark



See more: Irish Top Ten , Irish immigration