Investigating the effect of immigration on the labour market
Nina Heyden, a US student on a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Essex, won the university’s 2018 Secondary Data Analysis Award for an MSc investigating the effects of immigration on the labour market. Here she discusses her journey of investigation with the data.
In autumn 2014, my Italian class watched belarus rcs data news reels of immigrants on rubber dinghies attempting to find refuge. It was the height of media coverage of the European migration crisis and my curiosity about what could be done to alleviate suffering was at a peak. In response to overwhelming humanitarian challenges, the fields of statistics, economics, and data visualization offer me a logical, concrete approach to access the root of issues. Diving into UN data, I conducted an exploratory analysis of immigration to provide an understanding of trends, using the program Tableau to publish interactive visualizations.
Figure 1 is a screenshot of a map of the total population of concern, a category including refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced persons and others of concern to the UN Refugee Agency. I used the map to explore immigration trends in over 150 countries over six decades (and you can too: TotalPopulationofConcernbyCountryofAsylumCountryofOrigin1951-2014/Dashboard2). 1.6 million Syrians took asylum in Turkey in 2014. Yet also significant were the 6.0 million internally displaced persons in Colombia in 2014, who were not a focus of international attention. The graphic reveals that recent migration trends are not an anomaly.