How to use this app?

Migrants Around the World—Mapping International Migrant Populations

This dashboard is conceived to visualize stock migrant populations across the globe. Built with R Shiny, this dashboard uses the UN DESA (2020) stock migrants data which estimates mid-year migrant numbers every five years from 1990. Migrant flows to and from any user-selected country or region is summarized to show geographic distributions, trends and the top sources and destinations associated with the selected country or region. Visualization of data is done through interactive maps, 3D globe, graphs and data tables.

Please view the source of the data linked in the references below to find out more about how the estimates are made. The flag icons presented next to the country/region names are presented using the gt R package’s (Arel-Bundock et al. 2018) fmt_flag function.

R packages used:

  • countrycode
  • echarts4r
  • echarts4r.assets
  • gt
  • shinydashboard
  • shinydashboardPlus
  • shiny.fluent
  • shinyWidgets
  • tidyverse
  • viridisLite

How to use this dashboard?

This dashboard is used to explore the international migrant populations around the world by country or region. First, select a region from the select country/region drop down menu. A region is selected at random on the first launch of the dashboard. Then select a year for which you want to explore the data from. The slider input determines the number of top items to be presented. The output will be updated once any changes are made to the selection.

Three different visualizations are presented in the tabbed panel on the main dashboard page. The globe view shows an interactive globe with lines connecting the selected region with all the regions that migrants come from with green lines and the regions where migrants from the selected region go to in blue. Click and hold the mouse button to rotate the globe. The outflow map shows a 2D global map highlighting the regions where the emigrants from the selected region are located in. Similarly, the inflow map shows the same map but highlights the regions where migrants in the selected region come from.

The two trend bar charts show the evolution of the number of immigrants or emigrants for the selected region over time. The top regions for emigration and immigration are presented to the right. A maximum of twelve top regions can be selected using the input slider on the left sidebar.

More information

For more information regarding the UN DESA dataset, please see the reference section. If you wish to contact the author, please email asheshwor@gmail.com.

Citation

Shrestha A M 2024. Migrants Around the World: Mapping International Migrant Populations. R Shiny data dashboard, URL https://app.shrestha.au/migrants-dashboard.

Disclaimer

The boundaries and names depicted in the maps and the designations used on this visualization do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever by the author(s) conferencing the legal status of any country, territory or area or of its authorities.

References

  • Arel-Bundock V, Enevoldsen N, Yetman C, 2018, “countrycode: An R package to convert country names and country codes.” Journal of Open Source Software, 3 (28), 848. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00848.
  • Iannone R, Cheng J, Schloerke B, Hughes E, Lauer A, Seo J (2024). gt: Easily Create Presentation-Ready Display Tables. R package version 0.10.1.9000, https://github.com/rstudio/gt, https://gt.rstudio.com.
  • United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (UN DESA), 2020. ‘International Migrant Stock 2020’. URL: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/content/international-migrant-stock (Accessed September 2023).