50 Years of Migration Waves

This morning while reading a National Geographic article about animal migrations in national parks I stumbled onto a related feature titled Migration Waves. Migration Waves is a series of graphs depicted the movement of humans between countries between the years 1967 and 2017.

The graphs on Migration Waves are grouped according to four factors that prompted migration. Those four factors are labor markets, political policies, political instability, and poverty. Each graph in the Migration Waves series has a caption that explains some of the conditions leading to migration.

Applications for Education
My first thought when viewing Migration Waves was to use it as a prompt for students to further investigate the causes of migration during the 50 years covered in the graphs. Then I thought some more about it and decided that a more challenging assignment would be for students to look at a couple of data sets then create their own similar migration waves graphs.

To find some a couple of data sets for students to use to generate their own migration waves graphs I turned to Google’s Dataset Search. It was through Google’s Dataset Search that I found this GDP by state and region spreadsheet (you’ll have to create a free Data.World account to access) and found the Census Bureau’s Population Distribution and Change document (PDF).

Google Dataset Search tool is still in beta. Earlier this year I published the following a short video about it.