July 23, 2012 | News | In the Press

Measuring Migration-flows with E-Mails

A publication by MPDIR researcher Emilio Zagheni demonstrating migration trends by e-mail traffic has captured wide media attention. Zagheni and co-author Ingmar Weber of Yahoo! Research compiled a dataset on global migration trends, having analyzed the global flow of millions of e-mails across the globe.

The method's application potential to areas such as the investigation of migration flows in developing countries is what the journalists found most interesting. More and more people are having access to the Internet in these countries, but it is not likely that reporting systems providing reliable data will be established there at similar speed. Meaning that the researchers' method would be further advanced than that used by the state to record migration movements.

The forecast of migration flows is another potential area of application, say the researchers. “A person sending a lot of E-mails to Germany probably has a lot of friends there,” Emilio Zagheni says to the news portal Zeit Online. Such person would probably someday migrate to Germany. In further research, the study´s authors want to find out how likely this is.

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