Visualizing Australian internal and international migration flows

Abstract

Migration research in Australia has tended to focus on internal migration, partly due to the paucity of international migration statistics at the regional scale, especially for emigration. In this regional graphic, internal and international migration flows for 50 major regions of Australia are presented using census data on internal migration and immigration over the one-year interval before the 2011 Census together with new estimates of regional emigration. Because of the difficulties of mapping migration flows for a country with huge variations in the geographical size of regions, a new visualization tool – the circular migration plot – is employed. It enables a more complete, and more interpretable, summary picture of the spatial pattern of internal and international migration in Australia to be depicted than has been possible previously.