Fatal Journeys: Visualizing the Horror

In war, truth is the first casualty (Aeschylus)

I am not a pessimistic person. On the contrary, I always try to look at the bright side of life. I also believe that living conditions are now better than years ago as these plots show. But reducing the complexity of our world to just six graphs is riskily simplistic. Our world is quite far of being a fair place and one example is the immigration drama.

Last year there were 934 incidents around the world involving people looking for a better life where more than 5.300 people lost their life o gone missing, 60% of them in Mediterranean. Around 8 out of 100 were children.

The missing migrant project tracks deaths of migrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, who have gone missing along mixed migration routes worldwide. You can find a huge amount of figures, plots and information about this scourge in their website. You can also download there a historical dataset with information of all these fatal journeys, including location, number of dead or missing people and information source from 2015 until today.

I this experiment I read the dataset and do some plots using highcharter; you can find a link to the R code at the end of the post.

This is the evolution of the amount of deaths or missing migrants in the process of migration towards an international destination from January 2015 to December 2017:

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The Mediterranean is the zone with the most incidents. To see it more clearly, this plot compares Mediterranean with the rest of the world, grouping previous zones:

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Is there any pattern in the time series of Mediterranean incidents? To see it, I have done a LOESS decomposition of the time series:

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Good news: trend is decreasing for last 12 months. Regarding seasonal component, incidents increase in April and May. Why? I don’t know.

This is a map of the location of all incidents in 2017. Clicking on markers you will find information about each incident:

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Every of us should try to make our world a better place. I don’t really know how to do it but I will try to make some experiments during this year to show that we have tons of work in front of us. Meanwhile, I hope this experiment is useful to give visibility to this humanitarian disaster. If someone wants to use the code, the complete project is available in GitHub.