A day after the Liberal Party’s majority government win, the advanced cartography class went to work on infographics along the theme of Liberal Party promises in the style of a Globe and Mail visualization.
In light of the ambitious pledge to expand government supported Syrian refugee numbers to 25,000 in 6 months, I produced an infographic that examines the capacity of countries to process asylum applications in the face of a mass exodus out of Syria.
Data Acquiring + Mining
The basemap for the political territory of the Syrian Arab Republic is from Natural Earth, a free source for shapefiles.
The source of my data comes from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees Population Statistics Database. Before I searched for data, I thought about what I wanted to investigate – whether asylum seekers from Syria were receiving sufficient assistance like refugee recognition from other countries. After downloading thousands of raw data from the UNHCR Population Statistics database, I looked through the data and immediately saw variation in numbers across Europe and neighboring countries to Syria (Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon).
Geographical Units
I decided to shorten my list of European countries to EU member states for a couple reasons:
The EU is governed by an executive body in Europe made up of representatives from each member state that meet to discuss state issues, uphold trade agreements and treaties, and propose and enforce legislation. They more or less influence individual state governments in Europe. Recently, the European Commission called for EU member states to assist in receiving asylum seekers arriving in Greece and Italy. This has influenced the distribution of asylum claims across Europe.
By setting my scale to EU countries rather than all countries in Europe, finding data would be more efficient. There are similarities in the institutions and agencies recording immigration and other population statistics.
Time
For the time scale, I decided to start with data from 2011 for obvious reasons, and collect data from each year following to examine the variation in numbers over time.
Who?
The UNHCR data includes procedure types, including RA for “Reapply/Appeal/Reopening Application”, FI (or NA, used Germany) for “First Instance/New Application”, FA that mixes both “First Instance AND Appeal”, and JR for “Judicial Review” applications. For this project I was interested in looking at new claims for refugee status to look at new asylum seekers from Syria since 2011.
I sifted for data of interest and populated more excel spreadsheets for “data mining” for my deeper search for patterns in the data. During this search, I noticed the many pending applications that were present in the start of each year and the exponential growth in numbers of applications submitted during the year. At the end of the year, most EU countries had a few hundreds, and for some up to a few thousands of applications overreaching into the new year. (Side note: To my dismay, there were countries receiving thousands of applications in which the majority of decisions made were rejections….). I wanted show the complexity of the application procedure, and how even with thousands seeking asylum during a civil war, countries are not immediately granting asylum to those seeking it, and are actually turning them away or sending them back.
The visual styles to display this data was inspired heavily by Edward Tufte’s Principles for Analytical Design and Napoleon’s March, Alberto Cairo’s “Brazilian Population Grows More In Prisons”, and the Globe and Mail visualization titled “Islands in the Stream”. Big shoutout to Sally and Dawn for going over concepts about representation and perception over the last two weeks.