Studying inter-national mobility through IP geolocation

• Authors: Bogdan State;Ingmar Weber;Emilio Zagheni
• Venue: Proceedings of the sixth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
• Year: 2013

The increasing ubiquity of Internet use has opened up new avenues in the study of human mobility. Easily-obtainable geolocation data resulting from repeated logins to the same website offer the possibility of observing long-term patterns of mobility for a large number of individuals. We use data on the geographic locations from where over 100 million anonymized users log into Yahoo!~services to generate the first global map of short- and medium-term mobility flows. We develop a protocol to identify anonymized users who, over a one-year period, had spent more than 3 months in a different country from their stated country of residence ("migrants"), and users who spent less than a month in another country ("tourists"). We compute aggregate estimates of migration propensities between countries, as inferred from a user's location over the observed period. Geolocation data allow us to characterize also the pendularity of migration flows -- i.e., the extent to which migrants travel back and forth between their countries of origin and destination. We use data regarding visa regimes, colonial ties, geographic location and economic development to predict migration and tourism flows. Our analysis shows the persistence of traditional migration patterns as well as the emergence of new routes. Migrations tend to be more pendular between countries that are close to each other. We observe particularly high levels of pendularity within the European Economic Area, even after we control for distance and visa regimes. The dataset, methodology and results presented have important implications for the travel industry, as well as for several disciplines in social sciences, including geography, demography and the sociology of networks.