Building the wall
Spurred by conflict, natural disaster, persecution, and poverty, global populations are experiencing growing trends of forced migration. This journey for asylum seekers is more often fraught with danger at every juncture. Vulnerable populations experience perilous conditions at home, forcibly displacing them which requires travels through deadly routes. If these populations are lucky to find a host city, urban environments and refugee camp conditions prove an additional social and health risk.
The ubiquity and frequency of migrations will be exacerbated by climate change. It is crucial to understand the perils of forced migration; investigating the causes of tragedies enroute will provide better knowledge to limit the occurrences and aid in developing solutions. The humanitarian effort in helping refugees is an act of global solidarity. Nascent ethnocentric and populist movements reflect the difficulties of existing in a globalized world, compounding the difficulty in refugee humanitarian work. We currently have the opportunity to understand and adjust how nations can provide safety to forced migrants, an important endeavor as the frequency will increase as lasting environmental changes unfold with climate change.
The election of Trump has created vitriolic discourse around immigration stemming form Latin America. Politicizing this issue undermines the humanitarian challenges involved; the extreme danger and tragedies that occur during these journeys are masked by ignorant rhetoric and blatant disregard. We hope to create an project that focus on these tragedies in light of the political landscape.
Goal: visualization of immigrant deaths as a product of societal hate and exclusionary ideology
Methods:
- Automated random selection of hate crimes related with immigrants
- Automated random selection of satellite images of locations of migrant deaths
- Progressive building of a wall in the Mexican border with those images
Deliverable:
Self building wall over the Mexican border made of images of migrants deaths and triggered by hate crimes headlines
Data Sources:
ProPublica, Google News Lab, and Pitch Interactive. 2017. “Documenting Hate News Index.” https://projects.propublica.org/hate-news-index/.
IOM. “Migrant Deaths by month” [excel table]. September 25, 2017. IOM Missing Migrants Project. https://data.humdata.org/dataset/refugee-and-migrant-deaths-while-trying-to-reach-europe. (Accessed: November 12, 2017).
Google maps satellite imagery
Team:
Kenny: collecting/cleaning data and writing post
Nick: building the code
Sean:collecting/cleaning data and writing post
Gloria: building the code and making visualizations for post
Based on the previous work:
Hate Crime Kennet Warner
Tragedies of Forced Migration Sean Nelsen
