As one of the most conspicuous consequences of the household registration (hukou) system, China’s so-called ‘floating migration’ has attracted a lot of interest across scholarly disciplines. In this research note, we argue that our understanding of the geographies of this floating migration can be enhanced through appealing visualizations of the migration flows, as these can be useful background references in a range of academic studies. Research on the effective visualization of dense spatial networks — of which China’s floating migration is a good example — is rapidly gaining pace, and here we explore the potential of different visualization techniques. We discuss and compare different visualization techniques, analyze what insights can be gleaned from these, and suggest which techniques best fit what purposes.
In many European countries a traditional policy and legal response to an undesirable increase of asylum applications has been the change of asylum law and procedures. By making it more difficult to obtain asylum and refugee status, the attractiveness as a possible country of asylum is believed to diminish. In the period from 1992 to 2003 three major revisions of the Belgian asylum procedure were enacted. When speaking in absolute figures these changes resulted in a certain decrease in the number of asylum applications filed. However, upon a closer examination of the number of asylum applications per country of origin, the effects appeared to be quite differential. Hence, factors other than geographical ones, such as the location of the country of origin or distance, must be decisive for the effect of a change in legislation on the number of asylum claimants coming from one particular country. Nevertheless, it has been possible to distinguish seven clusters of countries of origin where similar developments in patterns of asylum applications and shifts therein, depending on changes in asylum law, can be seen.
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