A Really Cool Immigration App

By John Derbyshire on April 9, 2013 at 12:07pm

An email friend with whom I was discussing Lady Thatcher’s passing asked me how sound she was on immigration.  Not bad, I eventually replied; and got better across her career—sufficiently better for Simon Heffer, in his biographyimage of Enoch Powell, to refer to “the Powellite-Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party” (p. 934).

Doing some rudimentary fact-checking before giving that reply, I turned first to this very handy app on British immigration (and emigration):  “Long-Term Migration into and out of the United Kingdom, 1964-2011.”

It’s an animated timeline.  If you slide the wee pointer along to any year the app tells you numbers for inflow and outflow in that year, main nations of origin/destination, key immigration-related news items from that year, and relevant numbers like total population, unemployment, etc.

I’d like to know more about the methodology and definitions behind the app; and it’s a U.K. government website, so skepticism is definitely in order.  (Was Australia really such a major source of immigration across the Thatcher years?)

Still, in the realm of visually displaying quantitative data, this app is a gem.

Is there a tech-savvy immigration patriot out there who could cook up a similar app for U.S. immigration/emigration?  It would come in very handy for websites like VDARE.com.  I went looking on other immigration-patriot websites—CIS, NumbersUSA etc.—but didn’t find anything half as good . . . though if I missed something, tell me and I’ll post it here.