Purpose

Remittances sent home by migrants to developing countries are equivalent to more than three times the size of official development assistance.

- The World Bank, http://bit.ly/tgXFHZ

Cutting prices by at least 5 percentage points can save up to $16 billion a year.

- The World Bank, http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/

ImmiViz is an interactive tool designed to help advocates, journalists and communities better understand the costs and results of migration.  Remittances (money sent home by migrants) have a huge impact on the economies of recipient countries.  The personal impact of remittances, and some of the challenges faced by migrants on their journeys to be in a position where they can send money home, are illustrated in the Stories section of the website.

Remittances could go even further toward ending extreme poverty if the sending and receiving costs were lowered.  Extreme poverty is defined by the World Bank as living on $1.25 or less per day (http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview).  Cutting the costs associated with remittances could have a great impact in this area, as the Numbers section of the website shows.

Many factors go into determining the transaction fees associated with remittances, but hopefully by visualizing some of the costs and impacts of remittances this site can help move the discussion on this topic forward.

ImmiViz was built using D3 (http://d3js.org/), Angular (http://angularjs.org/), and Node (http://nodejs.org/) / Express (http://expressjs.com/).  

Google’s Website Translator (https://translate.google.com/manager/website/) was used to translate the site into 60+ langages.  

The site is hosted on server space generously donated by the Knowtion Group (http://www.knowtiongroup.com/).  

The remittance costs are from the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide 2013, 3rd quarter dataset (http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/).  

The number of people living on less than $1.25 per day was drawn from the World Bank’s ‘World Development Indicators: Poverty rates at international poverty lines’ (http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/2.8).  

Stories

Stories were gathered from a number of sources, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Overseas Development Institute, The Economist, The World Bank, Georgetown University Center for Latin American Studies, and the Migration Story site of California State University East Bay.  Each story on the site includes attribution and a link to the source.