European refugee crisis

' No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.' — Warsan Shire

Guideline

Part I

UNHCR database for the statistic of refugee

Part II

Visulization on the maps for number of events, average tones of media coverage and GINI coefficient of media tones

Part III

Correlation analysis of tones and inequaliy of tones in the countries

Part IV

Cluster analysis on countries based on the different metrics

Part V

Time evolution of number and tone of the media coverage in the range of 2015-2017

UNHCR Database

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is a United Nations programme with the mandate to protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people, and assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. This map visualizes the change in the number of the refugees for each country in the World between 1950-2017.
The size of the circle stands for the number of refugee in this map.
Click the bar of each year on the bottom, you will see the change of the map for each year.
Click the country on the map, you will see the time revolution of the number of refugee in this country on the bottom.

European Union refugee number statistics

As we can see latest peek of refugees number was in 1991 (collapsing of USSR and war in Yugoslavia).

After the year of 2015, we could see there is a dramatic increasing happening.

Since 2011, the countries in Middle East, North Africa have been facing civil wars, military coups, suppression of free media and press by authoritarian leaders. Starting from Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, since 2013 Syria, Iraq, Yemen have been following them. A lot of people are suffering from the egregious wars, destruction of their homeland. The unjust jail of the opposition press workers and politicians are increasing as well. In all circumstances, they all have one hope - migration to Europe and to find a new hope to live. But there is a problem... Now, Europe is about the new refugee crisis.

In this report we will mainly focus on the events in Europe which are related to refugees and their coverage in media from the year 2015, 2016 and 2017

Number of Events

Click 'play' button on the top left, you cuold see the time revolution of year 2015, 2016, 2017 in this map.
Move mouse to the map, you will get the detalied information in all the countries.

This map shows the number of events that related to refugee in the distribution of europe countries.

  • From year of 2015, we could find the top 4 countries with highest number of events are: Germany, Turkey, United Kingdom, Greece. We could see those 4 countries are very discriminative comparing the rest countries. Most of the events are happening in these countries. France, Hungary and Italy are following them.
  • Those mentioned countries are keeping their importance in next years as well.
  • From the year of 2016, the number of events have an increasing trend comparing the year of 2015. 2016 is accepted as a emerging year, many negotiations were settled between western powers - Germany, UK, France and border countries such as Greece, Turkey and Hungary.
  • From the year of 2017, we could see the events in all the countries are decreased in comparison with the year of 2015 and 2016.

Average Tones

This map shows the average tones of the events that related to refugee in the distribution of europe countries. The measurement of tones is from -10 to 10. Negtive value means negtive tones and positive vakue means positive tones.

  • We could see in general all those countries have negtive tones related to regufee events.
  • From the time revolution of the year 2015, 2016, 2017, we could observe that the tones in 2015 and 2016 are relative more negative in comparison with the year 2017.
  • From the regions we could see western and southern countries are much more negative on tones than eastern and northern countries especially in the year of 2015 and 2016. The main reason behind it is most of the main destinations of the post-war refugees are either well-developed western Europe countries or southern Meditterian border countries like Turkey and Greece.

GINI Coefficient of Tones

This map shows the GINI coeffificent of the tones that related to refugee in the distribution of europe countries. GINI coeffificent is the most commonly used measurement of inequality. The measurement is from 0 to 1. The higher the more inequality it has.

We could see the GINI coefficients are not high in general in the year of 2015, 2016 and 2017. This means the tones in the countries are all equally negitive during those three years.

Correlation between tones and GINI coefficient in countries
Year of 2015, 2016, 2017

Now, we want to show the relationship between tones and inequalities in countries. So we make scatter plots for tones (median) and gini coefficient of the tones in all european countries for the year 2015, 2016, 2017.

The first scatter plot is the year of 2015. To explore the relationship of tones and gini coefficient with the view of statistic, we fit a linear regression on those two variables.
The R-square is 0.41. That means the two variables have linear correlation in the year of 2015.

The second scatter plot is the year of 2016. The R-square of the liner regression is 0.63. This means the two variable has linear correlation in the year of 2016. Also, this corrleation is even stronger than the year 2015.

The third scatter plot is the year of 2017. The R-square of the linear regression is -0.47. That means there are no relationship between tones and the gini coefficient in the year of 2017.

Clustering countries
Plot1:Number of the articles and average tones;
Plot2: GDP per capita and average tones;
Plot3: Tones in 2016 and 2017


Plot 1:
K-means clustering of countries based on the number of events and the average tone of media coverage related to refugees

  • The green dots represent the four major countries who are in the center of the crisis, especially in 2015 and 2016 - Germany, UK, Greece, Turkey. Except UK, they are too negative towards refugees.
  • Other clusters are seperated based on the average tones of events that occur in that country.
  • The orange dots represent relatively positive countries to the refugees. If we hover the points we can see that, they are either northern - Baltic triples, Iceland or relatively small countries such as Luxembourg, Bosnia, and Portugal.
  • The red dots are mainly neutral countries, most of them are Central European coutries such as Poland, Czechia, Slovakia
  • The blue dots represent countries whose media coverage is mainly negative about the refugees. We can represent them in 3 subgroup. Meditterian border countries - Italy, Albania, France and South Eastern coutries which has very close border with Turkey - Bulgaria, Macedonia. And interestingly, these two parts of Europe are the main path for the refugees. Morever, besides these two subgroups, there are some countries which have mainly nationalist right wing government such as Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland.



Plot 2:
K-means clustering of countries based on the GDP per capita of them and the average tone of their media coverage related to refugees

  • Blue points are the outliers, - Ireland, Iceland, Luxembourg, the countries that are not too busy with refugee problems.
  • We can see the main interesting points in green, red countries, and some of the orange ones.
  • Green countries are countries with low GDP per capita, they are mainly Baltic countries and Portugal with leftist government.
  • Orange countries are relatively poor countries, but they are border countries such as Hungary, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia.
  • Red dots represent countries with high GDP per capita. These countries are western and high-developed. However, we can see the tendency that, in those countries, average tone of the media coverage is far more negative than poor countries.



Plot 3:
We use K-means algorithm to cluster the countries with the tones in 2016 and 2017.

  • Green group always has negative tones in those two years, they are the countries: Albania; Austria; Belgium; Bulgaria; Czechia; France; Germany; Greece; Croatia; Hungary; Italy; Macedonia; Norway; Romania; Slovenia; Sweden; Switzerland; Turkey.
  • Orange group always has relatively less negtive tones in those two years, they are the countries: Bosnia; Belarus; Estonia; Iceland; Latvia; Lithuania; Luxembourg; Portugal.
  • Red group always has relatively middle tones in those two years, they are the countries: Cyprus; Denmark; Ireland; Finland; Slovakia; Malta; Caribbean; Netherlands; Netherlands; Poland; Russia; Spain; UK; Ukraine.
  • Only blue group has relative less negtive tones in 2016 while very negtive tones in 2017. it's the country Liechtenstein.

Time revolution of Tones (median)/number of article in the year

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Important events through time in the crisis

23.08.2015

1. Positive change in tone of the media coverage

Italy coastguard: 3,000 migrants rescued in one day in Mediterranean

09.09.2015

2. Number of articles related to refugee were increasing

European Commission put the package of proposals for the help address the refugee crisis

28.09.2015

3. Average tone of the media coverage was very negative

Hungarian police arrest driver of lorry that had 71 dead migrants inside

17.04.2016

4. Very negative (-5) average tone in the articles

Twelve Christian migrants drowned after Muslim migrants threw them overboard following a row on another migrant boat.

25.04.2016

5. Positive jump in the tone

European Union leaders praise Turkey’s efforts in welcoming refugees.

20.09.2016

6. Huge increase in the media coverage

UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants 2016.

20-25.12.2016

7. Increase in number of articles and drop in the tones

The Guardian's article related to abuses of young refugees in Denmark. The bombing attacks in several cities of the Europe(Berlin, etc).