Wednesday, August 12, 2026 Strategy, technology, media, and social systems

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Sorin Adam Matei

Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.

Facebook data used to identify cities that attract migrants in a systematic way

Cities attracting migrants most systematically

Systematic migration is defined in the study as “coordinated” migration in these terms:

We formally define a coordinated migration as the movement of population from a hometown h to its most likely current city c(h) such that:

  • At least 100 users have listed city h as their hometown.
  • At least 20% of the users with hometown h have current city c(h) in their profile (p(h) > 0.2).
  • The hometown h and its most likely current city c(h) are different cities. 

To reiterate, what we look into here are those cases where at least 20% of the users from city h moved out AND currently live in city c(h). For this reason, we gave the name of “coordinated” migration from hometown/origin h to current city/destination c(h).

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