Human migration research is quite multidisciplinary and has yielded works in social sciences, physics, and even the new field of city science. International immigration has societal impacts on both the source and the destination countries at several levels such as economy, city planning, politics, and law enforcement; it leads to changes in the demographics landscape. Existing studies concentrate on modeling the phenomena or on explaining the causal reasons for immigration. In this work, we investigate the role of social media and postulate whether it can be considered a proxy for the reality of international immigration (which includes refugee placement). Our data analysis supports the argument that Twitter may be considered a reasonable source for information about immigration and refugee placement with the benefit that it has a real-time dimension to the information being tracking.
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