[rrreese]

Interestingly, both the UK and Russia are top destinations for people to both go to and leave.

Also there seem to be almost as many people leaving Russia to go to the Ukraine as leaving Ukraine to go to Russia. Any one have any idea why this would be?

[notahacker]

In Russia's case there's no real anomaly: it's one of the most populous countries in the world anyway and has a lot of ex-USSR family and historic ties to the surrounding countries. Throw in the sort of political problems and business opportunities on both sides of the borders that might further incentivise migration.

The UK has strong historic connections with the rest of the world that are reflected in relatively generous reciprocal visa arrangements, strong family ties and dreams to move here. Europeans can easily move backwards and forwards as job opportunities come and go, and usually speak good English these days. People from South Asian and Caribbean have strong family connections as well as economic incentives to migrate here. On the other hand, we have a strong economic incentive to take higher paying jobs in Australia (with young people getting automatic work visas for a year in advance of any attempts to secure a job) or the US, which is probably a little less unsympathetic towards Anglophone countries and qualifications when it comes to handing the visas out.

[HistoryInAction]

Not sure about the permanence of the moves being tracked by the site, but the Eastern Ukraine has a lot of cultural overlap with Russia (see: Yanukovych's base of support) and has a booming natural gas economy that is fairly dominated by Gazprom. As a result, there's a lot of back and forth travel for extended periods of time by mid-level execs and families.

[redwood]

Probably similar to the way many New Yorkers move to Pennsylvania and many Pennsylvanians move to NY each year.

But perhaps in the UK case: we'd probably see that those leaving tend to be retirees whereas those coming are coming to work!

[Cogito]

I have no idea if this is related, but I remember reading something a while back about how hard this type of data is to interpret.

A poignant example was given, describing how an entire city might switch countries, for example from Ukraine to Russia (and maybe back again?), and how that is a difficult situation to deal with.

Do the entire occupants of that city count as emigrants? What if they then decide to move back across the border? What happens if the city moves back a year later?

In any case, I don't know if there are issue like that here, but I would not be surprised if there were.

[rythie]

It appears that in the UK people come for the posperity/jobs and people born in the UK leave because of the weather - or at least that's what the press here in the UK say.