Mapping and visualising 500 years of family migration

It has been difficult to watch the rise of anti-immigration sentiment in the two countries I have immigrated to, Australia and the UK, particularly as the our industry is fuelled by immigration. I have been an immigrant since I was 21. My father, grandparents and generations before them were immigrants, as is my sister. In fact, perpetual migration is a historical family trait. For just over 500 years, my family has included immigrants who moved for economic opportunities, settlers who established colonies at the expense of others and refugees escaping religious persecution. Many of our stories before then are unknown, although it is likely we were both invaders and displaced people, a story shared with most humans on earth. Some of my ancestors participated in the 300,000-year human migration, returning to the continent where our species began.

In unity with my fellow immigrants, I have mapped my family migration story using Ancestry.com and AI tools as search engines. The result has been an overwhelm of information, with hundreds of stories begging to be explored. This is a summary mapped using InDesign because I still enjoy manually creating infographics.

My hope is that people will learn to recognise that what divides us is not immigrants vs non-immigrants, particularly as most of us are the product of historical migration. The division lies between the minority who hoard wealth and prosperity to the detriment of the majority.

When wealthy countries neglect locally born people, the immigrants that bring skills and labour to fuel growth are not the problem. Instead, it is a lack of progressive taxation, living wages, labor rights, equal access to credit and capital, affordable access to technology, education, housing and healthcare, fairer and more effective justice systems, cultural preservation and inclusive governance, to name a few solutions truly worth lobbying for.

Lobbying against people who have legally met multiple requirements just to contribute skills, growth and investment undermines everyone’s ability to thrive, particularly as skills gaps are perpetual challenge in our industry.