Nowcasting International Student Migration: From Core–Periphery to Multipolar Global Geographies

Ebenezer D. Narh and Michael Buzzelli

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025, vol. 115, issue 8, 1887-1906

Abstract: International student migration (ISM) is playing an increasingly important role in global population movements and international connectedness. Traditional core–periphery channels (e.g., United States and India, respectively) are changing due to new nodes (e.g., Brazil, South Korea) in an emergent multipolar global structure. This study examines these structures, specifically by documenting and analyzing big data drawn from social media to “nowcast” (i.e., estimate current) global ISM. Facebook data were scraped for twenty countries to identify their higher education student migrant stocks and analyze the network structure of ISM in 2023. Social network analysis together with multinomial logistic modeling are used to examine the influential countries within the network and the extent to which origin–destination similarity explains the variations in migration. The analysis finds prominent roles played by classical geographical topologies of distance, contiguity, and similarity, playing out in nuanced ways that reveal both established migration channels and signals of an emerging global multipolar structure. The study’s findings contribute to our understanding of new mappings and multipolar structures of ISM including the potential for research avenues based on big data drawn from extensive social media data reservoirs.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2025.2511940

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