About

Well not us, really just me. My name is William Hoppes, you can find me on LinkedIn here, and I’ve worked in a number of research and data science roles. At its core, I build computer code that takes large amounts of data and processes it into pleasant reports, graphs, and other human-readable formats.

Migrating Cranes is halfway between a passion project and a startup. I’m building a number of automated reports to provide clear data on immigration both into the US and, eventually into the other four big Western economies of the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I’ll post and update them here on Migrating Cranes for at least 2023-2026.

Why? Well, I don’t think anyone has taken a ā€œbig dataā€ approach to immigration data, or any modern data analytics approach at all. Things I would consider very basic, like how immigration from the Philippines to the US changed from 2005-2015, are almost impossible to find and almost always done in an ad hoc basis. More complex and interesting questions, like comparing the migration of top tech talent to the US and Canada over the past twenty years, are essentially unknown. Yet the data is increasingly there; government has gotten much better over the past 3 years about open sourcing their data. It’s simply unprocessed.

Thus Migrating Cranes. Immigration is a really interesting area with a lot of problems, a lot of room for improvement, and a lot of importance, both financially and in people’s real lives. I’ll spend some time putting up these automated reports and sharing them freely. If this is something people value, if it’s something they view and share and want more of, then I’ll know there’s some traction. If not, it’s still a cool technical challenge I can show to future recruiters.

I hope you find this helpful.