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Data

Interactive Data Exploration Tool for Asylum Applications in Mexico

Creator at Refugee Solidarity Network

Skills

Data AnalysisData Visualization

Technologies

Looker StudioBigQuerySQL

Team Size

1 person

View project

A dashboard enabling non-technical users to perform exploratory data analysis on asylum application data from Mexico’s refugee authority (COMAR), transforming an unwieldy 430,000-row spreadsheet into accessible, interactive visualizations.

+430k Rows of data
COMAR Data source

The Problem

The Mexican refugee authority COMAR published asylum application data, but only as a massive Excel spreadsheet with over 430,000 rows, making it effectively inaccessible to anyone without technical data skills. Key questions like “Where are the majority of asylum applications filed?” and “What nationalities represent the majority of asylum-seekers?” remained buried in the data.

What I Built

  1. 1

    Data Pipeline

    Ingested and cleaned the raw COMAR spreadsheet, structuring it for efficient querying.

  2. 2

    BigQuery Backend

    Loaded data into BigQuery to cache queries and minimize latency when working with the large dataset.

  3. 3

    Interactive Dashboard

    Built visualizations in Looker Studio allowing users to filter, explore, and answer their own questions about asylum trends in Mexico.

Impact

The tool democratizes access to asylum data in Mexico, enabling journalists, researchers, and advocates to explore trends without needing technical expertise or data processing capabilities.

Explore the Dashboard

Interactive asylum application data for Mexico (COMAR)

lookerstudio.google.com