Origin and Destination attachment of migrants on Twitter

The cultural integration of immigrants conditions their overall socio-economic integration as well as natives’ attitudes towards globalisation in general and immigration in particular. At the same time, excessive integration—or assimilation—can be detrimental in that it implies forfeiting one’s ties to the origin country and eventually translates into a loss of diversity (from the viewpoint of host countries) and of global connections (from the viewpoint of both host and home countries). Cultural integration can be described using two dimensions: the preservation of links to the origin country and culture, which we call origin attachment, and the creation of new links together with the adoption of cultural traits from the new residence country, which we call destination attachment. In this dataset we introduce the origin and destination attachment indices extracted from Twitter data. In this dataset we provide novel origin and destination attachment indicators extracted from twitter data. The OA index is defined as the fraction of tweets of a migrant that discuss topics related to their origin country. Similarly, DA is the fraction of tweets discussing topics related to the destination country. These definitions are based on the idea that the topics discussed provide indications on various aspects of attachment: the amount of information that a person holds about a specific country, the social links to people living in a certain country, the interest in political and public issues of a country, adoption of customs and ideas, all related to integration as a wider concept. Twitter data consisted in Tweets and User data downloaded from the Academic Twitter API.