Locating Undocumented Migrant Populations: A Case Study Using Statistical Data of Cork City of Sanctuary, Ireland

Perilous countries often produce citizens who will risk becoming undocumented in a foreign country in order to seek safety. However, the term undocumented migrant includes many sub- categories such as trafficked individuals, students who have outstayed their visas or those who unintentionally transitioned from legal migrant to undocumented migrant. Cork City of Sanctuary was created to protect all communities including documented and undocumented migrants living in Cork City Ireland. Government and social service institutions that have been established for migrants are only beneficial if they are spatially accessible to highly-vulnerable migrant populations. This study utilized interview data, a Principal Component Analysis and a K-Means Cluster analysis to create a highly-vulnerable migrant population segmentation of Cork City of Sanctuary. As a result, the study found that creating segmentations of highly-vulnerable migrant populations Cork City was possible however, the available statistical data was limiting considering migrants have many sub-categories in which government census data does not capture, there was a lack in variety within the various census variables, and available open source data does not provide statistical information on undocumented and documented migrants collected from sanctuary colleges/university or sanctuary hospitals within Cork City of Sanctuary.