Global Market Tracker: Layoffs, Hiring, and Immigration in One View

Overview

As someone who sees the struggles of immigrants in 2026, I built what I found out was missing: one place to see who is cutting jobs, who is hiring, and which countries are making it easier or harder to work there. For an immigrant job seeker, those three questions decide where an application is even worth sending. But the answers were scattered across more than 200 headlines a week, split across regional news editions, and nothing put them side by side. Global Market Tracker does. Every week it pulls layoff, hiring, and immigration stories from six Google News regional editions, tags each one by category and country, and turns them into week-over-week trends, a layoff heat map, and an immigration ease index. It's live for anyone facing the same three questions.

Highlights

• Puts the three questions an immigrant job seeker asks on one screen: who is cutting, who is hiring, and where the immigration climate is opening up or closing.
• Week-over-week KPIs show direction as well as volume, so a jump in layoff or hiring news stands out the week it happens.
• A 30-day trend chart and a country breakdown show whether a headline is one company's bad week or a pattern across a market.
• A layoff heat map shows where cuts are concentrated, so applications can go where hiring is holding up.
• An immigration ease index scores each country from the tone of recent visa and immigration coverage. It's a rough, headline-level signal by design, and the dashboard says exactly how it's calculated.
• Covers six regional editions (US, UK, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and India), and credits stories that name no country to the edition they came from.
• Scoped to run for free: public Google News feeds instead of a paid news API, and one scheduled weekly refresh instead of a server running all day.

Built with

How the pipeline works

1. 1

   Weekly trigger

   A scheduled job kicks off the refresh every Sunday morning, Eastern time.

2. 2

   Pull the news

   Searches six Google News regional editions for layoff, hiring, and immigration stories from the last 14 days.

3. 3

   Tag by country

   Matches each headline against 60+ countries and major cities. Stories that name no country fall back to the edition's home country.

4. 4

   Score the tone

   Scores immigration headlines for words that signal easing or tightening, which feeds the immigration ease index.

5. 5

   Store once

   Saves each story to a Postgres database a single time, skipping duplicates.

6. 6

   Show the picture

   Turns the last 30 days into KPIs, a trend chart, a country breakdown, a heat map, and a live feed that refreshes every minute.