A deep dive into who the American people are and where they come from, this is an exercise in tracing the history of an immigrant nation with data.
The problem this project undertakes is the lack of mainstream understanding of U.S. immigration patterns over time. Since U.S. immigration policy has become a hot topic over the past year, most of the conversation revolved around the importance of the narrative that the U.S is a “nation of immigrants” and continue on a line of argumentation to uphold said narrative. However, there is a little discussion about the history of how immigrants came to the United States, a discussion on how, from where, and why immigrants came to the United States when they did. Also lacking from the discussion is a historical understanding of how United States legislative efforts have shaped and affected who came to the United States at various points in its history.
This project aims to solve that by showing where immigrants have come to the United States over time from a global perspective, individually by country, as well as where they have settled in the United States more recently. This is done in order to get a larger historical perspective, a global perspective as to where immigrants are coming from, and a more recent perspective of where people are settling in the United States.
This visualization allows the user to select a range of years over the past decade and see how the state’s compare to one another in terms of the amount of new immigrant residents. The sliders will allow you to choose any year range between 2008-2015.
This map shows a choropleth of where immigrants over time are coming to the US. This is so the user can quickly get an idea of where immigrants are coming to the US from around the world in a quick snapshot.
China provides an interesting use case into understanding exactly how much legsilation can affect immigration movements.
Leading up to the 1870s you can see that there is a strong influx of immigration from China. This was due
to the Chinese coming over to work as laborers on transcontinental railroads such as the Central Pacific
Railroad, as well as working as miners. Chinese immigrants faced discrimination at every level and those
that felt threatened by the presence of Chinese immigrants dubbed them as the "yellow peril".
Despite efforts for equal treatments for Chinese wokers, many labor unions rallied against Chinese immigration leading to the Page Act of 1875 aimed to limit Chinese immigrants and reinofrced a stigma that the Chinese are "dishonest". The Page Act also responded to the perceived idea that was promoted by the American Medical Association that the Chinese brought in ”germs” that were “deadly” to Whites. This led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which prohibited any immigration from China and is the only law put into effect to discriminate immigration by race. It would be made permenant in 1902 and stay in place till 1943. There would not be large influx of Chinese immigration until Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 uplifting some restrictive quotas on the amount of immigrants and after President Nixon's famous trip to China in 1972 to normalize relations with China after 25 years of seperation between the U.S. and China.
Outside of the case study you can use this tool to select a country or multiple countries to compare and see when and in what numbers immigrants from the selected countries are coming to the USA. This provides a nice easy way to investigate trends and as a starting place to dig into understanding what may have caused a dip or spike in immigration from a certain country, countries, or a region. It is a good starting point to look for other information in the history of immigration to the United States broken down by country.
Hold ctrl or cmd to select multiple countries.
In this treemap you'll notice there are a lot of Cuban's entering the United States seeking refugee and asylum status. Since
the Castro revolution of 1959 hundreds of thousands of Cubans have come over to the United States fleeing
the rule of the Castros and the Cuban government. Most of the immigrants are from the middle to upper-middle
classes of Cuba. Congress in 1966 paseed the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) that directed over $1.6 billion of
direct financial aid to Cuban immigrants for education classes, medical treatment, scholarships, loans, etc.
Many community banks also championed the causes of Cuban immigrants. The CAA also allowed for any Cuban who
has been present in the United States for a year a path to legal residency. Cubans enjoyed a favored immigrant
status in the United States for a long time.
In 1994 and 1995 the Clinton adminstration and Cuba reached an agreement for safe and orderly immigration and implented a policy dubbed "wet foot, dry-foot". "Wet foot, dry foot" meant that any Cuban migrants found in US territoral waters must be returned to Cuba unless they cite fears of persecution and Cuba cannot retaliate against these returned migrants. However, those that reach land, "dry-foot", are allowed to stay in the United States and can apply for legal residency after a year of reaching shore. The United States is home to the largest Cuban immigrant population in the world.
This treemap is based on data from 2015 immigration to the United States. It groups the countries into continents and allows the user to explore the different reasons why people are moving to the United States in what numbers from where and for what reasons.
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