Data Visualization

U.S. Immigration: National and State Trends and Actions

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U.S. Immigration: National and State Trends and Actions

In the United States, the federal government maintains primary authority over immigrants' admission into and removal from the country. Historically, the states have been largely responsible for the practical aspects of absorbing and integrating immigrants into their communities. But the relationship between the federal government and the states with respect to immigration has become more collaborative, and the states are playing a more active role in creating policies. These developments have resulted in new cooperation and conflicts between the levels of government.

This dynamic coincides with changes in the size and distribution of the nation's foreign-born population over the past three decades. Before 1990, immigrants were largely concentrated in a few states, but today, significant numbers live in all 50 states. This interactive tool illustrates the growth of the foreign-born population in the states from 1980 to 2012 and provides a snapshot of key immigration-related activities at the federal and state levels.

This analysis is not comprehensive, however. It does not include all immigration laws, policies, and other factors that have shaped the relationship between the federal government and the states and does not draw or imply conclusions about causal relationships between population change and federal, state, and local activities. It is intended only to provide historical context for today's discussions on immigration and the states.

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development notes

More projects will be posted soon, with relevant annotations about the tech stack, implementation notes and other relevant technical details.

Please note that these are my personal copies so they might differ slightly from current versions on the client's website.

This showcase area was originally designed as a live testing environment, as well as a “preview area” for all of the products created by me for Pew.

This “harness website” automatically rebuilt itself daily by analizing selected Pew website pages and updating assets or code changes. This was necessary because we did not have access to the CMS in a way that made rapid development of our projects feasible in any other way.

I developed this “harness” using Apache, PHP, NodeJS, Javascript, PhanthomJS (a headless browser), and some bash scripting. (Node’s Express and other http servers where beyond my technical ability at the time)

Unit testing was performed with Sashi. Browser testing was done using a combination of Browserstack, other technologies and a local suite of real devices.

Want to see the code? Just right click and inspect. One of the requirements (or constraints) at Pew was that to publish these apps the entirety of the code and resources needed to be copy-and-pasted into a single CMS field. There was no practical access to the filesystem for resources.

How about the data?Again, inspect. Pew wanted to make sure that any researcher would have easy access to the data that powered these visualizations, so the data is not hidden away in strange structures. It is in plain preformatted tab-delimited tables that one can copy and paste into excel and that you will see plainly when you inspect the page.