Immigration Visualization Project

Honestly, I was quite surprised to see the current placement with immigration on the graph. I feel honored to live in such a "drastic" period in history. The last spike in immigration happened quite a while ago. But now, I can see that in my generation, immigration has been the highest it's ever been. But after looking at the graph, I noticed that it's not very linear. In other words, it doesn't have one set increasing rate. It doesn't increase by a certain amount every decade. It's very sporadic, and for some reason, I kind of expected that. 

In history, you can't really predict how things would go. The great depression would have never happened if people knew it was going to. So therefore, it's truly hard to determine how things will be for our future. There are a multitude of options. For example, the United State's economic position right now is... terrible. I don't know how things were during the great depression, but I'm sure it wasn't good. And look how fast that happened. If something happened to America, it could possibly spark another very serious economic predicament. So that means we can go from the highest immigration number EVER, to possibly the lowest. Or, maybe by some unusual coincidence, congress passes some new immigration law that brings more people to the United States without as much difficulty prior. Then instead of nine million, it sparks to eleven million. It's impossible to determine how things could turn out. Next year is 2012 after all, who knows if we'll even be here! (Kidding). 

In our project, similar to a bar graph, we hand-drew a city that's building's sizes vary depending on how the amount of immigration during that decade. And I feel it was interpreted fairly well. You can see some buildings nearly come off the page because of how many people immigrated to the US, whereas you'd need a magnifying glass to see the buildings during the late 1800's. (Exaggeration, you can see it without a magnifying glass). Then each building's name was determined by something that happened in that time period. The larger buildings were from the early 1900's because of war and from this decade. Whereas the "Great Depression" building is only about a centimeter because of the low amounts of immigration. 


In general, the way we wanted to present the information was the hardest difficulty. We had so many awesome, creative ideas. But after realizing that we had almost 20 decades to cover, we came to a loss. Then the idea of a "populated city" came into the discussion, which made a lot of sense. The more people = the larger the city. So I feel it was an effective way of transferring the information in a spiffy little way. After we decided on how to present, it was smooth sailing from there. 

I believe the way we did the project this time was very well. If WE had the opportunity to change something about next time, the amount of decades was rather difficult in portraying in a unique way. If it was a lower amount, I feel one of our prior ideas to the city could have been better. But explaining 20 decades was a little more challenging. Though, you can't leave out important dates in history. So I suppose we'll just have to stay content with our city.

 




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