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Before the project started, I knew a lot of people immigrated to the US but when I actually saw the numbers, I was very surprised. I never realized exactly how many people came to the US and all the different places they came from. Another thing I was unaware of is how Congress used to restrict the number of immigrants from certain places and how they forced different  laws upon them once they arrived, depending on their origin. Other bits of information didn't strike me quite as much like what had caused some of the low points in immigration. It makes a lot of sense that no one would want to come to the US during the Great Depression. 

Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.

There are many different ways to predict the rise or fall of immigration through the next twenty years. If history were to repeat itself then one could assume that the rates would continue to rise, but some things are going on in our country that may negatively affect the amount of immigration. Right now, the United States is in a recession and if it were to worsen then I would predict a significant drop in immigration rates. On the same spectrum, many countries in Europe are in a similar situation and if we held our ground, that might encourage immigration. There are many different ways that immigration could go and it is certainly difficult to predict how it will go. 

Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.

We chose to do a color coded timeline because we felt it was a good balance between information and vibrance. It is very organized and easily understood. 

What parts of group work were challenging?

Overall, the group worked well together though one thing that could have been improved was the division of work. Though we all provided and filled in our own information, when it came to color coding it was difficult to separate it equally. We tried to divide it but it just became complicated. 

What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?

Honestly, I am very pleased with the outcome of the project. The only reason I would change anything is if we had more and more technical skill. Even though I am very pleased with our current project. 

• What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?
  Among the things that surprised me the most were the dramatic decreases that the data showed in certain decades of US History. However, once I considered the decades with the decreases and the different events happening in America at the time, they made perfect sense.
  
  Also, one thing that really intrigued me was how the overall American population had a nearly linear, steady increase, where as the immigration arrivals often changed.
  
  
  
• Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.
  I believe that the immigration trend in the US will suffer a slight decrease, due to the dissolution of the American economy. I believe that these problems in the federal government will not attract people from foreign countries to inhabit the US.
  
  
  
• Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.
  We decided to place emphasis on the push/pull factors that encouraged immigration.  We decided that each decade had multiple perspectives, and so we wanted to display that in our visual piece.
  
  
  
• What parts of group work were challenging?
  I think everyone in the group had a massive amount of ideas, and it was very hard to compress those ideas into a singular image.
  
  
  
• What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
  If we had more time, I would include photos in the decades as well. I feel that this would have really solidified the multiple perspectives that we were trying to convey.

• What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?
  The thing that surprised me most about the data was the general numbers of immigrants. The great depression was literally one of the most depressing times in America and all though there was a severe decrease in immigrants there were still a large amount. It was obvious that in times of war, over seas especially, there would be an increase in people trying to escape from the war zone. 
  
  
• Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.
  I think the immigration numbers would continue to rise and may have some points from 2000-to present where it decreases because of the economic inflation. I do not think that it would cause a severe drop but it would be a noticeable one. 
  
  
• Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.
  Originally my group created a very boring slide show, which we soon fixed to a single image. I had originally wanted to do something basic and even elementary because with things like history sometimes it doesn't hurt to simplify the information so that all people , really uninformed to experts, would understand. I liked the idea of child like smiley faces because if I was the audience it would appeal to me.
  
  
• What parts of group work were challenging?
  I think as a group we could've did a better job splitting up the work because with both versions of the presentation someone was left doing 90% of the work. I do think, however, that it was more efficient to work like that in this instance because doing separate things and trying to incorporate it all into one simple photo would have been difficult in the amount of time we had. Although, we did all have a say in what the image should include and how we could represent it. Original ideas were shared by everyone equally. 
  
   
• What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
  I would probably want to make the presentation something a little bit more animate and interactive and somehow portray why the numbers dropped a bit better. 

• What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?

• Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.

• Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.

• What parts of group work were challenging?

• What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
  

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What surprised you most about this information?  

-When doing the project with my group mates, I was surprised that there were many events that I never heard of that had such a huge impact on the immigration percentage. For example, in Germany, many people left the country and entered the United States because our soil was richer than Germany's. I never once thought that they would leave their own county for food, let done come to the United States. 

What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?

-The things that were most obvious were locating the dates and putting a pattern together. Every time the United States was in global conflict (wars), the immigration process slowed down because people were afraid of living in a country that was fighting a stronger power. 

Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.

-Presently, I know that the United States is more hard on immigrants. They now need proper documents to arrive and live in the country and if they don't, the United States doesn't give them a chance to earn the papers, it's just deportation. In the next two decades, I feel that it will get worse with immigration as we are now in a recession again. When more immigrants arrive, they might take jobs from US citizens causing no jobs and little money making process which will further increase our 14 trillion deficit in the economy.

Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.

-At first I had an idea for my group to take clips from YouTube™ that showcased many of the events that affected immigration, but that became too tiresome as we only had 3 days to work on the project. We then switched to a 3D graph visualization. 

What parts of group work were challenging?

-The dates I found challenging were finding accurate and major events that caused immigration or immigrants to leave the US. For instance, in the 1960's we entered the Cold War with the Soviet Union. I thought that would be major enough, but it was not accurate as the Cold War was 85% shielded by the government and anyone who knew of what happened int hose times denied the very fact of it taking place. 

What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?

-If I could redo this project over again I would create a movie using the clips from YouTube™ and make a moving graph that showcased the immigration change. Instead of a bar graph, I would create a line graph. 

• What surprised you most about this information?  What seemed quite obvious about explaining this data set?
  
  What surprised me most about the information was the laws created against Chinese immigrants and many other immigrants, locking down how many of them are allowed to come into our country. 
  
  
• Looking at the overall trend and incorporating what you know about the US presently, predict and defend the immigration trend for the next two decades.
  
  I think immigration will go down, seeing the current situation our economy and government is in. It's very discouraging to come to a country where we're on the verge of an economic crisis, if we aren't already in one. My prediction is that we'll slowly begin to get less immigrants in the next two decades. 
  
  
• Describe how you made a decision on how to visually represent the information.
  
  Originally, we were going to create ours in a Keynote, but that didn't work. Cheyenne suggested using smiley faces and frown faces, which me and Justin though were just silly, but then we gave it a shot and we're proud with our final results. It's a set of smiley and frowny faces, the smiley faces show a year where immigration increased, while the frowny faces show went it decreased. 
  
  
• What parts of group work were challenging?
  
  Just helping Cheyenne out, because neither I nor Justin are at all experienced with using Photoshop. 
  
  
  
• What would you do differently if you had this project to do over?
  
  I'd probably want to do something like a video. I think I'd have a lot of fun making a video. 

• • 
    
    When finding out the history between the US and it's immigration, most things seemed to make sense besides one thing. The period between 1881-1890 (note: I realized that I made a mistake for this date on the project) . While it was a huge immigration boom during this period, I found the Chinese Exclusion Act was also established during this same decade. So, I'm still confused as to why the immigrant numbers increased so greatly. Some obvious increases and decreases were things like The Industrial Revolution, and The Great Depression (which are great points that show extreme disparities between immigrant numbers in the US history.) As for my prediction of the US numbers of Immigrants for the next two decades, I don't find that to be the easiest thing to predict. My reason for that is  because of the current economic state of the US, which is still in it's stages of pending effort to create more jobs, and to not add more to our deficit. Then again, we are still the most developed nation in the world, and I can imagine other millions of people wanting to come here for the opportunities as well. Not to mention, the number of immigrants that come would have to do with the nations that they are leaving from. The US would be flooded with immigrants if a nation perhaps has some sort of natural disaster, or fall in government. But overall, over the next two decades because the world is advancing more (could be in negative or positive ways) I could see 4 or 5 millions of people more than the previous decade coming over. As a group, we made our decision to to present the information similar to graph style but with a twist simply because of our inability to come up with something else more creative, but could also could be done within a certain span of time. But in the end, we decided to represent each decade as a building in a city and  the title of each building has historical significance to the events of the decade that affect US immigration numbers (it's on paper by the way). Some parts of the group that were challenging was really finding the time to work on it together besides in class. Also, we weren't always on the same page, or we always were. If I could do this project over, I would definitely go with one our first ideas because they would've been more visually appealing, albeit more time consuming.

For US History class we looked at two graphs that showed how population grows and how over the past last 190 years immigration to the United States has changed.  The first thing that was noticed was simply that these graphs were far from the same. The next thing was what could cause the strange and drastic changes in the immigration graph. Through research we found that these numbers were affected because of events, major ones were the Industrial Revolution, which caused a major increase in immigration and the Great Depression, which caused a major drop in immigration. One specific event thing I learned and was surprised about through this project was the Quota Acts. The Quota Acts were very strict laws limiting immigration from countries, some more limited than others. For instance during the Quota acts in 1924 where Chinese immigrants were limited to in the hundreds, German immigrations went into the hundred thousands. This made me realize how hand crafted the American population really is.

From what I’ve learned about history and immigration through this project I predict that the US immigration is close to a crash. I don’t know much about American economics but if we have another crash in the stock market and go into a depression it’s going to drop like it did before. Actually in fact when immigration hit the last peak it was at it crashed soon after, currently we are back up at the same numbers the previous peak were at, which to me signifies a soon drop. It will continue to go down for the next decade or so, and won’t start lifting up at least till the 2030’s.

The process for developing a product for this project was challenging. Our team Ryan Harris, Paige Wayman, and I hit a couple roadblocks in developing a good way of representing the data. At first we were going to make a Prezzi presentation but found that it was in fact fairly complicated to work with and decided it wasn’t the right type of visual representation we were aiming for. So instead we produced a map with arrows. The arrows size represents the amount if immigration that came from that part of the world. The color correlates with the color on the time line at the bottom. We found this to be a more eye-catching way of presenting the data. If we were going to do this project over I think we could have mixed the Prezzi and the map together. For example the events that we put on the map we could make little side notes that went off giving more information. Nothing was particularly challenging except building it. We all agreed on ideas and came together to work equally and cohesively.

What surprised me the most about this information was that there was a lot of different reasons for the immigration rates throughout the years of American history. What's quite obvious was there were a lot of hardships in other countries causing them to flee to a better country that could provide money, jobs, and education which was America. Though there were problems within America itself there were not as much immigrants arriving but there were always some for each decade.

Many ups and downs occurred in the numbers of immigrants arriving to America, but there are also many push and pull factors. With our the recession currently going on in America the trend expresses that we may go down due to the recession, job cuts more than ever before.

My group and I had a difficult time of picking the best way to present our information visually. We eventually decided to do Prezi because it is an easy layout and very fun to do. The most difficult part of the group work was including all different pictures and everyones separate part of decades into one project. There is nothing I would like to change with my project because I am very happy with my final product.