Income ladder for the children of immigrants

You’ve probably seen the moving bubbles that show how something changes over time. NYT Opinion lowered the abstraction level and showed little people climb the steps of income. The graphic is based on research by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan:

Using the data set, Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan were able to compare the income trajectories of immigrants’ children with those of people whose parents were born in the United States. The economists found that on average, the children of immigrants were exceptionally good at moving up the economic ladder.

Abramitzky and Boustan just published a book on the topic.

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Immigration in the United States visualized as rings of tree trunk

Pedro M. Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael and Felipe Shibuya from Northeastern University used a tree metaphor to represent a couple centuries of immigration in the United States:

Like countries, trees can be hundreds, even thousands, of years old. Cells grow slowly, and the pattern of growth influences the shape of the trunk. Just as these cells leave an informational mark in the tree, so too do incoming immigrants contribute to the country’s shape.

Feels real.

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If We All Left to “Go Back Where We Came From”

Imagine that those with immigrants in their family tree left the country. Almost everyone, basically. Read More

Citizenship question returning to Census

Emily Baumgaertner reporting for The New York Times:

But critics of the change and experts in the Census Bureau itself have said that, amid a fiery immigration debate, the inclusion of a citizenship question could prompt immigrants who are in the country illegally not to respond. That would result in a severe undercount of the population — and, in turn, faulty data for government agencies and outside groups that rely on the census. The effects would also bleed into the redistricting of the House and state legislatures in the next decade.

Welp.

Justin Elliot reporting for ProPublica:

The full census, however, hasn’t included questions about citizenship since 1950. The Census Bureau has gathered such data in other surveys. The bureau switched the method of those surveys after the 2000 census. Today, it conducts the American Community Survey every year, which includes questions about citizenship, along with many other questions. The survey covers a sample of residents of the United States.

Experts said the Justice Department’s letter was misleading. And they questioned the Justice Department’s explanation in the letter, noting that the American Community Survey produces data on citizenship that has been used in Section 2 cases.

Welp.

WELP.

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Boost economy with immigration

Want to increase the GDP? Easy. Let more immigrants in. Lena Groeger for ProPublica:

In an analysis for ProPublica, Adam Ozimek and Mark Zandi at Moody’s Analytics, an independent economics firm, estimated that for every 1 percent increase in U.S. population made of immigrants, GDP rises 1.15 percent. So a simple way to get to Trump’s 4 percent GDP bump? Take in about 8 million net immigrants per year. To show you what that really looks like, we’ve charted the effect below. You can see for yourself what might happen to the economy if we increased immigration to the highest rates in history or dropped it to zero – and everything in between.

The interactive in the article lets you pose the what-if with various immigration rates. Give it a try.

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Visa restrictions and possible impact on innovation

The Washington Post talked to three experts on the American workforce and innovation and how immigration restrictions to the US might impact future progress. Aside from the important topic the ratio of words to charts is interesting. I’ve gotten used to seeing pieces that are chart-heavy or word-heavy, but this is more one-to-one. I like it.

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Demographics for immigrants from banned countries

As I’m sure you know, the current administration banned immigrants from seven countries recently. The New York Times looks at immigrants from these countries who already settled in the United States — their education, salaries, and where they live.

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Immigration history

Immigration stepper

American immigration history is chock full of policies and restrictions, and you can see the effects in the distribution of immigrants into this country over the years. Alvin Chang for Vox steps you through the major policy shifts since 1820.

The graphic above shows how these policies affect who enters the country. It shows 200 years of legal immigration into the United States — and how different policies and international dynamics affect the patterns of who gets let in. Migration into the United States has ebbed and flowed in tandem with who policymakers believe ought to be allowed refuge and who doesn't qualify.

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Immigrant America

Immigrant dot

Similar in spirit to dot density maps we've seen before, this one from Kyle Walker, an assistant professor of geography at Texas Christian University, uses immigrant data from the American Community Survey to show the makeup of immigrant America.

Each dot represents approximately 20 immigrants in that Census tract from a given region, and the dots are placed randomly within Census tracts. The project was inspired by other interactive dot map implementations including The Racial Dot Map at the University of Virginia; Ken Schwenke’s Where the renters are; and Robert Manduca’s Where Are The Jobs?.

Color represents origin, such as red for Mexico, cyan for South Asia, and green for Southeast Asia.

The tools used to make this map? A combination of R, QGIS, ArcGIS, and Python for data processing and Mapbox for the web presentation.

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State of birth, by state and over time

Where people in Idaho were born

We've seen migration within the United States before, but Gregor Aisch, Robert Gebeloff, and Kevin Quealy for the Upshot take a more time-centric look at how people moved state to state, over the past century.

The following charts document domestic migration since the turn of the last century, based on census data. For every state, we've broken down the population by resident's state of birth. The ribbons are color-coded by region, and foreign-born residents are included at the bottom, in gray, to complete the picture for each state.

The good thing about the ribbon approach, other than the flow-like aesthetic that lends well to the topic, is that you can see the change in order through the years. Unlike a stacked area chart, each layer isn't restricted to an original ranking, so you can for instance, see that a lot of people born in California moved to Idaho starting in the 1960s.

On top of that, there are lots of nice details like ribbons move to the top when you mouse over, labels that follow the time series pattern, and a thicker highlight bar at each point in time. All of these make the data easier to read.

Check out the details of your state and others.

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