May 12, 2017

Mapping Immigrant America: A Look At The Immigrant Population In The U.S.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about immigrants in the U.S. following the election of Donald Trump. While the president and his administration have been attempting to push policies that would limit immigration into the U.S., many opposed to his rhetoric have stressed the fact that the U.S. was built by immigrants, for immigrants. But just how many immigrants are there in America?

Mapping Immigrant America, a project by Kyle Walker, was created for his upcoming talk in September at Dallas’s Old Red Museum, “Visualizing the Changing Landscape of US Immigration.” The map, a dot-density model of the immigrant population in the U.S., is painted in colored dots representing immigrants’ place of origin. The regions consist of Mexico (red); Latin America and the Caribbean, other than Mexico (Blue); East and Southeast Asia (green); South and Central Asia (aqua); Sub-Saharan Africa (purple); North Africa and Southwest Asia (pink); Europe (orange); Oceania (yellow); and Canada (brown).

Walker pulled demographic data from the American Community Survey (2009-2013) and geographic and demographic data from the National Historical Geographic Information System. Each of the dots featured on the map equals roughly 20 million immigrants from a given region and are placed randomly within the Census tract the data was pulled from.  Because the American Community Survey pulls from a sample of 3 million households yearly and averaged over 5 years to attain estimates for each Census tract, Walker emphasizes that the map only represents estimates of immigrant population in the U.S. and is, therefore, subject to a margin of error. This and the fact that a large number of colors (nine) are represented on the map led to Walker’s decision to have each dot illustrate 20 million immigrants instead of one dot per immigrant.

You can check out Walker’s full map here and discover more about the immigrant population across America.

Source: Visual News