Mapping Immigrant America
▻http://personal.tcu.edu/kylewalker/immigrant-america/about.html
Mapping Immigrant America is a project I am working on for my upcoming talk September 19 at Dallas’s Old Red Museum, “Visualizing the Changing Landscape of US Immigration.” The map is a dot-density representation of the US immigrant population, with dots colored by immigrants’ general region of origin. The regions include:
Mexico (red);
Latin America and the Caribbean, other than Mexico (blue);
East and Southeast Asia (green);
South & Central Asia (aqua);
Sub-Saharan Africa (purple);
North Africa & Southwest Asia (pink);
Europe (orange);
Oceania (yellow);
Canada (brown)
Demographic data are from the 2009-2013 American Community Survey at the Census tract level; both geographic and demographic Census data come from the National Historical Geographic Information System1. I use ACS table B05006, “Place of Birth for the Foreign-Born Population in the United States.” 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?.
Feel free to explore! Also, I welcome comments and feedback; I’m available on the web and on Twitter. A few additional points about the map are below.
How was the map made?
Making this map took a lot of experimentation, and in turn a number of tools. I processed the data with a combination of R, QGIS, ArcGIS, and Python; the map itself was designed in Mapbox Studio, and built with Mapbox.js and Bootstrap. I also use Chris Whong’s really cool Legend Buddy to make the legend.