Steamgraph representation of the origin countries of migrants into the United States from 1990-2010

Quick Observations

Some trends I noticed from this view of the data at a cursory glance is that the mid-nineties seem to be a big boom for immigration into the United States from a greater variety of places compared to the other periods. Overall migration shrinks both in terms of absolute numbers and representation from different countries. The second piece of this trend might be explained by the dot-com bust and 9/11, a changed economic and political climate that seems to still be resonating today. Greater prosperity in many countries as the world stabilized after the end of the Cold War may have also reduced the incentive to move to the United States.

Less dramatic observations are the ready increase of people arriving from Mexico, China, and India, likely coinciding with the need for labor skills from those countries. There are also some countries, such as the Phillippines and Vietnam that provide a remarkably consistent and constant flow of migrants, likely due to certain visa programs, such as family reunification, that strictly manage immigration numbers.

Credits and Callouts:

  • I used Will Thurman's Interactive Steamgraph block as a base.
  • Data comes from the THE GLOBAL FLOW OF PEOPLE
  • Current tooltip implementation isn't ideal since it's a date match, so the tooltip falls away past the year range of the data, which jumps five years per data point. You need to hover at the date tick marks to see the tooltip values that show country and number of people
  • There are a bit too many values to show in this steamgraph alone and isn't the best use of visual encoding. I am working on a series of other charts to give more color to this story.