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    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.