The link to the presentation can be accessed by clicking here. 

This project was fun to research, and fun to create a presentation for. The thing that surprised me most about this project was seeing how certain events made such a big impact on immigration. The single most surprising event was seeing how much impact the great depression had on the immigration to the United States. I would have guessed that it had some impact, but not as much as it actually did. Something that somewhat obvious was that since nothing as big as the great depression has happened in a while, the immigration would be rising at a rate close to what it should be. The only major things that have happened since the research left off was the war in Iraq, and our recession. These things will probably have some impact on immigration, but not as big as something like the great depression. If everything continues with nothing major happening for the next 20 years, then I think immigration will continue in the trend that it should. 

The most challenging part of this project was setting up the presentation. We got all of the data and information fairly quickly, but it was hard to set up the presentation tool that we wanted to use to represent our data. At first my group wanted to use a many-eyes tree chart, but it wasn't working out in the way that we wanted it to. After the tree chart didn't work we decided to do a sort of time line, showing how the number of immigrants increased depending on what the decade was, and if you click on each point you can see what the most important thing that effected immigration was. An example is that if you click on the 1930 point, the main thing is economy because our country was in a depression. 

If i was going to do this project over i would try to use a different presentation tool. The one that we used ended up working out, but it would be much better if we had spent all the time trying to use one too, doing something else with another tool or way to present. The presentation could have been much more creative than what it ended up being if we had more time to focus on the tool the we ended up actually using. 

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Reflection.

It was kind of challenging to figure out what kind of project we wanted to do. It was also challenging dividing the work all at once. But I really enjoyed the process of the project. We took a risk and we don't know for sure how the risk will fair out. But I really liked the communication of it though. We might do and easier project differently maybe because this one actually took a long time to do. We also wanted to do a video but that didn't really work out well. I think the immigration is really unstable. Since during the great depression there was really no immigrants coming in I think during the recession we would start to lose because there will be no jobs and no money. So there would be no reason for them to come here. But since immigrants keep coming in maybe because of the American dream and just being america makes people come here. Thats how my friend came here.

When first exposed to the immigration statistics, I took note on how drastic the different change in numbers were. As observed the information further, I connected the different highs and lows of the numbers to different points in history that I was previously aware of. I cannot say that the statistics took me completely by surprise, but neither can I say that one point didn't intrigue me. In the timeframe where the Gilded Age was at its height, the immigration numbers were't as high as I pictured them.

Predicting the future immigration statistics is perplexing. On one hand, the United States is currently in a time of economic tension, which I believe would repel immigrants. On the other, immigrants today from many countries in Europe are trying to escape their own nation's economic problems that are worse than the situation in America. One prediction I feel confident about, is that there will be many immigrants from countries like Greece and several North African nations. I do not know if our immigration numbers will follow the same increasing trend.

My group and I wanted to create a timeline of sorts, but we didn't want a normal, horizontal/vertical type of graphic. We decided to use a spiral, because it is a visually captivating figure. We then added several pictures that represented different points in time that effected immigration. The most challenging tasks in creating our piece had to have been using Adobe Illustrator and marrying physical media with digital media. Finding a scanner was a laborious task as well...
If given the chance to recreate my group's final project, I would like to do all of it in Adobe Illustrator. I feel it would look more streamline that way. I would have also added more information, as well as a y axis so that people would be able to actually get numbers from this visual.