The Changing Population of Unauthorized Immigrants by State from 2005 through 2010

We’ve been experimenting with new ways of visualizing information, this time taking data on the number of “unauthorized” immigrants by U.S. state from reports compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center, using the tools at IBM’s ManyEyes site to visualize the dataset, then using Scribd to present the visualized data in a Flash-based slideshow format, which makes it easy to see the year-over-year changes for each state!

The slideshow is below. One cool feature we found is that you can use the + or – buttons to zoom in or out on a portion of the charts, and the slide show will stay focused on the zoomed section of the graphs as you change from slide-to-slide, making those year-over-year comparisons really easy.

You can access an interactive version of the charts on the ManyEyes site, which will also give you direct access to the dataset from which it was created.

We’ve provided the data for 1990 and 2000 as well in the interactive version, but we chose to omit it from the slideshow presentation because IBM’s ManyEyes site would not fix the vertical scale of the charts, which makes it difficult to perform direct visual year-to-year comparisons with the presented data and the data for those two years.

Data Sources

Pew Hispanic Center. Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State Trends, 2010. Tables A3 and A4. 1 February 2011.

Pew Hispanic Center. U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Mid-Decade. Table A1. 1 September 2010.

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