Impact of Historical Events on Patterns In U.S. Immigration and Integration

Sara Speckhard, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)

Since its formal inception in 1891, the Federal immigration service has kept records of who has been admitted, who has naturalized, and who has become a part of the U.S. population. These trends have varied significantly over time; however the breadth of detail makes the information hard to compare and contrast in tabular form. This poster session provides a visual method of presenting large amounts of information through multi-color graphs that allow the comparison of a timeline of significant immigration milestones and important world events with U.S. immigrant admission and naturalization numbers from U.S. immigration data and foreign-born stock data from decennial census reports. These graphs provide a unique perspective on how immigration in the United States responds to global events and contributes to the U.S. population and how different source areas have affected the foreign-born composition of the population over time.