United States Immigration History ·
A visual timeline of immigration policy, military spending, refugee admissions, and border enforcement in the United States from 1790 to 2026. Toggle data layers to reveal the feedback loop: military action abroad, refugee flows, restrictive policy, border militarization, enforcement spending.
Sources, Credits & Attribution
Immigration History (immigrationhistory.org) — A comprehensive timeline of U.S. immigration history maintained as an educational resource covering acts, laws, court decisions, and events from 1790 to the present.
Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center, SMU Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences — Timeline and research on the U.S.-Mexico border, boundary commissions, and transborder policy history.
This interactive timeline was originally created in December 2024 for a thesis exhibition project in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALAS) program at San Diego State University. The research compiled immigration history data from the sources listed above, synthesizing acts, treaties, court decisions, executive orders, and border policy events into a chronological narrative.
The Miro board was subsequently converted into this interactive web-based timeline using AI-assisted development (Anthropic Claude) in February 2026. The AI was used to structure the data, generate the HTML/CSS/JavaScript code for the scrolling interface and population graph, and to update the timeline with 2025–2026 executive orders and policy developments. All historical content was sourced from and cross-referenced with the primary research sources above.
U.S. population figures are drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau decennial census (1790–2020) and intercensal/annual population estimates. Census years are marked with larger dots on the graph; intermediate points are estimates used to approximate the growth curve between census periods.
Radio Axiom · Artivist.Media
Research, design direction & curation by the author. AI-assisted code generation and data structuring by Claude (Anthropic).