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 originated in Fall 2024 as research for a paper on the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act written for a History of the 60’s course at San Diego State University. AI-assisted research tools were used to compile and structure the immigration history data, an approach explored concurrently in an AI course taught by Gabriel Doyle at SDSU.
The research was developed into a Miro board timeline intended for a thesis exhibition as part of the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences (M.A.L.A.S.) program at SDSU, with a transborder studies focus. The exhibition timeline was not completed before graduation in May 2025.
The project was revisited in 2026 during coursework in the Master of Science in Humanitarian Action (MSHA) program at the University of San Diego, Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, where studies in humanitarian policy and border enforcement prompted a return to the Miro timeline. The board was converted into this interactive web-based visualization using AI-assisted development (Anthropic Claude), expanding the original immigration history research with data layers for military spending, refugee admissions, border enforcement budgets, migrant deaths, and barrier construction. All historical content was sourced from and cross-referenced with the primary research sources listed above.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).
