Summary
This post presents a timeline of US immigration policy from the Immigration Policy Tracking Project and Professor Lucas Guttentag.Table of Contents
Overview
The post uses the data from the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, a project of Professor Lucas Guttentag, with the assistance of Stanford and Yale law students. The post explores the volume and type of changes in immigration policies of the U.S. during President Trump’s administration. It is informally known as the “Trump-tracker.”
Background
Beginning in January of 2017, Professor Guttentag began compiling the different changes in administration policy with regards to immigration.[1] On April 1, 2021, the data was scraped from the website and there were 1064 changes during President Trump’s tenure.
Data and model
The data for the project was scraped from the website using rvest. [2]
Results
Plot Policy Changes by Type
Plot Google Search Volume
The google search volume was downloaded for the term ‘immigration’ over a five year period. The highest value over the time period is assigned a value of 100.The google trend data is reported on a weekly basis. A simple 4 interval moving average was superimposed to eliminate volatility using the tidyquant package. [3]
Google trends found the highest value to have occurred in January, 2017, just after President Trump took office. It should be noted that other reasons for the surge in “immigration” searches, other than changes in U.S. policy and President Trump, might account for the interest on the internet.
The first surge in immigration search was in January, 2017 and may have been as a result of three sweeping executive orders President Trump issued. The first executive order became known as the “muslim ban” by its critics and created confustion as to who could be admitted to the U.S. The second order required the building of the Mexican border wall. And finally, the third order expanded efforts to cut illegal immigration. See story here.
Conclusion
The Trump administration made a consistent effort after the first couple of months in office to change existing immigration policies. The policy initiatives seemed to spike at and around the November, 2020, election for the presidency. Without a longer timeline, it is difficult to say how the Trump administration differed from previous adminisrations at least in terms of the volume and types of changes. Public interest in immigration appeared to have waned in the end of Trump’s term when measured by internet searches. Of course, the pandemic was the preeminent story for most of 2020 and may have subsumed the public’s attention.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge and thank the following people and organizations:
Roman Cheplyaka for the tip to group the time series data using
lubridate::floor_datefunction; and
References
Disclaimer
The views, analysis and conclusions presented within this paper represent the author’s alone and not of any other person, organization or government entity. While I have made every reasonable effort to ensure that the information in this article was correct, it will nonetheless contain errors, inaccuracies and inconsistencies. It is a working paper subject to revision without notice as additional information becomes available. Any liability is disclaimed as to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Reproducibility
─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
setting value
version R version 3.6.3 (2020-02-29)
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language (EN)
collate en_US.UTF-8
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tz America/Chicago
date 2021-04-01
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