Deportation Data

This Data Days 4 Good project invites students to build an interactive, searchable dashboard that helps GBH journalists and the public better understand foreign-born population trends in Massachusetts Gateway Cities. The goal is to enable users to explore how immigrant populations have changed since 2010, understand demographic shifts at granular levels, and identify patterns related to economic assimilation. Students will create a data-driven tool using Census data that allows users to look into any Gateway City and see how the foreign-born population has changed over time, broken down by specific countries of origin (e.g., Vietnamese, Brazilian, Lebanese, Chinese) rather than just top-level categories. All data will be presented as rates and per capita to enable apples-to-apples comparisons across cities and to statewide totals. The dashboard will include interactive filtering and comparison features, allowing journalists to identify which cities have the highest or lowest rates of specific variables, compare cities side-by-side, and generate city profiles. A key feature is a chatbot interface that enables users to ask questions of the data and generate graphs dynamically, making the data exploration accessible to non-technical audiences. This tool will support GBH's investigative reporting by surfacing patterns about which cities have experienced the greatest foreign-born growth, which populations are growing fastest, and indicators of economic assimilation including median income, housing patterns, educational advancement, and employment.