- otus
- June 25, 2012
AC
The Supreme Court upheld the most controversial portion of Arizona's immigration law Monday, clearing the way for police officers in the state to ask about a person's immigration status during routine stops. Whether this tactic will deter future border crossings will be difficult to measure, however, because illegal immigration from Mexico has plummeted in recent years. There are many factors that have probably contributed to this decline, chief among them is the fact that there are more border patrol agents on the ground and fewer jobs for those who do make it to America. To visualize how dramatically illegal immigration has abated, Yahoo News teamed up with Michael Gastner, a junior research fellow at Imperial College London, who specializes in creating maps that manipulate the shape of states to represent data. (One of his popular "cartograms," for example, uses physics equations to reshape the United States according to population density.) In...