A Future Where...
A Reimagining of Our Feature Map Played in Reverse
Every day, the U.S. government continues to use the systems we inherited to exclude and divide. By exposing the truth about how U.S. authorities have adopted and revised immigration policies to target nonwhite communities, we can start dismantling those rules and building something better. Our feature map reflects how U.S. immigration policies have expelled nonwhite communities for over 127 years, but our world doesn’t have to look this way. What would our future look like if we reversed the patterns of our history?
This map features the same deportation data that our feature map, Who Gets Deported?, displays. However, this time, the basemap is transformed into the Waterman Butterfly projection with the landbases of the world colored in with a vibrant orange gradient and the world waters symbolized as dark brown and gray gradients to mimic the colors of a monarch butterfly–a powerful symbol for immigrant rights. The dots representing the number of deportation orders are white instead of multi-colored to echo the monarch’s color patterns. The map is then animated in reverse starting in 2022 and going all the way back to 1895.
A Future Where… is dedicated to all those who have fought and continue to fight for immigrants’ rights, and to those who dare to imagine a future where we can build a better world full of belonging.