Web developers, journalists, and software engineers joined forces at the Chicago Migrahack, a “hackathon” designed to promote the use of technology and open data to reveal issues surrounding immigration. During the three-day event run by the MacArthur-supported Institute for Justice and Journalism, participants learned new tools for working with data and teamed up in a competition to develop open-access digital projects that were judged on how effectively they used data visualization to tell a story about immigration. Winning projects revealed information about immigrant access to healthcare, the trajectories of undocumented people in custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and trends in the number and origins of immigrants obtaining resident status around the world.
