In the 10/20 Map of the Week, I quickly rendered an immigration network. To make it, I combined two 3-degree citation network. Both networks started with 2010’s Padilla v. Kentucky as a child. Padilla’s two network parents were the Chinese Exclusion Case (1889) and Fong Yue Ting (1892). I then filtered this combined two-parent network to opinions containing the word “immigration.” The resulting map looked like this:
Note that this look of the network employs a Spaeth visualization. Unfortunately, Spaeth only goes back to 1946. Many of the cases in immigration doctrine are much older. Thus our immigration problem: The y-axis is meaningless for the cases plotted in green.
First project then is to rehab this map by inserting proper vote counts pre-1946. I’ll have to count votes by hand. Of course, this fix won’t solve all our immigration problems. But it will help and is a fair first step. Will report back on that step and on future steps in the next post.