First Thoughts

Up until this point in the semester, I've been working on one project, Enfut. However, for the third and final project of this class, I want to step away a little bit from that and start working on something new.

As I'm in my last semester of college, I've been faced with new challenges, including post-grad opportunities applications amongst many other big, scary decisions. One of the biggest challenges for myself and my friends has been visas--whether that be keeping a legal status, securing one, even winning one through lotteries. 

I started thinking about this last project from there--why are visas so hard to get? But our situation doesn't compare to other people in much more precarious situations, the people who need this stamp of approval for shelter. I then started talking to my friend, who's majoring in Political Science and who is going to be doing immigration work post-grad, and he helped me find some good, accessible databases: UNHCR, Operational Data Portal, European Commission, etc. 

Out of the databases we looked at UNHCR offers public API access to their data. So for The Queue, I’m using data from the UNHCR Refugee Statistics API, which offers public access to real-time and historical asylum records. Specifically, I’ll be drawing from the asylum-applications and asylum-decisions endpoints to map global movement patterns and bureaucratic outcomes. 

Each record includes structured fields like country of origin (coo_name), country of asylum (coa_name), year, number of applications (applied), and decision outcomes (dec_recognized, dec_rejected, dec_closed, dec_total), allowing me to build a simulation that reflects the administrative layers and human stakes behind migration data.