Not long ago, computer-assisted reporting was a language that other reporters spoke, as foreign to me as Serbo-Croatian. I had a hard enough time opening e-mail attachments, so slicing and dicing numbers by computer seemed beyond my grasp. Then my newspaper sent me to a four-day workshop that it sponsored with the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. An instructor demystified spreadsheets and databases. I saw the possibilities.
I cover immigrants and immigration for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and have written extensively about changes affecting non-citizens since Sept. 11, 2001. The Immigration and Naturalization Service detained hundreds of people from Arab and Muslim nations for violations of immigration law that were once considered minor, such as overstaying a visa. It has held many of them in secret and displayed great reluctance to divulge information about them.
Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to know the nationality of people deported after Sept. 11?
A simple phone call to the INS public affairs office in Washington got a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in my e-mail inbox that showed the nationality of all people removed from the United States for the past six budget years. It listed countries alphabetically; the nations were not ranked by the number deported in any particular year.
The spreadsheet had more than 200 rows for the countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The 18 columns showed for each of the past six years the number of people expelled, the number of criminal expulsions and the number of noncriminal expulsions.
The findings from the data included that the number of foreign nationals expelled to North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia multiplied faster than for citizens of nearly all other nations in the year after Sept. 11, 2001. Eight of the 10 countries with the most dramatic increases in deportation were Muslim nations. The countries with the most dramatic increases in order were Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Guyana, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Samoa, and Algeria. By contrast, overall deportations went down 18 percent. The number of immigrants deported to Mexico, which sends the vast majority of immigrants to the United States, went down 24 percent.