Did you know that the US Travel Department releases statistics on the processing of nonimmigrant visas? I certainly didn't.
I'm making this app to satisfy my own desire to explore and tinker with this data in an interactive way.
The final Shiny app lives here.
- To replicate the cleaning steps taken, run the following scripts in this order:
- 1_cleaning_issuance_refusal.R
- 1_cleaning_regional.R
- 2_additional_cleaning.R - note, this file requires the manual creation of a crosswalk; a completed version can be found here.
- Source: See Nonimmigrant Worldwide Issuance and Refusal Date by Visa Category
- Relevant cleaning script: 1_cleaning_issuance_refusal.R & 2_additional_cleaning.R
- Cleaning steps:
- Download each years' data as a PDF
- Use the built-in OCR reader in Nuance Power PDF to convert each document to an Excel sheet
- For each document, check that the # visas issued + # visas refused = total workload, and manually audit 10% of the numbers (including any rows that failed the previous check)
- Import into R and clean each worksheet, and convert into a year-category level dataset.
- Sources:
- Relevant cleaning script: 1_cleaning_regional.R & 2_additional_cleaning.R
- Cleaning steps: Download data, import each worksheet into R and convert into a year-category-nationality level dataset.
- Sources:
- travel.state.gov List of Nonimmigrant Visa Symbols, also available to download here.
- travel.state.gov 2004-2008 Table of Nonimmigrant Visas Issued by Classification, also available to download here.
- travel.state.gov Border Crossing Card Info Page
- Relevant cleaning script: 2_additional_cleaning.R
- Cleaning steps:
- Cleaned and consolidate visa categories across datasets (1) and (2)
- Created crosswalk linking each visa symbol to its description, using the links above to populate crosswalk in order provided.