Tracking immigration trends across Massachusetts through an interactive data dashboard
The Massachusetts Gateway Cities Dashboard is an interactive data platform that explores foreign-born population trends across 26 Gateway Cities in Massachusetts using American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates from 2012–2024.
The project was designed to help journalists, researchers, and policymakers understand immigration patterns, economic integration, and demographic changes across cities. Instead of manually analyzing Census tables, users can explore the data through visual dashboards, maps, and natural-language queries.
Key Features
City-level demographic insights
Explore foreign-born population share, income, poverty, education, employment, and housing metrics across Gateway Cities.
Country-of-origin analysis
View detailed breakdowns of where foreign-born populations originate from, with data covering 150+ countries.
Interactive mapping
A geographic view of Massachusetts cities using Leaflet maps, where markers are sized and colored based on immigration indicators.
Cross-city comparisons
Compare metrics such as foreign-born share, unemployment, income, and homeownership across cities.
Time-series trend analysis
Analyze how key indicators have changed from 2012 to 2024 using interactive charts.
AI-powered data exploration
A built-in chatbot powered by Google Gemini allows users to ask questions like:
- “How has the foreign-born population changed in Lowell?”
- “Which Gateway Cities have the fastest immigrant population growth?”
- “What countries contribute most to Lawrence’s foreign-born population?”
The chatbot combines deterministic data analysis with LLM-generated explanations, enabling conversational exploration of the dataset.
My Role
I developed the project end-to-end, including:
- Collecting ACS data using the U.S. Census API
- Cleaning and standardizing multi-year demographic datasets
- Engineering city-level metrics for immigration and economic indicators
- Designing a Flask backend API serving processed datasets
- Building a React dashboard interface with interactive charts and maps
- Integrating a RAG-based AI chatbot using Google Gemini
Tech Stack
Frontend: React, Vite, Recharts, Leaflet
Backend: Flask, Python
Data Processing: Pandas, PyArrow
AI Integration: Google Gemini API
Data Source: U.S. Census Bureau ACS
Data Pipeline
The system uses a structured pipeline to transform raw Census data into analytics-ready datasets:
- Data ingestion
Python scripts fetch ACS data for all Massachusetts places from the Census API. - Data cleaning and normalization
City names and geographic identifiers are standardized across years. - Feature engineering
Metrics such as foreign-born share, unemployment rate, poverty rate, and education attainment are calculated. - Storage and access
Processed datasets are stored in Parquet format and served through API endpoints to the frontend dashboard.
Impact
This project transforms complex Census datasets into an accessible analytical tool that helps identify trends in immigration, economic mobility, and demographic change across Massachusetts communities.
By combining data engineering, analytics, visualization, and AI, the dashboard enables faster insight generation for data-driven storytelling and policy research.