I have this self-centered idea that you sat around thinking about what you could do to become even more appealing to me, and you hit upon this mapping project.

God, I love maps.

Have you seen the ones in Tufte's Visual Display of Quanitative Information? The map/timeline of Napoleon's Russian invasion completely seduced me. It's simply amazing. I've been a map junkie ever since.

Can't wait to see the finished project!

Awesome.

Great stuff. I think the two colors should interpenetrate each other even more to reflect contemporary reality. Southern California needs to be very yellow, as do most major urban centers. Perhaps you could quantify this based on estimations of illegal immigrants per capita or something similar.

I'm not sure how to quantify penetration of American capital into Mexico, but I'd love to see a world map that attempts to depict this.

Might we also see a bleed of American Immigration and influence on the Canadian border?

For those upset about US/Mexican Immigration issues, I would ask that you change it from being against Mexicans coming here and move the argument towards Parity with Mexico and its policies towards Immigration along its southern border and a removal of Mexicos constitutional restrictions of foreign ownership of Mexican land.

If Mexico were to change its policy on foreign ownership of real estate Mexico would become the fastest growing country in the world, but since foriegn capital cannot be used there, it sits in a perpetual 3rd world state. This, along with an unholy amount of government graft and corruption that causes what little investement in land that is made there subject to extortion by government officials is the reason why people leave that countyry for this one. We are one of the few countrires in the world to allow non citizens to own property. Mexicans find it easier to be illegal in the US than they do being legal in their own country.

We should not blame the people who come here,nor should we start machine gunning people at the border who try, but it might be time to do a little regime change south of the border.

Changing the Property rights situation in Mexico is the first step towards changing the immigration issue.

Frank,

We're agreed on the need for economic (and political) reform in Mexico. But when you speak of regime change, I can only say: We gots us bigger fish to fry these days!

Seriously... you're still right. But that's a project for another decade.

Re the situation on the Canadian border...

Giving Canada a similar color to the US was meant to establish exactly what you're arguing for. There might be better way to do it, but probably not without losing too much of the map's coherence. However, I am giving serious thought to shading Quebec with a touch of green (but without a black-line border). Similarly, Canada's northern territories might end up swirled with a lighter blue (or even white in the polar regions) to indicate their not-quite-controlled-by-Ottawa status.

Ideally, this project deserves its own website. A Wikipedia-type site, where strangers could propose changes, new methods, etc. In my dream world, it would all appear on a Javascript rotating globe. Zoomable, mutable, etc.

Hmm...

I agree. Unless you've suddenly become a world expert on immigration and economics, a project like this is *way* too big for one person...outside of a doctoral thesis or something.

Very cool.

One place you might want to check out foe a model (oddly enough) is the CORE project for the Hearts of Iron WWII sim. It's a similiar idea, a "worldwide" project divided up by country to plan a cohesive whole. This project wouldn't be quite as detailed but could be planned in the same way.

Give each country or region its own thread where people can argue for and against the merits of drawing the map in a certain way, then take the consensus and use it for the final product.

Count me in big time if you get it up and running ;)

Joan: spot on, Tufte's Napoleonic disaster is the most stunning "plot" I've ever seen.

I am not sure Tufte created the Napolean graph or simply cited and popularized that work (by somebody else) as a great example of a good graph.

Steve:

Great idea. I'm wondering, tho, why you don't distinguish between population and capital? Seems to me that they could/would be two different maps. How do we distinguish between a population infusion and a capital infusion??

Just asking....

Oh, I'll be interested to see Costa Rica and Panama - there's a fair 'infusion' of Gringos down there.

leelu

A thought; you might want to look at somehow differentiating Quebec from the rest of Canada.

Stephen,

Love your blog. I also share your love of maps. My love led me into mapping as a career. I have all the mapping software one could imagine. Let me know if I can be of any assistance on your project. Looks like something I could do pretty quickly.

Stephen....Forgot to color in Puerto Rico a light blue color (perhaps)

A very good idea. You could do a variation of the Bush Country map where you do colors for the world by county or region. That would be very interesting..

Pouncer: the Napoleonic Campaign map was not Tufte's creation. IIRC, he included it in his book as an example of just how much data can be packed into one display. It is perhaps the best graph ever created, or was, at the time.

Sorry if I gave the impression that it was Tufte's creation. He just recognized it for the genius it was.

Tom Barnett has already written a whole book on the subject--The Pentagon's New Map. It shows where Islamism and other chaotic forces are colliding with advanced states and legal frameworks. It's an interesting read.

As much as the southeast gets blended with yellow, so schould northern mexico have some shades of blue, as the society there is wealthier, and all around much "bluer" than the southern part of the country

So, you know you've indicated that Canada is USA-lite. Intentional, or a freudian slip?

A few quibbles:

what factors are you going to try to show? If you're talking about de facto legal and political control, the US-Mexican border is actually pretty distinct. It's porous, but it's well-defined. On the other hand, if you're trying to show economic or cultural interpenetration, the US-Canadian border is much less solid than your draft indicates. There are portions of nothern states where Canadian coins and currency circulate freely, and the US dollar circulates pretty freely in a lot of places - so perhaps the US-Canadian border can remain solid, but the colors could bleed across a little?

Andwhy is Cuba white?

Check out some of L.L. Cavalli-Sforza's (sp?) works-- if I could find them in my garage, then I'd name the title. He's an anthropologist from Stanford who traces human genotypes across geography using orthographic representations of hundreds of genes and proteins to produce colored variations across his maps: beautiful and fascinating.

You could definately use his formulae and imput your own variables, which I would love to see.

Buona fortuna!

A powerful concept worth pursuing. A suggestion for you to think about - taking the border with Mexico as an example, I think that long-term historic patterns should be incorporated (perhaps very subtly) as both an explaination of existing and a predictor of future conditions. The line of demarcation of Mexican influence loops up through New Mexico into southern Colorado, where the first non-native settlements were created in the 1600's. That is not to say that those areas are not primarily American in culture, but on the other hand they are not Ohio. I recognize that sometimes the demographic shifts are far more sudden (the rather recent creation of Islamic populations in Scandanavia as the result of post WWII immigration policies for example), but have an intellectually untested hypothesis that historic patterns may have a greater impact on cultural shifts. And yes, I love maps too.

Coming late to the party, but, are you familiar with Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America?

See
www.garreau.com/nnna.html and
www.harpercollege.edu/~mhealy/g101ilec/namer/nac/nacnine . The latter, oddly, has a better map.