Their Stories, Our Stories

Rewriting the narrative on immigration and the U.S. economy.

Challenge: Public conversation about immigration is often shaped by misconceptions, "they take our jobs," "they don't pay taxes," "they don't contribute", repeated so often they get treated as fact. Data and research tell a different story, but statistics alone rarely change minds. The real challenge was finding a way to make that evidence land emotionally, not just informationally, so the piece needed to work on two levels at once: rigorous enough to hold up the facts, human enough to actually shift how someone feels about them.

My Approach: I built the piece around a single American city, Utica, NY, as a concrete lens for a national story. Utica lost nearly half its population after industrial decline, then was revitalized through decades of refugee resettlement starting in the 1970s. Structuring the narrative around one place let the piece move naturally from a vivid "imagine this" opening, through historical and economic data, into a myth-versus-reality breakdown addressing the most common misconceptions directly, before closing with real families whose stories embody exactly what the data shows. Each section was designed to build on the last: place the reader in a specific moment, ground it in real numbers, then let personal narrative do what statistics alone can't.

Solution: An interactive, scroll-driven story combining historical timeline data, sourced economic research, and profiles of real families, published as a fully designed digital narrative experience. The piece reframes a heavily politicized topic through evidence and story rather than argument, giving a reader a concrete, memorable answer the next time they hear one of the misconceptions it addresses.