Potential Intervention Points in the Immigration Journey

Journeys are a visual timeline representation of an end user’s typical experience. It is often used in design to understand all the steps one must go through with their point of view. This helps:

• Build empathy;
• Identify important moments, like pain points and areas of opportunity;
• Understand the user's mindset before, during, and after each moment;
• Imagine solutions for specific contexts and moments.

After interviewing over 60 immigrants, we've learned that their journeys are so unique that it would be hard to condense all stories into one, or to tell all of their stories. However, we felt it was possible to tell a story that contextualizes many of the insights we found during our research, along with common obstacles and possible intervention points to overcome them. The journey we present is a fiction, based on many of the true stories we heard from interviewees.

We outlined the entire journey of an immigrant to help illuminate the story before naturalization colors decisions around it, beginning with emigration, focusing on the bureaucracy around advancing their immigration status, and ending with their naturalization. It also helps to visualize all the opportunities for education that could happen well before they become eligible.

This is the story of Selma, a citizen of Mexico, who marries James, a U.S. citizen. We chose a marriage-based Green Card because it is the most common way immigrants obtain their lawful permanent residence — it also happens to be one of the most stressful and invasive applications as well. As Selma obtains her Green Card and then considers her citizenship, we've incorporated many common mindsets, roadblocks and events that other LPRs conveyed to us in interviews. We've also paired opportunities with moments where it made sense, so we could better contextualize our recommendations.