Ellis Island Immigration Automation

A simple yet effective immigration database record

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Inspiration

With the recent USCIS immigration law changes and its effect on many of the Indian immigrants, we started thinking about the immigration process of the past when there were no technological systems. This got us thinking: is there a way to speed up the processing and improve the accuracy? Since the prompt was about a historical event, we did some research and found out that millions of people had to wait on Ellis Island to get their immigration, so much so that 3,500 people died because of diseases! This inspired me and my team to create this project of automating the immigration form process.

What it does

Given the struggles of many of the passengers during the largest migration in history between 1892 through 1954 of more than 65 million immigrants, we were thinking of building an efficient immigrant management system. This system will help keep all the immigrant records centralized in a database for easy search, sorting, and further accessing the records for future use.

How I built it

I used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front-end. I made a form that had text fields, dropdowns, and a submit button. When submitted, the data would be converted into JSON and sent in an HTTP GET request to the MySQL Database. Here it would get stored as a record. Node.Js and Express.Js were used in the back-end or the server-side. It translated the request into an SQL statement with the response.

Challenges I ran into

I had no idea how to use SQL, Node.js, or Express.js before. I also didn't know how the HTML forms worked, with the GET and POST requests. Because of this hackathon, I got a crash course in those languages and frameworks. It was difficult and tough, but I persevered.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of what I did in this project because I learned something completely new and created something with that newfound knowledge. I am really happy with the way it turned out, and although improvements could be made, it is a good start. We also came together as a team and learned how to work together.

What I learned

I learned the structure of forms, server-side JavaScript, Node.js, Node's Express.js framework, and SQL.

What's next for Ellis Island Immigration Automation

I would want to add more use cases such as Date of Entry, relations to American citizens, and more detailed fields to get more accurate data. I would also want to automate the acceptance process instead of making the officer review the database. A search feature to find the immigrant records and edit them from the front end would also be useful. A better-looking UI front end site, scalable server code, and handling many millions of records would also be very beneficial.

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