Immigration In Pictures

What would you expect to find if you searched for the term immigration in pictures? We believe Google doesn’t have a very satisfactory answer. The first page of the search results is mostly websites that sell stock images. Google is therefore assuming you wish to buy images of immigration. We think we could provide more relevant results by studying broader searches that relate to immigration pictures.

If you adopt this approach, you will learn that people are interested in the following as they relate to immigration and pictures: one of the things that people are interested in is historical pictures of immigration in the United States. This could be pictures of immigration from Ireland, pictures of Italian immigration to the United States or even Chinese immigration. On the other end of the historical perspective, people are looking for pictures of how immigration is playing out in the US now. People are looking for pictures of people protesting against uncontrolled migration into the US. They are also looking for pictures of people holding rallies or protests against US immigration policies.

Related to how immigration is playing out in the US today is people’s interest in particular immigration stories. People search for general stories of immigration and picture format as well as looking for someone successfully obtaining asylum in the United States. People generally love and uplifting story. Many times an illustrated story of success can provide a lot more insight than one with words.

Although we are looking at US search results, people resident here have interests beyond the United States. We find that people are interested in immigration in other countries. We further find that we can split this interest into 2 subgroups. People are interested in finding pictures of general immigration in other countries; for example, pictures of Latino immigration in Spain. But, they are also interested in the political consequences of immigration elsewhere as well. People look for how uncontrolled immigration has worked out in countries like Canada and Europe.

 

Quite a few people are interested in immigration pictures from the sense of whether you can take a picture of your experience when you were going through immigration in the United States or another country. It seems that the general answer is no, immigration services do not like you taking pictures, or even having your cell phone out as you are being processed. Some countries take pictures of you as you enter the country. Perhaps they assume these will come in handy later to make sure the same person is leaving the country as arrived, or tracking you down if you don’t leave when you are supposed to.

 

Besides the searches for answers to the question about taking pictures in immigration, people often look for pictures of people being processed. Perhaps they are searching for information on what they would experience if they went through the immigration process in that country. Sometimes immigration services that work to admit you into a country are grossly inefficient that results in huge lines. By checking for pictures, people can estimate how long they might have to wait if they are merely transiting through and catching another flight.

Lastly, whenever a particular immigration issue makes the headlines, a lot of people will look for pictures to learn more about that story or issue. We see that when the media started to make child migrant detention an issue after 2016 when Pres. Trump was elected. A lot of people search for pictures of children in cages for example

From our brief survey here on related searches, you can see why we think that Google could do a lot better than simply listing every directory that sell stock images. A much better, and more useful approach, would be to fill those top 10 results with a representative website that addressed each of these categories in the general way. Our goal is to see whether we can help the situation by getting this website into Google’s top 10 to provide a more balanced answer to the question what are people searching for when they use the term immigration in pictures.