Immigration money map

Who funds, runs and lobbies for immigration into the US, placed where each one works: 1,578 organizations, agencies and people, 4,360 documented links, coded by who they serve, how much money moves and how much they shape who arrives. Rotate it and click anything for its sources.

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How to read it

Year. Pick a fiscal year (or press play) to see who received federal money that year, sized by that year’s dollars. Grantees with no money that year drop out. “All years” shows FY2017–26 combined.

The floor is the globe. Drag to spin it; zoom in and the view tilts so the layers above the map stand out. Every organization has a thin stem that drops to the city where it is based. Click one and the area it works in lights up: its city, its state, or the whole country.

Height is role. Funders and decision-makers float highest, intermediaries and contractors in the middle, and frontline groups sit on the map itself. People float between the top two layers.

Color is who the work serves. unauthorized and irregular arrivals · lawful humanitarian arrivals · work, family and citizenship, including H-1B · mixed. The color describes clients, not whether anything is illegal.

The mark shows type. Solid dots are nonprofits, dots with an outer ring are government, hollow rings are businesses and employers, and small dots are people and political actions.

Size is your choice: dollars, influence (1–5) or likely impact on people arriving or staying (1–5). Each score is explained when you click.

Lines arc from payer to payee. Blue lines tie local resettlement offices to their national agency, gray lines are career ties, dark lines are probes and lawsuits, and gold lines are H-1B approvals and filings.

Layers can be switched on and off: the core network, about 530 local federal grantees, about 390 resettlement offices, shelters along the route through Mexico and Central America, US-funded aid programs abroad (including refugee processing and aid in Africa, the Middle East and Asia), the biggest H-1B law firms, and the 50 companies and universities with the most new H-1B hires in FY2025. Candidates who received PAC money appear when you turn on “Campaign donations (PACs)” or click a donor. A politicians layer shows officials, members of Congress, governors and mayors tied to these groups by documented actions. Click “only” on a layer to show just that layer. Zoom in to read the small ones.

Federal money from USAspending.gov (pulled November 9, 2026, fiscal years 2017–26); nonprofit revenue from IRS Form 990s via ProPublica; H-1B counts from the USCIS Employer Data Hub as analyzed by NFAP; everything else linked to its source. Source tags: GOV official record · DATA dataset · ORG the group’s own material · NEWS reporting · ADV partisan or advocacy outlet (verify). A documented sample, not a census. Ties show who worked or gave where, not coordination or wrongdoing.

Sources, coding and method

How each entity is coded

Code	What it means
Who it serves (color)	Unauthorized & irregular arrivals: people who crossed without authorization, children apprehended at the border, people in removal proceedings or without status. Lawful humanitarian: refugees, Afghan and Iraqi special-visa holders, sponsored parolees. Work, family & citizenship: H-1B and other employer sponsorship, green cards, naturalization. Mixed covers several of these. The code describes clients, not whether the work itself is legal; nearly all of it is lawful activity.
Where (floor position)	Headquarters city, or operating city for frontline groups. The area lit up on click is its reach: the city (local), its state or states (regional) or the whole country (national and international).
Money	The largest documented figure: federal awards in USAspending for FY2017–26, a government body’s outflows on this map, or latest annual revenue from IRS Form 990. Multi-year totals and one-year revenue are not the same unit; the basis is shown on every entity.
Influence (1–5)	5 sets or blocks federal policy directly · 4 repeated national policy impact (lobbying, nationwide litigation, staff moving into government, top funder of the field) · 3 national voice or big-state influence · 2 regional voice · 1 little policy influence. An Asturias judgment from the record linked on each entity.
Impact on arrivals (1–5)	5 runs entry, release or placement at national scale (100,000+ people a year) · 4 direct services at entry or placement for about 10,000+ a year · 3 about 1,000–10,000 a year, or legal defense that decides who stays · 2 local services, or advocacy with documented policy effects · 1 indirect (research, grants, convening). Also an Asturias judgment.

The wider network: local offices, the route and H-1B lawyers

Local federal grantees (about 530). Every recipient USAspending lists under the refugee, unaccompanied-children, shelter-and-services, torture-survivor and citizenship grant programs, FY2017–26, placed at its registered address. Five could not be placed.
Resettlement offices (about 390). Every local affiliate in the refugee program’s June 2025 directory, plus Catholic (USCCB) and Episcopal offices from the last public directory that listed them (December 2016), which may have closed since.
Shelters on the route (about 115). 96 shelters and soup kitchens across Mexico from the BBVA Research migration observatory’s 2020 map, groups in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador from the American Friends Service Committee directory, and Panama’s Darién reception stations. None of these shows US government funding in the records found.
US-funded aid abroad (about 150 programs). Every State Department and USAID award performed in 13 Latin American and Caribbean countries whose description mentions migration, placed in the country where it was spent. Most of the money (Colombia, Peru and Ecuador above all) paid for food, shelter, health care and legal status for Venezuelans staying in those countries, not for travel north. Also added: the US-run Safe Mobility Offices, which screened people for legal entry and closed in January 2025, and HIAS’s work with people leaving the Darién.
Caravans. The records found show no US government funding for organizing caravans. Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the group most linked to the 2017–18 caravans, is shown with what is documented about it.
H-1B law firms (34). The largest filers of H-1B labor applications in FY2025, with name variants combined. Firms whose headquarters could not be confirmed were left off the map.

Africa, the Middle East and Asia

Resettlement Support Centers. Every refugee admitted to the US is interviewed, screened and prepared for travel by a State Department–funded center in the region. Church World Service runs RSC Africa from Nairobi, the International Catholic Migration Commission runs RSC Turkey and Middle East from Istanbul, and the International Rescue Committee runs RSC East Asia from Bangkok. Together about $632M in State awards, FY2017–26, plus HIAS’s refugee work in Kenya.
Refugee aid in the region (31 countries, about $1.9B). State Department awards for refugees in places like Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Ethiopia, Uganda, South Sudan, Bangladesh and Thailand. Most of it pays for refugees to live where they are, not for travel to the US.
South Africa. Since the 2025 refugee suspension, nearly all FY2026 admissions have been Afrikaners, processed under a separate program. Shown as its own node.

Politicians and officials

A news- and record-sourced layer of named politicians tied to organizations on the map by documented actions: executive orders, funding clawbacks and bans, oversight letters and probes, hearings, earmark requests, lawsuits and bills. Each sits in its home state, between the funder and intermediary layers. It is not yet a money layer: campaign contributions and lobbying totals will come from FEC and OpenSecrets bulk files once downloaded. Earlier career ties (officials who came from or went to these organizations) are in the same layer.

Campaign money

From the Federal Election Commission’s bulk files (2023–24 and 2025–26 cycles, downloaded November 9, 2026): every direct contribution from the PACs of 35 organizations on this map to federal candidates, plus their independent spending for or against candidates. The 167 candidates who received the most from these PACs are shown in the politicians layer, sized by what they received; turn on “Campaign donations (PACs)” to see the lines, or click any company or politician. Totals are PAC money only; employee giving is under Tax filings below, and corporate treasury money and lobbying spending are not included. Most nonprofits on the map have no PAC; the advocacy groups that do (UnidosUS, CASA, United We Dream, Make the Road, Community Change, Center for Popular Democracy) mostly spend independently rather than giving to candidates.

Tax filings

Tax filings (IRS Form 990): 491 nonprofits on the map are matched to their filings through the IRS 990 Parsed dataset (CC0, built from the IRS e-file releases; Hugging Face, piercewetter3/irs-990-parsed). Each panel shows the latest year’s revenue and government-grant share, the three best-paid officers it lists, the US groups it gave grants to (Schedule I), and, for 62 of them, federal political giving by people who named it as their employer (FEC itemized contributions, reports filed 2024–26, matched on the exact employer name; ActBlue and WinRed pass-through records are left out so gifts aren’t counted twice). 327 grant links between organizations on the map are drawn as “Nonprofit grants (990)” lines (off by default). Government contracts paid as fees are reported as program revenue, so the government share can understate contractors. Public universities and church bodies such as USCCB don’t file 990s, and names that matched the wrong charity were removed by hand. Each figure links to the filing on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. UN agencies such as UNHCR and IOM file no 990; their US fundraising arms were not substituted.

H-1B top 50

The 50 employers with the most H-1B approvals for initial employment (new hires, not renewals) in FY2025, from the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub as compiled by the National Foundation for American Policy. Amazon leads with 4,644; the list includes four universities, the Mayo Clinic and a nurse-recruiting firm. Counts for FY2023 and FY2024 are shown for the top 25, the only ones published by year. Each company sits at its US headquarters; ByteDance’s filing address could not be confirmed, so it is placed in Silicon Valley. Use “H-1B hires” in Size by, or click “only” on the H-1B layer.

How the years work

Federal money is shown by fiscal year from USAspending (net obligations, so money pulled back appears as a negative year). Grants abroad are spread evenly across each award’s period. Other entities appear in the years they existed where that is documented (for example the Safe Mobility Offices 2023–25). Resettlement offices from the 2016 directory show through 2024 and the June 2025 directory offices show in every year, because no directories in between were found. H-1B counts and law-firm filings are FY2025 figures in every year, and nonprofit revenue is from each group’s latest 990.

Still missing

Lobbying totals. Pending the OpenSecrets or Senate lobbying files. The Senate lobbying database can only be searched one filing at a time from here. The map includes only the lobbying figures confirmed so far, such as Cognizant’s $470,000 in the first quarter of 2025 on H-1B and DACA. A full immigration lobbying ledger needs the database’s bulk download.

Also not here: the hundreds of nonprofits accredited to give immigration legal advice (the Justice Department roster), smaller H-1B law firms, local church-run shelters inside the US, and shelters in Mexico that opened after 2020.