Hanging Steel

In 2009, Michael Dougherty and I created Mass Enrollment, an interactive simulation of the process of signing up illegal immigrants for an amnesty, should Congress pass a law granting immigration benefits to illegal immigrants. Mass Enrollment had a user interface, allowing the user to explore different sign-up processes, different temporary staffing strategies for the sign-up, and different strategies for application fees. Mass Enrollment simulated the dynamics of adoption: did immigrants apply at the first opportunity or did they wait to see what happened when others applied? Mass Enrollment simulated both legitimate applications, and also fraudulent applications by people who are trying to achieve immigration benefits with fraudulent documents. And Mass Enrollment simulated the backlogs in the process, showing which tasks in the selected process built up long delays.