Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Today's @bopinion post is about why hostility to immigration is so persistent, both in the U.S. and in other countries.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

2/Note that although immigration support has increased under Trump, more Americans still favor decreasing immigration than favor increasing it.

3/And even these numbers may be an overly rosy picture of true immigration attitudes.

4/Why do people have such deep-seated suspicion of immigration?

I won't run through the whole pro-immigration case again here, but it's very solid. Immigration is awesome.

5/Maybe it's just racism. But it could also be a tangle of misinformation, cognitive biases, and suspicion of the welfare state.

A recent paper by @S_Stantcheva et al. shows some startling survey data on perceptions and attitudes about immigration.

nber.org/papers/w24733

6/First, it seems like EVERYONE tends to think there are a lot more immigrants around than there really are.

Young, old, rich, poor, right-wing, left-wing, men, women...all seem to think immigrants make up 15-20 percentage points MORE of the population than they actually do.

7/And in Western countries, everyone seems to think immigrants are more likely to be Muslim than they really are.

8/And they tend to underestimate the % of the skilled workforce that is made up by immigrants.

In other words, people are stereotyping immigrants as poor laborers and ignoring immigrant doctors, engineers, etc.

9/People also tend to think immigrants use a LOT of welfare benefits.

10/Interestingly, these misperceptions persisted even when the authors paid the survey respondents money to get the answers right!

In many cases, paying survey respondents will change their answers. Not here.

These are real honest mistakes.

11/So there appears to be a tangle of factors driving anti-immigration sentiment: xenophobia/nativism, misperceptions about the number of immigrants, misperceptions about the economic situation of immigrants, and suspicion of the welfare state.

12/In a follow-up paper, the authors show mathematically how all these factors enhance each other and interact to produce a toxic brew of anti-immigrant suspicion.

dropbox.com/s/h06i3hze5ois…

13/Suspicion of immigration drives suspicion of the welfare state.

The authors found that if they asked about immigration BEFORE they asked about redistribution, survey respondents tended to support less redistribution!

14/Of course, instead of "building a wall around the welfare state", as some libertarians suggest, the public is more likely to address its fear of immigrant welfare use by trying to limit immigration itself.

15/OK so what do we do about this?

One answer is to give people better information. But in the economists' survey, they found people across the demographic and political spectrum to be uninterested in obtaining actual facts about immigration.

16/One approach is to simply admit a bunch more high-skilled immigrants (note: this doesn't mean admitting fewer low-skilled immigrants!).

Having a ton of skilled immigrants around might change people's stereotypes of immigrants.

17/This effect will be magnified if we send those high-skilled immigrants to places that don't have many immigrants currently - for example, Rust Belt towns in the Upper Midwest.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

18/In any case, irrational suspicion of immigrants seems to be a very deep-seated, old, long-lasting problem. It will require creative solutions and persistence to overcome.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…