Why Is Anti-Immigration Politics and Extremist Ideology Gaining Traction In 21st Century?
Few weeks before the parliament election in Slovakia in February 2020, I read newspapers of one political party. This extremist political party close to Nazi ideology claimed this as part of their political campaign:
“We will stop all immigrants coming to Slovakia. They are violent and pose a great threat to our culture, values, and customs. Sweden accepted a lot of immigrants and now this country has the most rapes in the world.”
Sounds familiar? Igniting fear and turmoil with statements about immigrants taking your job, disrupting the country’s economy and culture, or even bringing terrorism to spread their religion is not uncommon. It has been used by politicians to create a problem and position themselves as saviors.
In the USA, President Trump has been building the wall. Political party Alternative für Deutschland in Germany built their campaign opposing the open immigration policy and is now the strongest opposition political party. Italy is no exception, with an anti-immigrant political party led by Matteo Salvini winning the election with the support of one third (!) of people’s votes. Hungary is another extreme example of politicians spreading irrational fear among people and banning any help to immigrants. Marine Le Pen (in France) claimed as part of her presidential campaign that 99% of immigrants were adult males (whereas 58% was the actual number). You get the picture. And it’s not pretty.
Instead of supporting inclusion, politicians are abusing facts. A lot of people, unfortunately, seem to fall for these traps. Eventually, they fancy simple and radical solutions promoted by extremist or radical politicians. It’s a natural instinct to trust simple solutions. It’s also natural to take a defensive stance in case you feel threatened. Especially when politicians are spreading fear and painting a picture of life-threatening situations endangering safety of your family, job, religious values, or national culture.
This trend in the world is undeniable. But why has it gained such strength in recent years? Here’s what I believe.
Social networks are reinforcing social bubbles
These social networks snowball ideologies and beliefs and are hard to escape. Think about it. We are following politicians, celebrities, or other public figures we like. This limits our exposure to contradictory opinions.
To make matters worse, algorithms of large tech companies (Google, Facebook) are feeding you content relevant to you, based on your likes, hearts and popular ideas. This makes it even harder to get in touch with opposing or different opinions. If you read about how great Trump is, the more you are fed that content. Also, you would be more likely to come across articles or videos about “Crooked Hillary”, or during the upcoming election, everything that’s wrong with Joe Biden. Or vice versa. This snowballs either way.
It’s also worth noting that
“81% of Americans that identify themselves with one party have a negative opinion about the other party. 61% of Democrats say they view Republicans as racists, sexists, or bigots. 54% of Republicans call Democrats spiteful. A third of all Americans would be disappointed if a close family member married someone from the other side.” (Good Economics for Hard Times, page 1)
Social bubbles are all the more dangerous because we still haven’t adjusted our education to systematically teach data literacy. Sure, Facebook and Google are being interrogated by Congress every now and then. They are improving the algorithms to forbid misleading and mendacious content.
It partly works. The above-mentioned extremist political party in Slovakia has had a lot of their recent posts deleted from Facebook in the past weeks as they promoted hatred and indirectly also Nazi ideology. However, can we rely on the mechanisms of few companies to solve the worldwide problem? I believe we need to also incorporate data literacy into education including and especially fact-checking frameworks. That brings me to the second point.
Fact-checking among people is still very rare
Coming back to my example with rapes in Sweden. (It supposedly has the most rapes in the world because of immigrants flowing in). I had my suspicion so I dug deeper.
At first, I was shocked to find out this was almost true (not something you see too often with an extremist political party). When comparing rapes per 100k population, Sweden was actually second in the world. But the devil’s in the details so I investigated further. Turns out Sweden is very specific in how they report rapes. Already in 1996, Sweden had 3 times the average of other European countries. This has two reasons:
- “…if a woman says she has been raped by her husband every day during a month, the Swedish police may record more than 30 cases of rape. In many other countries, only a single offense would be counted in such a situation”
- Also, the criteria that define rape have changed in 2018. To be specific, “Sweden has passed a new law that criminalizes sex without consent as rape, even when there are no threats, coercion or violence involved.” This was very different from other countries.
Another very important point is that there was no evidence whatsoever, that rapes increased due to the inflow of immigrants. There wasn’t even a correlation, not to mention causality. So this whole topic was — plain and simple — made up, to gain political capital for upcoming elections by spreading fear and positioning themselves as saviors.
How many people take their time to fact-check these made-up stories, conspiracies, or “facts”? Who has time for this?
If you’re working in education, I encourage you to think about how you can incentivize fact-checking and making it more comprehensible for students. It’s a useful skill to have in other aspects of life as well.
I will prepare a short and practical guide on how to fact-check information on the Internet quickly and efficiently. Stay tuned!
We are irrational when it comes to low-probability high-impact scenarios
In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains how irrational and biased we all are. Despite our intellect as a race, we are generally very susceptible to biases and act irrationally more often than we’d like to think. So which bias fits this topic?
Unfortunately, we are acting irrationally when it comes to scenarios with low probability. To be more precise, we are too focused on the impact that even 0.001% probability may cause. Lottery, slot machines, and casinos are a good example of this. Most people understand the odds of winning a lottery are very low. But the reward is very appealing. In a lottery in which you choose 6 from 49 numbers, your chances of winning the jackpot (correctly choosing all 6 numbers drawn) are 0.000007151124%. To put it differently, there’s 99,999992848876% chance you will not win a jackpot. Still, people are spending money on lottery, because they focus on a reward, disregarding odds completely. Dreams of a new car, yacht, or vacation home prevail.
On the flip side, the same applies to COVID-19. Chances of dying of coronavirus are very low. And yet, we have been incredibly cautious and have succumbed to panic, introducing unprecedented measures of safety, hygiene, and quarantine when it comes to reactions to illness across the world. I mean…toilet paper was out of stock, ladies and gentlemen. Toilet paper.
Despite this behavior being irrational, we will not overcome the feeling of being more afraid than we should. However, we can be aware that this behavior is irrational.
Why are people migrating?
The British Somali poet, Warsan Shire, wrote:
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay
For most people, immigration is the last resort. Fleeing the country, abandoning family, friends, culture, and familiar places is exactly as emotionally draining as it sounds.
I really recommend you read the second chapter of Good Economics for Hard Times. It’s full of examples where entire groups of people didn’t want to migrate despite high unemployment (Greeks), awful conditions after a war (Finns), drug wars (Northern Mexico), or even volcanic activity where lava decimated their homeland and consumed their houses (The Westman Islands).
I wouldn’t be surprised if you disagreed. This is the case for most people, not all of them. People on Medium are usually ambitious, self-driven, and belong to the other group of immigrants that are really chasing careers abroad because they can quadruple their income. But make no mistake to extrapolate this ambitious group of people and think that everyone is like that. Only a very small percentage of highly motivated people actually thinks like this.
If we look at visa lotteries, the motivation of the applicants for those is quite clear — to boost their career and income. Software professionals from India who get to the US manage to make six times more money than their peers who stayed in India. And there are numerous other examples.
Conclusion
So how do we fight this kind of pandemic of thought spread mostly through political campaigns? As a first step, let’s be aware of the catalysts that are spreading these conspiracies and misinformation even faster.
Social networks need to place mechanisms that allow users to expose themselves to opposing ideas.
It’s healthy in any aspect of life to be confronted with different thoughts and ideas. Feeding always the same, or very similar content to already existing beliefs dwarfs our mental abilities and critical thinking. This has to stop if we want to progress as humanity.
We should have a certain level of skepticism.
Mechanisms and algorithms can’t do everything for ourselves. Skepticism makes an incentive to fact-check information and helps us to differentiate signal from noise and opinions from facts. Don’t get me wrong, opinions and hypotheses do have merit and are the reason we progress. But opinions can be easily mistaken for facts. And this is often exploited, especially in political campaigns.
Lastly, let’s be aware we’re still human. We are driven by emotions and biases. This has incredible benefits and fuels our motivation to build new relationships, care for our loved ones, invent new technologies, and strive to progress. But there’s a flip side, too, and we should be conscious about situations where biases and emotions can be exploited to manipulate us.
If you want to have a strong opinion about immigration based on research, I recommend you focus on the second chapter of the book Good Economics for Hard Times. It’s written by Winners of the Nobel Prize, Esther Duflo, and Abhijit V. Banerjee. Trust me, they know what they’re talking about.
Disclaimer: I’m using an affiliate link to the book for Good Economics for Hard Times. This does not affect your price.
