The Truth About Immigration and Public Opinion
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This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I'm your host, Jerusalem Dempsis, and this show was born out of my writing here at The Atlantic.

Over the years, I've written about a bunch of different things, from the local politics of housing to the strange politics of student debt relief efforts. And the through line of many of my articles has been a nagging feeling that there was something wrong with the broad narratives defining a particular public conversation or policy debate.

On this show, there's no one right answer that we're trying to find. And of course, all facts are subject to interpretation, and you'll hear a lot of my and others' opinions. But the goal is to make arguments based on research and data, to poke holes where narratives have gone beyond the facts, and occasionally to give narratives their due. After all, many of them exist for good reason. Today's episode is about a topic I have thought about a lot—immigration—

In recent years, one overarching narrative has seemed to define the political debate, and that is that immigration is seen as a loser for the left and a winner for the right. This narrative has been hard at work in the Biden administration and among our congressional representatives. Just last week, President Biden issued a rule that seeks to make it more difficult for people trying to seek asylum to do so. His new order mirrors that of Trump-era policies he once condemned.

This about-face is clearly political. Biden's poll numbers against Trump are concerning to the White House, and immigration has long been a sore spot. Many believe that cracking down at the border is a good way to improve Biden's reelection chances. But does that theory make sense?

Now, this episode was taped before this latest move from Washington, but the political theory underpinning that decision is very much based on the popular narrative we're exploring here today. It's one we see here in the U.S. and across an ocean where my guest today is based.

John Byrne Murdoch is a columnist and chief data reporter at the Financial Times, who has written about public opinion and immigration in really compelling ways. And as someone who loves good data visualization, I think he's also a great person to follow on Twitter. Let's dive in.

John, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So I've been thinking about this topic for a really long time because I feel like this is one of those sort of like meta-political narratives that I have been, I think I was sort of taken in by it at first and then started thinking like this doesn't really fully make sense. But I feel like since like 2015, 2016, there has been this conventional wisdom that's sort of built particularly among center-left groups

like political pundits or folks who are trying to win elections or, you know, political observers that, you know, you know, activists may not like it, but immigration is a political loser. The electorate hates immigration. You have to be anti-immigration in order to win elections. That's just the way it goes, no matter what cosmopolitans in New York City or London want to tell you. And like that building narrative, like really felt like to me that it went into overdrive in 2016. Like, have you did you see that, too?

Yeah, it's super interesting. And one of the reasons I've been looking forward to this conversation is I think the number of times I'm probably going to overstate something and then backtrack and then restate something. Because this whole debate is so interesting and so nuanced. And there are so many different layers to it. So to start with the actual question you asked me, yeah, I think 100%. So Brexit in the UK in 2016, which...

was our sort of implosion just before Trump's election, was almost the perfect distillation of exactly this. So you had a sky-high concern over immigration. Numbers in the UK, for example, this was regularly coming out as the single issue that people were more concerned about than anything else.

And that was true, crucially, this was true not just among your sort of more right-leaning, more immigration-anxious people. This was true of people in the centre, many people on the left as well. This was coming off the back of the European migrant crisis in 2015 where huge, huge, huge numbers of refugees, asylum seekers were turning up in southern Europe. So there was this huge sense that this was the issue of the day. And

This is true however you look at it as well. So there are big surveys were done in the aftermath of the UK's vote to leave the EU where people were asked what were the factors motivating their decision. And however you looked at it, whether you looked at what option people ticked from a predefined list or whether you just let them speak or write all of their thoughts and then tallied up what got mentioned the most.

the dominant things by a mile were immigration and a broader sense of control. So 100%, this was the issue of the day. There was a real sense that this was what had determined the results of the EU referendum. And there's all sorts of solid academic analysis being done on this issue as well, much broader than just the UK, showing that

This really has been, over the last 15 or so years, a very genuine rising concern among the public and something that has enabled or empowered the rise of a lot of right-wing parties. Yeah, I think that obviously from an American context, which has largely been seen both in polling and just broadly in culture, is more immigrant-friendly place than the rest of the world. And actually...

And I remember seeing Brexit when it happened and saying like, you know, I was surprised, I think, by the result, like many people who were kind of just lightly following it from the U.S. But I was like, you know, maybe this is maybe this doesn't have like broader narratives for everyone. But then in the U.S., it really became clear with the election of Donald Trump and seeing what people were saying was a huge concern for them around immigration. And I think really importantly, because I think a lot of this conversation is going to be trying to complicate this narrative a bit.

Part of the reason I think this narrative has really taken hold is that politics happens at the margins, right? So people are, when elections are happening, they're not, you know, elected officials or candidates or, you know, even reporters in many cases are not always thinking about the staunch,

supporters of either party. They're really fixed on the, you know, people who are going to be persuadable, whether they're swing voters or these are individuals who seem heterodox in some other way. And those people, it seems like there was, especially at this point in time, an increasing amount of concern about immigration, whether there had been too much or whether the country had lost control of its ability to control its own borders. And I think that that's why it really took off and kind of got ahead of its skis here.

and became a characterization of the entire electorate rather than just like, oh, this is a question about like, who is a marginal voter?

Yeah, I think that's 100% right. And one thing I think we need to say here as well is that there is actually, at least up until around the 2016 period in the UK, but also more broadly across countries, there's actually a fairly good relationship between actual immigration levels and the extent to which people are concerned about immigration. So it can be easy for immigration liberals to say, look, you know, this is all...

a sort of concoction of the media and certain politicians or media organizations decide to turn up the button on immigration and that's what causes concern. And we'll come on the course of the conversation on the extent to which that can be true. But I think it's important for immigration liberals to recognize that people to a broad extent, and certainly until relatively recently, are responding to the actual situation on the ground rather than just what they're being told through various filters.

Yeah, I think this is a place where we're going to have an interesting conversation because I think that that decoupling is actually more than you're saying here because –

To me, when I look at the electorate, I actually see like large diversions between the numbers, little numbers at the border and concern around immigration. So October of last year, for instance, you see really high numbers at the southwest border encounters. It's like some of the highest that we've seen the entire year. But just 13 percent of Americans are saying, and according to Gallup, that immigration is a top issue and the economy is way outranking that. But I do think that in many ways it is decoupled. I mean, I think it's you know, there's evidence from when there were rising numbers of immigrants

minors coming to the border in 2014 in the U.S. We had like this huge crisis, right, that the Obama administration was dealing with. And there were all this conversation around like all these unaccompanied minors coming here and it's a way of gaming the system and it's really unfair. And when it all came and tallied up, it was just 69,000 over the entire course of the time period of 2014 where you were seeing, you

number of unaccompanied minors. And so to me, I think this decoupling has actually been around for a while. But the reason why I want to talk to you is because you're seeing this as a new phenomenon, this decoupling between the number of border encounters or immigrants coming to the country and public opinion. And you did a story about this last December. So I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. And look, I should stress, when I say that the concern with immigration tends to be related to the real situation on the ground, what I mean by that is,

It does seem to be related to the situation on the ground by some definition. So, for example, when you're talking about children at the border, that was, you know, a real event. And just now in the UK over recent months, for example, there has been a real increase in the numbers of people arriving in the UK having crossed the channel in small boats. But the idea that it's a simple numbers game, that just doesn't seem to be the case anymore. And I think this is one of the key things, which is that

The fact that we only have this single word, immigration, to talk about this enormously varied phenomenon, I think is really unhelpful for the debate. Because generally speaking, whether we're looking at the US, the UK, Europe, the concern that people have is not with people coming to work in the country. It's not with people coming to study in the country. It's a concern with people who are arriving in the country without any clear pathway into society.

society as it were and this general sense that there is a lack of control over what's happening. So the UK is a perfect example of this because immigration to the UK over the last year or two has been the highest it's ever been. But if you look at the numbers of people who say that immigration is the single biggest issue facing the country, those numbers are the same as they were about 25 years ago when immigration was lower.

And something I've always been sort of envious of about the US is it strikes me, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong here, that America has always had a better conversation around this because, you know, it's a country of immigrants. There is a sense that people going to another country to seek a better future, to work, to contribute,

is not only a good thing, but it's sort of the ultimate thing for America. And so in America, from my viewpoint, there's quite a separate conversation about people coming to work with visas,

versus people turning up at the southern border. And I think in the UK, for a very, very, very long time until very recently, we were just smushing all of this together. And what we're maybe starting to benefit from now is that since leaving the European Union and therefore having much more control or pretty much full control over who can and can't come into the country, we're now getting that better debate which can allow for more

precise discussions around what might need tightening up around the edges and allows a lot of people who are, let's say, in the middle of the population, not especially immigration anxious and not sort of open border liberals. It allows that group of people to distinguish between the two things and say, yeah, I'm a bit worried about the number of people who are coming over on small boats. This feels like a problem, but I don't have any problem with the numbers of people coming over to work in the healthcare system. Mm-hmm.

I think there are two really important distinctions you made that I want to pull out there. One is that this idea that people are responding to real events, but that their response to real events doesn't mean that their opinion is tracking with immigration numbers. Like there is an increased number of people coming to the U.S. There are increased numbers of people coming to the U.K. And there is, you know, media coverage of that. And so people are informed of that. And that's real. It's not being made up. Right.

But even though that's true, it doesn't mean that you can respond and say like, oh, there's a lever I can push, imaginary lever of less and more immigrants, and that will track public opinion. Like, that's not how it goes. I think that's like a really important conceptual framing that you have in your article. And the second thing is, and I think it's funny, I think, I mean, you know, here in the U.S., you can get so into this sort of insular debate about where we are in immigration that you kind of forget the larger context that

the U.S. is by an international account, like a really immigrant-friendly country. I think that, like, that is not how it is described in recent years anymore because that's been, like, a central political debate. And, I mean, just to, like, for our, you know, American listeners here, you know, when you're looking at the U.S.,

Even right now, there's not a majority of the country that thinks that immigration levels should decrease. 68% of Americans think that immigration on the whole is a good thing for the country. And 41% say immigration levels should decrease, whereas...

31% are comfortable with current levels and 26% say they want that increased. And when you look at what the actual immigration levels are at this time period, right, and I'm looking at the CBP data, nationwide encounters, fiscal year 2022, you're seeing like 2.7 million people coming into the United States worldwide.

over that year. And, you know, that's really high. That's a significant increase. And yet when you look at the number of people that are saying, yeah, I'm just kind of comfortable with what's going on and even I'm willing to see that number increase, I don't think they know the actual number. I don't think they're saying like, I think that 1 million or 2 million or 500,000 is like the right number of people to come in. They're just reacting, I think, to what their perception is about how immigration is affecting their lives. And I think that's a really important corrective for this. But so the reason

And I think that you're kind of getting at this here is complicating the question of what immigration is, like what types of immigration people have issues with when people become more or less amenable to immigration, when they feel concerned about it. Because when I started really investigating this question is when I started looking at the poll numbers around welcoming Ukrainian refugees in the U.S.,

By late September after Russia invaded Ukraine, almost 50,000 Ukrainians had been welcomed into the U.S. and another 80,000 were expected to arrive by the end of the year, and they did. At the time, polling from Gallup found that 78% of Americans approved of this plan. And I love that

number. And I was just kind of like, that seems like wild. Like what how are people deciding when and where and what factors make someone more amenable to immigration? So method of entry seems really, really important. What have you seen in the UK about like how people enter into the country really shaping attitudes towards immigration?

100% yeah so it's there's several factors here one is yeah the method of entry it has this has this person arrived here with permission basically I think it comes down to that so is this someone who the UK the government the home office they're aware of this person they've looked at the papers and said yep all good so that is a big part of this it's this really really really comes back to again and again again this issue of control over who's coming in

So that's a big part of it. Another part that I think is specifically true when we're talking about, for example, the Afghan translators for the US or the Hong Kongers coming to the UK, there's a sense almost of sort of duty to allies here that I think comes into this. It's harder to put an exact number on that because generally the research in this space focuses on the broader issues rather than thinking about these sort of foreign policy related situations.

But with Hong Kong and Afghanistan in particular, I think there's this real sense of we owe these people something. Or in the case of the British Hong Kongers, it's a sense of what, you know, you're essentially one of us already. I mean, the huge numbers of British people who in 2022 and 23 hosted Ukrainian refugees in their own families. So there was this real sense of, hey, look, I'm thinking about this purely as helping out someone who's helped us out, as it were.

Yeah, Hong Kong was like wild to me. I mean, Boris Johnson, famous leaver, obviously someone who was very critical of high levels of immigration. I mean, he announces basically that anyone with a British passport in Hong Kong, anyone who is eligible in Hong Kong to get one, which is over two and a half million people, I mean, roughly almost three million people, that can't

could come. And just 10% of respondents to a poll in the UK oppose that program. I mean, that to me is like really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I will say one thing I think, and this is not something I'm putting on you, but I think sometimes there's a tendency in the US to conflate Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. You know, they both have crazy hair. They certainly share some of their politics and some of their mannerisms. But

Johnson's been this slightly strange figure in that, you know, he was a very popular mayor of London for several years in the 2010s. And on many issues, he is just a classical liberal. And also in some areas, almost libertarian. So Johnson's approach to the Hong Kong situation is...

certainly I think didn't really necessarily feel contradictory in that sense. But certainly the party that he built around him included a lot of much more hardline people on immigration where that policy certainly would have looked more surprising. But just coming back to the original question, again, I think so much of this comes down to the sense of control, but then also the sense of are these people independent?

going to be contributing to society. And this, I think, is where the contrast between what we see in the UK and the US and what we see in continental Europe, for example, is really, really striking. So something that I think, again, a lot of listeners probably won't appreciate is that the sentiment towards immigration in continental Europe is significantly more negative than it is in Britain and America.

So if we look at, it's kind of whatever question you ask, there are variants which ask, you know, has immigration been good for this country or not? And that's a classic one where you'll see UK, US, Canada, Ireland down at the bottom end, France, Germany, Italy at the top end. But countries like Sweden, which I think most people think of as these sort of progressive bastions,

you get a really interesting contrast where people will say, if you ask them, "Do you like immigrants? Do you approve of immigration?" in the abstract, they'll say yes. And then if you ask them, "How has this gone for Sweden?" they'll say, "Not good." And when you dig deeper into what's happening with immigration in Europe, a lot of this starts to make sense. So, if we look at things like the employment or unemployment rates of the native-born people versus those arriving from overseas,

you just get this consistent pattern that comes out time and time again, which is that in English-speaking countries, generally, people arriving from overseas are more well-educated than the native-born. They are just as likely to be employed. They're often more likely to be employed in skilled work,

They're less likely to have dropped out of school at high school. Generally, across the board, there are some examples in the US in particular actually where there's a slight exception. Whereas if you look at France, Germany, Spain, Italy...

Sweden, Denmark and so on, you tend to see the complete opposite, which is that the immigrant populations in these countries are much less well-educated than the native-born population. Some people on the right generally respond to this and say, well, you know, it's clearly because of the type of people who are coming to these countries. And

Just from the outset, I think clearly there is an element to an extent that is true. But there are a couple of caveats I add to that. One is that a very large part of this is about language. So it's actually, I think, more about language than...

necessarily about skills. And by language, do you include culture in that? Or you mean literally, just can you speak the language? Mainly just speaking the language. Okay. So the reason I say that is if you look at the numbers of people, of immigrants arriving in different countries who have very good proficiency in the language of the country they've moved to or have very, very bad proficiency

In English-speaking countries, as one might expect, this is a global language with huge sort of soft power, you know, people are watching TV shows, it's often in English. As a result, the immigrants who turn up in English-speaking countries, very few of them don't speak the language. Whereas in the majority of European countries, you get significantly higher numbers who don't. But

But to dismiss it all as being a sort of accident of geography and history, as it were, and saying, well, you know, you just happen to have had this situation, I think is also an oversimplification because...

Arguably most important of all is what happens between the first generation and subsequent generations of an immigrant community in a country. And when you look at the socioeconomic outcomes of immigrants in countries like the UK and US, you consistently see in pretty much any group that the children of the first generation of immigrants have better outcomes than their parents. So higher incomes, higher employment rates, that kind of thing.

Whereas if you look at countries like France and Germany, for a lot of groups, there's no progress or for some, there's even a slight move backwards. So that is almost the worst case scenario for a country here because you've got...

just on a basic socioeconomic level, there's a sense from the sort of immigration anxious portion of the population that, well, you know, these people aren't fitting in. But also within those communities, you then start to get this sense of, hey, you know, why aren't we fitting in? Why do we feel like a sort of separate part of this culture? You get some people turning, therefore, to things like crime. So I've been rambling for a while here, but I think it's just really important to get across the

The fact that what immigration looks like and what immigrants look like in these different countries is very, very varied. And public opinion and politics around immigration generally map quite well onto those different situations. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. More with John when we get back. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot...

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I think that, you know, part of what is really interested me is the focus on when things become chaotic. Right. Because what you started off saying at the beginning of this episode around people responding to real events.

really resonates with what's happening in the last couple of years in the United States. So cities like New York and Chicago, these are really welcoming to immigrants. Yet there was a real turn against and anger at the local level about the migrant movement.

resettlement in their cities and the chaos that ensued. And it wasn't even, I mean, relative to population. I mean, I don't know if I would notice walking around New York City whether there were 150,000 more people or not. But what people did notice is that there were people sleeping on the streets in downtown Manhattan. What people did notice is that there were reports of even a school being used by migrants for shelter instead of housing local students for school. And, you know, hotels being taken up by migrants. And it really actually

And I remember I was doing some reporting on this and I kept hearing from people how like they separated out native born homeless folks from migrant homeless in a way that was like and they called them indigenous. It's like indigenous homeless people versus indigenous.

And I was like, it really opens up where you're like, the real problem here is when you see a serious drain on state and local coffers as a result of migration. And I think that that is a really important factor in this, that if you can assimilate a bunch of people, like when you look at what happened with the experience of Ukrainians, right, where they were given work visas right away, and there's a lot of coordination between the federal and state government to get people here, and they were arriving at airports, they weren't kind of coming to the southern border,

And being bossed by Greg Abbott sort of randomly without much coordination. And, you know, to me, I think that chaos was really impactful because you see a place like New York City, like Chicago, very used to waves of immigrants, very liberal, usually very open. And that sort of method of entry, despite

relatively small numbers really overwhelm the city. You had Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, saying, don't come here, which is not a thing that Democratic mayors of New York normally say to immigrants. Yeah, I think that's 100% correct. And again, it looks quite similar in the UK. So,

In the lead up to the EU referendum here, the areas of the country that voted to leave in the highest numbers were generally those where you had these two things in common. One was no history of immigration or very little history of immigration and then a sudden and quite rapid influx in the years preceding the referendum. And generally that was an influx of lower skilled people and these were relatively poor parts of the country. So areas that were already quite stretched in terms of their resources. Mm-hmm.

So it's 100% people are looking at how this is playing out. And again, of course, this gets amplified by the media and there are political opportunists here, but people are generally really sensing something real here. And as you say, if the change is relatively slow or not even necessarily slow, but it's the changes... It feels gradual. Exactly. It feels gradual because coming back to the fact that this isn't strictly all about numbers, it's...

of a certain number of people who all slot straight into the labour market, for example, is probably going to seem a lot less apparent than a significantly smaller shift of people who are, again, visibly in the streets all day. So exactly what you're saying there, I think people are absolutely aware of what's playing out and they're able to distinguish between these quite different situations. And that's why I think the fact that we're hopefully starting to be able to have these conversations about labour

differences here and what works better and what works less well is, I think, just a good thing for discussions and for future policymaking in this whole space. Yeah, I mean, I feel like when people want to talk about

talk about this, like there isn't a real problem that people are reacting to. There's a desire to kind of cast all the people who are kind of frustrated with immigration as xenophobes instead of trying to disaggregate what their real concerns are and actually address them. I thought this was like really obvious to me in Ireland, recently Ireland, as you mentioned, like historically, it's a very welcoming country to immigrants. I mean, themselves like have this history nationally of themselves, you know, being immigrants, especially to the U.S.,

And this past year, you've seen a lot of that shift. And I think primarily because there's this huge housing crisis going on in Ireland where it's so expensive to live. I mean, I read this stat that, you know, the number of young people going to Australia to get a visa to work has like skyrocketed because it's like cheaper for people to find like accommodation.

housing there. And when you set people up, I think this is one of the things that, you know, me and you talk about this a lot in our own writing about around housing costs and how that kind of spurs kind of anti-growth sentiment when you have really, really skyrocketing cost of living, primarily driven by shelter. And to me, when I look at the case of Ireland, I think that's like clearly what's going on here is that people are viewing their own cost of living going up. And then they're like, why is the government bringing more people here to take care of when they're not even taking care of their own people?

Yeah, 100%. I think the really interesting shift we're actually seeing starting in the last couple of years is certainly in English-speaking countries is the sort of hot-button topic around immigration is shifting from jobs to houses.

So again, in Europe, a lot of this is still jobs because there are poorer parts of Europe and when there are lower skilled immigrants coming in, there's a sense that this could put downward pressure on wages. Whereas in the English speaking world, where it's harder and harder to make those arguments about jobs and pay because they just haven't panned out that way.

what we're seeing this shift towards is housing. And it's funny that you mentioned Irish people leaving for Australia because I think any Australian would tell you that if you're coming to Australia for cheap housing, then things must be horrendously, horrendously bad where you are. But yeah, I think that's spot on. And this is another one where, as a migration liberal, it's simple supply and demand that if you have more people coming to a country who are going to be competing for jobs,

the same housing stock. There's just no two ways about it. That is adding pressure into already very, very hot housing markets. And of course, generally immigrants are moving towards the most dynamic cities in any given country, which is where these issues are already the most acute. I think the one note I always like to add to this is that

Housing policy, of course, is something that governments, both national and local, have a huge amount of control over. Yeah. And, of course, new house building is notoriously unpopular and that puts political pressure on and therefore a lot of stuff doesn't get built. But,

But if you look at the statistics... And you're in the nifty capital of the world. I thought it was San Francisco, but then I went to London and I was like, nope, it's here. Oh yeah, 100%. But what's really interesting is when you look at the two key numbers here, so population growth and house building, there are several countries in the Western world where the rate of population growth in the last 10 years has been higher than it has in the UK, for example.

but where they've built even more houses and therefore the number of people per household has continued to fall or houses per person has risen. So I think it's absolutely important that even progressives recognise that if you're a person who's worried about house prices and rents and wants more housing, then you also have to acknowledge that, of course, in terms of simple supply and demand, immigration puts some pressure on in this situation. But I think it's also important

Countries have a huge amount of control over the second part of that equation. And there are other countries, similarly rich countries, who are dealing with similar or even larger rates of population growth, but are simply building more homes and therefore dealing with the situation. Yeah, I mean, I think it's such a problem, though, because...

Demand is both more visible to people, like growth in demand, like growth in population. So demand for housing that feels more like if you're like looking for a house and you see that like there's like 30 people in line, you talk to someone in line and they're from California and you're in Nashville, Tennessee, like that feels really tangible to you. And like it's very hard to see the supply side of the equation.

I think that like there's a truth to the fact that like in the short run, increasing demand is really harmful. But we also have to admit that given that construction jobs in the construction industry, at least in the United States, is highly driven by immigrant labor. There's also something to the equation there. So but we've talked a lot about housing, which is something that I'm going to do basically, I guess, on every single podcast I host. But I also I think one thing that I think is also really important, we've touched on it a couple of times, but I don't think we've really addressed it is housing.

what is the role of the media in driving coverage on immigration? And part of me, my general sense of things when people like kind of rag on the media is like, I'm like, well, I mean, you're reading it, you're watching it. So it's kind of like you're contributing to the demand of what you're looking at right there. But at the same time, you know, I think you can't deny that there's like efforts when people are trying to win elections or, you know, they think that there should be fewer immigrants in the country for whatever political reason, that project that they have. And they want to increase salience of the issues they care about. And so I don't

think it's necessarily like you know illicit project it's just kind of like the way that media functions but in your sense like how does the media affect if views on immigration like do you think there's been because of the rise in right-wing media contingent there too I mean how does that play into all of this

It's a tricky one to unpick. So it's always tricky with this media stuff is to what extent is the media reflecting versus shaping public opinion? And the UK has been an interesting case study here because between around 1990 and 2015-16, so just before the EU referendum, two things were true. It was true that the percentage of people saying that immigration was one of the most pressing issues in the UK was

And the actual number of people arriving in the UK tracked each other very, very closely. So that's like a 25-year period where you could look at that and say, okay, what seems to be happening here is the numbers of people arriving are driving concern.

But then after the EU referendum, those two lines completely diverged and the numbers of people coming to the UK continued to be pretty high, they actually rose. But the number of people saying that immigration was one of the top issues just fell off a cliff. It went from sort of 45% to 10% at the same time as the actual numbers of immigration were rising.

Now, if you swap out the actual immigration numbers, though, and swap in the percentage of headlines in the Daily Mail, which is a right-leaning newspaper in the UK, if you swap in the number of times the Daily Mail runs stories about immigration, then not only did the two lines rise together between 1990 and 2015, but they also fall together between 2015 and 2020. So looking at that would certainly suggest that

that what the public are expressing concerns about is a reflection of what's being covered in the media. However, some people have spoken to some social scientists who've looked at this stuff. Their pushback on that is, well, it's not just that people suddenly stopped caring about immigration after 2015-16, it's that

Other concerns sort of pushed that down the list as it were. So the UK for the next three years was completely obsessed with, okay, what's Brexit going to look like? There was also, of course, then the pandemic where COVID pushed all the other concerns down. So some people have looked at this and said, well, maybe immigration actually did remain a big concern in line with numbers. It's just that people were concerned about even more things. Now, I'm pretty sceptical of that. That's partly just because the drop-off was so steep.

the drop off in concern with immigration, that is, sorry. It's partly because when you look at levels of concern with immigration in 2008-9, i.e. during the midst of a generational financial crisis, concern with immigration was still high then, even though you had all of this other stuff going on around you.

And then the third reason I mentioned this is that the UK and US are both right now dealing with all these other things, the cost of living crisis, economic sentiment in general. And yet right now in the US, about 27, 28% of people put immigration as the number one concern, whereas in the UK it's only 11%. So I think that's a long-winded way of saying it looks to me like the media and political discussion around immigration is

is doing more than just reflecting actual numbers and is also doing more to drive concern than the actual numbers. Yeah, I mean, it's obviously a very, I mean, it's just a multifactorial dynamic process and, you know, the media's reactions to things, even the idea that the media is like a whole is like a difficult to talk about in meaningful ways. I mean, you can think about average effects, but even then you're obscuring so much

difference that's going on. I think that like in general, when I think about how the media reacts to events, it is often driven by things that are visually alarming. So if you have something that is visually alarming, it often will attract a ton of attention, even over stories that may have like a larger impact. And so when you actually had a caravan or like the bus or whatever that people were tracking, like that was like media bait. Like that's just the sort of thing that like CNN wants to just like cover for like 10 hours a day. And then when I

I see, like, obviously, I think very similar to that when you have folks literally sleeping on the floors of police precincts in Chicago when there were not enough places for them to be housed. That is also something that is, like, really visually arresting and can grab viewers and has and maybe then gets arrested.

in a way that may not otherwise be commensurate to how much of an impact that it's having on, you know, or the number of flows or whatever. And so I can see that many ways that you would end up having media attention focus on things that are visually arresting. But then it's

It becomes kind of a weird question because the things that are visually arresting are the things that people care about, right? Like that's the sort of thing that people's attention gravitates towards. So, yeah, I definitely think that like the question of this media involvement is interesting. And like I think it's definitely something there's been a bunch more research about, but is really, really unsettled. But this seems like a great place to wrap up. Always our final question. What is something that was good on paper originally, but maybe didn't pan out for you in the end?

Right, so the question here is how completely off-piste can I go here? Go completely off-piste. No, it usually is, actually. Okay, so the one I was thinking of was many, many, many years ago, I was, I think, 18, 19 years old, and...

I'd just been round at a friend's house in like the next kind of a little village outside the town I lived in. And I was heading back home late in the afternoon, maybe early evening. And I thought, right, there's two ways I can get home here. I was on my bicycle and I thought, right, I can either go the long winding way or I go on these slightly bigger roads, but much quicker way. And I thought, well, you know, I've got to get home soon. I'm going to go the quicker route. And so I set off cycling along this road.

And the road started getting like a little bit busier. And then some of the signage on the road started changing. And basically about halfway through this 30 minute journey, I realized this road had turned into a motorway, which is in US speak, I guess, like one of the main highways. Yeah. Like six lanes. Yeah.

Kind of thing. And about a couple of minutes after I realized the situation, I then realized that I was being pulled over by the police for cycling along this road. And luckily for me, the police were very kind and basically said,

get off your bike come off at the next exit and you know we'll we'll leave it at that and luckily for me the next exit was where I was going anyway so I got away with it I feel like that's actually one of those stories that feels like it could have gone very badly oh yeah in so many different ways yeah yeah well I'm glad you're still with us John and thank you for coming on the show I really appreciate it thank you so much for having me I really enjoyed the conversation

Good on Paper is produced by Janae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Anna Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Claudine Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. And hey, if you like what you're hearing, please do leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. That's how people hear about the show. Or share it with a couple of friends who you think might like it as well. I'm Jerusalem Dempsis, and we'll see you next week.

There's a common perception that democracy ends with a battle, soldiers in the streets, a coup d'etat, the fall of a government. But we know that democracy can be lost one little step at a time. We've reported on it and lived through it. And when we look at America today, right now, we see a place where the slide to autocracy has already begun. It's not some distant future, it's the present.

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