One response is to claim that the data fails to reflect voters’ lived experience and that people’s first-hand perceptions are surely more accurate than dry statistics and aloof academic analysis. Yet a subjective interpretation of an anecdote – an unemployed local builder sees a Polish one working and blames the immigrant for his lack of a job – is scarcely rigorous evidence.
Indeed, negative perceptions of immigration are often not based on personal experience. It is telling that while few people in Britain think immigration is negative for them personally, many believe it is detrimental to the country as a whole. And in both the UK and the US attitudes towards migration are often much more negative in areas where there are few or no migrants than in areas where there are many. Mediated misperceptions are even less credible than first-hand ones. [...]
It is vital that instead of validating misperceptions and lies, politicians, campaigners and commentators put a positive, evidence-based case for immigration. They need to dispel ignorance and misinformation with information, misinterpretation with explanation, and confront prejudice head on. For instance, people typically think the immigration share of the population is much higher than it really it is; better information can help. Many people believe it is common sense that every job filled by a migrant is one less for locals; one can explain that there isn’t a fixed number of jobs to go around and migrants also create jobs when they spend their wages and in complementary lines of work. When Donald Trump slurs Muslim refugees as would-be terrorists, it can be pointed out that no American has been killed by Islamist terrorists who arrived in the US as refugees. [...]
Stories need to be accompanied with an attempt to reach out to those with different values and to speak their language. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, argues that liberal westerners suffer from a rationalist delusion that reasoning can cause good behaviour and is our pathway to moral truth. Yet in practice, he writes, most of our conscious reasoning is after-the-fact justification for our moral intuitions, which shape our emotions and unconsciously govern our behaviour.
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