translation: There are people conjuring thoughts like “I’ve seen one too many brown people”.
Also unsurprising where the sentiment is coming from:
srcs:
- https://www.ipsos.com/en/perils/perils-perception-prejudice-and-conspiracy-theories-0
- https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/many-people-overestimate-the-percentage-of-immigrants-in-their-country
More imbecility (from the same src):
We have cities in germany where “5.5%” really doesn’t paint the right picture. I’ve recently been to one where most shops had signs i can’t read and more muslims than i saw in Turkey or elsewhere. Seeing or hearing (a) german was a rare exception. And this is really no exaggeration.
Of course if you take all the rural areas into the equation, where usually very few are, you might see the 5% in toto, but in the cities and especially the cores? No way.
I think the issue is that most people live in cities, where populations tend to me more diverse. Then most polls probably also end up disproportionately asking cityfolk. So the polls ask people who live in areas with disproportionate numbers of immigrants (relative to non-urban parts of the country), and they forget how many non-immigrants are outside the cities.
how do people in the US think Muslim folk make up 22% of the population!? My guess was like 4-5% and I still overshot by a lot.
These polls tend to fumble their own methods, by trusting people to read definitions. They should be asking directly: how many people in your country were born in another country? The word “immigrant” literally means that… but that’s not the only meaning people envision, when they hear that word. To some extent you are always measuring that disconnect.
On the other hand, what fucking lunatics think 22% of America is Muslim?
who in australia thinks we have 20% muslims? we probably dont even have 20% christians
Argentina as usual being two racists in a trenchcoat pretending to be white
How do people in Japan think that 10% of the population is foreign!?
I guess Argentina makes a bit more sense - except that not many people are trying to get to Argentina. That sounds like Argentina though.
Argentina have a lot of immigration from Perú, Bolivia and Paraguay, but the important part, I think, is that Milei campaign were pretty much “illegal immigrants are destroying our country” and proposing a lot of shit that already exists, like background checks to get work and studying permits.
A lot is apparently not that many, and Argentina doesn’t need migrants to destroy everything, the extremely racist middle class and other European migrants already did that.
I assume it’s the same in most areas - humans are really susceptible to sampling bias and if you live in an urban area, you’re going to see a higher number of immigrants or foreigners. Plus, in Japan specifically, there’s currently a big backlash against tourists fucking with people’s daily routines, so I’m sure people mentally think there must be hordes of foreigners constantly invading the country.
Interesting that Argentina has the largest disparity here, actually. I would have expected it to be the US, given the rhetoric.
Swiss: about a third?
Real: 40%
Japan what the hell? When I’m there I usually go hours without seeing another white person, depending on where I’m at.
They get a lot of workers from places like Indonesia
They would have immigrants primarily from other parts of asia most likely
Who are all the people immigrating to Australia?
Skilled Family Humanitarian All permanent migrants(b) 1 India 356,100 China © 133,000 Iraq 62,400 India 439,700 2 England 197,300 India 81,900 Afghanistan 30,700 China © 334,900 3 China © 196,500 England 79,700 Myanmar 21,100 England 277,500 4 Philippines 103,200 Philippines 64,000 Syria 20,900 Philippines 167,400 5 South Africa 101,300 Vietnam 61,500 Iran 17,300 South Africa 118,200 6 Australia (d) 65,300 Thailand 34,400 Sudan 12,300 Vietnam 82,400 7 Malaysia 52,000 United States of America 27,300 South Sudan 7,000 Australia (d) 75,900 8 Sri Lanka 48,300 Indonesia 21,000 Pakistan 6,600 Iraq 72,700 9 Korea, Republic of (South) 40,700 Afghanistan 18,900 Thailand 5,800 Malaysia 69,200 10 Pakistan 39,000 Korea, Republic of (South) 18,700 Ethiopia 5,700 Sri Lanka 67,700 The above is from https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/people-and-communities/permanent-migrants-australia/2021
Looks like all the British are a problem
We’ve got people from all the continents, but mostly Asia.
Earlier this year at work each team put out a flag for each team member, and across like 100 flags there was surprisingly little repetition besides predictably China and India. Australia was maybe in 5th place.
My team has 15 people and we joked that our only Australian was a diversity hire.
We do software development in case you didn’t guess yet.
Malaysians, Chinese, indians, I’ve even met a couple from Timor
It’s also a common destination for upper middle class families on latinamerica, because you can pay in doing an MBA and getting a job.
I don’t agree, I see Latin American people in lower ranks but not often and never met one in management position besides myself. And I can spot them from big distance and even separate them from Philippinos who tend to have the same last names.
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You’d need an awful lot of people to bump that 19% up to “40-50%” and I’m fairly sure that if I went to Germany right now, and we’re on perception alone so it’s gunna be pretty racist, I wouldn’t see one person of colour for every white person.
I live in an international city and it’s still mostly white people here despite seeing many definite immigrants all the time. They just stand out against what I was conditioned to believe is “normal” but that’s it.
It would actually depend on where in Germany you are going, but since the first Turkish “Gastarbeiter” (among others, quite some nationalities) came to West Germany over 60 years ago, it is not uncommon to meet people of Turkish descent there. (East Germany not so much, they had Vietnamese workers but mostly deported them back to Vietnam after the re-unification.) Combine these Gastarbeiter (and the three generations after them) with a declining native birth rate and an influx of asylum seekers, and it could well be 40-50% all together.
The big question is what the problem is here, and the answer is that the far right wants it to be a problem so they can come to power. So they’ll bloody make it a problem and try and sabotage any solutions. These last lines are my personal opnion obviously.
Third generation citizens are not immigrants. They are native citizens.
I know, since I replied to this:
I think they’re saying that children who are born in the new country should be counted as foreigners. Which is kinda fucked up but yea
Did you find something specifically that stated that children weren’t included in the data? I did not find anything like that in the sources.
The link to the source from “Our world in data” mentions how children are included in their research, and they have a link to the UN migration spreadsheet that includes children of all ages: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/content/international-migrant-stock.
I think they’re saying that children who are born in the new country should be counted as foreigners. Which is kinda fucked up but yea I don’t think they’re saying that children moving to a new country aren’t counted.
No, they are saying people will see and count them as immigrants
Children of immigrants are perceived as immigrants as well
Yea I should have worded that a lot better.
Thanks for clarifying, I misunderstood what they meant.
What share of the population do you think are immigrants?
Where does “I don’t care” register?
Apart from a couple of countries, the percentages are small. The graph is distorted as it’s not showing the full 100%
Looks like most people, in most countries, are pretty close to accurate.
Alternative view (directly from the source):
IMO being off by around 10% or more is still quite the leap.
10% off isn’t bad for a casual onlooker at their community. That’s 90% accurate.
Right, but those estimates aren’t 10% off, but closer to at least 10 percentage points off – percent and percentage points are not the same thing.
Even Australia is ~23% off, and eg. Germany is 42% off, the US is 120% off, UK is 57% off, and eg. Poland is a whopping 650% off
People don’t give precise percentages though when surveyed. They might round to typical fractions like 1/4, 1/3, or they might round to 10 or 20 percent.
Nobody is saying “hmm, I estimate that it would be approximately 37 percent”.
Of course the wisdom of the crowd does wonders for smoothing those coarse estimates, but still, if the crowd is +/- 10 of the real percentage value, I’d say they’re pretty much on the money.
Anyway, Poland, wtf.
People don’t give precise percentages though when surveyed. They might round to typical fractions like 1/4, 1/3, or they might round to 10 or 20 percent.
Nobody is saying “hmm, I estimate that it would be approximately 37 percent”.
Of course the wisdom of the crowd does wonders for smoothing those coarse estimates, but still, if the crowd is +/- 10 of the real percentage value, I’d say they’re pretty much on the money.
Oh yes absolutely, people would definitely just “eyeball” their estimate and the percentages we see in the graphs are population (well, sample) level averages, but I’d still say that the differences between these average estimates and actual reality are by and large much worse that “on the money”. To illustrate, if the estimate for some country was eg. 30% and the real proportion 40%, the relative error – off by a factor of 1.33 – would be smaller than if the estimate is 12% and the real value 2% – off by a factor of 6 – even though both have a 10 point error.
So eg Poles’ and Argentinians’ estimates are both 12 percentage points off, but because Poland’s immigrant population is smaller that means that they overestimated its real size by 650% and so their estimate was 7.5x higher, but Argentinians were “only” off by 460% / 5.6x. 'Strayans were off by 7 points, but their relative error was only around 23%, which is still almost a 1/4 error and their estimate looks like it was the best out of these. The average global error was 100%, so on average people think there’s 2x as many immigrants as there actually are, and characterizing that as “pretty much on the money” is, well, maybe a bit generous
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Yeah as much as I love to call people out for their racist bullshit, the results are surprisingly close to the mark. I was expecting the gap to be much wider. At least for the English speaking countries.
This does not count Ukrainians for Poland though, even for 2022 before war there were much more of them than 2%, possibly as many as 3 million and that went up in years included here.
Yep, that’s true, the latest census was from 2021, and the figure was 3.69%.
Probably the figures weren’t available to Ipsos at the time, despite the publishing date :/? Idk…
That’s different question though on the census, about nationality of Polish citizens. Most of numbers of minorities with citizenship in Poland are Polish minorities who were born in Poland. Like Silesians who are not even officially considered minority and still half million of them wrote that in (in reality there’s at probably around a million of them since once the census bureau included them despite government not wanted to admit them at all). And even let’s say Polish Germans, Belorussians and Ukrainians (at least those 80000 mentioned in this census) are also living here for generations due to how frequently borders changed in last two centuries.
Polish state is also relentlessly engaging in polonisation of minorities since 1918.
90% or so of people in the USA are immigrants
I dont get these graphs
100% or so of people everywhere are immigrants…
Perhaps descended from immigrants. I presume most are native, meaning they were born in that nation.
Okay that makes sense
