Dots, threats, and illegal immigrants

Something that has continued to baffle me about the arguments over illegal immigration is how little of it tends to be based in fact.

Just in the last six months, four separate studies have found that the number of undocumented immigrants in an area has no correlation to the crime rate, either violent or non-violent.  This, of course, runs counter to the Trump administration's narrative that "our borders are being overrun by millions of illegals" and that all of those millions, immediately after crossing the border, sign a blood oath to MS-13.

Then there's the claim that the illegals are bankrupting us by stealing our benefits -- again, fostered by Trump's repeated claims that undocumented immigrants are immediately granted "welfare and free medical care."  According to EconoFact, here are benefits that illegal immigrants are explicitly prohibited from receiving:

• Children’s Health Insurance (CHIP)
• Disability, aka Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
• Food stamps, aka The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Health insurance, aka insurance via the Affordable Care Act (ACA)
• Medicaid
• Medicare
• Social Security
• Welfare

EconoFact states further:

Despite scapegoating in public discourse, the drain that undocumented immigrants place on government benefit programs is small.  The number of low-income undocumented immigrants is small relative to the size of the overall low-income population, and federal law restricts their participation in most programs.  Because so little federal assistance is available, some states and localities bear a disproportionate burden.  As enforcement efforts become more aggressive, it is expected that undocumented immigrants will be less likely to access public programs on behalf of their children who, as citizens, are legally eligible for these benefits.

Before I go any further, let me forestall any hate mail over this by stating up front that I am not saying we should do nothing about illegal immigration.  However, wouldn't it be nice if the discussion was based on reality rather than on the fevered imagination of the frightened?

The reason this comes up has to do with a study out of Harvard University by psychologist David Levari et al.  Called "Prevalence-Induced Concept Change in Human Judgment," the study looks at why we are so resistant to relaxing once a problem is being dealt with -- why we so seldom say, "My work here is done."

Levari's team did three separate, but related, experiments:

1. Show volunteers a series of dots colored in a range of colors from blue to red, and asked them whether the dots were blue, purple, or red.
2. Show volunteers a series of written requests, and ask them whether they were ethical, unethical, or somewhere in the middle.
3. Show volunteers a set of photographs of human faces, which had been carefully evaluated beforehand to determine how threatening the person looked, and asked them to rate the faces for threat level.

In each of the trials, the experimenters decreased the frequency of one of the types as the test went on -- in the first, blue dots; in the second, unethical requests; and in the third, threatening faces.  What happened was remarkably consistent.  In the first experiment, test subjects responded by identifying more purple dots as blue -- even ones that were shades of purple that they'd previously seen and identified as purple.  Similarly, requests analogous to those labeled as ethical were identified as unethical later in the experiment -- once truly unethical requests had become less frequent.  In the third, more neutral faces were identified as threatening once actually threatening faces were less commonly seen.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently, when we are made aware of something -- even something as innocuous as whether a dot is blue, purple, or red -- when the thing we're looking for decreases in frequency, we broaden the parameters of what we'll accept as fitting the description.

As Levari writes, in a discussion of his team's research in ScienceAlert:

Why can't people help but expand what they call threatening when threats become rare? Research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that this kind of behavior is a consequence of the basic way that our brains process information – we are constantly comparing what is front of us to its recent context. 

Instead of carefully deciding how threatening a face is compared to all other faces, the brain can just store how threatening it is compared to other faces it has seen recently, or compare it to some average of recently seen faces, or the most and least threatening faces it has seen. 

This kind of comparison could lead directly to the pattern my research group saw in our experiments, because when threatening faces are rare, new faces would be judged relative to mostly harmless faces. In a sea of mild faces, even slightly threatening faces might seem scary.

Which may explain some of the furor over illegal immigration.  Not only is most crime in the United States not committed by undocumented immigrants, illegal immigration itself has decreased -- it's been steadily dropping for about twenty years.  So, as the problem gets better, we respond not by breathing a sigh of relief, but by looking around us even more frantically for problems connected with immigrants that we might have overlooked.

Of course, the whole thing isn't helped by Donald Trump and his proxies over at Fox News screeching about it on a daily basis, whipping up the fear and anger -- largely, I believe, because frightened people will vote for the folks who are saying they know how to fix the problem, not for the ones who say the problem isn't as bad as it seems.

What the study by Levari et al. doesn't address, unfortunately, is what to do about all this.  How do you counteract what seems to be a natural tendency to see threats where there are none?  Knowing about the effect might help -- if you are aware of a perceptual bias, you might be able to compensate for it.  But other than that, it looks like we might be stuck with calling purple dots blue -- and seeing neutral faces as dangerous.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

The justification merry-go-round

Today's post is about several links that all appeared in my inbox more or less simultaneously, and are even more interesting in juxtaposition.

First, let's look at the study that appeared this week in the European Journal of Social Psychology called "'They've Conspired against Us': Understanding the Role of Social Identification and Conspiracy Beliefs in Justification of Ingroup Collective Behaviour," authored by Maria Chayinska and Anca Minescu.  The gist of the research is that people jump into belief in conspiracy theories with the greatest of ease -- as long as such belief reinforces the behaviors of the social groups they already belonged to.

The study looked at 315 people in Ukraine, split between people who were supporters of the anti-Russian "Euromaidan" movement and ones who were against it. The researchers presented them with (false) conspiracy theories about the annexation of the Crimea by Russia, and looked at the degree to which they believed it without question.  The Euromaidan supporters were far more likely to accept the conspiracy theory that secret societies and evil plots were at work to sabotage the Ukrainian resistance movement.

Study co-author Maria Chayinska writes:

We found that supporters of a particular cause not only were prone to endorse specific conspiracy beliefs but also to use them in a blame game, thus justifying collective behavior of the group they identified with.  Contrarily, the opponents of the same cause were found not to endorse those beliefs at all.  Thus, we found how ideologically charged social identities align with the tendency to believe in particular conspiracy theories surrounding acute political and societal issues that commonly cause a divide in a public. 

Conspiracy theories are ideological in nature, so people who either strongly endorse or oppose them have a reason to do so.  This reason is oftentimes rooted in their psychological commitment and loyalty to particular social groups that advocate a certain ideology.

Which is an interesting, if not especially surprising, result.

The same day as a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me the above story, I received five -- count 'em, five -- links addressing the current practice of indefinite separation of children from parents who are attempting to immigrate to the United States.  Let's take them in order of least-to-most egregious:

First, Fox News's Tucker Carlson:

This is one of those moments that tells you everything about our ruling class.  They care far more about foreigners than about their own people.  You probably suspected that already.  [The Left's] only solution is immediate amnesty for anyone who crosses our borders with a minor in tow.  And of course, that's the same as no borders at all.

Well, if you think that everyone objecting to the horrid treatment of these children is a member of "the Left," you're including Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Laura Bush, Bill Kristol, Ted Cruz, John McCain, and (for fuck's sake) Reverend Franklin Graham.  And Carlson's blatant straw man argument -- that Democrats are, one and all, for completely opening the borders to anyone -- is so idiotic it hardly deserves refutation.  (Allow me to say only that I defy you to find one elected official, left or right, who has proposed allowing unrestricted immigration.  Just one.)

Then there's Laura Ingraham, also (surprise!) of Fox News:

As more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents.  And temporarily housed at what are, essentially, summer camps.

Lady, I don't know what kind of summer camp you attended as a kid, but I'm guessing it didn't require sleeping inside a locked cage.

Speaking of cages, there's Steve Doocy, of... guess where?:

While some have likened it to — them to concentration camps or cages, you do see that they have those thermal blankets, you do see some fencing, but keep in mind — some have referred to them as ‘cages,’ but, keep in mind, this is a great, big warehouse facility where they built walls out of chain link fences.

So not cages!  Just nice guest rooms!  With chain-link walls and cement floors!

Working our way up the nausea-induction scale, we have none other than Ann Coulter, who I honestly thought had decided she had better things to do than to vie for the 2018 Eva Braun Award, but I guess I was mistaken.  Here's what she said:

I get very nervous about the president getting his news from TV...  I would also say one other thing, these child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now — do not fall for it, Mr. President...  A New Yorker article, the New Yorker is not a conservative publication, they describe how these kids, these kids are being coached.  They’re given scripts to read by liberals, according to the New Yorker.  Don’t fall for the actor children.

No worries!  The screams are all scripted!  Says so right in a non-existent article in the New Yorker!  (Maybe the kids are the same "crisis actors" the Deep State got to portray the victims of the Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Boston Marathon massacres.  May as well reuse them, since it worked so well.)

But, if you can believe it, one person went beyond Ann Coulter, which I didn't even think was possible.  So if we can take one more turn on the justification merry-go-round, let's look at Christian television host and moderator of the podcast Faith & Freedom, Leigh Valentine.  The kids aren't actors, Valentine said; they're actually -- evil:

Immigrants crossing the border are committing rape after rape after rape.  Children below ten years old engaging in sexual activity — all kinds of sin and disgrace and darkness; the pit of the pits...  So we’re not getting the top-of-the-line echelon people coming over this border.  We’re getting criminals.  I mean, total criminals that are so debased and their minds are just gone.  They’re unclean, they’re murderers, they’re treacherous, they’re God-haters.

 Yup, that's a pretty sketchy bunch of debased, mindless criminal God-haters, right there.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Linda Hess Miller, Mesa Grande refugee camp 1987 116, CC BY 3.0]

Look, I'm not claiming I have an easy answer.  As I said earlier, I -- like damn near every left-leaning person in the United States -- am not proposing opening the borders and letting anyone in who wants to.  But the vast majority of these people are not criminals (and they fucking sure aren't actors, Ann Coulter).  They're people who are desperate because of awful conditions in their home countries, who want what all of us want -- a clean, comfortable place to live, enough food and water, and opportunities for their children.  Whatever the answer is, it is not demonizing them, dehumanizing them, and/or claiming that what they're going through is not so bad.

If you think a while, you might come up with a few instances in history where the people in power had precisely the same response to the plight of children being held in involuntary captivity.

None of those ended well.

What we are doing right now is wrong.  Pure and simple.  Separating children from their parents is immoral.  And don't start with me about under whose administration the practice started; that's entirely irrelevant.  It's happening now, and it's happening on a scale the likes of which we have never seen.

You stand up against it, or you have abandoned all claim to the moral high ground.

But it does make a weird sort of sense, in light of the Chayinska and Minescu paper we started with.  If you already believe that we're under siege, that immigrants are a threat to everything we hold dear, it's only a small leap to believing that the immigrant children themselves are to blame, or that the whole thing is some kind of grand conspiracy to destroy The American Way.

And all I can say is, if this is The American Way, I'm horrified at what our country has become.

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This week's recommended read is Wait, What? And Life's Other Essential Questions by James E. Ryan.  Ryan frames the whole of critical thinking in a fascinating way.  He says we can avoid most of the pitfalls in logic by asking five questions: "What?"  "I wonder..." "Couldn't we at least...?" "How can I help?" and "What truly matters?"  Along the way, he considers examples from history, politics, and science, and encourages you to think about the deep issues -- and not to take anything for granted.

Fact avoidance

I've learned through the years that my feelings are an unreliable guide to evaluating reality.

Part of this, I suppose, comes from having fought depression for forty years.  I know that what I'm thinking is influenced by my neurotransmitters, and given the fact that they spend a lot of the time out of whack, my sense that five different mutually-exclusive worst-case scenarios can all happen simultaneously is probably not accurate.  It could be that this was in part what drove me to skepticism, and to my understanding that my best bet for making good decisions is to rely not on feelings, but on evidence.

It surprises me how many people don't get that.  I saw two really good examples of this in the news last week, both of them centered around embattled President Donald Trump.  In the first, he was questioned about why he was putting so much emphasis on securing the border with Mexico -- to the extent of sending in the National Guard -- when in fact, illegal border crossings are at a 46-year low.  (You could argue that current levels are still too high; but the fact is, attempted border crossings have steadily dropped from a high of 1.8 million all the way back in 2000; the level now is about a quarter of that.)

I'm not here to discuss immigration policy per se.  It's a complex issue and one on which I am hardly qualified to weigh in.  What strikes me about this is that the powers-that-be are saying, "I don't care about the data, facts, and figures, the number of illegal migrants is increasing because I feel like it is."

An even more blatant example of trust-your-feelings-not-the-facts came from presidential spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has the unenviable and overwhelming job of doing damage control every time Trump lies about something.  This time, it was at a roundtable discussion on taxes in West Virginia, where he veered off script and started railing about voter fraud.  "In many places, like California, the same person votes many times — you've probably heard about that," he said.  "They always like to say 'oh, that's a conspiracy theory' — not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people."

Of course, the states he likes to claim were sites of rampant voter fraud are always states in which he lost, because the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote still keeps him up at night.  But the fact is, he's simply wrong.  A fourteen-year study by Loyola law professor Justin Levitt found that a "specific, credible allegation existed that someone pretended to be someone else at the polls" accounted for 31 instances out of a billion votes analyzed.

To make it clear: 31 does not equal "millions and millions."  And a fraud rate of 0.0000031% does not constitute "many times."

So, Trump lied.  At this point, that's hardly news.  It'd be more surprising if you turned on the news and found out Trump had told the truth about something.  But when asked about this actual data, in juxtaposition to what Trump said, Sarah Sanders said, "The president still feels there was a large amount of voter fraud."

Wait, what?

What Trump or Sanders, or (for that matter) you or I, "feel" about something is completely irrelevant.  If there's hard data available -- which there is, both on the border crossings and on allegations of voter fraud -- that is what should be listened to.  And when you say something, and are confronted by someone who has facts demonstrating the opposite, the appropriate response is, "Whoa, okay.  I guess I was wrong."

But that's if you're not Donald Trump.  Trump never admits to being wrong.  He doesn't have to, because he's surrounded himself with a Greek chorus of people like Sanders (and his sounding boards over at Fox News) who, no matter what Trump says or does, respond, "Exactly right, sir.  You're amazing.  A genius.  Your brain is YUUUGE."

Hell, he said a couple of years ago that he could kill someone in full view on 5th Avenue and not lose a single supporter, and we had a rather alarming proof of that this week when a fire broke out at Trump Tower on, actually, 5th Avenue -- which, contrary to the law, had no fire alarms or sprinkler system installed -- killing one man and injuring six.

The response?  One Trump supporter said that the man who died had deliberately set the fire to make Trump look bad, and then didn't get out in time.

Facts don't matter.  "I feel like Trump is a great leader and a staunch Christian" wins over "take a look at the hard data" every time.

I'd like to say I have a solution to this, but this kind of fact-resistance is so self-insulating that there's no way in.  It's like living inside a circular argument.  "Trump is brilliant because I feel like he's brilliant, so anything to the contrary must be a lie."  And when you have Fox News pushing this attitude hard -- ignoring any information to the contrary -- you can't escape.

If you doubt that, take a look at what Tucker Carlson was talking about while every other news agency in the world was covering the raid on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's office: a piece on how "pandas are aggressive and sex-crazed."  (No, I'm not making this up.  An actual quote: "You know the official story about pandas — they’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they are almost extinct.  But like a lot of what we hear, that is a lie...  The real panda is a secret stud with a thirst for flesh and a fearsome bite.")

That's some cutting-edge reporting, right there.  No wonder Fox News viewers were found in a 2012 study to be the worst-informed of all thirty media sources studied, only exceeded by people who didn't watch the news at all.

So sorry to end on a rather dismal note, but it seems like until people decide to start valuing facts above feelings, we're kind of stuck.  Honestly, the only answer I can come up with is educating children to be critical thinkers, but in the current environment of attacking teachers and public schools, I'm not sure that's feasible either.

In the interim, though, I'm gonna avoid pandas.  Because they sound a lot sketchier than I'd realized.

Signs of the times

I'll be right up front with you.  I have no idea what to do about the problem of immigration, illegal and otherwise.  In my admittedly rather apolitical brain, this whole issue seems so intractably complicated as to admit no reasonable solution at all.

Do I feel sorry for the immigrants, most of whom are coming from corrupt countries with horrific standards of living, with no access to medical care, decent housing, clean food and water, and education for their children?  Of course I do.  In their place, I'd almost certainly be trying to get out, too, whatever the risk or the cost.  However, I also recognize that illegal immigration is... well, illegal.  And if it's against the law, we should either enforce it or else change it.

I also sympathize with the concerns of a birdwatcher/naturalist friend of mine who lives in Sierra Vista, Arizona, only fifteen miles from the Mexican border, who says, "We're being overrun.  This used to be a safe community, but the people trucking the illegals across the border are criminals, pure and simple.  Many of them run drugs and guns along with their human traffic.  I love this place, but not a day goes by that I don't think of getting out, moving further north."

I understand as well the concerns of people who see their culture changing more in a decade than it had in the preceding two hundred years.  This is especially striking in western Europe, where the influx of Muslims has led to some areas coming under something very close to Shari'a law -- people drinking alcohol, women dressed "immodestly," couples displaying affection, anyone showing signs of being homosexual have been harassed, and in some cases, assaulted.

Yes, I know that those incidents aren't as common as the media coverage would lead you to believe, and that for every clash there are thousands of white Europeans and Muslims living side by side in peace.  All I'm saying is that I can see where the fear comes from.

Unfortunately, we humans have a bad tendency, which is to pretend that impossibly complex problems have easy solutions.  "Build a wall."  "Deport 'em all."  "Seal the borders."  And as tempers get high, the rhetoric on both sides becomes increasingly vitriolic -- to the point that desperation sets in, and people are willing to lie to hammer their point home.

The whole thing comes up because of some photographs of street signs in England that have been making the rounds of social media in the last few weeks.  I've seen three so far:

The photos are usually accompanied by a hysterical caption to the effect that them Mooslims are infiltrating everything, to the point that even the street signs have to be captioned in Arabic.  And because the idea here is to engage the emotions and disengage the brain, the response has been uniformly horrifying, condemning the government officials who agreed to the sign change, railing against the immigrants who pushed for its necessity.

The problem is (well, one of the problems is) that the signs are photoshopped.  Put more bluntly, the claim is a bald-faced lie.  How do I know?  Well, a couple of reasons.  First, the Arabic script below the signs doesn't spell out the names of the towns; it's pretty clear that whoever Photoshopped these simply grabbed whatever Arabic text they could find and spliced it in.

In fact, not only does the Arabic below "Harrogate" not say "Harrogate," it says "salaam alaikum."  Which, you have to admit, would be an odd thing to put on a street sign.

Some of the people who have been forwarding the photographs around have further muddied the waters by claiming that the script is Urdu, presumably to stir up sentiment against Pakistanis.  It's not Urdu, it is (as I mentioned earlier) Arabic.  Not that facts seem to matter much, here.

Most damning of all, the photos themselves are simply downloads from Google Street View, and in the originals, the signs have no Arabic subtitles.  Take a look, for example, at the original of the top photograph:

This is clearly the same photograph -- the intrepid Photoshopper simply cropped it and spliced in the Arabic text.  In fact, if you look closely, you'll see that even the clouds are in exactly the same position in the two photographs.

What appalls me most about this is not that some hate-mongering bigot lied.  Hate-mongering bigots tend to do that, after all.  What appalls me most is how easily people fell for it.  We have become so terrified of The Other that when presented with further evidence of a takeover, we don't even stop to consider whether it makes any sense.  We swallow what we're given, and it further bolsters the fear, further squelches the rationality.

It'd be nice if we had answers, if these horrible problems our world is facing did have simple solutions.  The harsh fact, however, is that if they have solutions at all, they will be ones that are costly and require sacrifices.  But one thing I am certain of: your position is never strengthened by lying.  And to the people who are circulating these photographs, just stop.  What you're doing is making an already awful situation worse.