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.

Prison camps for children

When I considered topics for today's post, the one I was thinking about was so upsetting that I nearly decided to find some cheerful, science-newsy subject to write about instead.  But the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I couldn't leave what was first and foremost in my mind unaddressed.

So here goes.  If you're easily upset, you might want to opt out now.

It all started with Melania Trump's jacket.

Most of you probably know by now that the First Lady went to visit an immigrant shelter in Texas on Thursday while wearing an olive-green jacket that bore the words, "I Really Don't Care.  Do U?" on the back.

On first glance, this is tone-deafness on a level that makes Marie Antoinette's infamous "Let them eat cake" seem minor league.  Melania has given a lot of lip service to the Poor Immigrant Children, so to wear a jacket saying "I Really Don't Care" to a migrant camp is either epic cluelessness, or else...

... deliberate.

For all of the ridicule that Melania's gotten, she is not stupid.  There is no way that jacket choice was an accident.  She was dog-whistling her husband's rabid base -- people like Ted Nugent, who said that immigrants are "rabid coyotes" who "should be shot on sight."  You don't just pick up an item of clothing with a slogan in huge lettering without giving any thought to what it says or how it might be perceived.

And that goes double if you're the First Lady of the United States.

And triple if you're then wearing it on a tour of a migrant shelter.

So the jacket was a big ol' middle finger and "fuck you" to the immigrants and the people who support their humane treatment.  But what makes this even worse is that there are multiple (and credible) allegations of horrific abuse at these shelters, so Melania's tour, and subsequent conclusion that everything is hunky-dory, is a lot of whitewash over a situation that is about as nausea-inducing as anything I've read recently.

Let's start with one fact; these children are not criminals.  They were brought across the border by their parents.  Whether the parents deserve jail and/or deportation is a discussion we can have.  But these children are guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I won't go into all the allegations, but if you check out the link you can read about the charges that are being levied against not just one, but dozens, of shelters.  Here are a few, all of which are from children under the age of 16:

• forcible administration of psychotropic and/or addictive drugs, without the consent either of the child or the parent
• forcible restraint -- including one allegation of a child being strapped hand and foot to a chair and left there for two days
• manhandling that left kids with multiple severe bruises
• ridicule of children for being Hispanic or for speaking poor English
• children being gagged or having a cloth bag put over their heads to silence them (there is already a court case regarding a child who died of asphyxiation during restraint; it's been ruled a homicide)
• children being pepper sprayed in the eyes -- one child says it has happened to him seven times

Workers at these detention facilities say all this happens because the kids are "acting out."  Let me ask you a question that I'd like you to give an honest answer to; if you were fourteen years old, were separated from your parents, kept in unsanitary conditions (many of which have no air conditioning), were ridiculed and abused and drugged, wouldn't you act out?  Wouldn't you fight back?  Wouldn't you try to escape?

I sure as hell would.

One fifteen-year-old, who fled Guatemala to escape an abusive father and child labor, said, "The detention center makes me feel like an animal.  The conditions at the detention center are terrible."  A boy from Honduras said, "I want us to be treated like human beings."  An eleven-year-old named Maricela said, "I do not feel safe here.  I would rather go back to Honduras and live on the streets than be at Shiloh [Treatment Center in Virginia]."

Shortly after giving her sworn statement about the abuse she and others have received, Maricela was transferred from Shiloh to another facility.  Her current whereabouts are unknown.

Elissa Steglich, a clinical professor of psychology at the University of Texas Immigration Clinic in Austin, is unequivocal.  She said, "We've ensured there will be lifelong damage to these children."

Remember what I started with?  The children are not criminals.  But we're treating them like they are.  Worse, actually.  At least there are standards in prison to make sure the guards aren't abusing the prisoners, and the prisoners have at least some recourse if abuse occurs.

Here?  What recourse do these nameless, faceless children have?

What we've heard from the powers-that-be is nothing more than lip service.  The Republican leadership -- which has been shouting "all lives matter" for the last two years, and based their anti-abortion stance on "compassion for the poor children" for a hell of a lot longer than that -- has shown that in their view human rights begin at conception and end at birth.

And if you have brown skin, you probably don't even get that grace period.

It seems to me that we've reached a critical point, where we are establishing who we have become as a nation, whether we will be true to the idealistic "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free" that appears on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, or if we've decided that our identity is something darker, more insular, more selfish.  If we choose the latter, there may be no turning back.

So, to go all the way back to what started this post: yeah, Melania, it's pretty obvious you, and your husband, and your husband's hand-picked leadership, "don't really care."  You may as well stop pretending you do.

As for me, I care a lot.  And I can only hope that the fact we are currently being led by a family of lying, cruel, narcissistic grifters is not going to mark the end of America the Compassionate in the history books of the coming centuries.

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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.

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.

Evidence blindness

It is a sad fact of human nature that it is far easier to delude people than to un-delude them.

Once someone has accepted some counterfactual stance, you have all sorts of things working against you.  There's confirmation bias (the tendency of people to accept ideas they find appealing with little to no evidence), the backfire effect (the baffling fact that presenting people with evidence contrary to their beliefs can make them double-down on the belief in question), and the induction of cynicism when people discover they've been lied to (making them disbelieve everything they hear, including you).

This is why it was disheartening, but also unsurprising, to read the survey conducted by Public Policy Polling that found that among the Trump voters surveyed, over half said that their support for the president's executive order on immigration was at least in part due to the horrors of "the Bowling Green Massacre."

I would have thought by now that everyone on the planet Earth who has not been in a cave for the last three weeks would know that the "Bowling Green Massacre" is an invention of Kellyanne Conway, the Trump spokesperson whose grasp of the truth is so tenuous that if she said the sky was blue, the chance of it being some other color is nearly 100%.  She talked about the mythical attacks by Iraqi immigrants in Bowling Green, Kentucky on three separate occasions (so much for it being a "slip"), despite the fact that no one in Bowling Green has the slightest clue what she's talking about.

Of course, the problem is, the people who were already primed to believe her accepted it without question, and even after it was shown that she had lied (three times) it was easier for them to conclude that everyone else was wrong.

Or, of course, that the lying, crooked media had covered up the story of the Massacre.  Just two days ago a Facebook friend of mine posted a screed about how she and her husband are cancelling their subscription to the local newspaper because "all they print is lies" and "it totally has a liberal bias" and "it does nothing but slander the president."  (And allow me to add that we're not talking The New York Times or The Washington Post here; this is a town newspaper in the Deep South.  Rampant liberal bias down there, apparently, despite the fact that the whole area is as hardcore Republican as you can get.)

[Public Domain image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Fact resistance is getting to be a real problem.  For example, ask most people -- actually, on either side of the aisle, because I think this is a common misconception -- why we should restrict immigration.  Usually the first answer is "jobs," but a close second is "crime."  Those immigrants are poor, and besides, they don't have our 'Murikan sense of morals and ethics.  Invite 'em in, and watch the violent crime rise.

However, the facts don't support this.  Actually, they support the opposite contention, as counterintuitive as that might be.  A study just released last week in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, which looked at the last forty years of trends, found that there is no connection between immigrants and higher crime rate.  Lead author Robert Adelman, professor of sociology at the University of Buffalo, said:

Facts are critical in the current political environment.  The empirical evidence in this study and other related research shows little support for the notion that more immigrants lead to more crime...  Our research shows strong and stable evidence that, on average, across U.S. metropolitan areas crime and immigration are not linked.  The results show that immigration does not increase assaults and, in fact, robberies, burglaries, larceny, and murder are lower in places where immigration levels are higher... 

This is a study across time and across place and the evidence is clear.  We are not claiming that immigrants are never involved in crime.  What we are explaining is that communities experiencing demographic change driven by immigration patterns do not experience significant increases in any of the kinds of crime we examined.  And in many cases, crime was either stable or actually declined in communities that incorporated many immigrants.

The problem is, it is unlikely that this will make any difference at all.  The connection between immigrants and crime has been so tightly welded in the American mind by people like Conway and her boss, Donald Trump (think of his repeated use of the phrase "bad hombres" to refer to Mexicans), that a little thing like forty years' worth of data won't make the slightest dent in their certainty.  It seems like immigrants would be likely to commit crimes; therefore it must be true.

Evidence be damned.

I wish I had some kind of clever idea what to do about this.  The fact that a dishonest spokesperson for the current administration has a significant fraction of Americans believing in a violent attack that never happened makes me wonder if it can be fixed.  It'd be nice if people were more prone to looking at the facts and saying, "Well, okay, I guess I was wrong, then," but the sad truth is that people are way more likely to say, "Nope.  Nope nope nope.  These 'facts' have to be wrong."

All of which reinforces one thing in my mind; the most important thing we need to be doing in public schools is to teach critical thinking.  Information, long the currency of educators, needs to take second seat to thinking skills and methods for evaluating evidence.  Hell, the kids in my biology class can look up the definition of "endoplasmic reticulum" in twenty seconds flat on their cellphones if they need to know it.  What can't be looked up is skepticism as a way of thinking, the ability to question what you're reading or hearing, the understanding that media is inherently slanted and if all you do is listen to MSNBC or Fox News you're not getting the whole story -- that's the stuff they need to have solidly under their belt before they go out into the real world.

And become the next generation of voters.  Which privilege, it is devoutly to be wished, they will exercise more carefully than the current generation has.