What effects does immigration have on society? Some are obvious and can be seen with the naked eye. Immigrants may look different. They may dress differently and have different habits.
Other effects are less obvious and must be studied using social science. Do immigrants commit more or less crime than natives? Do they pay more in taxes than they take in public services? Do they shift the culture one way or the other? These questions are not straightforward to answer. You need to get your hands on the right data and enough of it. You need to use appropriate statistical methods. And even then, a definitive answer may elude you.
Different researchers studying the same question with the same data often get different, sometimes very different, results. This was shown in a 2022 paper by Nate Breznau and colleagues, which I covered in the Daily Sceptic.
Seventy-three teams of researchers were invited to take part in a study on the extent to which idiosyncratic decisions by researchers influence the results of their analyses. All teams were given the same data and asked to test the same hypothesis, namely “that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public”.
When Breznau and colleagues ran the numbers, they found that some teams had reported a negative effect of immigration on support for social policies, others had reported a positive effect, and still others had reported no effect either way.
It’s worth noting that they somewhat overstated the variation in reported results: none of the positive or negative effects reported by any of the teams was particularly large. Still, it is interesting that different researchers analysing the same question using the same data came up with not merely different but actually opposing answers.
All this raises the question of what factors influenced the idiosyncratic decisions that led to such divergent results. One obvious candidate is ideology. Perhaps the pro-immigration researchers were more likely to find a positive effect, and the anti-immigration researchers were more likely to find a negative effect. In this case, a positive effect makes immigration look good because most people are in favour of social policies.
In a new paper, Breznau and a colleague, George Borjas, examine whether ideology did influence those idiosyncratic decisions. All the researchers who took part had been asked, prior to receiving the data, whether “laws on immigration of foreigner should be relaxed or made tougher”. Breznau and Borjas looked to see whether there was any association between researchers’ answers to this question and the results they subsequently reported.
They found that there was. Researchers who said immigration should be “relaxed” were more likely to report positive effects, while those who said it should be “made tougher” were more likely to report negative ones. Ideology had an influence.
‘So what?’ you might say. ‘Some researchers lean one way. Some lean the other way. And it all cancels out, right?’ Well, not quite. As the chart above shows, there were substantially more pro-immigration researchers than anti-immigration researchers. The ‘net ideology’ of those who took part was not neutral but moderately pro-immigration. And this reflects the pattern in academia more broadly.
Now, if ideology didn’t have any influence, this wouldn’t matter. But Breznau and Borjas have shown it does have an influence. Which means that people studying immigration are more likely to make decisions that tilt the analysis toward pro-immigration findings than they are to do the opposite. Bear this in mind when reading about their work in the newspapers.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
It’s not rocket science. Just look at the countries and civilisations they come from, at how those countries are, economically and socially. Countries are made by people. There’s no such thing as magic dirt. I think most people realise this – some are more honest than others about admitting it.
Sociological equivalent of a corollary of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics – The Observer is Part of the Experiment.
Except sociology doesn’t deal in fundamental particles, it deals in people, the observers are biased and the experiments are loaded.
Go figure, Home Office and Hope Not Hate.
When discussing the effect of immigration or of certain classes of immigrants on public costs and fiscal revenue the calculations seem to only consider current expenditure. I have not yet seen a publicly available analysis of capital costs, inherited infrastructure and the accompanying aspect of queueing.
“Wow – staggering stats I have just received from the Acting National Statistician.
There are 494,000 people living in the country, born outside of the UK, who are currently unemployed.
For January to March 2025, the estimated number of people who were not born in the UK and were unemployed for more than one year was 102,000.
Almost half a million unemployed foreign nationals (excluding Brits born overseas) – what are they doing here? What are they contributing? On what visa?
If you are in our country and not upholding your end of the deal, then you should go home.” Rupert Lowe
But apparently we need immigrants to do the jobs that the locals won’t…
When the benefit sucking unemployed want at least £40,000 a year to work you can understand the appeal of cheap labour but fail to understand why the government is not making work more attractive by reducing taxes and cutting benefits.
It’s the miracle of Socialism!
I wouldn’t call it ideology it is more the hope that with a suffifcient number of immigrants the local culture will be overwhelmed. This gives rise to two positive outcomes in their view. It removes the local British culture which has always been hostile to them. I remember much talk about student-bashing. It also overwhelms the health and social security and education systems – these things cannot co-exist with mass immigration. It sounds paranoid but this has been a documented strategy since the 1970s and it is still widely thought to be effective as a revolutionary tool.
Denmark has just raised the retirement age to 70 to pay for the immigrants who were meant to pay for people’s retirement.
Lets be honest work until you’re dead was the only possible outcome. Logan’s Run is like paradise compared to this. You are seeing in front of your eyes your standard of living being reduced to that of the Third World. They would argue that someone has to manage decline and that they tried to do it the most painless way possible. Maybe the masses cottoned on but it was a little too late, which is exactly what they anticipated. Ninety percent of this whole agenda is about trying to cover up and distort the shortages that are coming for purely natural cyclical reasons. Just look at the rise in rice prices which is affecting many governments right now. We are not going to be able to sustain for much longer a global population anywhere near 8 billion.
Given Starmers affinity with every other country than Britain (England) how come I did not see BBC camera shots of him cheering Zimbabwe from the members stand at Trent Bridge.