A Lesson From Brexit: On Immigration, Feelings Trump Facts

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nytimes.com

A Lesson From Brexit: On

Immigration, Feelings Trump Facts
Amanda Taub

Many citizens, particularly those who have suffered under the

economic pressures of globalization, express their anxiety over
these changes by focusing on another form of change: foreigners in
their midst. Halting immigration, even if the actual effect is to worsen
their own economic situation, seems like a way of staving off those
larger changes.
Democratic governments have shown over and over that they have
no answer for this anxiety, even as the stakes, in Europe and
globally, continue mounting.
Facts Cannot Compete With Feelings
The economist Michael Clemens has called immigration a trilliondollar bill lying on the sidewalk: a tremendous increase in wealth
waiting to be seized by any country that is attractive to immigrants
and willing to welcome them. Loosening restrictions on global labor
flows, he argues, would offer a bigger boost to global economies
than would dropping all restrictions on trade and capital.
But evidence does not vote people do. And it turns out that the

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gains of immigration often feel elusive, whereas the costs can be

perceived as heavier than they really are.
A poll released June 20 by Ipsos/MORI showed that 47 percent of
voters planning to support Brexit said immigration had been bad for
Britains economy. Never mind that a study by Britains National
Institute of Economic and Social Research found that immigration
had increased the countrys gross domestic product and had
lowered the cost of government services like health care and
pensions, which in turn helped reduce taxes.
To be sure, just because immigration is a net positive for the country
as a whole does not mean that it benefits all of its people. The
geographic breakdown of Thursdays vote showed that the regions
where the Leave campaign fared the best were areas that tend to
have few immigrants but also lower wages, according to analysis
conducted by Torsten Bell, the director of the Resolution
Foundation, a British think tank.
This suggests that economic anxiety might be expressed as
anti-immigration sentiment even by Britons who have not lost jobs to
foreigners.
You tend to see anti-immigrant sentiment in areas hit by changing
economic circumstances or global crises, said Alexandra Cirone, a
fellow at the London School of Economics. Framing this
globalization problem as immigration can also tug on the
heartstrings of potential voters, regardless of the actual facts.
How Economic Pressures and Demographic Change Blur

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So why do people take their economic anxiety out on faceless

foreigners? The right answer is probably the simplest one:
Immigrants do change their new countries in a million tiny but
noticeable ways, even if taking local jobs may not be one of them.
Those changes can still be unsettling, even though many changes
are undeniably positive.
For people who are already destabilized by economic strain, those
social changes contribute to a feeling that something precious is
being lost, that their country is turning away from the things they
value and toward a new and unfamiliar future.
The Leave campaign spoke to those anxieties by arguing that
immigration (which, it sometimes implied, would be nonwhite) had
brought Britain to the breaking point. British tabloids covered
crimes by asylum-seekers in lurid detail and warned that refugees
were a swarm that could swamp the country.
That phenomenon is hardly limited to Britain. In the United States,
net immigration from Mexico has been at zero since 2010, but
Republican primary voters still cheered Donald J. Trumps promise
to build a wall on the southern border as though it would solve
whatever was worrying them.

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At a pub in London on Friday. Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Brian Klaas, also a fellow at the London School of Economics, said

there were many parallels between supporters of Mr. Trump and the
U.K. Independence Party, a prime backer of Brexit.
Both might be a working-class person who has felt completely
dislocated and left behind by the global economy, Mr. Klaas said.
Both feel that they have been left behind by globalization, and they
have both determined that the problem is not just immigration, but
also a shadowy government bureaucracy far away.
In Australia, rising anti-immigration sentiment has focused
especially on refugees who arrive via Southeast Asia, often
disparaged as boat people. The countrys leadership, under
growing popular pressure, created a system of offshore detention
centers to warehouse them indefinitely rather than allow them onto
Australian shores. These centers have been accused of abuses
including rape, assault and child sexual abuse.
When Anti-Immigrant Backlash Is Expressed at the Polls
Anti-immigrant backlash can play out in several ways. Immigrants
may experience xenophobic attacks or be endangered by legal

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limbo. But the consequences can also be much broader.

Brexit, of course, has shown that there can be severe economic
risks. But there are political risks as well. In Hungary, for instance,
anti-immigrant sentiment has buoyed President Viktor Orbans
popularity, as well as that of the far-right Jobbik party. Mr. Orban has
been criticized for restrictions on press freedom and judicial
independence.
In Greece, a platform of open hostility to foreigners and slogans like
Greece belongs to the Greeks have made the neo-fascist Golden
Dawn the third-biggest party in Parliament. The party won a
half-million votes in the September election, even though its most
prominent leaders were on trial for murder at the time.
A relatively new body of social science research portrays a group of
authoritarians who are dispersed across demographics but desire
conformity, order and social norms. These can be activated, as the
scholars describe it, when they feel threatened by social change,
and then will seek harsh, punitive policies that target outsiders and
restore the status quo.
As Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at New York
Universitys Stern School of Business, put it: Its as though a button
is pushed on their forehead that says, In case of moral threat, lock
down the borders, kick out those who are different and punish those
who are morally deviant.
Experts on this phenomenon say it helps explain the seemingly
sudden support, in the United States, for Mr. Trump and his

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proposals for mass deportations and a ban on all Muslim

immigration.
In other words, social change and economic stress exactly what
many pro-Brexit communities have been experiencing in recent
years often lead to a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment.
Globalization is not going away, and neither are the changes that it
brings, including the rise in migration and the division of societies
into economic winners and losers. The turmoil created by Brexit may
itself become the source of more change, more stress, more
instability.
Correction: June 26, 2016
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article
misstated the day on which Britain voted on a referendum on
whether to leave the European Union. It was Thursday, not Friday.

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