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 foreigners 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.
Distribution of immigration attitudes among researchers in the study.
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.
Noah Carl is the Editor of Aporia Magazine.
This piece was first published in The Daily Sceptic, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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. . . or when their bread and butter depend on it . .
Does it really matter when the Government (all parties) take no notice and carry on regardless, being far better informed by MPs and advisors with PPE degrees and no genuine work or life experience.