Probably because some people consider 2nd generation as still immigrants
Yay- this is a very useful and easy to view data representation, done without unecessary animation or other elements that make it difficult to interpret.
I wish it included UK, as perceptions about immigrants fuels such a consequential vote on Brexit.
So there aren’t fiftyleven million immigrants coming over the Mexican border every single day?
Another good one is ‘how people think wealth is distributed in their country versus how it actually is’
Good example of confirmation bias. People will perform mental gymnastics to avoid having to confront and change their beliefs.
More accurately, Americans misunderstand the *distribution* of immigrants. While it’s in reality only 15% in the US, fully ⅓ of all workers in California are immigrants. Most immigrants in the US live in a small number of states/cities, locations that are pretty solidly pro-immigrant.
Data on Argentina could be really misleading, getting papers here it’s really easy so they won’t count as immigrants right away.
Also there is a big chunk of population that are the first generation born in this country but still unadapted, so they still immigrants at the eyes of most people.
Finally, there are places (specially big cities) flooded with immigrants for different reasons, that could interfere with statistics.
Who the hell thinks 1 in 3 people in the United States weren’t born here? US at least seems crazy who are they polling? Trump supporters.
As an Argentinian, there is no way one person here thinks 28% are immigrants, that’s almost 1 every 3 people. Even though Argentina has very soft immigration laws, 1/3 of your population not being born in the country would be absurd for any country to have, unless your entire population had a massive increase I guess.
I downloaded the report because I was skeptical of the answers from Argentinians, 28% is an absurdly high number for any reasonable person to provide so I thought that maybe the question was ambiguous and led to the people think that 2nd generation immigrans were still immigrants, some people may not be aware that an immigrant is someone that has to have born in a different country.
The question in the report was written as follows
>What percentage of your country’s population do you think immigrants (i.e., people born in another country) represent?
They even put the “i.e.” to filter out the people that didn’t know the difference lmao.
I’m flabbergasted. How one person may truly think that 1/3 of the population in my country is immigrant. It’s an absolutely absurd number for any country to have, let alone a 3rd world country with shitty economy. Most people in the world can’t pinpoint Argentina in a map.
While the statistic itself is interesting, the interpretation of the data is lacking.
Countries (and in this case, Our World in Data) have different ideas of what constitutes an immigrant compared to their citizens. I was born abroad and lived in India for a while before coming to Germany, most people here, myself included, would consider me an immigrant. Yet, by law, Im not, because I was always a German citizen.
By the way, 29,4% of the German population have “Migrationshintergrund” (they or their parents immigrated). Since the debate on migration usually revolves around people with this status, not necessarily people who migrated themselves, the estimation as seen in the graph seems reasonsble.
Singaporean’s estimate – 20%? Reality – 40%
I have two thoughts on this data. One, Australia was actually pretty close! And two, how on earth do the Japanes think 10% of their population are immigrants when their country is famous for not allowing immigration?
Do they count tourists and people who unofficially live there on visa or never plan to leave permanently immigrants (for example visa says can only stay for 2 months but then they book a day trip to another country, or they got a 4 year student visa and plan on hooking up with a local or finding a job that will sponsor them). Because on the books they aren’t immigrants as they are “just visiting”
I do believe that if the surveys were done in big cities, this makes a lot of sense. For example, let’s take Germany, if most of the people that answered this were from Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt and so on, where the local average is much higher then the national average (not confirmed, but I believe this is a good guess, as to what I’m seeing around me), that explains the results very easily.
The study is doing a major mistake As per the study “an immigrant being defined as a person born in a country other than the one in which they currently live” Do they also count illegal immigrants in that number (which the number is always unknown) and how about refugees?
Why the question? The study refers only to legal documented immigrants.
for US and Italy If you account illegal and refugees the number will be much closer to what people estimate. The best example is Poland. The official number shows 2%. Poland is ~38mil population. At least 1 million are Ukrainians refugees. that alone is more than 2%. If you account the other immigrants that number will climb higher . Maybe it will not reach 15% but it would be a lot closer to probably 10%
For those who don’t know the math, 15% of 340m is 51 million for the US.
Can I have how people in the first survey defined immigrant, and how immigrant was defined in the calculation?
I imagine many (even if wrongfully) define children of immigrants as immigrants. Though these may not technically be immigrants, if we account for the fact that people are including them in mind I believe we will find interesting results
I really dislike posts where you force people to your own website. Just share the plot man
Curious if their samples were representative of whole populations, i.e contained people from different regions in each country. Cities tend to have higher immigrant populations so if they mainly polled urban residents their estimates might have been accurate to their own neighborhoods.
This is almost making my head hurt as an American. 33% is presumably the average of what multiple people said. That means that there is a non insignificant of people that think *more* than 1 out of every 3 people in the US are immigrants. Do these people not ever leave their homes and actually meet other people? I’m having a hard time grasping how anyone could think half of the people in the US are immigrants
It’s easy for US to overestimate because immigrants/aliens here either:
A): Occupy all public areas in a city
B): Suddenly double (or more) a small city/towns population
Well, how do you count as migrants? Foreign people who hold citizenship counts? 2nd generation migrants count?i think most countries that overestimate number of immigrants is because they put together all who are not native to their country. E.g. germans will count 4th generation Turkish people as immigrants even tough they probably dont speak turkish anymore and are holding german passport
People who think that 30% of the people in the US are immigrants don’t understand percentages. Seriously, you think one out of every three people is an immigrant?
Where was the “perception” study conducted? At a place where the statistics were tabulated or equally across the nation?
It’s understandable that people overstimate how many immigrants live in their country, given their over-representation in the media.
TLDR: The media are racist, not the public.
30% of Australians were born overseas.
Let’s say they took data what people think in big cities and then confronted with “real” numbers? Btw how to count illegal ones?
#WHAT!?!?
you mean to tell me that it isn’t true when Donold Tromp tells us that millions of illegals are coming in every day?????
Now do Canada. The right leaning folks here are going nuts over how immigrants (South Asians) are taking over the country.
If you look up the population totals and compare with the immigrant population totals, at least in the US, the current numbers are basically the same as they have been for the past 100+ years.
Not nearly an invasion, more a status quo.
People now equate illegals to “immigrants”.
But for US does that include illegal immigrants?
The fun part is being an immigrant that looks like the majority of people in my new country and I have their accent too, nobody suspects I’m an immigrant and they freely talk shit to me about immigrants.
No matter how many immigrants they overestimate by, I’m always missed in the count.
I’m a stealthigrant.
Here in Japan I think many people confuse foreign temp workers as immigrants, although some eventually do become one
only post in the account hmm
It would be useful to know where was this asked. If you asked this here where I live (Madrid), 50% wouldn’t be farfetched. Migrants don’t usually go to rural areas. If you are asking this in the more metropolitan areas while asking for a national average, people are bound to err by excess a lot.
Argentina and Poland are hilarious, like who the fuck realistically wants to move there?
I guess people perceive later generations as immigrants when they wouldn’t be counted here.
Poland is insane. How can you be this far off? Everyone should have some easy reference to get it approximately right, like the amount of non polish kids in a class or kindergarten.
Shows how powerful radcist xenophobic propaganda is, can’t speak on the other countries but I imagine the precieved number would be a lot lower if fox News and Republicans didn’t spend millions to convince Americans they are being “replaced”
42 comments
Probably because some people consider 2nd generation as still immigrants
Yay- this is a very useful and easy to view data representation, done without unecessary animation or other elements that make it difficult to interpret.
I wish it included UK, as perceptions about immigrants fuels such a consequential vote on Brexit.
So there aren’t fiftyleven million immigrants coming over the Mexican border every single day?
Another good one is ‘how people think wealth is distributed in their country versus how it actually is’
Good example of confirmation bias. People will perform mental gymnastics to avoid having to confront and change their beliefs.
More accurately, Americans misunderstand the *distribution* of immigrants. While it’s in reality only 15% in the US, fully ⅓ of all workers in California are immigrants. Most immigrants in the US live in a small number of states/cities, locations that are pretty solidly pro-immigrant.
Data on Argentina could be really misleading, getting papers here it’s really easy so they won’t count as immigrants right away.
Also there is a big chunk of population that are the first generation born in this country but still unadapted, so they still immigrants at the eyes of most people.
Finally, there are places (specially big cities) flooded with immigrants for different reasons, that could interfere with statistics.
Who the hell thinks 1 in 3 people in the United States weren’t born here? US at least seems crazy who are they polling? Trump supporters.
As an Argentinian, there is no way one person here thinks 28% are immigrants, that’s almost 1 every 3 people. Even though Argentina has very soft immigration laws, 1/3 of your population not being born in the country would be absurd for any country to have, unless your entire population had a massive increase I guess.
I downloaded the report because I was skeptical of the answers from Argentinians, 28% is an absurdly high number for any reasonable person to provide so I thought that maybe the question was ambiguous and led to the people think that 2nd generation immigrans were still immigrants, some people may not be aware that an immigrant is someone that has to have born in a different country.
The question in the report was written as follows
>What percentage of your country’s population do you think immigrants (i.e., people born in another country) represent?
They even put the “i.e.” to filter out the people that didn’t know the difference lmao.
I’m flabbergasted. How one person may truly think that 1/3 of the population in my country is immigrant. It’s an absolutely absurd number for any country to have, let alone a 3rd world country with shitty economy. Most people in the world can’t pinpoint Argentina in a map.
While the statistic itself is interesting, the interpretation of the data is lacking.
Countries (and in this case, Our World in Data) have different ideas of what constitutes an immigrant compared to their citizens. I was born abroad and lived in India for a while before coming to Germany, most people here, myself included, would consider me an immigrant. Yet, by law, Im not, because I was always a German citizen.
By the way, 29,4% of the German population have “Migrationshintergrund” (they or their parents immigrated). Since the debate on migration usually revolves around people with this status, not necessarily people who migrated themselves, the estimation as seen in the graph seems reasonsble.
Singaporean’s estimate – 20%? Reality – 40%
I have two thoughts on this data. One, Australia was actually pretty close! And two, how on earth do the Japanes think 10% of their population are immigrants when their country is famous for not allowing immigration?
Do they count tourists and people who unofficially live there on visa or never plan to leave permanently immigrants (for example visa says can only stay for 2 months but then they book a day trip to another country, or they got a 4 year student visa and plan on hooking up with a local or finding a job that will sponsor them). Because on the books they aren’t immigrants as they are “just visiting”
The underlying data is also interesting. [Here](https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/migration?hideControls=false&Metric=International+immigrants&Period=Total+number&Sub-Metric=Per+capita+%2F+Share+of+population&country=USA~DEU~FRA~GBR~SYR~TUR~YEM~IND~CAN) is a world map showing immigrant shares for all countries from the same source
I do believe that if the surveys were done in big cities, this makes a lot of sense. For example, let’s take Germany, if most of the people that answered this were from Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt and so on, where the local average is much higher then the national average (not confirmed, but I believe this is a good guess, as to what I’m seeing around me), that explains the results very easily.
The study is doing a major mistake
As per the study “an immigrant being defined as a person born in a country other than the one in which they currently live”
Do they also count illegal immigrants in that number (which the number is always unknown) and how about refugees?
Why the question? The study refers only to legal documented immigrants.
for US and Italy If you account illegal and refugees the number will be much closer to what people estimate.
The best example is Poland. The official number shows 2%. Poland is ~38mil population.
At least 1 million are Ukrainians refugees. that alone is more than 2%. If you account the other immigrants that number will climb higher . Maybe it will not reach 15% but it would be a lot closer to probably 10%
For those who don’t know the math, 15% of 340m is 51 million for the US.
Can I have how people in the first survey defined immigrant, and how immigrant was defined in the calculation?
I imagine many (even if wrongfully) define children of immigrants as immigrants. Though these may not technically be immigrants, if we account for the fact that people are including them in mind I believe we will find interesting results
I really dislike posts where you force people to your own website. Just share the plot man
Curious if their samples were representative of whole populations, i.e contained people from different regions in each country. Cities tend to have higher immigrant populations so if they mainly polled urban residents their estimates might have been accurate to their own neighborhoods.
This is almost making my head hurt as an American. 33% is presumably the average of what multiple people said. That means that there is a non insignificant of people that think *more* than 1 out of every 3 people in the US are immigrants. Do these people not ever leave their homes and actually meet other people? I’m having a hard time grasping how anyone could think half of the people in the US are immigrants
It’s easy for US to overestimate because immigrants/aliens here either:
A): Occupy all public areas in a city
B): Suddenly double (or more) a small city/towns population
Well, how do you count as migrants? Foreign people who hold citizenship counts? 2nd generation migrants count?i think most countries that overestimate number of immigrants is because they put together all who are not native to their country. E.g. germans will count 4th generation Turkish people as immigrants even tough they probably dont speak turkish anymore and are holding german passport
People who think that 30% of the people in the US are immigrants don’t understand percentages. Seriously, you think one out of every three people is an immigrant?
Where was the “perception” study conducted? At a place where the statistics were tabulated or equally across the nation?
It’s understandable that people overstimate how many immigrants live in their country, given their over-representation in the media.
TLDR: The media are racist, not the public.
30% of Australians were born overseas.
Let’s say they took data what people think in big cities and then confronted with “real” numbers? Btw how to count illegal ones?
#WHAT!?!?
you mean to tell me that it isn’t true when Donold Tromp tells us that millions of illegals are coming in every day?????
Now do Canada. The right leaning folks here are going nuts over how immigrants (South Asians) are taking over the country.
If you look up the population totals and compare with the immigrant population totals, at least in the US, the current numbers are basically the same as they have been for the past 100+ years.
Not nearly an invasion, more a status quo.
People now equate illegals to “immigrants”.
But for US does that include illegal immigrants?
The fun part is being an immigrant that looks like the majority of people in my new country and I have their accent too, nobody suspects I’m an immigrant and they freely talk shit to me about immigrants.
No matter how many immigrants they overestimate by, I’m always missed in the count.
I’m a stealthigrant.
Here in Japan I think many people confuse foreign temp workers as immigrants, although some eventually do become one
only post in the account hmm
It would be useful to know where was this asked. If you asked this here where I live (Madrid), 50% wouldn’t be farfetched. Migrants don’t usually go to rural areas. If you are asking this in the more metropolitan areas while asking for a national average, people are bound to err by excess a lot.
Argentina and Poland are hilarious, like who the fuck realistically wants to move there?
I guess people perceive later generations as immigrants when they wouldn’t be counted here.
Poland is insane. How can you be this far off? Everyone should have some easy reference to get it approximately right, like the amount of non polish kids in a class or kindergarten.
Shows how powerful radcist xenophobic propaganda is, can’t speak on the other countries but I imagine the precieved number would be a lot lower if fox News and Republicans didn’t spend millions to convince Americans they are being “replaced”
As a Native American, I find this inaccurate.
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