Statistics are like a bikini, I have often said: they reveal a lot but hide the essential.
A reader from Taiwan corrects The Economist's leftist "nuanced" "perspective", i.e., its "Don't worry, be happy" contention about immigration, legal or otherwise (the magazine rarely, if ever, notices the difference), being about little more than hysteria.
In the wake of the weekly's cover editorial stating that the Democrats' "overriding task is to defeat Mr Trump, and it is a vital
one in which guile and cunning are permitted", here is exactly what the once great weekly newspaper claimed:
Fear has curdled rich-world politics. A man who once advocated banning the Koran could be the next Dutch prime minister. Britain’s Conservative Party is trampling on constitutional norms to try to send asylum-seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda. Donald Trump tells hollering crowds that unlawful immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.
Some perspective is in order. The vast majority of people who migrate do so voluntarily and without drama. For all the talk of record numbers and unprecedented crisis, the share of the world’s people who live outside their country of birth is just 3.6%; it has barely changed since 1960, when it was 3.1%. The numbers forcibly displaced fluctuate wildly, depending on how many wars are raging, but show no clear long-term upward trend.
Chia-Hui Lin explains why The Economist's statistics about 3.1% rising to a mere 3.6% are misleading:
Measuring migrant numbers
“How to detoxify migration politics” (December 23rd) was a thought-provoking piece on an important issue. However, the statistic you cited on international migrants didn’t capture the true growth of this population. In 1960 3.1% of people lived outside their country of birth, you said, and today it is 3.6%, a figure that has “barely changed”. That may be true, but the global population has grown more rapidly from 1960 to the present day. So for context, in 1960, there were approximately 75m international migrants and in 2021 there were 281m, an increase of 275%. This is an alternative measure that may help us appreciate the scale of the migration issue more comprehensively.
Chia-Hui Lin
Taipei, Taiwan
A rise from 3.1% to "just 3.6%" is the MSM outlet's claim — when in reality the rise turns out to be from 3.1% to 275%! Either the gatekeepers are deliberately misleading or they are brainless — in any case, one more reason to despise them…
