Political beliefs influence how scientists assess the consequences of immigration. Researchers with strong pro or anti opinions draw different conclusions from the same data about the effects of migration on public trust and social cohesion.
Two researchers wrote this down Science Advances. American immigration economist George Borjas from Harvard and Nate Breznau from the German Institute for Adult Education analyzed an earlier experiment in which a large group of social scientists had to assess a dataset on the effects of migration.
The group of 158 researchers, divided into 71 teams, was presented with an identical set of data. The hypothesis they received was that immigration reduces public confidence in social policy. The participants – mainly sociologists (55.4 percent) and political scientists (27.4 percent) – had previously been asked about their views on migration, in particular whether they thought immigration laws should become stricter or not. The teams’ findings subsequently turned out to differ widely, with none of the teams coming up with exactly the same conclusions. However, according to the authors of the experiment, there were no indications in their statistical model that the participants’ beliefs played a significant role in this.
Trust and cohesion
Borjas and Breznau now conclude in their further analysis that it is. They believe they have found a clear correlation between results and political views of participating scientists. The results appear to diverge furthest between researchers with the strongest pro- or anti-immigration views. The first group saw the most negative effects of migration on public trust in government and social cohesion, the second group the least.
According to the authors, this does not mean that participants manipulated data or used models incorrectly. Consciously or unconsciously, they made different choices in the selection or weighing of relevant factors. According to Borjas and Breznau, this mainly concerned five choices, such as aggregating data on public trust (in various areas such as healthcare and employment), determining immigration as stock (percentage of population) or as flow (immigration minus emigration). According to the authors, the study raises “crucial questions about the subjective nature of empirical research.”
A limitation of the study, they note, is that few participants in the original experiment were outright anti-immigration. Of the 71 teams, nine could be designated as such. According to the researchers, this makes the analysis more reliable when it comes to the influence of pro-immigration opinions, but does not alter their general conclusion that “ideology plays a role in the outcomes of research.”
Migration historian Leo Lucassen, director of the International Institute for Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, calls the research “very interesting” and hopes that it will spark discussion, but he does have comments. For example, he misses attention to the political framing of the debate on migration. “It makes a lot of difference how politicians talk about migration. It may be that some researchers pay more attention to this than others and that this influences their results. But is that bias? You could also say: they take a broader view.” Social factors such as austerity in the welfare state can also play a role. Apart from that, he says, it does of course matter what you are going to investigate and how exactly, “but that applies to all scientists.” He also lacks an eye for this broader context in earlier work by Borjas, such as that on the effect of migration on wages for low-skilled labor.
Breaking ‘taboo’
Historian Steije Hofhuis, who conducts research on migration in Berlin, is “very happy” with the research, which, according to him, shows that “research on migration is sensitive to ideology, even with the best intentions and with defensible choices.” He points out that Borjas and Breznau do not doubt the integrity of the scientists examined and hopes that their analysis will help break the “taboo” on scientific debate on migration. Independent researcher Jan van de Beek, who made a name for himself on the political right flank with criticism of migration policy and his book Migration magnet Netherlands (2024), when asked if he wanted to respond, he gave a short and concise no.
The Cuban-American George Borjas (1950), professor at Harvard, is a renowned immigration economist known as a critic of low-skilled immigration and ‘political correctness’ in science. Borjas, who came to the US from Cuba with his mother when he was 12, has published extensively about the effects of immigration on the economic position of low-skilled Americans. His book We Wanted Workers (2016) is a critique of the “immigration narrative”. On his blog he spoke out in favor of stricter immigration rules and taxes on companies that profit from cheap labor by migrants, but against “inhumane” mass deportations and against building a wall on the border with Mexico.
In 2017, Borjas became the winner center of controversy about his analysis of Cuban migration in 1980 to the US that would have had a negative effect on the wages of American workers. That article attracted a lot of substantive criticism, but was approvingly cited by then-President Trump in support of his plan to restrict immigration. Borjas also received sporadic support from progressive quarters, from academics who felt that the left in the US was wrongly avoiding the discussion about the effects of migration.
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