Migration fearmongering

How it works

How many people a country takes in, who they are, how its borders are policed and how newcomers are expected to fit in: these are real policy questions with real costs and benefits, and reasonable people land in different places. The fearmongering is not the opinion. It is the toolkit used to make sure you never get to the opinion calmly.

The toolkit has five tools. Numbers without a base rate: “40,000 arrived” sounds different next to a population of ten million, and different again if last year was 60,000, so the comparison is left out. Crime without a base rate: a crime committed by a foreigner becomes a category; the identical crime committed by a local is just a crime. Your mental tally updates in one direction only, which is what a tally that only counts one way is for. Military vocabulary: invasion, flood, wave, army. Nobody declares war on a wave; the word does the declaring. Recycled images: a crowd photo from a Budapest railway station in 2015, from Italy, or from another continent resurfaces with a new caption and this week’s date. The travelling story: the same tale (a girl, a gang, a cover-up) appears in Germany, then Sweden, then Italy, with local names swapped in.

The best-documented case is the “Lisa case” of January 2016. A thirteen-year-old girl from a Russian-German family in Berlin went missing for a day. Russian state television reported that she had been kidnapped and raped by migrants; Russia’s foreign minister publicly accused the German authorities of a cover-up. Berlin police found that no abduction had taken place, but by then thousands of people had already marched in German cities. EUvsDisinfo has tracked the wider narrative ever since: Europe “destroyed” by migration, the EU “organising” it, fabricated videos of border guards. In Hungary the topic has been a permanent feature of public life since the 2015 Balkan route, so the toolkit is familiar here. The skill is recognising it whoever is holding it.

Example

@border_watch_eu, 2h 3,000 migrants a DAY storming the border right now. Look at this photo. This is an invasion, not “asylum”.

@zsofi_reverse, 1h Reverse image search: that photo is from a train station in September 2015. The border agency’s figure for the whole of last month is lower than your “per day”. Border policy is worth debating, with this year’s numbers and this year’s photos.

Notice that nobody in the thread has argued about policy yet. The first post skipped that stage and went straight to fear; the second simply puts the date back on the photo and the base under the number.

Why it works on you

• Fear does not do maths. A threatening image beats a base rate every time, which is why the image comes first and the number never. See appeal to fear.
• Faces beat statistics. One story about one victim outweighs a table of numbers, even when the table says the opposite. See emotional hijacking.
• It explains everything. Housing, crime, wages, culture, waiting lists: one cause for every worry is a relief, and an explanation that explains everything usually explains nothing. See scapegoating.

What to do

When someone does it to you: ask three things. Out of how many? Compared with when? Where is that photo from? The last one takes thirty seconds with reverse image search. You do not need to have an opinion on migration policy to ask any of them.

When you catch yourself doing it: if a crime story made you think “them”, ask whether you would have remembered the story if the suspect had a local name. If the honest answer is no, the story was not about the crime.

In a comment section: do not call people racist. It ends the conversation and confirms the “they call us names” story. Supply the base rate and the photo’s date, calmly. People with honest worries notice; the rest were not persuadable anyway.

Don’t confuse it with

• Arguing for stricter (or looser) migration policy with current numbers and real photos. That is politics, and it is allowed.
• Reporting a real crime with a real suspect. It becomes fearmongering when the suspect’s origin is the headline and the base rate disappears. See out-of-context photos & videos for the recycled-image half of the toolkit.
• The mirror trick: dismissing every concern about migration as racism also ends the conversation.