Good Economics for Hard Times

Racist alarmism, driven by a fear of the intermingling of races and the myth of purity, doesn’t heed facts. A survey of 22,500 native respondents from six countries where immigration has been a defining political issue (France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States) revealed massive misperceptions about the number and composition of immigrants.3 For instance, in Italy, the actual share of immigrants in the population is 10 percent, but the average perception of that share is 26 percent.

Restoring human dignity to its central place,

conversation must start by acknowledging the deep human desire for dignity and human contact, and to treat it not as a distraction, but as a better way to understand each other,