Getting the message

 

Gaps between perceived and actual crime rates, by immigrant group in the Netherlands. Dutch people underestimate the crime rate of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean while overestimating the crime rate of lighter-skinned immigrants, including Roma, Turks, and Chinese. The latter don’t benefit from the messaging of modern culture.

 

 

The crime news is unfair to Negroes, on the one hand, in that it emphasizes individual cases instead of statistical proportions [...] and, on the other hand, in that all other aspects of Negro life are neglected in the white press which gives the unfavorable crime news an undue weight. Sometimes the white press "creates" a Negro crime wave where none actually exists. (Myrdal 1944, pp. 655-656)

 

Gunnar Myrdal wrote An American Dilemma during the early years of the civil rights movement. He won over many young educated people, particularly when he argued that prejudice was making Black American criminality seem worse than it really was:

 

The popular belief that all Negroes are inherently criminal operates to increase arrests, and the Negro's lack of political power prevents a white policeman from worrying about how many Negro arrests he makes. Some white criminals have made use of these prejudices to divert suspicion away from themselves onto Negroes: for example, there are many documented cases of white robbers blackening their faces when committing crimes. (Myrdal 1944, p. 968)

 

The theme of the "framed Black man" would be central to a work of fiction, To Kill a Mockingbird. Since its publication in 1960 it has never been out of print. In 2006, it was the book most often mentioned when British librarians were asked: "Which book should every adult read before they die?" (Pauli 2006). Thus, for at least six decades, there has been a social norm of downplaying Black crime.

 

This norm has spread not only within the United States but also to all countries where English is widely used, particularly among the university-educated. In fact, it has spread to countries that never had black slavery or Jim Crow, or even a substantial African minority until recent times.

 

Perceptions and realities of crime in the Netherlands

 

One such country is the Netherlands. In a recent survey, 615 Dutch adults were given the following instructions:

 

There are many different immigrant groups in the Netherlands. For each of the groups, adjust the slider to your estimation of the crime rate relative to Dutch natives. This means you should adjust the slider to two (2) if you think the crime rate of this group is twice that of natives. (Kirkegaard and Gerritsen 2021, p. 4)

 

The actual crime rate of each immigrant group is known from public data published by the government. It was thus possible to measure how much the survey respondents overestimated or underestimated the criminality of each immigrant group. The respondents were chosen by two polling firms. A little over two-thirds of them came from a firm that tended to select younger and more university-educated people.

 

The findings are shown in the above graph. On the y-axis, the crime rate is overestimated at values higher than zero and underestimated at values lower than zero. The x-axis shows the percentage of Muslims in the immigrants' home country.

 

Kirkegaard and Gerritsen (2021, pp. 12-17) argue that the results show a pro-Muslim bias: the respondents tended to underestimate the crime rate of Muslim immigrants. But the bias was not favorable toward all Muslims. In fact, the crime rate was overestimated for immigrants from Indonesia, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and more or less correctly estimated for those from Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. In addition, the respondents showed much larger gaps between perception and reality when estimating the crime rates of different non-Muslim groups.

 

For source countries less than 25% Muslim, the crime rate was greatly underestimated (by a factor of 1 or more) for people from Congo, Angola, Cape Verde, the Netherlands Antilles, and the Dominican Republic. Conversely, it was greatly overestimated for people from Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Mexico.

 

Do you see a pattern? The respondents were underestimating the crime rate of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. Their pro-Black bias was much stronger than their supposed pro-Muslim bias. In fact, it was so strong that it affected their perceptions of different Muslim groups. The respondents perceived North Africans and Somalis as being better than they really are, while perceiving Turks as being worse than they really are.

 

It looks like people in the Netherlands, and probably throughout the West, are being conditioned to view the Black African phenotype positively and the White European phenotype negatively. This bias caused the respondents to overestimate the arrest rate not only of European immigrants but also of any group that deviates too far from the Black African phenotype, including Chinese, Mexicans and, apparently, Roma.(1)

 

What about the respondents who voted for Nationalist parties? You know, the “far right.” Although Nationalist voters were more inclined to overestimate the crime rate of Muslim immigrants, they were just as inclined to underestimate the crime rate of sub-Saharan African and Caribbean immigrants. The pro-Black bias seems very pervasive.

 

 

Note

 

1. Roma in Western Europe identify themselves to the authorities by their country of origin, not by their ethnicity. The Dutch respondents greatly overestimated the crime rate of immigrants from Romania, and the recent wave of Romanian migrants is widely perceived to be mostly Roma:

 

In these figures, the number relating to the Roma is indeterminate since the ethnicity of asylum seekers is not recorded. Nonetheless, the assumption is that the majority of these applications were made by Roma. Certainly, the press is of this view. Articles discussing Czech or Romanian asylum seekers refer frequently to the Roma. As a result, it is easy for the ordinary member of the public to assume that such groups of applicants are of Roma extraction (Stevens 2003, p. 440)

 

 

References

 

Kirkegaard, E.O.W., and A. Gerritsen. (2021). A study of stereotype accuracy in the Netherlands: immigrant crime, occupational sex distribution, and provincial income inequality. OpenPsych, June 14 https://openpsych.net/paper/60/  

https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2021.06.14

 

Myrdal, G. (1944). An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

 

Pauli, M. (2006). Harper Lee tops librarians' must-read list. The Guardian, March 2

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/mar/02/news.michellepauli  

 

Stevens, D.E. (2003). The Migration of the Romanian Roma to the UK: A Contextual Study. European Journal of Migration and Law 5(4): 439-461.

https://doi.org/10.1163/157181603322849343  

 

 

Skin color and the discrimination paradigm

Lighter skin color correlates with higher earnings among new immigrants to the U.S. This correlation holds up even if one controls for English language proficiency, education, occupation before migrating to the United States, and family background. It even holds up among immigrants of the same ethnicity, race, and country of origin. For some social scientists, only one possible explanation remains: discrimination.

The modern American credo blames underachievement by minorities on the majority, specifically through discrimination. The causal relationship may be direct, i.e., some people are consciously assigned to lower-paying jobs simply because of their skin color. Or it may be indirect, as Gunnar Myrdal argued almost seventy years ago in An American Dilemma:

The mechanism that operates here is the “principle of cumulation,” also commonly called the “vicious circle.”

[…] White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually “cause” each other.

[…] If, for example, we assume that for some reason white prejudice could be decreased and discrimination mitigated, this is likely to cause a rise in Negro standards, which may decrease white prejudice still a little more, which would again allow Negro standards to rise, and so on through mutual interaction. If, instead, discrimination should become intensified, we should see the vicious circle spiraling downward. (Myrdal, 1962, pp. 75-76)

Originally, this ‘American dilemma’ was supposed to explain underachievement by African Americans. Today, it is increasingly extended to immigrants, even newly arrived ones. This is the premise of a recent study by Joni Hersch (2008):

[…] most new legal immigrants to the United States have darker skin color than white U.S. natives and are on average shorter. This article considers whether skin color and height affect economic outcomes among new legal immigrants to the United States. (Hersch, 2008, p. 346)

To this end, Hersch consulted the New Immigrant Survey 2003. The survey involved interviewing a nationally representative sample of immigrants as soon as possible after they got permanent resident status. Among other things, the immigrant’s skin color was measured with a color scale: a series of increasingly darker hands numbered from one to ten. Interviewers were given the following instructions:

As you know, human beings display a wide variety of physical attributes. One of these is skin color. Unfortunately discrimination on the basis of skin color continues to be a reality in American life. Substantial evidence suggests that lighter skinned people fare better in a variety of social and economic settings than those with darker skins. In order to detect such discrimination, it is important that the NIS include a measure of skin color. We therefore ask interviewers to use the Scale of Skin Color Darkness as a guide to rate the skin color of each respondent on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the lightest possible skin color (such as that of an albino) and 10 is the darkest possible skin color” (Hersch, 2008, p. 361)

After analysing the data, Hersch found the following:

[…] I find strong evidence that darker skin color is associated with lower wages, taking into account a wide array of demographic and productivity-related characteristics such as English language proficiency, education, occupation before migrating to the United States, and family background, as well as ethnicity, race, and country of origin, which are themselves highly correlated with skin color. Immigrants with the lightest skin color earn on average 17% more than comparable immigrants with the darkest skin color. On average, moving from the 10th percentile to the 90th percentile of the distribution of skin color within ethnic or racial groups would reduce wages by about 7%-9%. These magnitudes are roughly similar to the black-white disparity and Hispanic-non-Hispanic disparity reported in Altonji and Blank. (Hersch, 2008, p. 346)

She concluded: “The results indicate that any such discrimination is not merely ethnic or racially based nor due to country of birth. […] Skin color is not merely capturing the effects of ethnicity, race, or country of birth but also has an independent effect on wages.”

Why does skin color have greater explanatory power than race, ethnicity, or country of origin? One reason is that these other variables are often problematic. ‘Blacks’ include anyone with some ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. ‘Hispanics’ encompass a wide range of populations. At one end, there are Amerindian groups in Guatemala and southern Mexico who use Spanish as a second language. At the other, there are Italian, German, and Jewish communities in Argentina who still maintain strong links with Europe.

Similar objections could be raised for country of origin. Hersch’s data show that 18.2% of immigrants from the United Kingdom self-identify as ‘non-white’ (Hersch, 2008, p. 355). There are similarly large non-European communities in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. In an increasingly globalized world, what does it mean to be ‘French’, ‘Dutch’, or ‘Norwegian’?

Interestingly, 1.7% of ‘Polish’ immigrants in the U.S. are actually Hispanic (Hersch, 2008, p. 355). This should be no surprise. Eastern European universities, with their low tuition, attract large number of Third World students. Many remain after graduation before eventually moving on to a third country, like the United States.

So to explain economic success among new immigrants, we should look at their skin color rather than their ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ or ‘country of origin’. Does it follow, then, that color prejudice is the ultimate cause? Or do some immigrants fare poorly because they are less able? Hersch (2008, p. 378) reports some evidence for the second explanation:

The possible connection between skin color and ability has been examined using the 1982 GSS, which includes a 10-item vocabulary test as well as a measure of skin color for a sample of about 500 African Americans. Using these data, Lynn (2002) reports a positive correlation between lighter skin color and higher test scores.

But this kind of explanation strikes her as being faulty:

However, using the same data, Hill (2002) demonstrates that controlling for education and family background eliminates the relation between skin color and test scores. […] Available evidence in the scientific literature does not support a link between skin color and intelligence. In addition, the correlation between skin color and ancestry varies considerably, with low correlations in many populations of mixed ancestry (Parra, Kittles, and Shriver 2004). In the absence of genetic evidence or a high correlation between skin color and ancestry, it seems unlikely that inclusion of test scores as a measure of ability would greatly alter the skin color effects found in this article.

This is more than a bit disingenuous. First, saying that some immigrants are less able than others doesn’t necessarily imply a genetic explanation, even if they share the same ethnic background and supposedly differ ‘only’ in skin color. A Mayan immigrant from Guatemala may be as Hispanic as a Jewish immigrant from Buenos Aires, but the two individuals bring very different attitudinal and behavioral tools for survival in a modern market economy.

Second, a genetic explanation doesn’t imply a direct causal link between skin color and intelligence. Skin color is just an indicator of one’s ancestral gene pool, which may statistically differ from other gene pools for any number of heritable traits, including those that influence intelligence. It’s also disingenuous to claim that skin color is weakly correlated with ancestry by referencing a study done on a population that has been intermixed over many generations. If a British immigrant has brown skin, the chances are very good that he or she is not of European origin.

Finally, it’s disingenuous to treat discrimination as a default explanation that should be accepted unless there is strong evidence to the contrary. This is in contrast to evidence for discrimination, which is usually inferred. For instance, Hersch (2008, p. 368) notes:

An analysis shows that those with darker skin color are less likely to be self-employed, controlling for the same predetermined characteristics used in the regression equations reported below. While it might be tempting to interpret this finding as suggestive that immigrants with darker skin color avoid self-employment out of concern about customer discrimination, there is no information in the data regarding customer contact, and there is limited empirical evidence of customer discrimination in the literature generally, so it seems wisest to avoid making this leap.

The above interpretation doesn’t strike me as “tempting.” Self-employment is typically a refuge for those who have been excluded from the job market. I remember many young people who turned to self-employment in the 1980s and early 1990s because they had no alternative. All of the stable jobs were reserved for older workers with seniority. But for Hersch, self-employment shows you’ve had more freedom to choose your livelihood.

Another point deserves mention here. When I think of self-employed immigrants, I readily think of Sikhs, Lebanese, Chinese, Armenians, and other ‘middleman’ minorities. Yes, they’re lighter-skinned than most immigrants. But do they choose self-employment over wage labor because they face little or no discrimination? That’s not my impression.

Conclusion

The discrimination paradigm was first applied to a minority that had suffered centuries of unequal, prejudicial treatment. Bit by bit, and somewhat unthinkingly, it has been extended to other groups: Amerindians and Mexican Americans and, now, newly arrived immigrants. Discrimination is no longer supposed to exercise its crippling effects through generations of enslavement and Jim Crow. After all, we see these effects in people who’ve just arrived.

Well, why not look just a bit further ‘upstream’? These different patterns of economic behavior also exist in the immigrants’ home countries. They exist worldwide. They have nothing to do with whatever prejudices White Americans might have.

But why do these patterns exist? Why should lighter skin improve one’s ability to perform in a modern market economy? Surely that proposition is just as absurd.

Actually, no. Please hear me out before you start shouting. Success in a modern market economy depends on the ability to plan ahead, and that ability has been favored outside the tropics—in areas where people tend to be lighter-skinned. The non-tropical zone has a yearly cycle that makes planning necessary. This cycle began to impact human survival as early hunter-gatherers spread into the temperate and arctic zones. It became even more important when their descendents took up agriculture. The fall harvest had to last until early summer; otherwise you and your family would starve (Frost, 2010; Frost, 2011).

The same yearly cycle also made men necessary for family survival, particularly in winter when hunting used to be the only other means of sustenance. This is in contrast to the tropics, where year-round agriculture enabled women to provide for themselves and their children with minimal male assistance. In such circumstances, men spent more time and energy seeking additional mates (Frost, 2008).

Are these patterns of behavior genetic? Or are they learned from one’s cultural environment? From the standpoint of natural selection, the question is unimportant. What works works, and what doesn’t doesn’t. But the question does matter to curious humans. To find the answer, the first step is to admit that the question is legitimate. Are we ready to take that step?

References

Frost, P. (2011). Religiosity and the origins of civilization, Evo and Proud, January 21
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2011/01/religiosity-and-origins-of-civilization.html

Frost, P. (2010). Out of North Eurasia, Evo and Proud, May 27
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/05/out-of-north-eurasia.html

Frost, P. (2008). Sexual selection and human geographic variation, Special Issue: Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2(4),169-191.http://www.jsecjournal.com/articles/volume2/issue4/NEEPSfrost.pdf

Hersch, J. (2008). Profiling the new immigrant worker: the effects of skin color and height, Journal of Labor Economics, 26, 345-386.

Myrdal, G. (1962). An American Dilemma, New York: Harper & Row.