What Happened When We Tried to Debate Immigration

What Happened When We Tried to Debate Immigration

"It was initially titled, “Is Rising Ethnic Diversity a Threat to the West?” This was certainly a provocative title, designed to draw in a large audience who might hold strong views on the topic but who would nonetheless be exposed to a moderated and evidence-led debate. Though we would later change the title, we couldn’t escape its powerful logic: On the night itself, we repeatedly returned to this phrasing because it is the clearest way of distinguishing competing positions...

As soon as the title of the event was published it provoked a strong backlash. Rather than a genuine debate, it was interpreted as an open attack on immigrants and minorities. Before the event had taken place, before a word had been spoken, one professor accused us of “helping to advance a white nationalist agenda” and engaging in “nativist and racist discourse.” Other academics retweeted accounts that suggested we were “complicit in violence,” including the U.S. mail bombs and the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue (two of our panelists are of Jewish heritage). Still others contended that we were contributing to racism, that by posing the question we were “devaluing” scholars from minority backgrounds (Kaufmann is of mixed race).

In the spirit of compromise, and to meet our critics halfway, we changed the title of the event to: “Immigration and Diversity Politics: A Challenge to Liberal Democracy?” But that was not enough. Even after this change, academics joined with self-described anti-fascist activists to publish an open letter on the platform Open Democracy. Titled “Framing ethnic diversity as a ‘threat’ will normalise far-right hate,” the letter claimed that the debate “was framed within the terms of white supremacist discourse” and “automatically targets communities already suffering from discrimination as part of the ‘problem.’” While the letter did not call for the debate to be cancelled, it concluded that “no other alternative factor or scenario is identified as a ‘threat.’” that the event had “racist presumptions,” “contributes to far right ‘dog whistling,’” and “serves to normalise ideas that should be firmly challenged.” These claims, they continued, were “undeniable.”

An e-mail account was launched and others were urged to sign the open letter, which was also shared on Twitter by a prominent (Routledge) academic book series as “an important response from anti-racist & anti-fascist academics to recent efforts to mainstream far right ideas & discourse.” One of our Wikipedia pages was vandalized while others sought to interest the press in a smear campaign. A network of activist academics and students—both inside and outside of our institutions—raised complaints with our universities. While we were not formally asked to cancel the debate, one of us came under pressure to withdraw. Like many such incidents, much of this activity was informal, relying on trolling, reputational damage and peer pressure to police virtue...

We faced criticism from liberal commentators outside of academe who, writing in national newspapers, criticized our decision to change the title as obfuscating a pressing subject that urgently requires rational discussion... “Ironically and tragically,” argued columnist David Aaronovitch, who joined the debate, “this idiocy by the liberal left allows the far-right to pose as the champions of free speech and therefore as champions of true British aspirations.”...

In the world of academic research, the word “threat,” which many of our critics found so troubling, is commonplace. Stick the words “threat” and “immigration” into Google Scholar and you will see more than one million entries... some academics have openly debated, in top journals, questions like “Is Hispanic immigration a threat to American identity?”

Furthermore, the reason that academics have spent so much time exploring the idea of “threat” is because large numbers of people across Western democracies do feel under threat from immigration and rising ethnic diversity. There is no point shying away from it. It is reflected in countless studies and surveys, such as an Ipsos-MORI study last year, which found that across 25 countries an average of 42 percent of people believe that immigration is having negative effects on their country, while just under half feel that immigration “is causing their country to change in ways that they do not like.”...

But there is also a deeper issue here, which concerns the “normalization hypothesis.” Warning against the “normalization” of the far-right has long been a cornerstone of thinking among anti-fascist and left-wing activists. The argument is that mainstream institutions like universities, the media and political parties should never give a platform to fascist or far-right figures because this treats them as legitimate actors, risks increasing their appeal, and fuels hostility towards immigrants and minorities. Merely adopting the language or phraseology of these controversial figures, it is argued, even as a basis for a public debate or critical reflection, lends credence to their ideology.

The “normalization hypothesis” is widely accepted by journalists and academics... Those who do not adopt this line are criticized, often with support from left-wing journalists.

Setting aside the fact that we are not members of the “far-right,” normalization is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis where genuine far-right speakers are concerned. But, like all theories, it must be open to falsification. It should only gain strength after surviving repeated attempts at refutation. Once a theory congeals into what the anthropologist Scott Atran has called a “sacred value,” something that lies beyond question (such as the divinity of Jesus for Christians), it stifles the progress of social science and restricts freedom of enquiry. Or, even worse, it can backfire, abetting the very forces it opposes. Given the importance of free expression and inquiry in any open society, we believe it is incumbent upon those who demand an ethical limit on free expression in the interests of sensitivity to offer rigorous evidence of harm, and a method of demonstrating harm that is transparent and can be replicated and falsified...

There are actually some good reasons to be skeptical about the claim that engaging with controversial ideas, even far-right ideas, or even giving controversial speakers a platform, has an effect on public opinion. Recently, voting results before and after the involvement of Steve Bannon at the Toronto Munk debate suggested that his appearance had zero effect on people’s views. In Britain, the appearance of a right-wing extremist leader on a popular television show in 2009 had no statistically significant increase in support for his party (which one year later promptly collapsed). While there are plenty of studies that show priming or framing effects (i.e. people who read a negative passage about immigration become more concerned about it), the idea that exposing a controversial speaker to critical questioning, or using a controversial phrase to frame discussion on a “mainstream” platform somehow increases support for extremism, has no basis in social science. The “normalization” charge is an article of faith rather than a conclusion based on an empirically-verified theory. The fact that it is so often invoked to no-platform speakers on university campuses, or silence enquiry, means that it must be held to empirical account...

Our critics, including those who signed the open letter, put forward two claims. First, that our debate was deeply offensive to immigrants and ethnic minorities. Second, that the “white supremacist framing” “normalized” public hostility toward these minority groups. Let’s interrogate the first claim, that deep offense has been given. To answer this question, within a modest budget, we conducted surveys of people in Britain and America, using the online platforms Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic. These have been used by thousands of academic papers. Those who take these surveys skew more liberal, young and white than average–this is not a random sample of the population...

One group saw our original title (“Is Rising Ethnic Diversity a Threat to the West”), another saw a picture of John Esposito’s (1993) book The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality, and a control group saw a blank page. Note that the cover to Esposito’s book included, at the top, a New York Times endorsement saying it was “a useful antidote to the barrage of exaggerated views on Islam.”...

The average level of offence among those who read our (original) debate advertisement was very low, at just 28 out of 100. This was, however, slightly higher than for the blank page (11/100) and the picture of John Esposito’s book (18/100). Indeed, there were a few individuals who gave our ad a 100 score, demonstrating maximum offence. But who were they? If we focus on the 79 individuals (41 white and 38 non-white) who were shown the debate poster, we find no significant difference in the degree to which whites and minorities find it offensive. However, the one group that was most offended (giving a score above 50 on the “offensiveness scale”), were those who self-identified as “extremely liberal” on a seven-point liberal-to-conservative scale. In other words, it was extreme liberals who were the most likely to be highly offended by the initial title of our debate.

What about the second charge, that we are “normalizing” racist discourse? If this was indeed the case, we would expect whites who were shown the description of our debate to alter their perception of ethnic minorities–to become more hostile. But the 41 whites who were shown details of our debate did not express any less warmth on a 0-100 thermometer scale towards Muslims, Asian and African immigrants, black people or European immigrants than the group of 33 whites who viewed a blank page, or the 51 that saw Esposito’s book cover. Like those who viewed the Munk debate, the effect on “hate” is again nil. These results are consistent with representative U.S. surveys showing that largely white “solid liberals” (16 percent of people) or “progressive activists” (eight percent of people) are much more radical than the political tribes occupied by most minority voters.

We academics—and those in discursive bubbles more generally—can sometimes possess a fine-tuned sensitivity, and a greater sense of our own importance, which others do not share. This holds as much for offenses against the right, as those against the left. Take the case of one of those who signed the open letter against us, the “radical political theorist” George Cicarellio-Maher. On Christmas Eve 2016, Cicarellio-Maher tweeted “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.”... We decided to re-run our analysis, only this time we showed respondents the tweet by Cicarellio-Maher. In sharp contrast to the description of our debate, of the 130 respondents who saw the tweet (65 each in UK and US), most were offended, though not overly so... as with our debate, there was no significant difference between whites and ethnic minorities...

White respondents who read Cicarellio-Maher’s “white genocide” tweet did not become more hostile toward minorities and immigrants. If anything, whites who were exposed to his tweet became warmer towards African and Asian immigrants (though no effects were visible for other minorities). They were offended by the tweet but this appeared to make some people more sympathetic to minorities. Why does this matter? Well, it goes to show that people aren’t the impressionable pieces of clay which the proponents of “normalization” would have us believe. While ideas have consequences, those consequences are complex and they often refuse to cooperate with simplistic narratives that enjoy support among activist scholars but which, when put under the microscope by evidence-led researchers, fall apart. Unlike our critics, we don’t invoke ethereal concepts like “normalization” or sacred narratives; our methods are transparent and open to replication and falsification (we will happily share these data)...

There is also compelling evidence from large-scale survey data that whites’ perceptions that they are being discriminated against is a driver of Trump support and this kind of tweet may have fed those perceptions (due to a sense there is a double-standard in which only white people may be abused, especially among “cultural elites”)...

Effects would need to be substantial to provide sufficient grounds for censuring debate in a free society. After all, discussion of controversial topics like Britain’s Middle East policy or Israeli settlements can give ammunition to Islamist extremists. This does not mean that these subjects should not be discussed in plain language and in a moderate, reasonable way. Moving forward with debate must be weighed against the cost of not doing so, which could involve ideas gaining popularity underground or giving ammunition to conspiracy theories against “elites.”

As the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said: “Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced.”...

The open letter and... the vitriolic attacks that followed... were aimed at smearing our reputations. As Haidt notes, the use of open letters, which seek to close down serious deliberation, has increased dramatically from 2017: “Such letters are efforts to win by applying social pressure, magnified by social media, rather than using the proper method of the academy: Reasoned argument.”"


No wonder liberals claim freedom of speech supports white supremacy and are so keen on deplatforming and censorship - if you ban people from discussing ideas behind "white supremacy", then "white supremacy" will never have a chance of being evaluated and everyone will need to accept their claim that "white supremacy" is bad.

Interesting study showing that extreme liberals are much more likely to be offended than minorities - so when they claim to be speaking on behalf of minorities they are doing no such thing. Rather they are projecting their views onto them, ironically silencing them. So speaking on behalf of minorities is a sham - once again (extreme) liberalism is white supremacy.

Ironically most people found the products of anti-racism (i.e. cheering white genocide) more offensive than the "racism" that anti-racists claim they are fighting.