Blog Post 3
Katherine WIlliams
14 April 2022
PS101
Blog Post 3
The United Nations estimates that every minute, an estimated 20 people are forcibly displaced due to conflict, persecution, or war. As of 2018, there were 68.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, of those, 25.4 million were refugees and asylees. In the years since that number has exceeded 80 million forcibly displaced, and that was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One of the largest issues facing refugees and asylees in America and across the globe is the racism and xenophobia they face upon arrival. Systemic racism yes, but also street-level micro and macro aggressions from their neighbors. This is driven by public perception of refugees and asylees as a whole, and what kind of messages people receive and internalize about their new neighbors.
The public perception of refugees is too often wrapped up in political messaging around national security, and the fixation on the dangers of human trafficking, MS-13, and ISIS in certain segments of the local and national news media only makes things worse. Of course, all of those are real issues that need to be addressed, but they are also nearly a non-factor in this discussion when you actually consider the facts. According to the Cato Institute, from 2008 to 2015, the likelihood of any given American being killed in a terrorist attack on US soil was 1 in over 30.1 million. If you break it down, the likelihood of being killed by a domestic terrorist is 1 in 43.8 million, more than twice as deadly as an attack by foreign-born terrorists at 1 in 104.2 million. Compare that to the likelihood of dying in an animal attack (killed by a dog, bear, snake, yellowjacket, bee, etc.), which was 1 in 1.6 million, during that time. Just think about that for a moment. You are more than 65 times more likely to be killed by a bear while hiking or by your neighbor’s Doberman than by a foreign-born terrorist. Yet the use of sensationalist images and videos in the television news media and online, makes it look like there are a bunch of scary potential terrorists coming to America in droves.
Public perception of Muslim refugees in particular is driven by the media. According to OurWorldinData.com, a terrorist attack receives 357% more coverage across all outlets if the perpetrator is Muslim. This vastly outpaces the other factors studied: whether or not the perpetrator(s) was arrested, if the target was law enforcement or the government, and the number of people that were killed. In comparison, a domestic terror attack committed by a non-Muslim against civilians receives 46% more coverage per person killed. It's a lot worse among just the major outlets studied (CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today), where attacks by Muslim perpetrators received 758% more coverage. This unbalanced coverage matters, increased coverage when a perpetrator is Muslim presents an inaccurate overview of US terrorism to the public. In the dataset that the study provided, Muslims perpetrated 12.5% of attacks in the US, yet received at least 50% of the coverage.
Unfortunately, the financial incentives in the news media industry mean that this trend will likely continue for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, there are other ways to combat this. The easiest is to simply encourage people to meet actual refugees and asylees living in their area. According to data from SINGA, a French NGO, as of 2013, only 12% of French citizens had regular interactions with a refugee in their-day to-day lives. In an effort to address this, they set up “business incubators” for migrants arriving in France. This allows highly skilled refugees to be introduced to local businesses as future collaborators rather than as charity cases. They also create other environments where locals and refugees can discuss issues other than migration and create what founder Alice Barbe calls “a common us”. This is how to change hearts and minds. Data from SINGA indicates that the work they are doing is improving the lives of native French people and refugees. The more French people a refugee knows, the easier it is for them to adjust quickly and they are happier overall, while the more refugees a French person knows in real life the less likely they are to hold racist views. And if a refugee becomes friends with 10 locals, they will be on a path to learning the local language, getting a job, and sometimes entering into a romantic relationship within 9 months of arrival. All of this is a stabilizing force in French society as it helps people to see each other as people rather than as potential threats or needing to be saved. This is something that could be easily replicated across the United States, especially in large cities where refugee populations tend to cluster. It doesn’t even need to be an activist group, simply taking a few friends to a refugee-owned restaurant in your area is a good place to start.
Sources:
https://www.cato.org/blog/more-americans-die-animal-attacks-terrorist-attacks
https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism#media-coverage-of-terrorism
Rhodes, Ben. Missing America, "Episode 7: Xenophobia.” Apple Podcasts.