I have started reading The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah, subtitled (and it seems like ALL non-fiction books these days HAVE to have a wordy subtitle) The Beauty and Terror of Life On the Move, and it's already proving to be a goldmine of information, fact-checking and disambiguation on all things relating to human migration and the movement of refugees.
For example, Ms. Shah explores the media reporting of several incidents in the period around 2016 and 2017, when migration into Europe and USA was getting a particularly bad press. In early 2016, many women in Germany were reporting sexual assaults and rapes after the usual debauched New Years Eve celebrations across the country, and they were specifically reporting them as occurring at the hands of newly-arrived migrants from Arabic and North African countries. Many news outlets (including right-wing American mouthpieces for newly-elected Donald Trump like Breitbart and Fox News) reported these events in lurid and incendiary terms, as well as the putative burning down of one of Germany's oldest churches by Islamic militants around the same time.
Some time later, it came out (courtesy of NPR reporters) that the rash of rapes and sexual attacks over New Year in Germany was not actually that exceptional. Sexual violence is endemic in Germany, and New Years Eve in particular always provides an opportunity for crimes of all kinds. The purported crime wave had not actually occurred, but had remained pretty much constant from previous years. And that old church? Accidentally set on fire by an errant firework by Syrian migrants celebrating a cease-fire in Syria!
Around the same time, there were reports out of Sweden, which had accepted more immigrants per capita than any other European country in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, of a sudden rise in reported rapes and violence, particularly in the tony Rinkeby suburb of Stockholm, as well as attacks by young migrants on an Australian film crew attempting to film the area. Once again, Donald Trump, Fox News and other right-wing news outlets gleefully covered what they saw as liberal Sweden's well-deserved comeuppance.
Later, it turned out that the documentary that made the claims about Sweden's migrant crime wave was artfully biassed. Sweden turns out to have much lower rape figures that most of Europe, and the "no-go" zones in Stockholm did not actually exist either, with the interviewed police officers confiming that their answers had been edited and deliberately taken out of context. And the Australian news crew turned out to be working for a racist, anti-immigration hate site, and police confirmed there had been no damage or injuries, and all investigations had been dropped.
Finally, government reports in 2016 and 2017, in Donald Trump's heyday, claimed there had been huge increases in attacks on US Border Patrol agents, who suffer the highest level of assaults of any group of federal law officers. Furthermore, it was claimed, fully three-quarters of those convicted of international terrorism were born outside of the USA. Then, the bodies of two Border Patrol agents were discovered at the bottom of a concrete culvert in Texas, apparently the victims of a gruesome attack by illegal immigrants. One officer died soon after in hospital, and the other suffered a brain injury and memory loss. The whole thing was portrayed as just one example of the threat that America faces from the porous border with Mexico.
As so often, the truth paints quite a different picture. The sudden rise in Border Patrol assaults turned out to have been because the Trump administration completely changed the method of counting assaults on immigration officers, so that the figures now show not just the number of officers attacked, but the number of officers times the number of attackers times the number of objects used in the attack (I kid you not!), so that each stick or rock thrown counts as a separate incident! Using more traditional methods of counting assaults would not show any spike in attacks, and would show that Border Patrol actually experience the LOWEST assault rate among law enforcement officers, much less than those who police residents, for example.
As for the international terrorist figures, a Department of Justice report into the situation concluded that immigration was NOT undermining national security or public safety because international terrorism only makes up a small fraction of total terrorism in America, most of which can not be blamed on immigrants. Oh, and those agents discovered at the bottom of a culvert? Well, the FBI found no evidence of any attack at all. It turns out that they FELL down the culvert in the dark, as the surviving agent confirmed when his memory returned!
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