THE MISCONCEPTIONS
I moved to the United States from Essex in England when I was 6 years old. Old enough to be sad to leave, but young enough to be naive about where I was going.
Fall, 2003
I’ve always been a good reader, and my passion for reading quickly stemmed from that. That’s how I ended up carrying a stack of books to my teacher in the first grade, quietly asking her where they went. Barely looking up from her papers, she replied quickly that they go “in the bin over there.”
I had been living in the U.S. for about 6 months at that point and had only been at school for a relatively short time. I hadn't yet had the opportunity to pick up on American English.
So, I turned away in slight confusion. They were perfectly good books, why would she be asking me to throw them away? Tenderly, I walked over to the trash can, what I knew at the time as the bin, and went to carefully set my precious books in the trash. Suddenly, my teacher popped up, arms flailing, a small smile on her face.
“Not there!” She exclaimed and handed me a clear bucket with other books just like mine stacked neatly inside. She was still laughing as I put mine in the bucket and informed me that this is also called a bin. I nodded silently and walked away, not seeing what was entirely funny about it, but with my newfound knowledge about American English tucked carefully into the back of my head.
For a while, I overlooked my roommate's confusion about immigration as an isolated instance of innocent ignorance. However, in the months after as headline after headline about immigration scrolled across my computer screen, I started to second guess that. It turned out it wasn't an isolated instance, instead, the misunderstanding is systematic.
Ideologies that natural-born Americans hold about immigrants in the United States are shockingly inaccurate. A survey conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research focusing on natural-born Americans demonstrates the extent of American's misconceptions.
Natural-born Americans, on average, believe that 36.1% of the US population is made up of immigrants. That’s almost 120 million people. The actual share of immigrants is closer to 43 million, about 13%.
They believe that immigrants are about 20% poorer than they actually are.
They underestimate the number of immigrants who practice Christianity, a religion that the majority of immigrants practice, by 21%.
They overwhelmingly believe that more immigrants are unemployed than those who actually are, by about 20%.
They think 23% of all immigrants are Muslim when they only make up about 10% of the immigrant population.
They overestimate the number of immigrants in the US from North Africa and the Middle East by 13%.
Regardless of a person's background, no matter their race, education level, gender, or political ideology, U.S. natural born citizens do not know accurate information about immigration in the United States.
What would cause people to so largely misrepresent the number and characteristics of immigrants living in the U.S.?
Is it simply that they are unaware of their surroundings, even as they live in the nation of immigrants?
The U.S. is known colloquially as a cultural and ethnic melting pot and the country is quickly nearing a status of a “majority minority,” when the majority of people in the U.S. will not be Caucasian. Is it possible that people are mistaking everyone who looks remotely different than them as an immigrant?
It might be, because no one ever thinks I’m an immigrant.
To attempt to understand where America's broad misconceptions about immigration are rooted, I looked to a place where I felt most people were developing their ideologies - and it wasn't at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website.
Instead, I turned to the U.S. media.