Immigration is a human story

This past weekend, an essay in the New York Times Book Review argued that business reporters are failing to adequately cover the financial crisis. The author, Chrystia Freeland, says the problem is that people don’t want to hear about the large systemic weaknesses that were the true cause of the economic meltdown. Instead, they want to hear stories about people, about heroes and villains.

A growing body of cognitive research is demonstrating something schoolteachers and entertainers have known for a long time: Most of us respond better to personal stories than to impersonal numbers and ideas. That cognitive bias is so pronounced that Deborah Small, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, has found that charitable giving actually goes down if too many statistics are included in individual tales of need (and if we get only statistics and don’t learn any personal stories, giving is even lower.) Forget “just the facts, ma’am.” Actually, forget the facts altogether.

She argues that this focus on people, rather than statistics, is a bad thing in business reporting. But in the story of immigration, we at Uniting NC would argue that the reverse is true. Too much of the debate over immigration has been focused on people shouting facts (many of questionable accuracy) about how immigration is changing our communities. But in this case, numbers can’t tell the story of the influx of people that has irrevocably changed North Carolina.

Immigrants fill jobs, but they also create them. Immigrants use public resources, but they also help fund them. Immigrants have sparked cultural clashes, but they have also revitalized towns that seemed destined to fade away. This list could go on to infinity. The dynamics of immigration are so complex that no statistic could ever adequately explain them. That’s because, at its core, immigration is about human beings seeking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That’s why we at Uniting NC spend our time talking about people. You won’t hear us throwing around statistics about immigration. Instead, you’ll see us focusing on the people, of all nationalities, who live in our state — and who deserve, if nothing else, to be treated like human beings.