How to convince people that more immigration is good?

[Bear Stearns]

I think it should be incentivised to move places that actually need people. The Rust Belt for instance could use an economic couterbalance for the decline in manfacturing (possibly reviving it).

They tried sticking a bunch of Somalis in Maine and it's been a failure.

[San Lumen]

I think it should be incentivised to move places that actually need people. The Rust Belt for instance could use an economic couterbalance for the decline in manfacturing (possibly reviving it).

They tried sticking a bunch of Somalis in Maine and it's been a failure.

How so? I know people in Maine. They weren’t stuck there. You are aware in most cases immigrants request to go to certain places?

[Bear Stearns]

They tried sticking a bunch of Somalis in Maine and it's been a failure.

How so? I know people in Maine. They weren’t stuck there. You are aware in most cases immigrants request to go to certain places?

My family is from Maine. And yes they were. This wasn't an immigration thing, it was refugee resettlement.

[San Lumen]

How so? I know people in Maine. They weren’t stuck there. You are aware in most cases immigrants request to go to certain places?

My family is from Maine. And yes they were. This wasn't an immigration thing, it was refugee resettlement.

They were not put there against their will.

[Nobel Hobos 2]

My family is from Maine. And yes they were. This wasn't an immigration thing, it was refugee resettlement.

They were not put there against their will.

State Dept puts more emphasis on the community they're being placed in (it having jobs available for instance) than on the refugee preferences. But I expect they do anyway: putting refugees where they're unhappy or where they're unwelcome wouldn't work out.

I really wish posters wouldn't use family anecdote as evidence. I don't like to attack anyone's family, so what am I to do when the "evidence" is clearly biased by ... y'know.

[San Lumen]

They were not put there against their will.

State Dept puts more emphasis on the community they're being placed in (it having jobs available for instance) than on the refugee preferences. But I expect they do anyway: putting refugees where they're unhappy or where they're unwelcome wouldn't work out.

I really wish posters wouldn't use family anecdote as evidence. I don't like to attack anyone's family, so what am I to do when the "evidence" is clearly biased by ... y'know.

They do take preference into account

[Borderlands of Rojava]

I think it should be incentivised to move places that actually need people. The Rust Belt for instance could use an economic couterbalance for the decline in manfacturing (possibly reviving it).

They tried sticking a bunch of Somalis in Maine and it's been a failure.

I haven't heard of any issues. Maine seems to be good and boring as always still.

[San Lumen]

They tried sticking a bunch of Somalis in Maine and it's been a failure.

I haven't heard of any issues. Maine seems to be good and boring as always still.

Maine isn’t boring at all. It’s one of my favorite states

[Ceranapis]

I think it should be incentivised to move places that actually need people. The Rust Belt for instance could use an economic couterbalance for the decline in manfacturing (possibly reviving it).

They tried sticking a bunch of Somalis in Maine and it's been a failure.

I don't know about Maine, but the same program has been really sucessful Erie, PA. It's provided economic opportunity for natives as well as refugees.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-to ... 1488290400

[Confederate Norway]

Tell them to pretend the refugee crisis in southern Europe doesn't exist.

[Nobel Hobos 2]

Tell them to pretend the refugee crisis in southern Europe doesn't exist.

Leaving people in camps is always pretty bad. But southern Europe is barely on the list of places that do that.

[Deacarsia]

It is not.

[Sicilian Imperial-Capitalist Empire]

Immigration is a complex issue that cannot simply be labelled as "good" or "bad." There are many factors influenced and responsible for the existence of immigrants. And to simply describe all of it as "good" or "bad" would do a great injustice to, for example, immigrants helping to fill the job market in critical areas or helping to spark political tension and civil wars.

[Sundiata]

With poorly funded schools, partisan news, deep-seated racism, and egregious violence, I've come to accept that the American mind is lost. But not the American heart.

[Kowani]

I prefer using data, because most of the time, the arguments against immigration on any level that aren’t “culture” tends to be empirically wrong.

[-Astoria-]

With poorly funded schools, partisan news, deep-seated racism, and egregious violence, I've come to accept that the American mind is lost. But not the American heart.

Is it still salvageable, though?

[The Twilight Embassy]

With the internet, if someone still hasn't gotten it into their skull by now that immigrants aren't the problem, then they're beyond salvaging.

The only solution at this point would be to create a self-sustaining island/city/region/space-station/bunker where we can fit all the immigrants/refugees/non-xenophobes into and heavily weaponize it so that the "anti-globalist" malcontents can't invade/pillage/terrorize the people inside--

Wait...

With poorly funded schools, partisan news, deep-seated racism, and egregious violence, I've come to accept that the American mind is lost. But not the American heart.

if the mind is lost, then the heart's been long gone.

[San Lumen]

It is not.

Why isn’t it?

[La Xinga]

It is not.

Why isn’t it?

People have told you multiple times why in this thread, and not only directly to you.

[Forsher]

It's definitely stories.

We had to make videos for a course once (actually twice but the other one wasn't relevant) where the general purpose was to sell a particular policy perspective (housing discussions in NZ focus on homeownership, the purpose of our work was to make people think about low income renters). So... well, here's the script:

This, is Cyndi. She’s 10 years old this July and lives with her family in Manukau.
Her parents are low income renters.
Cyndi shares a room with her sister and cousins.
They keep the heater on all day and all night in every room of their uninsulated house.
Cindy seems to get sick more often than her friends.

Cindy’s story is the norm for many.
22% of people in Manukau live in overcrowded homes. [INSERT GRAPH BELOW]
Measures of housing affordability typically ignore the quality dimension even though it is
an integral component to affordability
The quality of housing in New Zealand is terrible and the rental market is even worse than
the national average, estimates suggest up to 1.8 million private dwellings are under
insulated. Improving the quality of homes provided in New Zealand could save up to $500
million in health costs.
Unfortunately, rents for healthy and unhealthy properties alike have outstripped wage
growth across New Zealand.

Cyndi’s parents have been on the social housing waiting list for a state home for years.
Currently, rent takes up more than 30% of their household income
More and more families like Cyndi’s have been unable to turn to social housing for
affordable homes.

Approximately 35% of rental households pay more than 30% of their incomes on housing.
Social housing provides protection from unaffordable market rents for low income renters.
Despite the crisis, less than 500 state homes per year were built between 1992 and 2013.
In 2013, National Government sold off thousands of state homes in an attempt to create a
competitive quasi market for social housing
Between 2015 and 2018 the state housing wait list more than doubled to 11,000 people.

Cyndi’s family are lucky enough to have kept the same address for years, but they have also faced
two lease renewals and accompanying rent increases, which they are struggling to keep up with.
Cyndi’s parents wish the accommodation supplement helped with these increases.

Despite yearly increases in rent, the maximum entitlement allowed under the
accommodation supplement remained stagnant for 13 years, until a minor adjustment
was made in April 2018.
The accommodation supplements stagnation can potentially be explained by research that
suggests that landlords simply capture any increases in rental subsidies by raising their
rental prices.
In essence, the supplement becomes a subsidy for the middle class.
Such research is particularly concerning, as it sheds light on the ineffectiveness of an
annual $1.3 billion package.

Cyndi’s dad works locally but her mum has to catch the train to the CBD 6 days a week.
If Cyndi’s parents cannot retain the same address in the next lease negotiation, they will have to
move further away seeking cheaper rents. However, any rental savings would be offset by
increases in transport costs.

In reality, Housing costs are not restricted to rental costs. Time and money spent
commuting can make affordable rents, unaffordable.
In addition to this, vehicle based commuting over long distances can contribute to a lower
quality of life, just like cold homes.
However, popular but crude measures of affordability tend to ignore these geographic
factors, yet such measures heavily inform national and regional housing policy.
Auckland’s twentieth-century pro-sprawl policies and their low-density urban form have
greatly restricted people’s ability to live closer to jobs, amenities and schools.
The use of crude affordability measures encourages groups like Demographia to propose
sprawl as a solution to the affordability crisis.

Cyndi wonders why she and her family suffer from these problems and why her friends’ families
do not.
She knows her family gets government support but it doesn’t seem to be enough.
She wants a secure, warm home where she and her family are not left at the mercy of government
failure.
Government policies in social housing, rent subsidization and urban form have played a
key role in the creation of the unaffordability crisis facing low income renters.
But, there are still important unresolved questions.
· What have been the effects of the quasi market reforms in social housing for
low income renters?
· Has the accommodation supplement been effectively captured by landlords?

· How important are transportation and density policies to the provision of
quality rental housing?

To improve the lives of children and families like Cindy, we ask for your support in changing the
narrative of New Zealand’s housing affordability crisis

As you can see, we put a lot of figures in anyway with our fictional character Cyndi's story being the context around which they were put in. As I remember, that was a necessary feature of the assignment because the narrative should be the dominant thing.

That being said... you don't want to sound like a World Vision ad or just another cliched human interest story. Anyone remotely like me is just going to switch off immediately and, let's be real here, hate you for being a complete fucking bore. Yes, I know Cyndi's story is pretty much exactly like a World Vision ad... I was one of our scriptwriters. I personally think it's less preachy and also a bit more "blame the government" than World Vision ads which tend to rely on guilt tripping people but, again, I did write it... so, biased.

Actually, we told a story with the other video too but that relied on a really misleading use of statistics. Our topic in that one was "problem tourist drivers" but, uh, the problem isn't tourist drivers, it's maniacs who will tailgate you because you're not doing 120 km/h on twisty turny roads halfway up a mountain with official speed limits of 100 km/h... and the statistics bear this out. Don't get me wrong... I think there was a valid concept to that video, but... I guess what I mean is that there would've been a consumer but the market that we believed would exist for the fake product was different, so we basically just repeated all the xenophobic BS doing the rounds in the media. Ironically, we chose that topic in the first place because my partner was thinking about how his parents would find driving here if they visited from China. It's just that our product was definitely a Business to Business product, not B2C.

So... in conclusion... tell an interesting, "true" story in a way that isn't boring or preachy. People need to be able to connect and become invested in the narrative being spun but without being distracted by something else. Having something to blame is, as always in politics, probably a great idea. If this blame object can be tied to the specific point, I think that'd be useful. In the US I'd go with the (Deep) State for immigration, I think, but in NZ that would be the worst possible choice (the predominant narrative here is that immigration is a neoliberal conspiracy to boost GDP). Something like... maybe it's a television series about an immigrant family who spend their entire time fighting the government ("just like you") and forces within it that want to crush your freedoms and financial independence. Maybe have someone lose their job because of workforce shortages...

Of course, my first step would be not to try and do this in the middle of global pandemic. The timing is terrible for immigration as a policy option.

[Forsher]

I prefer using data, because most of the time, the arguments against immigration on any level that aren’t “culture” tends to be empirically wrong.

Nice idea, it's just that there's absolutely no reason on Earth to believe that this would work.

Data is for policy wonks and business decision making where "I don't care what you personally think" is part of what being a professional is. When communicating with a general audience, it's completely the wrong approach with literally any topic. You're selling a narrative so you have to use a narrative to do the selling... people don't believe inconvenient facts, won't listen to them and may even find novel interpretations, so you've got to get them in the right headspace as a first step.

The role of data is in making sure that the narrative you're spinning is true. If you create a plot line in your ad/film/show/novel/song/whatever and someone comes away thinking "that can't be true" you need the first Google hit to be "Ten Things in [Title] You won't Believe are True". The role of the narrative is to make the audience receptive to the idea that something they never would've believed previously could be true... which they will subsequently:

• take at face value and accept as a new truth, or
• look up themselves and (hopefully) find something confirming that it's true, or
• do nothing with.

There's also the likely "some of my best friends are X" problem too. The reality is that people are able to believe certain key things (e.g. immigrants create jobs) whilst simultaneously maintaining the old narrative (immigration is bad). That's something the human brain can do. Hell, I reckon it prefers to do that.

[Ceranapis]

(the predominant narrative here is that immigration is a neoliberal conspiracy to boost GDP)

Guilty as charged! Member of the neoliberal conspiracy and proud of it

All joking aside, both this comment and the next one area really good and informative. Can't agree more on the point about using data to convince and difficulty of this argument in the pandemic environment. Did you guys ever run your ad and get any feedback on it? Or did you look into different broadcasting options as part of the project?

[Rea]

It’s simple. Declare yourself to be for legal immigration while explicitly condemning anybody who illicitly enters the country, or is some kind of unemployed social parasite.

People actually like hearing rags to riches stories about successful immigrants who came in the front door, worked hard, and prospered without ever having to resort to dishonesty. Bonus points if they made a genuine effort to learn the language and get to know the locals outside their ethnic bubble. Even more bonus points if they’ve done the country a great favor by serving in the military or some kind of civil program. Emphasize that. The more this gets pounded into people’s heads, the more sympathetic they will be towards immigration.

[-Astoria-]

It’s simple. Declare yourself to be for legal immigration while explicitly condemning anybody who illicitly enters the country, or is some kind of unemployed social parasite.

People actually like hearing rags to riches stories about successful immigrants who came in the front door, worked hard, and prospered without ever having to resort to dishonesty. Bonus points if they made a genuine effort to learn the language and get to know the locals outside their ethnic bubble. Even more bonus points if they’ve done the country a great favor by serving in the military or some kind of civil program. Emphasize that. The more this gets pounded into people’s heads, the more sympathetic they will be towards immigration.

Agreed; however, are there not also invariably "rags to riches" stories of immigrants who also came in illegally?

[Xelsis]

Part of it is acknowledging that people who don't even particularly care about immigration can be anti-immigration because of how it affects other issues that they care about. You could have someone in, say, Virginia who is neutral or perhaps even moderately favorable towards immigration, but what they really care about is gun rights. If increased immigration is leading to majorities of politicians being elected who are going to clamp down on those rights, that person is not going to be swayed by personal stories, because they see the votes that come with that immigration as taking away their rights on a core issue.

Putting yourself in someone else's shoes is a good idea in almost any context, and it works here as well. Imagine that the situation were reversed, and increasing numbers of immigrants were leading to voting in politicians who started aggressively restricting abortion, or led anti-LGBT efforts. How many people who are now pro-immigrant would suddenly flip right around the other way?