Immigrant Discrimination and the Freeps

The media these days like to publish stories about academic research but as a rule, they do a bad job of it, and that is particularly true of my hometown paper, The Freeps.

An article published in the Freeps on July 31, 2023, headlined:

‘Alarming’: Study reveals hostility toward immigrants in London, region’

illustrates well what I mean.

The line under that headline read: “The study, funded by the London and Middlesex Local Immigration Partnership, surveyed the experiences of 30 London and Middlesex County immigrant and racialized people.”

Now, hold on. What can one possibly conclude about anything that might be happening in London-Middlesex after talking to 30 people? The immigrant population in the areas is, according to Stats Can figures reported in the actual study (more on it below) was around 90,000 in 2016, no doubt higher than that now. 30 is a laughably small sample of that population. However, reading on, the article goes on to say that this was ‘….a followup to a survey conducted by the same team that found about 60 per cent of those who identified as immigrants in Southwestern Ontario said they experienced some level of discrimination or racism in the last three years.’

Ok, so this suggests that at least two studies were done, a survey plus interviews of 30 local immigrants. The writer for the Freeps claims that 60% of immigrants reported discrimination in that survey. I determined to go find the actual studies to sort all this out, partly due to my reading this sentence further down in the article:

“A group of Western University researchers led by Esses heard newcomers say they were overlooked for promotion and their work was underappreciated.”

Ok, how many of your peers report being overlooked for promotion,  or underappreciated at their job? Maybe everyone? What makes that discrimination?

My curiosity fully aroused, I found the two studies on the website of the sponsoring organization mentioned above. You can, too, at this link

The first study, which surveyed 829 L-M residents in March of 2021, is written up in the paper dated August 2021. The second is indeed a report on interviews with 30 immigrants from the L-M region, and is dated March, 2023. This is the study mentioned in the tag line, and it is worth noting that all of the 30 people interviewed for that study reported being immigrants  and reported experiencing discrimination. Anyone who did not report those two things when first contacted to be interviewed, was not in fact interviewed. So the rate of reported discrimination among the interviewed group was 100%, by design.  That’s not what the article’s tag line would have you think but…ah, details.

As to the first, much larger survey, that’s where the Freeps reporting gets worse and the research gets, well, interesting. The 829 respondents to the survey were contacted by a hired polling company that used random-telephone-number dialing to collect its sample of respondents. Those who were actually given the survey to respond to were put into three groups, which the researchers titled Immigrants and Visible Minorities, Indigenous Peoples, and White Non-Immigrants.

Now, if one is trying to understand discrimination experienced by immigrants living in London-Middlesex, it seems very odd to include Indigenous Peoples in the survey. If anyone is 180 degrees different from being an immigrant, that would be indigenous folks.

On the other hand, including a set of White Non-immigrants in the survey makes sense. Whatever you learn about discrimination among immigrants is pretty meaningless without a point of comparison: the White Non-Immigrants can be considered the analog to a Control Group in a drug study. It’s like if someone tells you that The Bismarck displaced 41,000 tons when it was built, that doesn’t tell you it was one huge battleship unless you also know how big were other ships of the era.

Below are the self-reported rates of discrimination of these three groups – that is, the percentage of survey-takers in each group who reported being discriminated against – you can find these numbers on p.20 of the 2021 report:

Immigrants and Visible Minorities: 36.7%

Indigenous Peoples: 61.6%

White Non-immigrants: 44.4%

Which brings us back to the Freeps writing that “…60 per cent of those who identified as immigrants in Southwestern Ontario said they experienced some level of discrimination or racism in the last three years.”

Clearly that’s just wrong. Inaccurate. (See why I love the Freeps?) Indigenous peoples most certainly do not identify as immigrants. Count on it. The self-reported rate of discrimination among the immigrant group was 36.7%, which is way less than 60 in anyone’s arithmetic.

So the Freeps got the facts wrong, and they erred in the direction in which the Freeps always errs, in my experience. The Freeps has become The London Alarmist, always making things seem as bad as possible, so here they report the biggest, baddest number, even if it’s the wrong number.

However, I cannot let the researchers off free on this one, either. The word ‘Alarming’ in the headline is accurate, in that researcher Vicki Esses did use that adjective in describing the stories they heard in the interview study. But, of course, in the 2023 interview study the interviewees were pre-selected for saying they had been discriminated against. The earlier 2021 survey study could then be viewed as an attempt to understand how representative those stories are of the general experience of immigrants in the area.

But here’s the thing, which you alert readers likely have already noticed. White non-immigrants reported being discriminated against at a higher rate than the immigrants. As my foul-tongued friend Hugo might say – WTF?

The Freeps reporter did not question Esses about this finding from the survey, and I would bet a buck said reporter did not read either report. I mean, who has time to learn about the things one writes about? I would bet a lot more than a buck that had Ms. Rivers turned in a story to her editor headlined ‘Immigrants less discriminated against locally than white non-immigrants’ she would not have gotten her byline into The Alarmist.

A final note on the research, specifically the survey report. As the researchers write on p. 51 of the 2021 report – “Nonetheless, because participation was voluntary, it is likely that interest in the topic had some influence on whether or not eligible individuals participated, leading to some inevitable potential biasing of the samples.”

Yea. Likely, indeed. They note that the use of random-phone-dialing to get initial respondents helps work against bias, and that is only partly true. The researchers don’t tell us much about that respondent recruiting process, and were this study being presented in a seminar, here are just a few of the questions I would ask:

Did the phone-calling include cell phone numbers or just land-lines?

Was there a set text the callers used to screen potential survey-takers, and if so, what did it say?

Given that the survey involves unconfirmed self-reporting (the results from which should always be taken with a grain of salt) what reason is there for confidence that the reports of discrimination correspond to actual discrimination?

The reasoning behind the first two questions is simple: if only land-lines were called, as used to be the case, a whole swath of Canadians, mostly younger, who have no landlines anymore, is left out of the pool of potential survey-takers. How that might bias the results I cannot say, but it seems it must to some extent, so this is important for understanding the survey results.

And, if the callers doing the recruiting let out the fact- or even the possibility – that they were asking people to participate in a survey on discrimination, then my Spidey sense goes into full vibration mode. This will attract people who feel discriminated against disproportionately, and renders the ‘% experiencing discrimination’ statistic unrepresentative of what happens in the general L-M population. It is not reassuring that the researchers say so little about the respondent recruiting process.

The third question is prompted by the fact that White non-immigrants reported more discrimination than Immigrants. This makes it very difficult for me to believe that these responses tell us much about discrimination against immigrants.

To go back to the Random-Controlled Drug Trial analogy above, if the group you gave the drug to (the white non-immigrants) is more likely to get the disease the drug is supposed to cure than the group that did not get it (the immigrants), your drug does not work; indeed, it’s bloody dangerous.

That finding should have the researchers questioning just what the survey responses actually tell them, if anything. Do they believe that white non-immigrants are actually more likely to experience discrimination than immigrants? If so, are they seeking research funding to look into discrimination against white non-immigrants? I rather doubt the answer to either question is yes, but that’s the implication of their survey results if they want to insist that the survey responses tell us something about actual discrimination.  And that ‘Alarming’ thing kinda suggests they do.