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Johan Leman, 29 January 2024

It is urgent that when listing numbers of foreigners and migrants respectively, one should make it clear who exactly one is talking about. If this is not done, the risk is that people who only follow the matter from a distance really do not get a correct perception of what the situation is.

In the perception of many non-migrants, just about all migrants are wrongly seen as low-skilled, or out of work, or sometimes even criminal, referring each time to percentages they occupy, for example, among the unemployed or in prisons. Mistakenly, many non-migrants then think that those percentages also apply to the whole of a population, as if the presence of a certain percentage of foreigners in the prison system would mean that the same percentage of that community as a whole would consist of criminals.

One would do well, when stating numbers, to indicate more clearly whether it is about students (with temporary residence), about highly qualified people in some professions that are in demand, about asylum seekers, about people in irregular residence, about people who have come down to a bottleneck profession. Now sometimes the numbers really fly around our ears without a clear sense of who they are talking about. The places where these different categories live are also sometimes very different.

With a proper understanding of that diversity, many people would become much more cautious in assessing migrations and less anxious.

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