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Swedish medical researcher Hans Rosling spent his entire career trying to convince Western nations that we have a fundamentally messed up view of everybody else in the world. In public forums, private meetings, and viral TED talks, Rosling presented comprehensive data to demonstrate that–contrary to Western opinion–most people in the world are not starving to death in rat-infested s***holes. Most people, in fact, are doing much better than they ever have.

Rosling created the data-rich, interactive web site Gapminder before he died in 2017. HIs children Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund completed the book he was working on when he died. In April of this year, they published Factfulness in 24 different languages in the hopes of convincing global policymakers to start basing their decisions on an accurate picture of the world.

Many people need to read this book. Americans trying to understand the immigration issue need to read it twice, because the picture of the world that comes out of the data is fundamentally at odds with the assumptions underlying much of the debate.

To understand what I mean by this, take a look at this chart of the world in 1965. This is a single chart that looks at two characteristics that often serve as stand-ins for many other aspects of a country: the average number of children in each family and the infant mortality rate.



As you can see, the world in 1965 fit nicely into a narrative that saw everybody fitting into two boxes: Box 1 (small): “developed”–highly industrialized, wealthy countries with small families and great health care. Box 2 (big): Poor, overpopulated, non-industrial countries with big families and rotten health care. And a big, almost empty chasm in between. This was our narrative in 1965, and we even had a Cold-War term for the big box: at a time when the “civilized” world was divided into two warring camps, we called everyone else “The Third World.”

The problems is that we still have the same view of the world, even though it has changed enormously in the last 50 years. Here is what things looked like in 2017:





Now almost everybody is in the small box or between boxes. The two huge circles–China and India–are right where the rest of us are. Only a handful of countries are in the old box, and even there, infant mortality rate has improved substantially. There is no Third World. There is no gap. There are just people.

This same movement happens for almost every metric we can find: income rates, calories per day, education rates, access to health care. The world has gotten a lot better since 1965, but most Westerners still tend to think of everybody else as desperately poor, overpopulated, and miserable. To demonstrate this ignorance, Rosling developed what he called the “Chimpanzee Test” (take it here)–a set of questions about the world that the vast majority of Westerners answer less successfully than a chimpanzee randomly picking answers written on bananas.

Why is this important to the immigration debate? Because most of the people making and enforcing the current laws about who can and cannot enter our country have a fundamentally flawed understanding of the world. If everybody else is desperately poor and miserable, then of course they want to come to the United States–not because they are in any danger at home, but because they want to live the good life on America’s dime.

This view of the world means that we start every asylum request with the assumption that the asylum seeker is lying. We do not start with the assumption that a person is seeking asylum because they need asylum–because people where they come from are actively trying to harm their families. We reject the idea that they could be fleeing anything other than the desperate poverty that we are so sure everybody down there is experiencing. We make no effort to understand what sorts of other things may be making people want to flee their homes.

Underneath all of our debates about immigration lurks the assumption that the rest of the world is a desperately poor, overpopulated cesspool of misery waiting to overwhelm us and steal our toys. But this is not what the rest of the world looks like. This is not what Latin America looks like. It is an uncharitable and inaccurate version of what some parts of the world looked like in 1965; it has no business driving American policy in 2018.