Although immigration dominates the headlines, public beliefs about immigrants, as recorded in polls, often differ wildly from the facts. This timely and informative book lays out those discrepancies and discusses why they persist. Global migration, Kaushal argues, does not present a crisis, whatever populist politicians claim. As she points out, “the number of immigrants as a proportion of world population has not budged for over a century.” Many people, she argues, blame immigrants for unrelated problems. In the United States, for example, people usually imagine that foreigners carry out most terrorist attacks, and President Donald Trump has raised fears of terrorists crossing the border from Mexico. Yet native-born Americans, not immigrants, are responsible for a large majority of the attacks on U.S. soil, and none of the perpetrators have come from Mexico.
