Something very common in policy speeches this year has been the use of anecdotal evidence to illustrate a point. Whether it be the President, his contenders from the GOP, or even a mayor in a small town they all use this form of evidence. We too, the American people, use examples from our experiences of daily life to explain how we view a certain situation. All too often I hear that "as a business owner I don't want to pay more taxes to take care of crack heads on welfare" or then from the other side of the "young mother with a toddler who was raped that has no where to stay but the streets and 'why is there no funding to help her?'." Anecdotal evidence is important in itself but economists and myself being a future one, we like data that is far more spread out than one or two isolated incidents. For example, economists would be far more inclined to conclude a causation and / or correlation if say there was a population sample depicting evidence of either more funding being beneficial or being detrimental with an associated counterfactual. Essentially, finding a trend from the data. Trends are good, but too this extreme we forget the specific cases where outliers exist.
Something that has been on my mind lately has been the immigration enforcement of the past few years since Obama has taken office. During his presidency, 400,000 illegal immigrants have been deported in 2011 and since he assumed office a total of over 1,000,000 have been sent back to their native countries. From a statistical perspective, this data is very impressive and from an anecdotal perspective needs a deeper examination. That figure is extremely impressive to those most likely along the border states of Mexico, but to the families of latino Americans, it can be devastating when a mother is deported back to Mexico, leaving a father and her five legally born American children.
So the question really is, is this an effective policy, and is further, is it beneficial or detrimental? From a statistical perspective, less illegals in the country would likely produce a trend of lower subsequent illegal activity. This is not to say illegal immigrants are all evil rapists, murderers, or drug lords, but that it is far safer and more beneficial to all peoples to have an accountable record of those who live in this nation and that they are treated under the same rights and conditions as any American citizen. What is forgotten in this assumption, is that many of these people immigrated into the U.S. under times where the laws were less strict and the penalty for being illegal was notably lower. Many of these people have been living here for the past decade or more. Their roots are in this nation, and many of their children know nothing about their home country, they feel they are Americans, not illegal aliens. So the outcome can be a single parent with multiple children, all with more adversity than was already the case. This puts an even bigger burden on society, because due to this adversity, these children will possibly not be able to seek the opportunities they may have been on the path for if their mother wasn't deported. Further, the investment society makes in them for their education and well being will not be maximized because of their subsequent poverty trap or ability to graduate out of such conditions. The idea of making it even harder on people who are American citizens is not what this country is about, especially when those people are innocent children. What is the better thing to do is to ask, is the cost of taking a mother away from her children better to swallow than the cost of having here, maybe making it possible for her to become legal? That is why we need to examine reform that allows for more anecdotal perspectives within the trends we examine. In that anecdotal prospective, we also cannot fail to ignore the costs imposed on making incentives that increases costs on society. That is where we we need to come together and realize that in order to make society better, we cannot simply bash illegal immigrants nor can we accommodate them to the point where we will have created an incentive based approach that allows for a much larger problem. This should be our focus in policy, a much more balanced approach between anecdotal and statistical evidence.
Yes, I used an example, possibly anecdotal to explain my point, so I am guilty of that. But what I am trying to illustrate is that behind the numbers, there are important details we mustn't forget or ignore. So when we think that we are generalizing a situation too much, let us realize the mother who has been separated from her children, and when we get too anecdotal in our opinion, let us move past the point that just because one illegal alien was a drug trafficker, that it is not the case that all are. Assigning causation requires factoring out all other possible explanations of the correlation, that is the science part. The heart and human part is being able to look back at what we have done, and ask ourselves if we can sleep at night doing what we have done.
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