How many immigrants?
Before reading on, what proportion of New Zealand residents do you think were born overseas?
These data are about a decade old, but they’re still interesting (source, PDF). The horizontal axis is the percentage of each country’s population that were born in another country; the vertical axis is the average percentage estimated by residents of that country (from surveys).
In every country studied, people thought there were more immigrants than there really were, often by a very large margin. (via @MaxCRoser)
PS: In New Zealand the actual proportion is just over 25%.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »