People overestimate the percentage of immigrants in their country

Argentina as usual being two racists in a trenchcoat pretending to be white

How do people in Japan think that 10% of the population is foreign!?

I guess Argentina makes a bit more sense - except that not many people are trying to get to Argentina. That sounds like Argentina though.

These polls tend to fumble their own methods, by trusting people to read definitions. They should be asking directly: how many people in your country were born in another country? The word "immigrant" literally means that... but that's not the only meaning people envision, when they hear that word. To some extent you are always measuring that disconnect.

On the other hand, what fucking lunatics think 22% of America is Muslim?

how do people in the US think Muslim folk make up 22% of the population!? My guess was like 4-5% and I still overshot by a lot.

I think the issue is that most people live in cities, where populations tend to me more diverse. Then most polls probably also end up disproportionately asking cityfolk. So the polls ask people who live in areas with disproportionate numbers of immigrants (relative to non-urban parts of the country), and they forget how many non-immigrants are outside the cities.

Swiss: about a third?

Real: 40%

https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerung/migration-integration/nach-migrationsstatuts.html

Who are all the people immigrating to Australia?

Japan what the hell? When I'm there I usually go hours without seeing another white person, depending on where I'm at.

The "what percentage do you think" vs "what percentage are" would be much better either as a scatterplot with a y=x line, or as a ratio (think/are) vs actual percent

Here's a rough plot of the second thing. There's a number of issues with it but I think it more clearly conveys the crucial information

The first plot might arguably be better but you couldn't really see the way the ratio of overestimation decreased with more immigration as clearly as this one.

edit: Damn that came out way smaller than I expected. It's readable if you zoom in

What share of the population do you think are immigrants?

Where does “I don’t care” register?

We have cities in germany where "5.5%" really doesn't paint the right picture. I've recently been to one where most shops had signs i can't read and more muslims than i saw in Turkey or elsewhere. Seeing or hearing (a) german was a rare exception. And this is really no exaggeration.

Of course if you take all the rural areas into the equation, where usually very few are, you might see the 5% in toto, but in the cities and especially the cores? No way.

who in australia thinks we have 20% muslims? we probably dont even have 20% christians

Interesting that Canada wasn't included (at about 20%). Wonder how/why they picked those countries.

90% or so of people in the USA are immigrants

I dont get these graphs

This does not count Ukrainians for Poland though, even for 2022 before war there were much more of them than 2%, possibly as many as 3 million and that went up in years included here.

Apart from a couple of countries, the percentages are small. The graph is distorted as it's not showing the full 100%

Looks like most people, in most countries, are pretty close to accurate.