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March 12th, 2025 (Permalink)
21st Century Doublespeak, Part 3
Last month, I discussed the use of the phrase "immigrant living in the country without legal permission" as a euphemism for "illegal immigrant"1: I doubted that such a long phrase would catch on with the writers and editors at influential publications as a substitute for "undocumented immigrant" or "undocumented worker". Despite my doubts, an article earlier this month was published under the following headline:
What we know (and don't know) about immigrants living in the Houston area without legal permission2
As I mentioned in the previous entry, the careless use of the adjectival phrase "without legal permission" often leads to ambiguous sentences. Here, it sounds as though it's just living around Houston that's the problem, whereas I suspect that the immigrants in question lack legal permission to be anywhere in the country.
The first paragraph of the article under the headline includes the sentence: "No one knows exactly how many immigrants live in the U.S. without legal permission", which confirms my suspicion. The article repeatedly uses the phrase "without legal permission" and "undocumented" occurs only once in the phrase "undocumented immigrants", which is additional evidence that "undocumented" is on its way out.
The article even includes a helpful sidebar explaining the meaning of the phrase "without legal permission":
What does it mean to live in the U.S. without legal permission?
This population, sometimes referred to as the "unauthorized" population, includes those who entered the U.S. illegally (for example, by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border) and those who overstayed or violated the terms of their visas. …
The sidebar initially explains "without legal permission" with another euphemism, "unauthorized", but it helpfully explains that both euphemisms refer to those who either entered or remain in the country "illegally". Why can't they just say so, then? Interestingly, the article includes the following passage:
Put simply, researchers took a U.S. Census estimate of the total number of people who were not born in the U.S. and subtracted from that the total number of legal immigrants, as tallied by the Department of Homeland Security. The result gives a rough baseline of the number of people living in the U.S. without legal permission.
Why does the article refer to "legal immigrants" instead of "people living in the U.S. with legal permission"? Perhaps that's a bit too long-winded. However, if it's permissible to write "legal immigrants" why is it impermissible to write "illegal immigrants"? If there are legal immigrants then there are illegal ones: otherwise, the adjective "legal" serves no purpose. For consistency's sake, one should write both or neither; for clarity's sake, both.
Notes:
- 21st Century Doublespeak, Part 2, 2/4/2025.
- Matt Zdun, "What we know (and don't know) about immigrants living in the Houston area without legal permission", Houston Chronicle, 3/5/2025.
March 8th, 2025 (Permalink)
How to Tell Half-Truths with Charts & Graphs
Graphics must not quote data out of context.1
We saw in a previous entry how it's possible to tell half-truths with photographs2, and in this entry we'll see how to do it with charts and graphs. A chart that tells a half-truth is not one that lies; instead, it's one that tells the truth but not the whole truth.
A bar chart appeared in an article in Newsweek about a month ago3 unfavorably comparing the numbers of deportations during Trump's first term to those under Biden's only term. A similar chart, shown above, appeared in Barron's about a month earlier4. The main difference between the two charts is that the Newsweek one breaks the data down by month, whereas Barron's one is broken down by year. Since I don't have the monthly data, I will concentrate on the above one in the rest of this entry, though the points made apply equally to both charts.
As far as I can tell, the statistical data displayed in the chart shown is correct5, but even so, the graph tells only half the story. The chart shows that many more "unauthorized"―that is, illegal―immigrants were repatriated to their countries of origin under the Democratic Biden administration as opposed to the previous Republican Trump administration.
Why is this data interesting? Given that the former and current president has been so gung-ho on expelling those who came here illegally, it's perhaps surprising that the previous one seems to have deported many more such immigrants. Based on the chart, should we conclude that Biden was actually a much more aggressive enforcer of the immigration laws than Trump, despite the latter's bluster?
What's wrong from this picture? The chart shows us only half of the picture: it only shows those being sent out of the country, not those coming in. Yet, the number of repatriations is partly a function of how many cross the border illegally and are subsequently "encountered" by agents of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Of course, not all illegal border crossers are encountered by the CBP, but this is the only measure we have of the number of such crossings. Everything else being even, the more who cross illegally, the more who will be encountered, and the more repatriated.
So, what is missing from the chart are the numbers of encounters by the CBP in the relevant years. Thankfully, the Office of Homeland Security Statistics (HSS) provides a chart showing the number of encounters for the past ten years6. Below, I've revised the above chart to incorporate the total number of encounters nationwide for each year based on the HSS's data7.
It's not a pretty chart: if I were constructing it from scratch, I would use a more compact scale, and only lines for comparisons, but at least the revised chart tells the other half of the truth. As you can see for yourself, the most notable feature of the revised chart is the huge spike in encounters for the years 2021-2023, that is, in the first three years of the Biden administration. The number of encounters almost tripled from the high in 2019 under Trump―1.1 million―to the high under Biden in 2023―3.2 million. So, no wonder there were so many more repatriations during the Biden administration than during Trump's first term: there were many more to repatriate.
Notes:
- Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1997), p. 77. This is the last of Tufte's six principles of graphical integrity.
- How to Tell Half-Truths with Photographs, 2/12/2025.
- Dan Gooding, "Trump Migrant Deportation Numbers Compared to Obama, Biden", Newsweek, 2/11/2025.
- Corin Faife, Valentina Breschi & Omar Kamal, "Unauthorized Immigrant Repatriations From The US", Barron's, 1/17/2025. A French version of the graph can be viewed here: "Investiture de Trump: les migrants, un marché à plusieurs milliards de dollars pour les mafias", La Croix, 1/19/2025.
- It's difficult to be sure since the only precise number given is for part of last year, and otherwise one has to try to read the numbers off the scale at the left, but the amounts appear to be approximately correct.
- See: "CBP Encounters", Office of Homeland Security Statistics, 2/11/2025.
- 2014 is not included because that year is not included in the table―see previous note; also, I've left out the number of encounters for last year, since the chart includes only partial data for the year and the table is not broken down by month.
March 6th, 2025 (Permalink)
Oh, Snap!
Here's a recent headline from Newsweek based on two "snap" polls1 conducted right after Trump's big speech a couple of nights ago:
Donald Trump's Congress Speech Was a Huge Hit With Americans2
These polls, which are the only ones I could find that were done since the speech, showed similar results: in one sponsored by CBS News3, 76% of respondents approved of the speech; in one from CNN4, 69% had a positive reaction.
The target population for both surveys was those American adults who watched the address, and not American adults in general. In public opinion surveys, a sample is taken of the "population", which is the group you want to know about, then the results for the sample are extrapolated to the population as a whole. In both of the snap polls, the population sampled was American adults who watched the speech, not American adults in general. For this reason, the poll results can only be extrapolated to the population of those who watched the address, and not to Americans as a whole, contra Newsweek. This is a fundamental point about sampling: a sample can only tell you about the population sampled, and not some other population, not even a larger one of which the sampled population is a subgroup.
Given that Republicans and Trump supporters are more likely to watch a speech by the president than Democrats and Trump opponents, adult address-watchers is a self-selected subgroup of the more general class of adults. This fact is reflected in the CBS survey in which slightly over half of those polled were Republicans and only a fifth Democrats; for the CNN poll, 44% were Republicans and also about a fifth Democrats. So, Republicans were over-represented in the samples and Democrats under-represented.
CNN's report did a good job of explaining this point:
Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract generally friendly audiences that disproportionately hail from presidents' own parties. In CNN's speech reaction polls, which have been conducted most years dating back to the Clinton era, audience reactions have always been positive. The pool of people who watched Trump speak on Tuesday was about 14 percentage points more Republican than the general public.5
Another drawback of CNN's poll is its small sample size―only 431―and correspondingly large margin of error (MoE)―5.3 percentage points. In contrast, the CBS poll had a more usual sample size of 1,207 and MoE of 3.4 points. This is something to keep in mind about any snap poll, since such polls must be put together quickly and are, therefore, likely to have smaller samples and larger MoEs than standard polls.
Given the above considerations, there's not much news in either of the two snap polls. Mostly, what we learned is that people who watch Trump's speeches tend to agree with what he says. Big deal.
Notes:
- The word "snap" applied to a poll does not appear to have a technical meaning, but seems to refer to a topical poll taken quickly.
- Ewan Palmer, "Donald Trump's Congress Speech Was a Huge Hit With Americans", Newsweek, 3/5/2025.
- Anthony Salvanto, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus & Kabir Khanna, "Poll on Trump's 2025 joint address to Congress finds large majority of viewers approve", CBS News, 3/5/2025.
- Ariel Edwards-Levy, "CNN poll: Trump address to Congress gets modestly positive marks, changes few minds", CNN, 3/5/2025.
- See the previous note. Paragraphing suppressed.