This week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that UC Irvine Professor Charis Kubrin received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology — an honor often compared to the Nobel Prize in the field — for her research into the relationship between immigration and crime.
Kubrin is one of several researchers who have published repeated studies showing that immigrants are, on average, responsible for less crime than native-born citizens. The big takeaway? Crime rates tend to decline when immigration increases in a community.
Despite that data, a 2024 Pew Research Center study found that 57% of U.S. adults believe the opposite: that migrants bring crime into the U.S.
How does that gap happen? Often, through the power of anecdote.
Anecdotes are not bad things. Used well, they connect data to story, infuse analysis with a human touch, and can open a stuck mind or soften a closed heart. Jesus knew this. His ministry was built on the particular; on this woman at this well, on this tax collector up in that tree. The particular has a power that statistics never will.
But anecdotes can also be weaponized. A repeated drumbeat of stories about immigrants committing crimes or of people having bad reactions to a vaccine can construct a false picture of reality. Even if every individual story is true, the misleading focus can lead us to believe we understand the whole when we’ve only seen a carefully selected part. Used this way, anecdotes don’t inspire curiosity; they breed confirmation bias and distort the truth.
As people of faith, God calls us to something harder than choosing the stories that confirm what we already believe. We are called to truth-telling, which sometimes means sitting with data that challenges our assumptions, and asking ourselves honestly: Why does this make me uncomfortable? What am I afraid of losing if this turns out to be true?
The prophetic tradition in Scripture has never been comfortable with the gap between what people believe and what is actually happening to the vulnerable in their midst. Jesus did not accept the cultural “knowledge” that certain people were irreputable. He crossed social divides and encountered the actual person in front of him, like touching lepers the law said to avoid, or honoring a Samaritan the culture said to despise. The stranger behind the stereotype was always his concern.
So here is the call: Be disciplined about the stories you consume and repeat. Seek out the data even as you listen to stories. When our assumptions are challenged by evidence, we need to resist the reflexive counter-anecdote. Sit with the discomfort. Let it do its work.
Loving our neighbors, truly loving them, requires that we see them clearly, with compassion and curiosity. May we have the courage to seek the truth, and the grace to be changed by it.
