The Oldest Trick

The oldest trick

There is a magic trick politicians have been performing for at least seven hundred years, and the astonishing thing is that we keep falling for it. The trick goes like this: something goes wrong — a plague, a crash, a war, a wage that won't budge — and instead of pointing at the complicated, boring, structural causes that nobody can fix with a slogan, the magician points at a group of people who look a little different, speak a little differently, and pray to a slightly different god. There. There's your problem. The crowd turns to look. And while everyone is looking, the magician's other hand quietly keeps doing whatever it was doing all along.

The scapegoat is one of humanity's oldest political technologies — older than the printing press, older than democracy, older than the nation-state. And immigrants — the foreigner, the newcomer, the outsider already living among us — have been the favourite target for so long that the pattern is almost embarrassingly predictable once you learn to see it.

The whole mechanism in one image. One hand points at a visible, different, relatively powerless group; the crowd turns to look; and the other hand — the one nobody is watching — keeps working. The trick isn't the accusation. The trick is the misdirection.The pointing hand · and the hidden one

Let me show you the pattern. And then let me show you the part that should genuinely keep you up at night: by every careful measure we have, the scapegoat is almost never the cause of the problem. Often, the scapegoat is the thing actually holding the place up. This is a story about a lie that keeps getting recycled — and about the data that has quietly debunked it every single time.

The year the wells were poisoned

Start in 1348, because if you want to understand how scapegoating works at its most horrifying, the Black Death is the masterclass. A disease was sweeping across Europe that nobody understood. Nobody knew about bacteria, or the fleas riding on rats, or Yersinia pestis. What people knew was that their families were dying in agony, that the church's prayers weren't working, and that the dying wasn't stopping.

Between 1348 and 1353, the plague killed somewhere between thirty and forty percent of Europe's entire population. Roughly one in three people you know, dead inside of five years. That is the scale of terror we're talking about. And terror needs a story. The story that emerged was this: the Jews were poisoning the wells.

Stand here for a moment

You are standing in a town square in the autumn of 1348. You buried your mother last week. Your youngest is feverish this morning and you already know, in the animal part of your stomach, what the fever means. You are not stupid. You are not even, by the standards of your time, especially cruel. You are simply a person watching everyone you love die, who has been given no reason why. And then a man you respect — not a lunatic, a man with standing — stands up and says he knows why. Have you noticed, he says, how few of THEM are sick? He has a confession. Someone admitted it. What do you feel, right then? Under the grief, isn't there a flicker of something almost like relief? Because if it's the wells, then it isn't random. If it's them, it can be stopped. The lie doesn't feel like hatred from the inside. It feels like hope.

That flicker of relief — finally, an answer I can act on — is the exact feeling the scapegoat is engineered to produce, in 1348 and in every year since. Nobody burns their neighbour because they woke up evil. They do it because someone handed them a story that made the unbearable suddenly make sense, and the story pointed at a person.

There was even a grim, mundane reason the lie found its grip. Many Jewish communities lived somewhat apart, drew from different wells, and Jewish religious practice involved ritual handwashing and bathing. Basic hygiene gave them a marginal survival edge. To a medieval mind with no germ theory, that edge didn't look like soap. It looked like guilt. If they're not dying, they must be the ones doing the killing.

The numbers are staggering. In town after town across what is now Germany and France, Jewish communities were rounded up and burned alive. In Basel, in January 1349, the entire community was burned at the stake. In Erfurt, on a single day — March 2, 1349 — around a thousand Jews were killed. Zurich voted never to admit Jews to the city again. Many of these pogroms happened while the plague was still raging — which means the killing did absolutely nothing to stop the dying, because of course it didn't. The wells were never poisoned. The plague kept right on going.

And here is the detail that exposes the whole thing as the cynical machine it was: contemporaries noticed who benefited. Jews were often the moneylenders of medieval Europe — one of the few professions open to them. Killing them was a remarkably convenient way to erase the debts you owed and seize the property at the same time. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, arranged in some cases to claim the property of murdered Jews. The plague gave a moral cover story to what was, underneath, robbery and debt-cancellation dressed up as public health.

The scapegoat narrative wasn't just the emotional spasm of a frightened mob. It was useful to people with power and debts.
— the template for everything that follows

The stab in the back

Fast-forward almost six hundred years, to Germany after the First World War, and you watch the same trick performed on a national scale, with the volume turned up to genocide. Germany lost the war — a plain military defeat; the army was exhausted, the supply lines broken, and the generals knew it. But a defeated, humiliated, starving nation does not want to hear that it simply lost. It wants a story that preserves its pride.

So the military leadership, men like General Erich Ludendorff, handed them one: the Dolchstoßlegende, the “stab-in-the-back myth.” Germany hadn't really been beaten on the battlefield, the legend went. It had been betrayed from within — by socialists, by democrats, and above all, by Jews. It was, again, a perfect lie. It absolved the actual decision-makers — the generals — and pointed the rage of a humiliated nation at an internal enemy.

The mathematical absurdity of the mechanism. Jews were under one percent of Weimar Germany — roughly 500,000 in a population of 61 million, less than one in a hundred. Yet relentless naming made them feel like they were everywhere, controlling everything, responsible for every single thing that had gone wrong.Less than 1% · blamed for 100%

Then came the hyperinflation of 1923, when German money became so worthless that people burned banknotes for warmth and carried their wages home in wheelbarrows. Who got blamed? The “speculators” and “bankers” — and the propagandists made sure everyone knew many of those bankers were Jewish. Germans started calling the worthless inflated notes “Jew confetti.” Never mind that German Jews suffered through the hyperinflation alongside everyone else, and that — as the historian Donald Niewyk found after studying the census data — the overwhelming majority were not wealthy at all. The facts didn't matter. The story mattered.

Stand here too

It's 1923. You worked your whole life. You did everything right — you saved, the way responsible people are supposed to. A bank account, government bonds, a lifetime of careful, boring discipline. And over the course of a few months it all turns to confetti. The money you saved for forty years now won't buy a loaf of bread. Not because you gambled, not because you were lazy — you did nothing wrong, and you were wiped out anyway. Now someone gives the faceless forces a face. He tells you it wasn't random, wasn't the abstract machinery of war debt and money-printing that no human can picture or punch. He tells you there were people who profited while you starved — and he can point to a few wealthy financiers who happen to fit the story. He isn't asking you to invent a hatred. He's offering to take the grief and shame already sitting in your chest and give it somewhere to go.

The horror of Weimar isn't that Germans were uniquely wicked. It's that they were ordinary people drowning in a real catastrophe — and a real catastrophe is exactly the condition in which the scapegoat story becomes almost irresistible. The pain was genuine. The robbery was genuine. Only the culprit was invented — and inventing the culprit is the whole trick.

We all know how the story ends. Six million murdered. A continent in ruins. And it began, in large part, with a lie that took real economic pain — a lost war, a punitive treaty, reckless monetary policy, a global depression — and pinned it on less than one percent of the population who had nothing to do with causing any of it.

The ban that backfired

You might think this is a European disease, a thing of plagues and dictators. It is not. The United States — a nation that literally describes itself as a nation of immigrants — has run the scapegoat playbook on a loop. In the 1800s, Irish immigrants were blamed for cholera, Italians for polio, Jewish immigrants for tuberculosis. The newcomer-as-disease-vector is one of the most durable American scapegoat stories, and it resurfaced almost word-for-word when COVID-19 brought an old pattern of blaming Asians and Asian Americans roaring back.

But the richest case study — the one with a genuinely surprising ending almost nobody knows — is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. You'll recognize the beats. Chinese immigrants had come to the American West, many recruited to do the brutal work of building the transcontinental railroad. Then the economy soured in the 1870s. Unemployment in some communities hit twenty-five or thirty percent. People were frightened and angry and looking for someone to blame.

Enter the politicians and labour leaders with their pointing finger: the Chinese are taking your jobs. They work for less. They're keeping your wages down. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act — the first time America banned an entire group from immigrating based purely on race and nationality. It stayed in force, in one form or another, for more than sixty years.

Now here is the part that turns the entire theory inside out — worth remembering for the rest of your life, because it's an actual controlled experiment that history accidentally ran for us. In 2024, a team of economists — Long, Medici, Qian, and Tabellini — studied what actually happened to the American West after Chinese workers were forcibly removed from the labour force.

What the fixed-pie story promised vs. what happened. The Act reduced labour supply, lowered the earnings growth of native-born workers, slowed manufacturing, and slowed Western growth — with effects that persisted until at least 1940. In the counties that lost the most Chinese workers, the number of non-Chinese male workers also fell.Expected: pie grows · Actual: kitchen shrinks

Read that again. Banning the immigrants didn't free up jobs and raise wages. It did the opposite. It shrank the economy, slowed the factories, and left native-born workers worse off — for over half a century. The scapegoat wasn't stealing the pie. The scapegoat was helping to bake it, and when you threw the scapegoat out, the whole kitchen got smaller.

The fixed-pie idea feels like common sense, and it has been wrong every single time we have been able to measure it.
— the counterintuitive heart of the debate

And now — stand in your own kitchen

It's right now. Your rent has gone up for the third year running and your raise hasn't. The town you grew up in feels different — the shops have different signs, you hear languages you don't recognize at the grocery store, and something you can't quite name feels like it's slipping. You're not a bigot. You've never hated anyone in your life. You're just tired, and squeezed, and quietly afraid your kids will have it worse than you did. That fear is real. Nobody should tell you it isn't. And then a confident voice — on your screen, at a rally, in your feed at one in the morning — names the reason. It's THEM. It isn't asking you to invent a hatred. It's offering to take the exhaustion already sitting in your chest and give it a direction. And God help you, doesn't it feel just a little like relief?

If you felt even a flicker reading that — recognition, defensiveness, yes but — then you've felt the exact thing the man in the plague square felt, and the wiped-out saver in 1923 felt. Not because you're foolish or cruel. Because you're human, and the trick is aimed at a part of being human that doesn't get smarter with the centuries. The rent really did go up. The town really did change. The fear is real. Only the culprit is invented — and we now have something the people in the square never had. We have the receipts.

What the numbers say

The modern scapegoat story rests on two specific claims: immigrants commit crime, and immigrants drain the economy. Both are testable. Both have been tested, extensively, by researchers across the political spectrum. Here is what they found.

Claim oneOn crime — the most lopsided finding in social science

Immigrants in the United States have had lower incarceration rates than the native-born since at least 1870 — as far back as the data goes, more than 150 years. A landmark study led by the Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky, in the American Economic Review in 2024, tracked incarceration of immigrant and US-born men from 1870 to 2020. For nearly a century the two groups tracked each other — and then, after 1960, they dramatically diverged.

150 years of incarceration. The two lines move together for a century, then split after 1960. By 2019, US-born men were incarcerated at around 3,000 per 100,000, while the immigrant rate stayed below 1,500 — roughly half. It held across immigrant groups, regardless of where they came from.Immigrants · about half the rate

A 2020 analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research found immigrants about sixty percent less likely to be incarcerated than the US-born. A Texas study found undocumented immigrants there were forty-seven percent less likely to be convicted of a crime in 2017 than native-born Americans. Now hold that against perception.

The belief is almost perfectly inverted from the evidence. A recent Gallup poll found 47% of Americans believe immigrants increase crime, while only 5% believe they reduce it — even though the measured incarceration rate is lower. That gap, between what is true and what people fear, is exactly the space where the trick lives.What people believe · vs. what the data shows

Claim twoOn the economy — read the actual ledger

The fear says immigrants take more than they give. So look at the books. A 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — about as authoritative and nonpartisan a body as exists — concluded that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run growth, and that the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the country.

A 2026 white paper from the Cato Institute — a libertarian, free-market think tank, not a progressive one — ran the numbers from 1994 to 2023. Over three decades, immigrants contributed more in taxes than they received in benefits at every level of government: a fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion. Without it, the analysis suggests, US public debt would already be nearly twice its current level.Taxes paid · benefits received · +$14.5T

In other words, the people being blamed for draining the country may have been quietly subsidizing it — possibly preventing the very fiscal catastrophe they get blamed for.

But notice the scale and the shape: small, concentrated, often temporary costs on a narrow slice of workers, set against large, broad, durable gains in growth, innovation, and revenue across the whole economy. The honest summary — the one most economists actually endorse — is that immigration is, on balance, a clear net positive, with some real but limited costs that fall unevenly. That's a complicated, true sentence. The scapegoat story exists precisely to stop you from ever hearing a complicated, true sentence.

Why the trick keeps working

If the evidence is this clear, this consistent, across this many centuries — why do we keep falling for it? There are a few reasons, and understanding them is the only real defence.

emotional, not factualThe scapegoat solves an emotional problem, not a factual one. When you're frightened and suffering, what you crave is not an accurate diagnosis. Accurate diagnoses are boring and structural: supply chains, automation, monetary policy, wage stagnation. You can't burn a supply chain at the stake. You can't punch automation. But you can point at a person — and that conversion of dread into a punchable enemy feels like relief, like doing something.
profitable for someoneAlways follow the other hand. In 1349, blaming the Jews erased debts and transferred property to the powerful. In Weimar, the stab-in-the-back myth protected the generals who actually lost the war. The scapegoat narrative is rarely just a delusion bubbling up from below — it is cultivated, because every minute you spend looking at the immigrant is a minute you're not looking at them.
mathematically visibleA community that looks different, eats different food, speaks a different language at the market is legible in a way abstract economic forces never are. Under one percent of Weimar was Jewish; propaganda made them seem everywhere. Visibility gets mistaken for prevalence, and prevalence gets mistaken for causation. The mind takes a shortcut, and the shortcut runs straight off a cliff.

You will almost never catch the trick by reasoning about it from a calm distance, because the trick doesn't arrive when you're calm.
— why knowing the statistics isn't enough

Learn to see the hand

The next time a public figure points at a group of newcomers and tells you that they are the reason your wages are stuck, your town is struggling, your country in decline, or your streets unsafe — I'm not asking you to reflexively believe the opposite. I'm asking you to recognize the shape of what's being done, because it has a shape, and the shape is seven hundred years old.

A real problem. The fear is usually genuine — the rent did go up, the town did change. Don't let anyone tell you the pain isn't real; that's not where the lie lives.
A visible, different, relatively powerless group named as the cause. Watch for the finger pointing at the people who are easiest to see and least able to answer back.
A simple story that converts dread into anger. The more it relieves you — the more it turns a faceless force into a face — the more suspicious you should be.
A quieter hand that benefits. Ask who profits from where your anger gets pointed: whose debts, whose failures, whose decisions you've stopped looking at.
Then ask the boring question: what does the actual data say? We have the receipts now, in a way the terrified people of 1348 and 1923 never did.

And here is the thing the data alone can't do, the reason I made you stand in that square and sit in that kitchen. The trick arrives in the worst moment — when you're frightened, broke, grieving, or up too late and angry at a world that feels like it's coming apart. That flicker of relief when someone finally names a villain: that is the moment. Not later, when you're being reasonable. Right then, in the feeling itself.

The pocket cardscreenshot & keep

The trick

Something goes wrong. The magician points at a visible, different group. The crowd turns to look. The other hand keeps working.

The four performances

1348: the Jews poisoned the wells. 1882: the Chinese took the jobs. 1923: the stab in the back.

Today: the immigrants drove up your rent. Same trick, four times.

What the receipts say

The wells were never poisoned. The stab never happened. The ban made native workers poorer for 60 years.

Immigrants commit less crime, not more — and have been subsidizing the budget, not draining it.

The shape to watch for

A real problem · a visible, powerless group blamed · dread turned to anger · a quieter hand that benefits.

The skill

Notice the flicker of relief when someone names a villain. That feeling is the trick, working on you in real time.

Then turn your head, just slightly, and watch the other hand.

✻ · ✻

Sources

The Black Death and the 1348–1351 pogroms. — 30–40% European mortality; the Basel and Erfurt (March 2, 1349, ~1,000 killed) massacres. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death. (1969)
Debt-cancellation as a motive. — Why Jewish mortality differed (separate wells, ritual washing) and how the pogroms erased debts and seized property. Statista / Jewish Encyclopedia; The Low Countries.
The shock of the Black Death. — The economic and political mechanics of medieval scapegoating. Persecution and Toleration, ch. 6, Cambridge University Press.
The stab-in-the-back myth. — Ludendorff, the Dolchstoßlegende, and the ~500,000 Jews (<1%) in a population of ~61 million. Facing History & Ourselves.
Who was blamed for the inflation. — Most German Jews were not wealthy. Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, via Facing History. (1980)
Financial crises and political radicalization. — The 1931 Danat Bank collapse measurably boosted the Nazi vote. Bank for International Settlements Working Paper No. 978. (2021)
The Chinese Exclusion Act's economic impact. — The ban reduced labour supply, job quality, and earnings of US-born workers and slowed Western growth until at least 1940. Long, Medici, Qian & Tabellini, NBER Working Paper No. 33019. (2024)
At America's Gates. — The exclusion era and anti-Chinese violence, 1882–1943. Erika Lee, UNC Press. (2003)
Law-Abiding Immigrants. — The 150-year incarceration series; immigrants ~60% less likely to be incarcerated today. Abramitzky, Boustan, Jácome, Pérez & Torres, American Economic Review: Insights. (2024)
Immigrants and crime, summarized. — The NBER 60% figure, DOJ prosecution data, and the Texas study (47% less likely to be convicted, 2017). Migration Policy Institute; Brennan Center. (2024–25)
The Gallup perception gap. — 47% of Americans believe immigrants increase crime vs. 5% who believe they reduce it. Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 198. (2026)
The economic and fiscal consequences of immigration. — Net positive long-run growth; second-generation immigrants among the strongest fiscal contributors. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2017)
Immigrants' recent effects on government budgets. — The $14.5 trillion fiscal surplus (1994–2023) and the public-debt argument. Cato Institute white paper. (2026)
Immigrants and the U.S. economy. — Small or negligible wage effects, concentrated among workers without a high-school diploma; the more skeptical view. Migration Policy Institute; Manhattan Institute; Center for Immigration Studies. (2025)