The Oldest Trick

The oldest trick

The scapegoat is one of humanity's oldest political technologies — older than the printing press, older than democracy, older than the nation-state. The literary critic René Girard spent a career arguing that whole societies have always discharged their internal tensions onto a chosen victim, and that the ritual feels like justice from the inside [1]. 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.

Let me show you the pattern — four performances across seven centuries, the same script in different costumes. 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 [2]. 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 [3].

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 [3].

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 [4]. 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 [5]. 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.

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 [6]. The facts didn't matter. The story mattered.

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 [9].

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 [8].

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 [8]. 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

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.

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 [10].

Today, immigrants are around sixty percent less likely to be incarcerated than the US-born [10]. A study of Texas — the one state whose records let researchers separate undocumented immigrants cleanly — found they were forty-seven percent less likely to be convicted of a crime in 2017 than native-born Americans [11]. Now hold that against perception.

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 [13].

In other words, the people being blamed for draining the country may have been quietly subsidizing it [14] — 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.

• crimeImmigrants are ~60% less likely to be incarcerated than the US-born, and have been less likely since at least 1870 [10].
• TexasUndocumented immigrants in Texas were 47% less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans in 2017 [11].
• perception47% of Americans believe immigrants raise crime; 5% think they lower it. The belief is inverted from the fact [12].
• growthThe nonpartisan National Academies find immigration is a net positive for long-run growth; the second generation are top fiscal contributors [13].
• budgetImmigrants ran a $14.5 trillion fiscal surplus (1994–2023) — they have been subsidizing the budget, not draining it [14].
• the catchReal but narrow costs: modest wage pressure on natives without a high-school diploma, and short-term local strain [15].

Who the trick is really for

Step back from any single performance and the most important question is not who gets blamed — it's who benefits. Because the scapegoat narrative is rarely just a delusion bubbling up from a frightened crowd. It is cultivated, top-down, because it pays. And it pays in the same four currencies every single time.

• deflectIt hides a structural failure behind a human face. The Weimar generals lost the war; the stab-in-the-back myth moved the blame off them and onto an internal enemy. Every minute the public spends staring at the immigrant is a minute it isn't auditing the people who actually made the decisions.
• plunderIt cancels debts and seizes assets. In 1349, the murdered were often the lenders; killing them erased what was owed and transferred their property to the powerful. Blame, conveniently, points away from the creditor and toward the convenient.
• mobilizeIt manufactures turnout. Fear is the cheapest, most reliable fuel in politics — a frightened base shows up, donates, and forgives almost anything. Naming an enemy is a turnout machine that runs on dread instead of policy.
• consolidateIt licenses power. An enemy within justifies emergency measures, loyalty tests, and the silencing of dissent. The scapegoat is the doorway through which ordinary politics becomes something harder to vote out.

Ask not whether the accusation is true. Ask who gets to keep their job, their fortune, or their power if you believe it.

— the question the trick is designed to prevent

The square went digital

If the mechanism is seven hundred years old, the delivery system is brand new — and far more efficient. The medieval demagogue needed a town square and a carrying voice. Today the square is in your pocket, it never closes, and it has been engineered to find exactly the moment you are most tired, most alone, and most afraid.

The machinery rewards the trick by design. Researchers studying millions of posts found that adding moral-emotional language — outrage, disgust, contempt — measurably increases how far a message spreads, and that it spreads most fiercely inside groups that already agree [17]. A separate study of every major news cascade on Twitter over a decade found that falsehood travels faster, farther, and deeper than the truth, because novelty and outrage are exactly what the feed is built to amplify [18]. The scapegoat story is novel, emotional, and morally charged — it is, in algorithmic terms, perfect content.

So the oldest trick now runs at the speed of a thumb, A/B-tested for maximum rage, delivered to the frightened at 1 a.m. The fear is still real. The misdirection is still the point. Only the reach has changed — from a single square to a billion of them, all lit at once.

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.

Of all of these, the one worth learning to feel in your own body is the flicker — because it is the moment the trick actually lands. Gordon Allport, mapping the psychology of prejudice in 1954, described how a free-floating anxiety with no object is almost unbearable, and how naming a target converts that formless dread into something that feels like understanding and control [16]. The relief is not a sign that the story is true. It is a sign that a burden has been set down.

You already know the feeling, even if you've never named it. It's the small, almost physical hit of satisfaction when a post confirms that the people you suspected really are the problem. It's the warmth of a comment section agreeing with you at midnight. It's the way a rally chant can make a stadium of strangers feel, briefly, like they've solved something. None of that is evidence. All of it feels like evidence. That counterfeit of insight — relief masquerading as understanding — is the precise sensation the scapegoat is built to manufacture.

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.

References

1. [1] R. Girard, The Scapegoat. Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986.
2. [2] P. Ziegler, The Black Death. London, U.K.: Collins, 1969.
3. [3] S. K. Cohn, Jr., "The Black Death and the burning of Jews," Past & Present, no. 196, pp. 3–36, Aug. 2007.
4. [4] N. Johnson and M. Koyama, Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019.
5. [5] Facing History and Ourselves, "The Stab-in-the-Back Myth," in Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA, USA: Facing History & Ourselves, 2017.
6. [6] D. L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany. Baton Rouge, LA, USA: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980.
7. [7] S. Doerr, S. Gissler, J.-L. Peydró, and H.-J. Voth, "Financial crises and political radicalization: How failing banks paved Hitler's path to power," BIS Working Paper No. 978, Bank for Int. Settlements, Basel, Switzerland, 2021.
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9. [9] E. Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill, NC, USA: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003.
10. [10] R. Abramitzky, L. Boustan, E. Jácome, S. Pérez, and J. R. Torres, "Law-abiding immigrants: The incarceration gap between immigrants and the US-born, 1870–2020," American Economic Review: Insights, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 491–509, Dec. 2024.
11. [11] M. T. Light, J. He, and J. P. Robey, "Comparing crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas," Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, vol. 117, no. 51, pp. 32340–32347, Dec. 2020.
12. [12] A. Nowrasteh, "Immigration and crime: Perception versus reality," Cato Institute, Washington, DC, USA, 2024.
13. [13] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration. Washington, DC, USA: National Academies Press, 2017.
14. [14] A. Nowrasteh, "The fiscal impact of immigration on the United States," Cato Institute white paper, Washington, DC, USA, 2024.
15. [15] G. Peri, "Immigrants, productivity, and labor markets," Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 3–30, Fall 2016.
16. [16] G. W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA, USA: Addison-Wesley, 1954.
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