“The plural of anecdote is data.”

(allegedly said by the late George J. Stigler.)

Last Tuesday I drove up to San Jose State University to visit and have lunch with Professor Jeff Hummel. We normally go to the restaurant across the street, a restaurant called Pomegranate. But I noticed that the name had changed: it is now a Vietnamese restaurant. (It was very good, by the way.)

There’s a back story. The owner of the Pomegranate is an Iranian. He was fairly wealthy and owned a few restaurants. For some reason, he needed to renew his immigration permit regularly. But this time around, it was harder. He just said the hell with it, sold his restaurants, and moved to Canada. So we gained a Vietnamese restaurant but lost an entrepreneur.

This is just one anecdote. But this article, “United Gates of America: The Trump Administration’s Relentless Assault on Legal Immigration,” by Shikha Dalmia, July 5, 2018, suggests that it is likely one anecdote out of many.

UPDATE: The story is all wrong, as a commenter below points out. So some of the commenters were right in saying that the plural of anecdote is NOT data–not when the anecdotes are all wrong.