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Multiculturalism

The kindness of strangers?
Feb 26th 2004
From The Economist print edition


Diversity makes people anti-social. That is not as catastrophic as it sounds

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WHEN Robert Putnam, a Harvard University sociologist, visited Downing Street three years ago, he said exactly what the government wanted to hear. In his influential book “Bowling Alone”, Mr Putnam had argued that communities were getting more fragmented and mistrustful—in the jargon, they were haemorrhaging social capital. Happily, though, a committed government could staunch the flow with clever social initiatives. People could be persuaded to trust one another, which would make them healthier, happier and less criminal to boot.

Less back-slapping will occur during Mr Putnam's return visit next week, to a private seminar organised by the home secretary. That is because his research has taken a dismal turn. A large ongoing survey of American communities seems to show, uncomfortably, that levels of trust and co-operation are highest in the most homogenous neighbourhoods. People living in diverse areas, it turns out, are not just more suspicious of people who don't look like them; they are also more suspicious of their own kind. Because of that, they suffer socially, economically and politically.

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Click to buy from Amazon.com: “Bowling Alone”, by Robert Putnam (Amazon.co.uk).

Living in Britain”, published by the Office for National Statistics, contains information from the 2000 General Household Survey.

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The worries of one of Tony Blair's favourite gurus chime with a growing concern about the social consequences of Britain's biggest-ever immigration wave. Although numbers seeking asylum seem to be tailing off, fears now focus on those expected to come from the ten countries joining the European Union in May. On February 23rd, Britain became the latest EU country to throw up hurried defences against a projected “flood” of immigrants. They will be allowed to work in Britain, but not to claim most welfare benefits.

Unusually, nativist cheers at this move have been accompanied by sighs of relief from some on the left, who worry that if people are unable to identify with the foreigner who lives next door, they will not contribute to things like union funds and social security programmes. David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, has framed the “progressive dilemma” starkly. Britain can have either mass immigration or generous welfare, he says, but not both—and of the two, welfare is better.

Nobody has yet worked out whether Britons living in racially mixed streets are less likely to exchange cups of sugar. Certainly, the pattern holds true for large areas. The 2000 General Household Survey found that the three most mixed areas (London, the West Midlands and the South East) had the lowest proportion of neighbourly people, while the four most lily-white areas (Scotland, Wales, the North East and the South West) had the highest. But that may be because the most diverse regions are also the most urbanised.

There is better evidence for a link between immigration and attitudes to welfare. A recent MORI poll found that half of all people who felt hard done by reckoned that immigrants and ethnic minorities were getting priority over them. Only 8% pointed a finger at single mothers, the former scapegoats of the benefits system. Such sentiments may make people stingy: Canadian researchers have shown that xenophile nations have seen the smallest increases in welfare spending over the past 30 years. If the pattern holds true, Britain will become less like Scandinavia and more like America, with its racial diversity and frayed social safety net.

Separating cause from effect is a little tricky here. It may be, for example, that immigration helps nations keep their bills down. But the interesting thing is that connections between immigration and social dislocation have been made, and not just by men in jackboots. For the sake of Britain, is it time to raise the drawbridge?



Nobody has yet worked out whether Britons living in racially mixed streets are less likely to exchange cups of sugar

There are strong reasons to think not. Shamit Saggar, who follows the topic at Yale University, says there is no point in trying to rebuild cohesive communities of the sort that may, in any case, never have existed. “We should develop a glue that is sticky enough to build common outlooks in times of need, but is not so sticky and cumbersome that it cements us into uniformity,” he says. That can be achieved partly through things like citizenship ceremonies, and partly by whittling away at the old inequalities that lead to isolation and mistrust.

There is a case, too, for reforming the welfare state rather than immigration. The argument that countries can have either mass immigration or generous social spending assumes that welfare is what economists call a club good—something that can be denied to outsiders. That perception is reinforced by government decisions, like the one made this week, to restrict benefits to those who have been in Britain for two years. Fair enough, hard-nosed progressives might think. But does this mean that, having earned their way to the honeypot, people should be able to feed off it forever? It is probably better to do as the Canadians do, and use welfare to ease people into work.

Even if there were a stark choice between diversity and social solidarity, it is not clear that the latter would be better. In 1856 Walter Bagehot, deprived of the diversity which the past century and a half has brought, railed against his tight-knit society, which he thought stifled excitement and innovative thinking. “You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius,” he wrote, “but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour.”





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