There are endless arguments about diversity being bad. Many such arguments are made by racists. But others come from well-meaning people who lack much information and imagination, unable to see outside of mainstream opinion. One such example is a 2010 dissertation by Maureen A. Eger, Ethnic Heterogeneity and the Limits of Altruism (University of Washington):
“Taken together, the analyses in this dissertation provide empirical support for the diversity-altruism hypothesis. The comparative strategy reveals that immigration-generated diversity depresses support for welfare state attitudes regardless of a country’s institutional features. However, these analyses also demonstrate that the relationship between diversity and altruism manifests itself in country- specific ways. Results suggest that countries’ historical institutions and experiences with ethnic diversity play a more important role than contemporary national institutions in how diversity affects attitudes.”
How does that explain that multicultural Western social democracies have stronger, more well funded welfare systems than most of the homogeneous countries in the world?
Only by cherry-picking examples and data (along with not controlling for confounding factors) can you make an argument that multicultural Western social democracies are failures, relative to most other sociopolitical systems. There are plenty of severely dysfunctional and oppressive societies out there with governments that don’t take care of their citizens, no matter how homogeneous the population.
Also, as always, context matters. There is a vast difference between freely chosen immigration of those seeking opportunities of betterment and enforced immigration because of refugee crises caused by civil conflict, international war, terrorism, genocide, climate change-caused droughts, etc. We are living at a time of vast global instability. That doesn’t lead to good results for anyone. But let’s keep in mind that this vast global instability was largely caused and supported by the Western elites now discussing whether diversity and immigration are beneficial (e.g., Why are there refugees at the US southern border?).
Those in power like to complain about dangerous brown-skinned others, even as their power is dependent on the neoliberal exploitation of cheap labor that impoverishes and makes desperate those people, turning them into immigrants and refugees. That neoliberalism backed by the neocon war machine has harmed and destroyed so many societies, bleeding them dry of their natural resources and externalizing the costs of Western industry. These foreigners are on the frontlines of climate change with the harsh reality of environmental destruction, ecosystem collapse, drought, food shortages, social instability, political weakening, economic problems, and the ensuing refugee crises.
Many of the Middle Eastern refugees right now are escaping droughts in particular that have made farming impossible in what was once the bread basket of the world. What are all these poor, unemployed farmers to do when they can’t even grow food to feed themselves, much less to make a living? And if these countries can no longer feed their own people and their economies are in free fall, what exactly are they supposed to do? These people are struggling for survival, in dealing with problems largely caused by others. Meanwhile, the Western elites are debating whether climate change is real and debating whether diversity is good. These elites are either entirely disconnected from reality or they are sociopaths, authoritarians, and social dominance orientation types — surely, a combination of all of these, going by what they say and do.
Here is an idea. Maybe stop destroying people’s lives in other countries and then we can discuss the problems caused by past and ongoing failures of political vision and moral accountability. Just a suggestion.
I made a rule about this a while back:
“We can only deny immigration to citizens of countries where the US government and military has never meddled in their society. We will demand any immigrants to go away and leave us alone, if and only if we have done the same to them.”
If we are serious about trust, then we should quit implementing the very policies that destroy trust. We already know what builds and destroys a culture of trust. This isn’t exactly a new area of study. Besides, it’s all rather common sense, if one can free one’s mind from dogmatic rhetoric and ideological ‘realism’.
As Eric Uslaner explained (from Segregation and Mistrust, Kindle Locations 65-73):
“[C]orrelations across countries and American states between trust and all sorts of measures of diversity were about as close to zero as one can imagine… [L]iving among people who are different from yourself didn’t make you less trusting in people who are different from yourself. But that left me with a quandary: Does the composition of where you live not matter at all for trust in people unlike yourself? I had no ready answer, but going through the cross-national data set I had constructed, I found a variable that seemed remotely relevant: a crude ordinal measure (from the Minorities at Risk Project at my own university, indeed just one floor below my office) of whether minorities lived apart from the majority population. I found a moderately strong correlation with trust across nations – a relationship that held even controlling for other factors in the trust models I had estimated in my 2002 book. It wasn’t diversity but segregation that led to less trust.”
(*begin rant*)
Let me explain something for those a bit slow in the head, cold in the heart, and stunted in imagination. It isn’t diversity that harms a society. It is division.
This typically is caused by segregation, no matter what form it takes: race, ethnicity, religion, nativism, class, regionalism, etc. In American society, racism and classism have been inseparable. But even without racism, international studies have shown that high economic inequality leads to vast social problems and political dysfunction.
When a society separates itself into social groups and communities that don’t interact with each other, the natural human impulse of empathy shrivels up and conflict inevitably follows. When people see their fellow citizens and humans as enemies, the results are never pretty. Division and divisiveness go hand in hand.
Wake the eff up, people! This isn’t rocket science. It’s Human Nature 101.
(*end rant*)
I’m not arguing that a kind of exclusionary, authoritarian ‘trust’ can’t be created in a bigoted, closed society. Germany under the Nazis was a high trust society, in a severely limited sense, even though Jews who had lived their for centuries weren’t trusted. Many authoritarian societies are high trust because the citizens/subjects are obedient from some combination of propaganda, violent rule, external threat, xenophobia, scapegoating, and a collective Stockholm syndrome.
No one is doubting that such ‘trust’ can be created and enforced. And in the case of Nazi Germany, the average German was initially doing quite well and was comfortably oblivious to the suffering of those in the concentration camps, at least until it was too late. The average citizen in most reasonably functional societies wants to trust their government. Such basic trust isn’t hard to achieve and authoritarians easily take advantage of it.
The question is: What kind of trust? And to what end?
That is a particularly difficult question in a society like that of the United States. North America has been an immigrant destination for a half millennia and, for that reason, it is diverse in terms of culture, ethnicity, race, religion, language, etc. Diversity is the very heart of American culture. Yet contrary to the beliefs of some people, the United States rates way above the global average in terms of culture of trust, functioning social democracy, and strength of welfare state. We are far from a perfect country, but we are even further from being one of the worst.
Immigration and diversity is an American tradition, the very foundation of our society. We have many centuries of practice (i.e., learning by way of mistakes) in dealing with diversity, tolerance, and assimilation. Why scrap the one thing that has made American a great or at least interesting, albeit imperfect, experiment?
Besides, if not for multiculturalism and the welcoming of the huddled masses to American shores, what moral justification is there for our present American imperialism that seeks to rule over the entire world? How are we to pay the moral debt to the victims of Western policies, if we are to refuse them even the basic right of refuge from the problems we helped cause? Why do elites assume their opinions matter at all, these elites being the very people who are most responsible for and most benefiting from this state of injustice and unfairness?
(*crickets chirping*)
Maybe the greatest threat we face isn’t from immigrants and diversity but from those who fear-monger and scapegoat to push their self-serving agenda of cronyism, authoritarianism, plutocracy, oligarchy, corporatism, and neo-imperialism. Is the concern about what makes the world a better place for all or how the elite can maintain their wealth and privilege, power and control? Those are opposing purposes to be pursued with far different kinds of methods, policies, and actions. What if we average people, the common masses choose to disagree with those who presume to be our masters, the self-proclaimed meritocratic elite?
If anyone bothered to ask me, I know the kinds of people I’d deport and imprison. In seeking to create a culture of trust, it is exceedingly clear the oppressors who undermine trust and so who are a threat to a culture of trust. Those who disseminate mistrust should not be trusted. There is the source of the problem that needs to be taken care of with extreme prejudice.
* * *
The Golden Rule and Reality
Origin of American Diversity
The Root and Rot of the Tree of Liberty
Midlands Mestizo: Pluralism and Social Democracy
The Fight For Freedom Is the Fight To Exist: Independence and Interdependence
“Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America.”
“…from every part of Europe.”
Incentives of Individualism
How do we make the strange familiar?
Good Liberals vs Savage Nihilists
Cost of War
The War on Democracy: a simple answer
A System of Unhappiness
Costs Must Be Paid: Social Darwinism As Public Good
Ideological Realism & Scarcity of Imagination
The Unimagined: Capitalism and Crappiness
“just a means to that end”
It’s All Your Fault, You Fat Loser!
Capitalism as Social Control
The Moral Imagination of Fear
The Living Apocalypse, A Lived Reality Tunnel
Racial Reality Tunnel
Race Realism and Racialized Medicine
More Minorities, Less Crime
The Desperate Acting Desperately
From Bad to Worse: Trends Across Generations
Are White Appalachians A Special Case?
Opportunity Precedes Achievement, Good Timing Also Helps
Moral Flynn Effect?
Marmalade 
I think we finally figured out why Sanders supporters were rare in the Democratic Party:
https://www.thenation.com/article/can-a-sanders-democrat-win-the-new-jersey-governors-race/
If you read the article, the person who did the booting denies it, but I don’t believe them.
At least we know now why so few got behind Sanders.
It’s unsurprising. This is the kind of thing many people assumed happen and happens all the time. That is how party politics works. It is a party machine, not a democratic process.
If you read the full article, this is like reading about a some gang, not a political party.
You wouldn’t be the first person to describe a political machine as a gang. In the late 1800s into the early 1900s, political machines were powerful and highly controlled. They often exerted their most direct control at the local level, but that gave them the clout to manipulate the parties at the national level. That was a time when corruption, bribery, etc was common.
Many politicians were bought and sold, beholden to powerful groups that were aligned with or had power over political parties. One of those powerful groups was the Second Klan who gained great influence within the Democratic Party. The Second Klan had politicians on their payroll. Early labor unions also became immensely powerful and they rarely bothered to operate in a democratic way, often being directly tied to organized crime. Most labor unions to this day remain hierarchical organizations, such as most union leadership supporting Clinton while most union members were supporting Sanders.
What has changed is how some of corruption and manipulation has become more covert, as they’ve found more effective ways to manipulate the political process. Power also has become more concentrated among an ever smaller select group of ruling elite. This has a lot to do with corporatism, as big biz is now more powerful than it was during the Gilded Age. This has been going for a while, but this election brought it out into the open. There has never before been so much info released through leaks and hacks. It might take decades for the American public to come to terms with it, assuming we have decades before some major catastrophe or mass civil unrest.