The Harvard political scientist, Robert Putnam, famous for Bowling Alone, his book on declining civic engagement, has found that the greater the diversity of a community the fewer people vote, the less they volunteer, and the less they give to charity or work on community projects. In the most diverse communities neighbours trust each other about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings.
iht.com/americas August 5th, 2007
You would think this would be common sense, an uncommon phenomenon these days. We are subjected to a small minority of thought police who tell us that we are to enjoy all this diversity (read: immigration), or else. I have a sneaking suspicion that, were an exhaustive survey to to undertaken, one would find that the people who are so keen on cultural and linguistic diversity have the money to have nice homes in leafy suburbs and the opportunity to educate their children in schools attended by upper middle class people like themselves. It is always the poor and disadvantaged who bear the brunt of the latest experiment in social engineering. That is to say, it is the poor who have to compete with immigrant minimum wage workers on $7 an hour in the US, for instance.
And this from a political liberal!
This is one of those “duh” studies. As you said, common sense and open eyes will lead one to the same conclusion. People prefer to live and work with people like themselves. There’s a reason we hear that old saying “birds of feather flock together” on a regular basis. It’s true.
Not to say it’s not a useful study. Always good to have numbers. I wonder what Epicurus would have to say about it. I think he’d probably be a scientist of some kind (physicist?) and would be much more open to these data than those with a political/economic stake in “celebrating diversity” (and forcing others to do so). Seeing as mass immigration decreases mean happiness, I think he’d be against it.