About the most certain prediction we can make of any developed country is that it will be more ethnically diverse in a few decades’ time than it is today. The magnetic pull of the rich world is such that slamming the gates is probably not possible, but even if it could be done, immigrants already in the West are set to have enough children to represent a growing population share for a time to come.
This week, US President Barack Obama visited the UK for the G20 summit. The first black president of the US is an apparent symbol of American comfort with diversity, and a prompt for wondering whether the UK is similarly at ease. For the last few months, I have been writing a book with a team of researchers — led by Harvard professor Robert Putnam — who have been trying to find this out. Despite the undoubted economic and cultural gains from diversity, it transpires that it does put certain strains on community life, on both sides of the Atlantic — especially when politicians exploit unease.
With electric blue eyes and a prophet’s beard, Putnam stands out as a man drawn to big ideas at a time when university life is ever more specialized. He made headlines around the world in 2000 with his book Bowling Alone, which looked at everything from bridge clubs to PTAs to reach its conclusion that community life in the US was withering on the vine.
Despite that grim verdict, he brims with the conviction that societies can turn themselves around, and his work has won the attention of politicians ranging from Obama to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. He has now teamed up with Manchester University in northern England for a £5 million (US$7.2 million) five-year project to examine the vast forces that are reshaping society in the UK and the US. Studies on the feminization of working life and the gulf between pious America and secular Europe will follow on from the work on immigration.
Diversity has run much further in the US than Britain; there, as many as one in three citizens belong to one ethnic minority or another. In the UK, the figure is around 10 percent, or slightly more if groups such as the Irish are included. But even this figure is a remarkable transformation when it is recalled that the non-white population was vanishingly small until the Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury in 1948, bringing the first large group of West Indian immigrants to the UK a mere two generations ago.
More pertinently, the proportion has been growing fast. The credit crunch has temporarily depressed the inflow of arrivals, but before long it will probably pick up again.
A flick through a children’s history book is enough to inspire speculation about differences in the way the US and Britain will handle the transformation. The Statue of Liberty is the symbol of an immigrant nation, whereas fusty myths of British tradition concern an island people fending off all comers since 1066. Indeed, it turns out that, in many respects, immigrants in the US fare better, finding work more easily and enjoying better health than new arrivals in the UK.
With race, the story is different, thanks to the poisonous legacy of slavery. The black American population is more ghettoized and suffers worse health than almost any section of US society. Despite warnings by Trevor Phillips, chair of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, about Britain sleepwalking into segregation, the census reveals that there are few true British ghettos.
The most keenly anticipated findings concern the effect of racial diversity on community life. Two years have passed since Putnam — a staunch progressive who still believes immigration is, in general, a force for good — sparked controversy with research that showed diversity tended to weaken trust and active citizenship.
Surprised by the result, he adjusted the analysis to take account of every feasible alternative explanation, including inequality, poverty and neighborhood turnover. But whatever else was factored in, the diversity effect remained.
“It was not,” he says, “that diverse neighborhoods were beset with racial tension. Rather, it seemed people responded to living in a mixed area by ‘hunkering down,’ withdrawing from the social world as a whole — including from interaction with people of their own color — like shy turtles retreating into their shells.”
Is the same thing happening in Britain? Ed Fieldhouse, professor of social and political science at Manchester University, has led the research at the British end, applying a similar methodology in both countries at once.
He found the adverse link between diversity and community-mindedness applied in the UK too, but was much less powerful. In the US, diversity proved almost as corrosive as poverty, while in the UK the impact was more modest, akin to the effect of an increase in turnover among the local population.
The trans-Atlantic contrast may reflect different dividing lines in the two societies. Racial identity has historically loomed large in American thinking, whereas in the UK the class cleavage traditionally counts more. That could conceivably result in Americans hunkering down more in the face of racial diversity, although this remains somewhat speculative, and Putnam stresses that more work is needed on this point.
But even if modest, the adverse reaction to diversity was still there in Britain, and Fieldhouse wanted to understand its nature.
To do so, he focused on the minority ethnic population itself, to see whether it reacted in the same way as the white majority. He discovered it does not: For non-white individuals, being exposed to diversity has little impact on attitudes such as trust.
“At first, we weren’t sure whether this was because minorities faced less prejudice in mixed areas, or whether instead it was because diverse neighborhoods more often provided the chance to live alongside others from their own particular ethnic group,” Fieldhouse says.
As it turned out, the second explanation was correct. Once the greater scope for, say, Pakistanis to live alongside other Pakistanis in diverse areas is discounted, they hunker down in the face of diversity in much the same way as white people.
So it seems that it is the desire to live with one’s kith and kin that explains why diversity strains social solidarity.
The difference in the British and US results, however, demonstrates that this desire is more a matter of conditioning than immovable instinct.
Putnam points out that when he was a teenager of Methodist stock in the UK of the 1950s, Jewish and Catholic girls were not seen as feasible dates.
“Religion was an important dividing line back then,” he says. “But by the 1980s, when my own kids were at high school, it was seen as so incidental that they were no more concerned with their classmates’ faith than whether they were left or right-handed.”
If religion has ceased to be a source of social division, Putnam says, there is no reason in principle why ethnicity should not in time cease to divide as well.
“In fact,” he adds, “evidence uncovered in our research shows that on both sides of the Atlantic younger generations are growing steadily more comfortable with racial diversity than their elders.”
The election of a black American president, unthinkable a generation ago, only confirms that the process is well under way. (Though with one white parent, it might be argued that Obama is not “truly black.” The fact that he is almost always described as such, and identifies himself that way, is another reminder of the reality that racial categories are socially constructed rather than God-given.)
But if shifting political winds can snuff out discomfort, they can also greatly inflame it. One chapter in Putnam’s new book, to be published later this year, will be dedicated to exploring what happens when political debates turn against immigrants.
The British Conservatives’ 2005 election campaign is a case in point. They plastered two slogans on one poster — “It’s not racist to talk about immigration” and “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” — that together pulled off the brazen trick of linking race and migration in the electorate’s mind while insisting that they were separate.
The effect? The proportion of the electorate ranking immigration or asylum as their top concern increased by two-thirds during the campaign. There is little need for the usual caveats about unpicking cause and effect; this finding was established by asking the same people the same question immediately before and immediately after the campaign. Analysis in the US confirms that anxiety about immigration is shaped more by media coverage than objective demographics.
The political mood also determines which particular immigrants bear the brunt of resentment. In 1980s Britain, news reports often linked West Indians with crime and disorder — partly because of the riots in Brixton, south London. And back then, living in African-Caribbean neighborhoods, though not South Asian ones, fueled anxiety about immigration. Twenty years on, the media’s treatment of Muslims after Sept. 11 has turned the heat onto them instead.
So the message of Putnam’s research comes in two parts. First, diversity currently imposes strains on society, but second, there is no inevitable reason why it should.
Taking the long view, he reflects on the big social changes of the past, such as the Industrial Revolution, which was cradled in Manchester.
“Initially, life expectancy fell and the quality of life declined,” Putnam explains.
“But people did not go back to the villages. They stayed in the cities, devised new arrangements for public sanitation and so on, and ended up much better off than before. Greater diversity is one of the revolutions of our own time. It will no more be reversed than industrialization. The challenge is to find ways to make a success of it,” he says.
The choice of a black man with an immigrant father to lead the rich world is a sign that the necessary changes are already under way.
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