Hacker News Reader

Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

When looking beyond solely economic effects, studies paint immigration/diversity less favorably - that it reduces trust and social cohesion [0,1], and makes ethnic conflict more likely [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/juaf.12015

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1409

View on HN

I'd appreciate it if you didn't deliberately misinterpret your citations, considering in your first he explicitly says: "in the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits" [1]

And your second citation says nothing of the sort with regards to immigration, it is solely examining the affects of geography within a country as it affects conflict both religious and ethnic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...

I didn't misinterpret anything - the study author says so, not the study itself. And he failed to show it in that or any subsequent study. He also delayed publication for 6 years because he didn't like the results, so it's not surprising he said so.

The second citation doesn't examine the effects of 'geography', but the effects of borders and boundaries between ethnic groups, finding increased conflict where those boundaries are missing.

Accusing the above comment of deliberately misinterpreting the citations adds an unnecessary negativity to this discussion. Better to assume incompetence than malice, if that's even the case.

Furthermore, this discussion is about the overall cost/benefit calculation, so your point about the paper saying there are benefits does not preclude what the above comment stated.

> When looking beyond solely economic effects

Like it or not, in the USA cash is king. It is what people optimize for.

If you FIX a highly-rewarded measure for a nontrivial time period, the "take best comers" approach kicks ass. As long as your fix apriori and them measure. That's what we see here. GDP was defined before current immigration policy was set, after all.

If we have faults, they are in our system for doling out rewards. Not in the color/creed/religion of the people we let compete for those rewards.

If you want better social cohesion, design social systems to REWARD that cohesion. Then, communities will offer what you seek. To your great surprise, I suspect, those communities will be highly diverse.

Otherwise, you end up with sub-populations that severely under-perform on actually measured metrics and go out to search for bullshit alternative (under/arbitrarily)measured metrics by which they win. Again, that's what we see in your comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com