Dels finns ett antal possitiva effekter som har samband med invandring:
- Creativity in general seems to be enhanced by immigration and diversity (Simonton 1999). Throughout history, for example, immigrants have accounted for three to four times as many of America’s Nobel Laureates, National Academy of Science members, Academy Award film directors and winners of Kennedy Center awards in the performing arts as nativeborn Americans [...].
- Immigration is generally associated with more rapid economic growth [...].
- In advanced countries with aging populations, immigration is important to help offset the impending fiscal effects of the retirement of the babyboom generation [...].
- New research from the World Bank has highlighted yet another benefit from immigration, one of special relevance to the Nordic countries that have long played a disproportionate role on issues of global development. This new research suggests that immigration from the global South to the richer North greatly enhances development in the South, partly because of remittances from immigrants to their families back home and partly because of the transfer of technology and new ideas through immigrant networks. So powerful is this effect that despite ‘brain drain’ costs, increasing annual northward immigration by only three percentage points might produce net benefits greater than meeting all our national targets for development assistance plus cancelling all Third World debt plus abolishing all barriers to Third World trade (World Bank 2005; Pritchett 2006) [...].
Etc. Men så till relationen till förtroende:
- Ethnic diversity will increase substantially in virtually all modern societies over the next several decades, in part because of immigration. Increased immigration and diversity are not only inevitable, but over the long run they are also desirable. Ethnic diversity is, on balance, an important social asset, as the history of my own country demonstrates.
- In the short to medium run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital. In support of this provocative claim I wish to adduce some new evidence, drawn primarily from the United States. In order to elaborate on the details of this new evidence, this portion of my article is longer and more technical than my discussion of the other two core claims, but all three are equally important.
- In the medium to long run, on the other hand, successful immigrant societies create new forms of social solidarity and dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities. Thus, the central challenge for modern, diversifying societies is to create a new, broader sense of ‘we’.
I grew up in a small town in the Midwest in the 1950s. Of the 150 students in my senior class, I knew the religion of virtually every one. Even now, when I have long forgotten their names, I can generally remember who was a Catholic, who was a Methodist and so on. Nor was that some personal quirk of mine, because in fact most of my classmates knew everyone else’s religion. My own children, who went to high school in the 1980s, knew the religion of hardly any of their classmates. Why the difference? To solve the mystery, you need to know that over those thirty years religious endogamy (the practice of marrying only within one’s faith) has largely faded in America, at least among mainline Protestants and Catholics and Jews. In the 1950s, for the most important aspect of any adolescent’s life – mating – it was essential to keep track of one’s peers’ religious affiliations. By the 1980s, religion was hardly more important than left- or right-handedness to romance.Exemplet blir mer relevant om man betänker hur etnifierade de amerikanska samfunden var på den tiden. Merparten av kyrkorna vände sig uteslutande till en etnisk eller rasdefinierad grupp. Detta gäller inte inte minst för de "svarta" och "vita" kyrkorna i södern, men också på t.ex. katolska kyrkans relation till bl.a. irländska och italienska invandrare. Under USA:s första hundra år uppfattades inte minst inflyttningen av katoliker, och kanske i synnerhet just irländare, som ett betydande samhällsproblem. Idag har en omfattande utveckling ägt rum, en utveckling som kan beskrivas både statistiskt och etnografiskt. Nya kyrkor definieras i minskande grad i etniska termer, samfundsexogami blir allt vanligare och en gång etniskt och religiöst begränsade traditioner - från S.t Patrick's Day till pizza - har nu blivit allmängods. Ingen skulle längre ifrågasätta en persons amerikanskhet med hänvisning till att denna är katolik eller härstammar från Sicilien.
Jämförelsen med utvecklingen bland amerikanska trossamfund är inte minst relevant ur svenskt perspektiv med tanke på att många av våra nya religiösa samfund specifikt vänder sig till olika invandrade grupper. Detta gäller t.ex. de ortodoxa kyrkorna. Relationerna mellan sådana organisationer, staten och samhället i stort spelar enligt Putnam en central roll för utvecklingen:
Our field studies suggest that locally based programs to reach out to new immigrant communities are a powerful tool for mutual learning. Religious institutions – and in our era, as a century ago, especially the Catholic church – have a major role to play in incorporating new immigrants and then forging shared identities across ethnic boundaries. Ethnically defined social groups (such the Sons of Norway or the Knights of Columbus or Jewish immigrant aid societies) were important initial steps toward immigrant civic engagement a century ago. Bonding social capital can thus be a prelude to bridging social capital, rather than precluding it.Kontentan är att identiteter är någonting som förändras över tid, att såväl gemenskap och lojalitet som kulturell och ekonomisk utveckling kan växa ur blandningen av kulturella, etniska och religiösa grupper, samt att detta inte behöver leda till en total löskoppling från tidigare traditioner, men däremot att de förändras och får nya betydelser. Integration är alltså enligt Putnam om en utmaning som har god chans att både lyckas och leda till framgång, vilket är någonting ganska annorlunda än ett påstått kausalt samband mellan kulturell mångfald och låg tillit.
(Alla citat är från Scandinavian Political Science, Vol. 30 – No. 2, 2007)
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