High-trust societies prosper, and low-trust societies don't.
That is a gross generalization, but it is also true.
A corollary: turning a high-trust society into a low-trust society is easy. The opposite is extremely difficult.
— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) August 3, 2025
While the immigration debate is too intimately wrapped up in discussions about race, race is actually a distraction from the much bigger issue of the culture from which migrants are coming. If a migrant treks to a Western country from Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Somalia, they are steeped in a culture in which social trust is quite low, and are very unlikely to integrate well into Western society.
If they are coming from a Western European country or the United States, they are likely to integrate well--unless they come from a pocket within those societies where trust is low. Robert Putnam, for instance, wrote a book called "Bowling Alone" about social trust, and his earlier work explained why Northern Italy was more prosperous than Sicily--social trust was the answer. Sicily is tribal in a way that Northern Italy is not, which is why the Mafia thrives there.
It is difficult to discuss these issues because there is such a strong overlap between cultural groupings and race, and if you say "Somalis are likelier to commit fraud" than Americans, people immediately jump to race as your motivation for saying so. But, as I can attest, coming from Minnesota, Somalis commit a huge amount of fraud. Our biggest government scandals are Somali fraud cases.
It's the culture, not the race, that matters. Nobody I know would be anything but thrilled if Idris Elba, Rishi Sunak, or Kemi Badenoch immigrated to the United States, and few people I know would be thrilled if a Somali family with a wife in a niqab moved in next door. That may sound bigoted, but it is true because it is rational.
It may be surprising that Norway keeps statistics that are embarrassing to the reality-shy, but they do. And the statistics about crime committed by native-born Norwegians and immigrants tell a story we need to hear about migration from low-trust societies. Not only are the migrants from these societies much more likely to commit crimes than Norwegians or Western European migrants (or US migrants), but their children are even worse.
As you can see, Danes and Western immigrants commit crimes at similar rates. Western migrants commit a tiny bit more property crime and fewer violent crimes than Danes. On the other hand, migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey are, as a group, a menace. Their rate of rapes is 9x that of Westerners, violent crimes as a whole 5x, and robbery 10x. Non-Westerners as a group are not quite so bad, but clearly a net drain on social trust and society as a whole.
This is, of course, on top of the fact that the average non-Western migrant is a net consumer of government resources, so the society is paying taxes to have their quality of life and long-term societal health diminished.
And it's not just a first-generation problem. The second generation, if anything, is a bigger drain on society.
Suppressing discussion about these issues is dividing society, actually increasing racism as people get tired of being bashed over the head for speaking truths, and driving down social trust. The pendulum is swinging away from political correctness and tiptoeing around issues that make people uncomfortable, and when pendulums swing, they usually go beyond the set point where the discussion is healthy.
We should focus on issues like social trust rather than race. If somebody is 9x as likely to commit a crime as somebody else, it's probably a bad idea to invite them into your home.
Individuals and societies that look away from reality to avoid seeing uncomfortable facts are on a path to failure. In the United States, we twist ourselves into knots about race, pretending not to see that there are segments of our minority communities that are totally dysfunctional. We dance around issues rather than confront them, and that makes fixing the problems impossible, and frustrates people so much that some give up entirely on the whole idea that they can be fixed.
We are eroding social trust in our society for no other reason than that we want to be politically correct. Everybody knows that the assault in Cincinnati was a racial hate crime, but no liberal wants to say it. They twist reality into knots and attack anybody for telling the truth. They complain that we notice.
The problem is that inner cities are pockets of low-trust societies within larger, higher-trust societies. Few people in the exurbs worry that they can't walk at night. Few people in large parts of our cities feel that they can walk their neighborhoods safely.
There is a neighborhood in Minneapolis called "Little Mogadishu," and while not quite a "no-go" zone, it isn't exactly welcoming. It's not racist to say that because it is a true statement.
Look at those charts. They tell a story. You may not like it, but there it is.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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