Vice President JD Vance says “too much immigration too quickly” to the United States destroys America’s social cohesion, giving way to balkanization and ghettoization of American communities.
In an extensive interview with the New York Times, Vance opened up about his national populist worldview — stating, as many social scientists have argued in the past, that mass immigration drains a nation of its civic trust and social trust.
“The point that I’ve tried to make is I think a lot about this question of social cohesion in the United States. I think about how we form the kind of society again where people can raise families, where people join institutions together. Where what I think [Cardinal] Burke would have called the mediating layers of society are actually healthy and vibrant,” Vance said:
And I do think that those who care about what might be called the common good, they sometimes underweight how destructive immigration at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years is to the common good. I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly. [Emphasis added]
That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly. [Emphasis added]
Research continuously shows that social cohesion is eroded by mass immigration.
For example, the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory published such studies, noting that “most of the empirical literature on this subject finds that the relationship between diversity and trust is negative – the more diverse a community is, the less likely individuals in it are to be trusting.”
“The trend seems to hold especially strong for the US,” the Migration Observatory states:
Costa and Khan (2003) established with the General Social Survey that people in more diverse neighbourhoods trust their neighbours less and are less likely to be politically or communally involved. [Emphasis added]
Alesina and La Ferrara (2000, 2005) found that trust in general and more specifically interpersonal trust is lower in more racially heterogeneous communities in the US. Stolle et al. (2008) comparing US and Canada observed a strong negative effect of diversity on trust; however, they also found that contact may neutralize but not make this relationship positive. Most notably, Putnam (2007) argues that diversity seems to alienate people in general and in his words pushes them towards ‘hunkering down’ i.e. towards segregation and isolation. [Emphasis added]
Similarly, research published in the Annual Review of Political Science in 2020 reviewed similar studies, ultimately finding the same outcome — mass immigration erodes social cohesion.
“The negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust applies for all types of trust, but there is substantial variation in strength between types,” the research article states. The negative relationship is strongest for trust in neighbors, intermediate for in-group trust and generalized social trust, and weakest (and statistically insignificant) for out-group trust.”
Most recently, the Pew Research Center published a report on social trust in the U.S. The study found declining social trust among Americans — coinciding with a record level of foreign-born residents residing across the country, increasing the nation’s ethnic diversity.
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“Fewer than half of Americans (44%) now say they can trust all or most of the people in their neighborhood, down from 52% a decade ago,” the Pew Research study states. “And only around a third say most people can be trusted – also down around 10 points over the past 10 years.”
The study notes that increasing diversity has long meant decreasing social trust:
Scholars have argued that higher levels of ethnic diversity are related to lower levels of social trust, and the U.S. population has been growing more racially and ethnically diverse. From 2000 to 2018, at least 109 counties in 22 states – from California and Nevada to Kansas and North Carolina – went from majority White to majority non-White. [Emphasis added]
Americans now see more racial diversity around them: 50% say that all or most of their neighbors are the same race or ethnicity as they are, down from 55% in 2018. And, particularly among White Americans, the sense that one lives in a neighborhood with a lot of people who share the same race and ethnicity is related to higher levels of social trust. [Emphasis added]
Today, nearly 52 million foreign-born residents live in the U.S. — a record never seen before in American history.
Annually, the U.S. imports about a million legal immigrants, a historically high figure, and an uncounted number of illegal aliens. It is estimated that about 11 to 22 million illegal aliens reside in the U.S.
Nearly all U.S. population growth today is driven by immigration, legal and illegal. With an immigration moratorium, the nation’s population would stabilize.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
