The Cultures of Migrants
So mutual regard, trust, and moral outrage against those who free ride all support an equitable and cooperative society. How does this relate to migration? Migrants bring not only the human capital generated in their own societies; they also bring the moral codes of their own societies. Thus, unsurprisingly, Nigerian immigrants to other societies tend to be untrusting and opportunistic. In a classic study of differences in cultural attitudes, Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel
compared the payment of parking fines by diplomats in New York. 8
During the key period, diplomats had legal immunity from fines, and so the only restraint on a refusal to pay was their own ethical standards. Fisman and Miguel found that the behavior of diplomats from different countries varied enormously but was well explained by the corruption level prevailing in the country of the diplomat, as measured by standard surveys. Diplomats brought their culture with them. The study also investigated whether, through exposure to New York, diplomats gradually absorbed local standards of behavior: in this case, the incidence of nonpayment would gradually
68 HOST SOCIETIES: WELCOME OR RESENTMENT?
converge on the very low levels already prevalent among diplomats from the low-corruption countries. Instead, the opposite happened: diplomats from high-corruption countries continued not to pay fines, whereas those from low-corruption countries became less likely to pay. The most reasonable interpretation of these results is that diplomats did not absorb the norms of New Yorkers, but
instead began to absorb the norms of the diplomatic community.
Not only do attitudes to parking fines reflect the culture of origin, but so do attitudes toward social redistribution. Geert Hofstede has attempted to measure a wide array of cultural differences between
countries systematically. 9 His measures correlate with reasonably
well-measured differences in observable behavior such as the murder rate. So, uncomfortable as it may be, there are large cultural differences that map into important aspects of social behavior, and migrants bring their culture with them.
People in all societies manage mutual regard for their families, and usually also for their local communities, but the distinctive feature of the high-income societies is that mutual regard embraces a much larger group of people, namely fellow citizens. Thus for example, the French are more willing to cooperate with each other and to make transfers to other citizens than are Nigerians, and this supports a range of institutions and norms that have enabled France to become much richer and more equal than Nigeria. Such differences in mutual regard are not genetic: in the distant past France used to be like Nigeria. But France has benefited from a succession of intellectual revolutions that have gradually reconfigured how people perceive each other.
The effect of immigration then depends partly on its scale and partly on the speed with which immigrants adjust to the trust norms of their host society. Do Nigerian doctors practicing in Britain adopt the norms of indigenous doctors, do they remain a
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self-referential group like diplomats, or, in extremis, does a sufficiently large influx of Nigerian doctors retaining Nigerian practices lead to the decay of coordination games such as life insurance?
I doubt that in any of the high-income societies migration has to date significantly jeopardized the mosaic of cooperation games. But I am not assessing past migration: I am trying to infer from relationships observable today the possible consequences of continued acceleration.
Countries vary in their success in enabling immigrants and their children to take on the norms of their new society. Among the most successful is America. Children growing up in America almost
unavoidably assimilate American values. The same is far from true in Europe. Indeed, there is now mounting evidence that the opposite happens: the children of immigrants are more resistant to adopting the national culture than are their parents. The children of some immigrant groups appear to want to self-identify as different from the prevailing national identity around them. Everyone has multiple identities, such as worker, family member, and citizen.
Like everyone else, immigrants can take on such multiple identities.
But how they balance these identities affects their behavior. For example, in a fascinating experiment, researchers tested Asian American women on mathematics, first emphasizing either their Asian identity or their female identity. They found that when women were primed with their Asian identity, they achieved significantly higher scores than when primed with their female identity. 10 I have already discussed the economic significance of identity at the level of the firm. 11 One narrative that, while not unique to immigrants, is atypically common is that of self-improvement. Immigrants are self-selected from among those people who are most aspirational for themselves and their children. That is why they choose to uproot themselves. This attitude about opportunities
70 HOST SOCIETIES: WELCOME OR RESENTMENT?
tends to make them particularly good workers. Thus, migrants and their children may find that preserving a separate identity is no handicap to individual success. This is supported by a new study
of second-generation Turkish immigrants to Germany. 12 Germany first treated its Turkish immigrants as temporary guest workers and then adopted a strategy of multiculturalism. Unsurprisingly, neither the first nor the second generation has integrated into mainstream German society. Reflecting this, Chancellor Merkel recently described multiculturalism as “an utter failure.” So Germany is clearly at the low absorption end of the spectrum of how rapidly migrants assimilate. The study investigated whether the choice between German and Turkish identity made by the second generation of Turkish migrants mattered for how well they performed in education and for whether they got a job. The approach was to trace back to the first language in which migrants had been raised: German or Turkish. This language choice, made by parents, strongly influenced the identity that their children took on: those reared in Turkish as their first language were much more likely to self-identify as Turkish and less likely to identify as German. However, as long as they subsequently became fluent in German, this made no difference to schooling or jobs. So migrants themselves do not lose out from preserving a separate identity. But as members of society, if immigrants reject national identity, they are indeed choosing to be outsiders. This does not matter in the narrowly defined behavior spaces of school and work, but it may matter in the open behavior space of society at large for the informal nation-wide systems of cooperation and political support for redistribution, which distinctively characterize the high-income societies.
The process whereby young people adopt identities is not well understood. Until recently, economics would not even have considered the question well posed: people’s preferences were simply
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givens, and the determinants of behavior were the incentives with which people were faced. However, a central recent insight in social science is that people copy the behavior of others. This appears to have deep neurological foundations: in the mid-1990s it was discovered that the mirror neuron fires both when someone performs
an action and when they see someone else perform it. 13 In effect,
copying is the neurological default option; behavior that avoids copying an action requires a conscious decision to override the mirror neurons. This does not make us slaves to the actions of others, but experimental psychology is revealing that we are disturbingly suggestible. A subject who observes rude behavior will behave more rudely; a subject who is told to think about the characteristics of the elderly will themselves walk more slowly. The behavior of young people does not follow simply from their genes, their training, and their incentives: it is strongly influenced by what they see around them as pertinent role models. But what, then, are the pertinent role models?
Some role models are much more accessible than others. A con-
cept closely related to that of role model is t
hat of stereotype. They differ in their normative connotations—something described as a role model is usually implied to be good, whereas something described as a stereotype is usually implied to be bad. But what they have in common is the idea that they are ready-made identities. Try to strip the concept of a stereotype of its negative connotations because it has a different characteristic that is important. A role model is usually some individual person: a father can be a role model for a son. But a stereotype is the product of a culture: it is not an individual, who can only be known within a personal circle of acquaintance, but a generalized role model accessible to anyone who is part of a culture. The idea of a “good plumber” is in this sense a stereotype. We do not need to specify all the aspects of
72 HOST SOCIETIES: WELCOME OR RESENTMENT?
behavior that constitute a good plumber; that has already been done for us in any society that has the concept. Betwixt and between role models and stereotypes are celebrities. Celebrities are individual people and so can be role models, but they are also part of a culture and so readily available to anyone within the culture. Typically, the culture will portray a celebrity not as “the man in full” but as a caricature in which certain features are emphasized: in effect, a celebrity is a role model who can function as a stereotype.
Popular culture is a menu of readily downloadable stereotypes.
Some young people will be impervious to popular culture and grow up as their own eccentric selves. But many will download some ready-made identity and live it out, probably periodically changing it. If this is a reasonable depiction of how behavior gets shaped, then public policy can influence behavior in two distinct ways. The conventional approach of the past century has been through incentives: for example, we tax behaviors that are socially damaging, such as smoking, and subsidize behavior that is socially useful, such as raising children. But the scope to influence behavior through incentives has often proved to be quite limited: once someone has downloaded the identity of a criminal, incentives may have little power to deter socially costly behavior. The other way of shaping behavior is to alter the menu of downloadable stereotypes. This is, of course, controversial, but to take an example, there is ample evidence that repeated exposure to violence through the media reduces inhibi-tions to violent behavior.
How might this relate to migration? We now have three seemingly unrelated sets of propositions. One is about mutual regard: mutual regard is valuable for the trust that supports cooperation and the empathy that supports redistribution. The habits of trust and empathy among very large groups of people are not natural but have grown as part of the process of achieving prosperity; immigrants
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from poor countries are likely to arrive with less of a presupposition to trust and empathize with others in their new society. The second is about identity: the identity that people adopt matters for their behavior; many people adopt some of their identity by downloading stereotypical behavior from their culture. The third concerns the identity adopted by immigrants. In an important new study, a team of researchers investigated variations in the willingness of Hispanic immigrants to America to cooperate for public goods. The variations were designed to pick up differences in how immigrants perceived both their identity and their degree of exclusion from the society around them. An innovation of their research was that in addition to the conventional laboratory games designed to tease out attitudes to others, it included real neighborhood public goods, such as local health and education facilities. They found powerful evidence that how migrants see themselves influences their willingness to cooperate and contribute to public goods. The more migrants self-identified as Latino as opposed to American, the less they contributed. One practical insight of the research was that fluency in English mattered: the more that English was the language used at home, the stronger
was a sense of American identity. 14 This study is new and I am not aware of an equivalent one for Europe. However, in America immigrants absorb national identity more readily than they do in Europe, where if anything resistance to taking on national identity appears to be increasing. A reasonable speculation is that in Europe immigrants absorb prevailing levels of trust more slowly than in America.
Immigration, Trust, and Cooperation
A growing group of people with low levels of trust can be destabilizing. If the number of people playing opportunistic rather than cooperative strategies accumulates, it may no longer be sensible for
74 HOST SOCIETIES: WELCOME OR RESENTMENT?
other people to continue to play cooperative strategies. The vital ingredient of successful cooperation is that enough people should be willing to punish those who do not cooperate. But if those who adopt opportunistic rather than cooperative strategies are disproportionately immigrants, punishment may become misconstrued as discrimination, making people more reluctant to punish. Further, other members of the immigrant group might misconstrue punishment of opportunism as discrimination against their group and themselves punish those who punish to enforce cooperation: recall that these are the “supervillains” in cooperation games who most effectively cause cooperation to collapse.
Unfortunately, there is evidence that these concerns are not
merely hypothetical. Robert Putnam is a leading social scientist at Harvard and the world’s foremost scholar of the concept of “social capital.” Using a large American sample, Putnam investigated the
effect of immigration on trust. 15 One of his findings, though disturbing, was standard: the greater the proportion of immigrants in a community, the lower were mutual levels of trust between immigrants and the indigenous population. In other words, far from proximity leading to greater mutual understanding, it leads to heightened mutual suspicion. This relationship has been widely studied, and Putnam’s results are in line with the majority of other such research.
However, Putnam went on to a completely new result that is far more troubling. The higher the level of immigration in a community, the lower the trust was not just between groups but within them. A high level of immigration was associated with a lower level of trust of each other purely among the indigenous people in the community. As would be expected from the importance of trust in fostering cooperation, the lower level of trust manifested itself in many different forms of reduced cooperation. Putnam refers to this effect
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as “hunkering down”: indigenous people living in a high-immigrant community retreat into themselves, trusting less and taking less part in social activities, having fewer friends, and watching more television. I have described Putnam’s results as if they were merely simple correlations between the level of immigration in a community and the level of trust. Were this the case his work would be open to a myriad of statistical objections. But Putnam is a highly professional researcher who has carefully investigated and controlled for a wide range of spurious possible explanations for his results. All social science is open to challenge, and given that Putnam’s results were politically anathema for many social scientists, it was inevitable that his results would be contested. While they may turn out to be misleading, they should not be dismissed. Despite Putnam’s evident discomfort with the results, as he says, “it would be unfortunate if a politically correct progressivism were to deny
the reality of the challenge to social solidarity posed by diversity.” 16
The big limitation of Putnam’s analysis, which he recognizes, is that it is based on a snapshot: it does not track changes over time.
This does not invalidate the results, but the data cannot be used to analyze what might make immigration less damaging to cooperation. What we are left with is a robust result that immigration reduces the social capital of the indigenous population. Unfortunately, at least in America, the effect is quite powerful. At the level of individual communities, it becomes more pronounced the larger the proportion of immigrants is. While the result that social capital even within a group is reduced by diversity
is new, the more general result that ethnic diversity in a community inhibits cooperation has been found in many different contexts. Evidently, the salient feature of ethnicity is not genetic but cultural: distinct ethnicities stand proxy for distinct cultural identities. An important example of this research, which ultimately demonstrates the irrelevance of
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genetic differences, is a study by Edward Miguel of Berkeley that investigated the provision of a basic public good—the maintenance
of a village well—in rural Kenya. 17 Kenya has around fifty different ethnic groups, and so villages differ considerably in their degree of ethnic diversity. Miguel found that those villages that were more diverse were less able to cooperate to maintain a well. I will return to this result in chapter 11 because there is an important twist to it.
Putnam and I are not suggesting that the present levels of
migration-generated diversity have seriously endangered coop-
eration. The point is not to castigate past migration but to recognize the potential risks from further large increases in diversity. Paradoxically, the high mutual regard societies of Europe may be more at risk than the lower mutual regard evident in the United States.
Unsurprisingly given their very different histories of migration, European countries are more cohesive than the United States, and their norms reflect this greater cohesion. Putnam’s results apply only to the United States; to my knowledge there is no equivalent analysis yet for Europe. However, two factors are not encouraging.
One is that America has been more successful than Europe in
integrating immigrants. This is hardly surprising: unlike Europe,
“American identity is rooted not in nationhood but rather in the
Paul Collier Page 7
