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Notes -
That they are foreigners.
Okay, but is there an economic difference?
I think the problem is that:
Is the loss in social trust caused by ethnic diversity in general, or by specific high-crime ethnic groups? The high crime groups (ADOS blacks in the US, Jamaicans and Somalis in the UK, Arabs and Afghans in Continental Europe) did not get here through work-based legal immigration.
My impression is more that there is a somewhat indirect, but stable link between these two: If you're part of the elite, you usually already consider yourself more a cosmopolitan who just happens to life in this particular country. You have lots of elite friends from other countries, you have lived yourself in other countries. You profit from lower-class immigrant workers suppressing salaries. You should be able to live in the good part of wherever you are insulating yourself from most problems. All this together means is that you have a very strong positive disposition towards ethnic diversity. Any negative mention of any ethnic group except your own is frowned up on to such a degree that it is near-impossible to publicly acknowledge even obviously problematic minorities, it's always just specific people or at most this particular clan. Not being able to acknowledge a problem leads to that problem proliferating.
There is also the problem that some groups are simultaneously supplying useful cheap work, but are also high-crime. Some of this is even systematic, such as using legal low margin work companies as a front to do illegal side work which can range from merely supplemental to being the actual income stream. I think that's as usual a spectrum, with extreme cases such as east asian immigration at "great work, no crime, high willingness to fit in", the middle is something like east europeans "low-value work, often significant illegal side work, medium willingness to fit in" and the extreme other would be something like sub-saharan "very little work, income almost entirely illegal or from state support, no willingness to fit in". The middle groups are here for work, but still cause issues and some loss of trust, but just not as much.
The is not an accurate description of 21st century immigration to the UK from sub-Saharan Africa. Within working and middle-class London neighbourhoods (i.e. segregating by ability to make rent) the recent African immigrants are better neighbours than the whites, and are overrepresented in cheap private schools, parent groups demanding more rigorous curriculum in State schools, Christian churches, and the Conservative Party.
This is obfuscated by statistics which lump them together with Caribbean blacks (who are now an indigenous underclass with similar but less severe pathologies to ADOS blacks in the US) and Somalis (who are basically undesirable in every way).
What is going on here is that there are social problems caused by the bottom 50% of the population (primarily consuming more public services than you pay in taxes) and social problems caused by the bottom 2% of the population (like crime). It only takes a minimally selective immigration filter for the immigrants to cause less of the second kind of the problem than the natives do - Sub-Saharan immigrants in the UK passed that test, even under the ultra-permissive Blair regime. The groups that don't are the completely unfiltered ones - refugees and illegals. (FWIW, the stats aren't great but in the US "put food on the table without drawing hostile attention from the authorities" looks like it was a sufficient filter that your illegals were less likely to commit non-immigration crimes than a native population that is 15+% ADOS blacks).
I'm all for further subdividing groups to get a better understanding, and it always should be kept in mind that different countries will have somewhat different problem immigrant groups due to geographical and political realities, but it doesn't really change my point. Somalis are very common here in germany nowadays, one of the most problematic groups and usually grouped as sub-saharan african.
FWIW, before the recent asylum waves that especially the Somalis, but not only them, took advantage off, sub-saharan black immigrants in germany also were somewhat of a model-minority, though also extremely rare. As a child, the only black girl I personally knew was an adopted, extremely bookish nerd, and otherwise would occasionally see a black priest from some mission.
Find the difference.
You and the average western intellectual could really benefit from adding that subcategory. It's not complicated, their tribal religion requires them to hate us ("The enmity and hatred that has arisen between us and you will last until you believe in Allah alone" Coran 60.4) and obey the moral code of a 7th century desert raider. This has negative consequences when you're trying to live with them.
"Immigrants from Christian Africa are easy to assimilate and at the margin we should be more welcoming to them" is a minority position among immigration realists, but not a fringe one. On the Tory (but not the populist) British right, it also ties into Empire nostalgia and the idea that we should discriminate in favour of Commonwealth countries.
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