Losing Social Capital

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said that the states are the laboratories of democracy. You can try out policy on the state level before you go more global with it. 

Fair enough.

But now, we have nations that have become testing grounds for policy. In this case, for immigration policy. What happens to your country when you allow in masses of illegal migrants who do not conform to the local customs and mores.

Were you to listen to certain talking heads, illegal migrants are the salt of the earth. They do the jobs that citizens disdain. They pay their taxes and show up on time for work. As even President Trump has recognized, deporting too many illegal migrants will damage the economy, especially the hospitality and gardening businesses.

And yet, most Americans, by a large margin, do not want the illegal migrants to stick around. They might have noticed what has been happening to Great Britain, thanks to the recent analysis offered by one Daniel Hannan in The London Telegraph.

Hannan describes a nation that once  had great social capital, where everyday transactions are frictionless:

It was little things that made me fall in love with Britain. You didn’t have to count your change in shops. You almost never saw private security guards. You could drink from the tap. You could flick a switch and the light would actually come on.

You could get into a taxi, confident, not only that you wouldn’t be mugged, but that you’d be driven by the shortest route and charged the correct fare. If you stopped at a red light, you would not have every car behind you hooting in fury. You could send valuables by post.

He continues:

Because Britain was a high-trust society, everyday transactions were frictionless. The cost of doing business was low, because neither side had to take expensive precautions against fraud. Social capital gave Brits a sense of patriotism and responsibility. They accepted election results when their party lost, obeyed laws with which they disagreed, paid their taxes grumblingly but honestly.

Now that Britain has been flooded with illegal migrants, social capital is disappearing. It shows itself in everyday transactions:

Take the epidemic of shoplifting. Last year, retailers logged 20.4 million incidents of theft, an increase of 3.7 million on 2023. Or look at our filthy streets. The touristy parts of central London manage to pick up most of the debris, but every other part of the capital is grubbier than before lockdown, with fast-food wrappings and cartons blowing about forlornly.

Traditional Britain was a socially cohesive, high trust society. People felt connected to their neighbors and would not imagine sowing social chaos. 

How did it break down? At the least, those disparate groups that migrated to the nation did not feel like they belonged. They did not know the rules and did not play by them. They were untrustworthy and did not trust anyone else.

The consequences have been stark:

We should be asking the same questions about stealing from shops, which now costs retailers (or, rather, non-shoplifting customers) £2 billion a year. The thing that used to hold most people back from shoplifting was not fear of criminal sanction – few are caught, fewer detained and almost none prosecuted – so much as a feeling that it was unacceptable. That feeling, like so many things, was vitiated by the pandemic. At the same time, mass immigration dilutes the homogeneity on which high-trust societies depend.

As happens today in Los Angeles, the wealthy have retreated from social commerce. They live in gated communities and have their own private security.

The rich are retreating into gated communities, hiring security firms, posting sentries (these are especially obvious outside synagogues, which have felt unprotected since anti-Israel protesters were allowed to behave menacingly at their doors while the police looked on). Walls are springing up – including a hideous new fence around Parliament.

Bring in a lot of third world people, too many to assimilate, and you end up with a third world nation. 

It is in this sense that we are most authentically becoming like a developing nation. A Government that aspires to do things that are none of its business simultaneously fails in its core responsibilities – above all, in its duty to provide a functioning justice system that protects property.

How long before we move from confronting people who push through ticket barriers to actual vigilantism? A friend in Islington tells me that his local Co-op recently removed some items from its shelves and put everything else – even food – behind anti-theft locks. It was responding to a spate of aggressive shoplifting that had seen its guachimán beaten up twice.

Of course, migrants are not likely to assimilate. Certain members of the intelligentsia tell them that they need not do so. When you learn that traditional culture is repressive and oppressive, and that you are its victims, you are not likely to learn how to trust.