What Robert Putnam actually said: "The initial social psychological reaction of people – all of us – to diversity is to hunker down and pull in. And that means

What Robert Putnam actually said: "The initial social psychological reaction of people – all of us – to diversity is to hunker down and pull in. And that means that collectively there is often an initial reaction in a period of immigration to a sense that, “wouldn’t it be better if we just didn’t have these immigrants?” That would be exactly the wrong reaction because, in fact, immigration for the United States has been an enormously important national asset. We wouldn’t be anything like as successful a society as we are if we weren’t an immigrant society. A vast and disproportionate number of American Nobel Prize winners are actually immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. The economy is actually helped on average by immigrants. I don’t mean to imply that every single American benefits because there is added competition, to some extent, in some labor markets. But the net benefit of immigration for the economy is quite strong. As a society we need to learn how to transfer the benefits of the immigration – the greater economic growth, for example – to other parts of the society that are perhaps damaged by immigration in the short run." [1] [1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/insight/democratic/robert-putnam https://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/insight...