Identity and Belonging
Western societies are becoming more multi-ethnic faster than at any historical precedent. The data on composition change, the measurable effects on trust and cohesion, and the strongest version of each serious position.
(up from about 5% in 1970)
(up from about 1% in 1970)
(up from a marginal share before reunification)
A note on framing. Identity is one of the most charged topics in modern political life. The numbers are real, the underlying social changes are real, and the political conversation around them in many countries is unusually distorted - in different directions on different sides. The page below tries to walk through the data plainly, present the strongest version of each serious position, and respect the reader's right to reach their own conclusions. Where research findings are uncomfortable, this page does not edit them. Where political claims go beyond the research, this page tries to mark the difference.
What has actually changed
Most Western countries today are substantially more multi-ethnic than they were two generations ago. The composition change has been driven primarily by migration, and secondarily by differences in birth rates between groups. The pace varies by country, with the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Germany seeing especially fast change since 1990, and France, the Netherlands, and Sweden seeing similarly fast change since 1970.
The United States in 1970 was about 83% non-Hispanic white, 11% Black, and 4% Hispanic, with smaller shares of other groups. The United States today is about 58% non-Hispanic white, 14% Black, 19% Hispanic, 6% Asian, and the remainder a mix of multi-racial and other identifications. Census projections place the non-Hispanic white share below 50% sometime in the 2040s, depending on assumptions about migration and inter-group identification.
The United Kingdom in 1970 was about 99% white. Today it is about 86% white (including white minorities like Polish and Irish migrants), with about 14% from non-white minority backgrounds. London and several other major cities are now minority-majority. The change has been faster than most observers in 1970 would have predicted.
Germany built its postwar prosperity partly on guest workers from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Italy, and others. Reunification, EU expansion, and the 2015 refugee inflow added further composition change. Today about 30% of Germans have a "migration background" (themselves migrants or with at least one parent who was), even though the country does not collect data on race or ethnicity in the way Anglo countries do.
Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Austria all show similar patterns of significant composition change, with migration concentrated in major cities. Spain, Italy, and Portugal experienced rapid migration changes after 2000 from a much lower baseline.
Canada and Australia have been actively shaping migration policy to attract skilled migrants, and have generally absorbed substantial composition change with less political disruption than several European countries.
What is unusual about this period is not the existence of immigration - the United States in particular has been a country of immigrants for its entire history - but the speed and scale of composition change in countries that previously had relatively homogeneous populations. The United Kingdom going from 99% white to 86% white in fifty years is a faster and larger change than most precedents in modern history outside of major conquests or empire dissolutions.
What the research finds
A substantial body of careful research has tried to measure the effects of composition change on social trust, political stability, economic outcomes, and individual wellbeing. The findings are mixed and contested even among careful scholars, but several patterns are robust enough to be worth noting.
Diversity correlates with lower social trust in the short run. Robert Putnam's controversial 2007 paper found that, across hundreds of US communities, ethnic diversity was associated with lower social trust both within and between groups - even after controlling for income, education, age, and many other variables. Subsequent meta-analyses (van der Meer and Tolsma 2014; Dinesen, Schaeffer, and Sonderskov 2020) found the relationship holds more reliably for out-group trust than for in-group trust, with effect sizes generally smaller than Putnam's original framing and varying substantially by national context. The underlying short-run pattern - some friction in initial trust during rapid composition change - is more widely accepted than the public conversation suggests. The longer-run effect, as societies adapt and develop new shared identities, is less clear.
Diversity also brings real economic benefits. Most studies find positive effects of immigration on national economic growth, innovation, entrepreneurship, and labour-market dynamism. Migrants are more likely to start businesses than native-born workers, more likely to take essential service jobs that local labour markets struggle to fill, and over time tend to converge toward the host country's average outcomes across most measures. The economic case for moderate immigration is well-supported across countries.
Integration outcomes vary substantially by group, generation, and country. Some immigrant groups have converged rapidly with host populations across most measures (Asian-Americans in the US, several Eastern European groups in Western Europe). Some have integrated more slowly (parts of the Maghrebi community in France, parts of the Turkish community in Germany, parts of the Pakistani community in the UK). The reasons are varied - educational starting points, religious differences, residential concentration, host-country policy, and the receiving political environment all matter. There is no single story about how integration works.
Pace of change matters. Most research on integration suggests that slower demographic change is generally easier to absorb than faster change. Communities that experience large composition shifts in a short period tend to show more political backlash and slower trust recovery than communities that experience similar total change over longer time periods. Pace is something policy can influence; absolute level usually is not.
The class dimension is large and often underweighted. The communities that experience composition change most directly tend to be working-class urban neighbourhoods. Wealthy suburbs and rural areas often see less direct demographic change. The asymmetry produces a political dynamic where elites in higher-income communities push for migration policies whose direct effects fall on lower-income communities, which contributes to political backlash that elites tend to underestimate. William Julius Wilson and others have written about the way race and class together shape these dynamics in ways that single-axis analyses miss.
How countries actually compare
Patterns of composition change and political response vary widely across countries, with implications for what policies have worked and what has not. The numbers below give a rough sense of the picture.
The takeaway: composition change is large, fast in historical terms, and uneven across countries. The countries that have selected migrants carefully (Canada, Australia) have seen less political disruption than those that received large unselected flows. The countries that have remained homogeneous (Japan, much of Central Europe) have paid a different price in demographic decline and labour shortage. There is no costless option, and the trade-offs are visible in every direction.
Why this is politically difficult
Identity politics is uncomfortable to discuss honestly, partly because three things that are usually held separate become entangled.
The data is the data. Composition change is real, large, and historically fast. Effects on trust, neighbourhood patterns, and politics are measured. Pretending these are not real is a common move in some parts of the political conversation, and it does not actually help anyone - including the migrants whose interests it claims to protect.
The values question is genuinely contested. Reasonable people, looking at the same data, reach different conclusions about how much composition change is desirable, how much should be controlled, what the obligations of host societies and newcomers should be, and what values should guide the response. None of these is simply a question of fact. The political fight is partly a value disagreement, not just a factual disagreement.
The framing is heavily strategic. Every political faction has incentives to describe the data in ways that support its preferred conclusions. Pro-immigration framings tend to under-emphasise short-term integration costs. Restrictionist framings tend to under-emphasise long-term economic benefits and the human reality of migrant lives. Race and ethnicity claims are often used as rhetorical weapons by people whose main concern is something else entirely. A reader who only consumes one frame is consistently being given a partial picture by people who know they are giving a partial picture.
The serious work of citizenship in this area is to hold the data, the values, and the framing strategies all separately and apply judgment. That is harder than committing to a single political identity and reading mostly within it.
The paths from here
The composition change underway in most Western countries has substantial momentum. The shape of the next thirty years depends partly on policy choices about immigration levels and integration support, and partly on the deeper question of what kind of national identities are being built.
Continued composition change with growing political backlash
Migration continues at roughly the current pace. Composition continues to change. Political backlash continues to grow alongside it, with restrictionist parties gaining further ground in many Western countries. The political environment becomes more polarised on identity questions; coalition-building becomes harder.
Will it happen? This is roughly the base case. Almost every Western country has seen rising restrictionist political success over the last decade. The pattern shows no clear signs of slowing.
Tighter migration policy reduces the inflow
Public pressure produces meaningful tightening of migration policy in major receiving countries. Net migration falls. Composition continues to change but more slowly, and the political tension reduces. The cost is a worse demographic and labour-market position over the next twenty years.
Will it happen? Already partly happening in some countries (UK net migration policy under recent governments, US enforcement actions, Italy's external-border arrangements). The political appeal is real; the economic and demographic costs are also real, and most countries struggle to maintain restrictive policies once they hit their labour-market consequences.
Better integration policy succeeds
Western countries get better at integration: language acquisition, employment matching, recognition of foreign credentials, dispersed settlement rather than ghettoisation, civic-identity strengthening rather than fragmentation. Demographic momentum continues but the social outcomes of immigration improve.
Will it happen? Patches of this work in specific countries and contexts. Sweden in the 1990s, Canada under several governments, Germany after 2015 in many regions. The full version - a confident, multi-ethnic, civically integrated Western society at scale - has not yet been clearly achieved by any Western country, but the building blocks are visible.
A new shared civic identity emerges
Major receiving countries succeed at building genuinely multi-ethnic shared identities that bind newcomers and long-established residents to common institutions, language, history, and rituals. The American experience after the 1965 immigration act is the modern reference case; whether others can replicate it is open. National identities are reinvented rather than abandoned, with explicit room for citizens of every background.
Will it happen? Possible but hard. Successful examples (parts of US history, parts of the British Commonwealth experience) suggest it can be done. Failed examples (parts of European integration, parts of post-imperial transitions) suggest it can also fail. The political work involved is substantial and is rarely the work the loudest political voices are doing.
Identity tribes harden into separate political camps
The groups within multi-ethnic societies organise more strongly along ethnic, religious, or racial lines. Politics becomes increasingly a competition among identity coalitions rather than a contest of ideas across them. The civic-national frame weakens. Political polarisation deepens.
Will it happen? Already partly happening in several countries. The trajectory toward identity-based political alignment is real. Whether it stabilises or intensifies depends partly on choices that institutional design and political leadership can influence.
Convergence across generations softens the picture
Second and third-generation migrants increasingly identify with their host country, intermarry across groups, and follow educational and economic trajectories that converge with the broader population. The visible composition change of the parents becomes less visible in the lives of the grandchildren. The "minority" categories themselves blur as multi-ethnic identification becomes more common.
Will it happen? Has been happening visibly in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe. Multi-ethnic identification has been the fastest-growing US Census category for two decades. Whether the convergence continues at the same pace, slows, or reverses depends on factors that are not fully predictable.
External pressures (climate, conflict) reshape migration
Climate-driven displacement, political instability in parts of the Global South, and ongoing conflicts produce migration pressures that exceed current European and North American absorptive capacity. The next thirty years see more involuntary migration than the last thirty, with consequences for politics in receiving countries.
Will it happen? Some version is virtually certain. The scale is the question. Climate-driven migration is hard to predict but the underlying physical conditions point toward larger flows, especially out of parts of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. How receiving countries handle this will be among the most consequential political decisions of the period.
The realistic forecast is, again, a mix. Composition change continues. Political tension around it continues. Some countries handle it better than others. The successful examples involve some combination of selective immigration policy, strong integration support, confident host-country civic identity, and political leadership that takes both the concerns of newcomers and of long-established residents seriously. None of those conditions are universally present in the West today. Whether they can be built in the next two decades is the deepest political question of the period.
Where serious analysts disagree
Identity is one of the topics where the gap between political slogans and careful research is widest. The named voices below represent serious positions held by working scholars; reading them directly is more useful than reading commentary about them.
Diversity creates short-run challenges that careful policy can mitigate but not erase
Robert Putnam's 2007 finding - that ethnic diversity correlates with lower social trust in the short run - was uncomfortable for the political and academic environments that received it. Putnam himself is a longtime liberal and explicitly supportive of immigration; his finding was that the data showed something more complicated than the easy "diversity is strength" narrative. Pretending the finding does not exist is itself a form of intellectual dishonesty that does not help build better policy.
Held by: Robert Putnam (Harvard) himself, plus a wider body of cross-country trust research that has confirmed parts of his findings while questioning others. Honest engagement with this work means treating its uncomfortable parts as data rather than as offence.
Integration generally works over time and most current concerns are misframed
Looking at multi-generational data, the children and grandchildren of migrants tend to converge with native-born populations on educational outcomes, economic outcomes, language, identity, and political participation. The integration story is one of largely successful absorption, with specific failures usually traceable to specific policy choices rather than to the existence of migration itself. Most of the public anxiety reflects short-run friction rather than long-run trajectory.
Held by: Richard Alba (CUNY, "The Great Demographic Illusion"), Roberto Suro, and a substantial body of immigration research. Their data on multi-generational outcomes is solid; the open question is whether the future will resemble the past well enough for those patterns to continue.
The political backlash is rational and is being underestimated
Citizens of high-immigration societies who feel their countries' character is changing in ways they did not vote for are not all racists or fools. Many of them have legitimate concerns about wages, housing, public services, schools, and cultural transmission that are being dismissed by elites who do not bear the direct costs. The dismissal feeds the backlash. Honest engagement with the concerns - even when one disagrees with the political conclusions - is more useful than the standard left-of-centre move of treating restrictionism as illegitimate by definition.
Held by: Eric Kaufmann (Birkbeck, "Whiteshift") and a body of political-science research on immigration backlash. His position is contested in academic circles but has gained traction as the political reality has caught up to the analysis.
Race and class cannot be separated
Discussion of identity politics in the United States that focuses only on race or only on class consistently misses the picture. The lives of working-class Americans of every race share more with each other than with the upper classes of their own race. Working-class Black, Hispanic, and white Americans are subject to similar economic pressures, similar housing stresses, similar healthcare gaps, and similar political marginalisation by elites of various races. Building political coalitions across race within class would change politics; the way the conversation is currently structured prevents that.
Held by: William Julius Wilson (Harvard) and the broader tradition of race-and-class scholarship. The implication is that single-axis identity politics misses what the data actually shows.
Civic-national identity can be reformed inclusively
The failure of many Western multi-ethnic societies to handle composition change well is not a failure of multi-ethnic society as such. It is a failure of civic-national identity to be reinvented for the new reality. Successful multi-ethnic societies (parts of Canadian, Australian, and US history; some city-state examples) have rebuilt national identity to explicitly include all citizens, not as a fiction but as a worked-out civic project. The work is hard but is more promising than either ethno-nationalism or post-national cosmopolitanism.
Held by: Yascha Mounk (Johns Hopkins, "The Great Experiment"), and a strand of liberal-democratic political theory. Their position is contested and prescriptive; the supporting evidence is mixed but real.
None of these readings is fully right or fully wrong. What can be said from the available evidence: composition change is real, large, and historically unusual; integration generally works over time but with real short-run friction; the political backlash reflects a range of concerns that different observers assess very differently; race and class cannot be separated cleanly; and the work of building inclusive civic identity is hard but is the most promising path forward. None of this maps cleanly onto the slogans of either political side, which is one of several reasons the conversation is in worse shape than the underlying reality.
What this means for you
Identity touches almost every reader directly: where you live, who you live among, who your children go to school with, what your country's politics looks like. A few practical observations that work regardless of one's political position:
If you are thinking about where to live
The pace of demographic change varies dramatically across cities, neighbourhoods, and regions. Some neighbourhoods have been in slow steady change for decades; some have been transformed in five years. Whether either pattern is comfortable for you and your family is a personal question. Going in with eyes open about the demographic trajectory of a place - not just where it is today - is more useful than being surprised later. The information is widely available in census and equivalent data.
If you are raising children
Most countries' children today will grow up in more ethnically diverse environments than their parents. Whether you welcome this, want to control it, or are indifferent to it, the practical reality your children will live in is one where they will work, marry, and form friendships across boundaries that did not exist in earlier generations. Equipping them with both confidence in their own background and respectful curiosity about others is more useful than choosing between defensive identity politics and dismissal of identity altogether.
If you are an immigrant or descendant of immigrants
Your experience of integration depends on factors largely outside your control - the receiving country's policies, the local communities you encounter, the broader political environment. It also depends on choices you can make: language acquisition, professional networks, civic engagement, willingness to engage across community lines. The most successful immigrant trajectories tend to combine genuine engagement with the new country with confident retention of what is valuable from the original culture. The choice between assimilation and identity-preservation is rarely as binary as it is sometimes framed.
If you have lived in your country for generations
The demographic change of your country is real and large. Both the political tendencies that pretend it isn't happening and the ones that frame it apocalyptically are doing different forms of dishonesty. The realistic posture is to take the data seriously, engage thoughtfully with newcomers as individuals rather than as representatives of categories, and support the policies that produce successful integration rather than the ones that produce neither effective restriction nor effective integration. That posture is not the loudest one in the political conversation, but it is the one most consistent with both the data and the values most readers across the political spectrum actually hold when they slow down.
If you are voting and engaging politically
Identity politics in most countries is more useful as background than as foreground. The politicians who deliver actual results on immigration, integration, education, and civic life are usually the ones who treat it pragmatically rather than the ones who use it primarily as rhetorical fuel. Voting for specific policies (selective migration, integration funding, language education, anti-discrimination law, equal-opportunity hiring) is more useful than voting for slogans about identity. The slogans are designed to mobilise; the policies are what change outcomes.
The mechanics behind this
The identity story sits on top of three deeper mechanisms covered elsewhere on this site. If the analysis above depends on ideas you want to understand first, these fundamentals make the conversation more legible:
