Nicholas Wade

I think the thing about immigration is it needs to be done on a sort of

more on a trickle basis than a sort of great big flow, because otherwise you don't give people time to adjust.

Immigrants become sort of threatening if people think they're taking their jobs, or all the usual sort of anti-immigrant feelings that are sort of always latent will get stirred up the larger the immigrant population is.

Well, it's simply sort of the inside-outside dichotomy.

I mean, anyone who's not like you is an outsider.

So the best kind of person is someone sort of related to you because you know you can trust them.

You haven't met my family.

The more people become sort of different, sort of different religion, different language, different ethnicity,

the harder it is to establish the bond of trust, which is the essential glue of human societies.

No, I think there are cultural adaptations, and there are multiracial societies that work very well

Now, Singapore leaps to mind, but I think you have to recognize that you have one ethnicity, the Chinese, that essentially are in control.

I have to be careful in phrasing this, but it's definitely... One doesn't want a situation in which any one ethnicity claims to be superior to others.

But it's also the case that if you have one ethnicity...

able to govern, then that ethnicity can make things safe for everyone else.

And you don't have vicious intercommunal warfare as you do, for example, in multi-ethnic states like Afghanistan or Lebanon.

So states work best when you have a dominant ethnicity that treats everyone justly, which is the case in the U.S.

and in many European countries.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the big problems of not taking human nature seriously and not accepting the fact that we have certain behaviors written into our genome by evolution because of our survival value.

acting like a member of a tribe is one of them.