importing low trust, by el gato malo

People trust their countrymen more than they do immigrants. Who knew? From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

and the decline of high-trust society

so, here’s an interesting chart:

it shows what many have long lamented: the erosion of high trust society in the US. the chart stops in 2010. one can only imagine the depths to which it has plummeted today.

now, we all know that correlation is not causality and does not prove that A begets B, but sometimes it sure can get pretty provocative and just because something is not hard and fast proof does not mean it should be lightly dismissed either.

so let’s, for the sake of being provocative, look at a second chart.

now this one is almost certainly incorrect for recent values and probably reads far too low but the overall data shape is interesting. immigrants as a % of US population peaked at 14.7% in 1910. it then began a sharp decline reaching a low of 4.7% in 1970. from there it began to rise again reaching 14.3% in this series and likely more like 18% in actuality as the numbers for recent years look to be 10-20 million low. there is no way the absolute number of immigrants grew by only 2.9 million from 2019 to 2023. this means we’re likely at record levels since the civil war by quite a large margin.

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