The "drawbridge mentality" is commonly observed in Australia. Surely in the Netherlands or Australia it's a great example of how political and social identities are mutable, and change in line with perceived self-interest, or of how people do adapt to fit the "values" of their social settings? What do you want, migrants do "don't integrate" or who "do integrate" and rapidly become conservative, proto-nativist pricks?
I had a good read of Kel's two studies linked above, and can summarise them as follows.
Putnam (2006) reflects descriptively via census and survey data on places like Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, the East Bay, San Diego, Houston, Denver and others. He is interested in "social capital" (broadly defined as how "networked" the average person is in the social setting—friends, excursions, community participation). He notes these "ethnically diverse" places have low self-reported rates of "trust", importantly including of trust of peoples' own groups.
Putnam reports these findings using an order I find polemic. First he declares that in a diverse social setting, people don't trust people of other "ethnicities". Then, as if it's a revelation, he notes that people also don't trust people of their own "ethnicity" in these diverse social settings. His description:
Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.
Given that Putnam's big, startling conclusion is that trust is reduced across the board, another take might be to note these places are also the sites of great economic opportunity (both domestic and international). They suffer from labour shortages, or are destinations for migration.
It's true that Putnam controls to some extent for the effects of eg residential mobility or decades in the community, but his analysis can't encompass the "refrain" of ambition, hustle and precariousness in, say, the Bay Area. These are not just areas that have changed to become diverse under immense economic forces, but it is understood and speculated will change much further. I would explain the paranoia of such a setting by the steep and variable gradients of perceived economic opportunity (not status, speculative opportunity). These in turn explain the accumulated "diversity".
For instance, technical workers have moved to the Bay Area from all over the world to roll the dice at startups for over a generation now. Their arrival has created economic pressures that mean service workers can't afford local rents, so have to commute long distances. Is it "diversity" creating these effects, or is it really just the "dynamic" economic factors that Putnam acknowledges his analysis skips over?
Or is it really just that the parcel of poorly regulated and taxed Silicon Valley billionaires aren't sharing?
The second study from Alesina and La Ferrara is more like this:
We propose a simple theoretical framework in which the skills of individuals from different ethnic groups are complementary in the production process for a private good, implying that more diversity translates into increased productivity. On the other hand, individual utility also depends on the consumption of a shared public good and, since different ethnic groups may have different preferences on the type of public good to provide,
increased diversity lowers the utility from public good consumption.
From "Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance" linked above, de-paywalled version here: https://sci-hub.st/10.1257/002205105774431243
This study treats the "ethnic group" as a (mostly) fixed factor in arguments about aggregate socioeconomic behaviour. It roughly claims that given a population at equilibrium, if you add or remove people of different "ethnicities", some elaborate proposals around inter-ethnic dynamics reliably predict how other measures change (such as those quoted above).
Now, with such a dehistoricised model, you can't faithfully describe why a Palestinian in Gaza might distrust an Israeli soldier in this way. The economic model given allows you to say each of these individuals has a different fixed, primordial, ex nihilo "ethnicity" … and therefore one probably won't buy lunch from the other. I guess that's one way to explain it. It is quite weird to read them comment on black–white relations in the United States with no reference to Jim Crow.
Anyway, neither study provides any argument in favour of the politics of Geert Wilders. Putnam's piece argues benevolently for political modes that enhance "social capital": investment in community groups such as sports clubs, the promotion of multicultural "hyphenated" identities. Alesina and La Ferrara's piece mainly announces "diversity is bad because racism is bad". In other words, both commend a political outlook unlike that of Wilders, although I have no doubt Wilders talks a good game about how he's not a racist.
My views, give or take:
Material conditions are the cause of rational human movements: crises in places of origin, versus economic opportunity (or labour shortages answered by slavery or penal colonies) in destinations.
"Economic opportunity" in destinations for migration is largely a factor of the places themselves. If there are "good jobs" for migrants in a place, the place is the controlling factor and not the migrants—usually just means the place is relatively wealthy with a history of migration, or that there's an economic bonanza in progress.
Under capitalism, national arguments over migration rely on unwritten socioeconomic covenants, and are inflected class struggles in which arriving migrants take little or no part. Usually capital wants to import labour, but labour isn't keen on increased competition.
From the labour perspective, a premise such as Wilders' "Islamisation" wholly or partly substitutes for a real problem: the domination of (colonial, imperial) capital.
The lifting of the domination of capital would end systematic "neoliberal" looting of public goods, permitting the more serene socioeconomic integration of migrants based on economic demand. It would also abate the crises abroad which generate migrant movements in the first instance—it might be too late for the millions who will be displaced by climate change, however.
A big mouth like Wilders may well take a strong line against "neoliberalism" or promise to "make the Netherlands great again", but he will lack the power to do it as much as the centrist parties he condemns. For workers, his prime ministership would be a racist variation on prior disappointments. As Trump's was, of course.
The 2015–17 "migrant crisis" in Europe (the backdrop to Wilders' rise) was of course provoked by over a decade of cynical, destructive warfare in the Middle East.
The vilification of outsider workers in established societies coincides with increased human movement produced by the demands of capital for labour, and consequently changes its character as often as capital's demands change.
For instance, in the 1860s in pre-federal "Australia" when there were 20,000 people migrating to a relatively tiny Sydney colony each year, there was also virulent anti-Irish racism. During this period the "father of Federation" Henry Parkes took a similar view to the Irish as Wilders takes to Muslims. That is difficult to fathom if you look at whiteness in "Australia" today, it's an artefact of history—as today's racist attitudes to Muslims will become.
This regularly mutating "ethnic" vilification does nothing in and of itself to resolve the domination of capital or transform its demands for labour. As a result, governments notable for their racist rhetoric at times of increased human movement often preside over paradoxically high nett migration.
Examples include John Howard's government in "Australia" in the 00s, or the Johnson–Truss–Sunak mess in the UK. The UK in 2022 recorded its highest ever annual nett migration. Voters in the workforce who are comforted by the rhetoric and its promise of increased security are likely to be perplexed by the statistics.
Brexit offers a perfect example of the trouble caused by believing migration is the problem.
