America’s diversity stress

On a crisp morning last December, I took the 6 train from near my apartment in East Midtown toward UnHerd ’s new US headquarters in Lower Manhattan. If the 6 isn’t delayed — which it often is — the trip is a miracle of transit efficiency, perhaps 15 minutes door to door. On this occasion, it was on time. The train stopped, and the doors happened to open right where I was standing. They revealed a curiously empty subway car (for peak rush hour).

It wasn’t, in fact, empty. Most of the straphangers had crowded to the ends of the car, leaving a gap of empty seats in the middle. It took me only a second to discern why. Sitting there was a man with a heavy shawl around his head and a stick in one hand. He rocked back and forth, absorbed in self-talk: now muttering softly, now breaking into shrill shouts. The language was maybe Tamazight, but I couldn’t be sure (I’m usually really good at clocking foreign tongues).

The doors closed behind me — too late to switch cars. According to an unwritten rule of subway safety, I should have joined the others at one of the two ends of the car. But I didn’t adhere to the crazy-guy-blast-radius norm, partly because I wanted to read my papers in peace, and partly because I figured the chances of an unpleasant incident were low.

I figured wrong. As the train rattled through the underground, I’d glance up from my copy of the New York Post and catch the man glowering at me. He kept up his chatter. His periodic outbursts, formerly directed at the cosmos or God or the gods, now seemed aimed at a specific target: me . First stop, Grand Central — no incident. Second stop, 33rd Street — still nothing, though the growling had intensified. Final stop, 28th Street — home free.

Or not. The man sprang up from his seat in tandem with my motion. Before I could reach the door, he removed the heavy shawl from around his neck and began whacking the backs of my legs. His shouting crescendoed to a mad sputtering rage. The shawl-whacking produced only mild discomfort, and maybe for that reason, my first thought wasn’t escape , but indignation mingled with amusement. For a split second, I just stood there in the door, looking into his wild, unblinking eyes while the other passengers stepped around me and out.

Then he raised his stick. OK, now get out .

Amusement and confusion — not really anger — were my initial emotions as I took the short walk from the station to our office. “Crazy old fuck ,” I remember saying to myself. Next came a set of questions. Why was this foreign person, who couldn’t speak English and was clearly unstable, menacing people on the transit system? Which precise path had brought him from his country to the Big Apple? Had he arrived as part of the Biden wave that had ushered an estimated 8 million newcomers, many of them unvetted? Or did he come earlier? And what was to become of him — raging stranger in a strange land — today, tomorrow, a month from now?

Soon the questions gave way to a conviction, which my mind repeated like a mantra: We shouldn’t have to live like this. We shouldn’t have to live like this . . . I wasn’t unaware that my mantra is popular among the very-online Right on both sides of the Atlantic. This was discomfiting: the line had popped into my head in the same way that an advertising jingle might. It discomfited me still more that the mantra summed up precisely what I felt at that moment, and that it harboured a hard kernel of truth.

I’d just then experienced an acute case of what I’ve come to call diversity stress or migration fatigue: the pervasive anxiety that attends life in societies buffeted by too much migration and too much diversity. Too much defined as the point at which assimilation falters and majority-minority distinctions evaporate.

Diversity stress arises from having to constantly negotiate housing-, services-, and street-level incohesion: as we navigate linguistic barriers, normative differences, sheer unfamiliarity, and the potential for misunderstanding, the position is stressful, even if the outcome is relatively “harmless” (as in the case of my subway accoster). As the French geographer and urban theorist Christophe Guilluy has noted , people in such societies “need to manage, day in, day out, a thousand and one ethno-cultural questions while trying not to get caught up in hatred”.

It’s important to talk about diversity stress because it’s much less visible than spectacular cases of violence like the attempted beheading of Stephen Ogilvie by a Sudanese migrant in Belfast this week. Those sorts of cases are relatively — mind you, relatively — rare. They thus allow policymakers who’ve presided over uncontrolled migration to isolate the crisis in a dishonest manner: to speak of a few bad actors who must be left to the justice system to deal with.

What this framing misses is the systemic, low-grade diversity stress that afflicts much of the population as a result of mass migration, and which goes a long way toward explaining…