Unveiling Assumptions: Diversity, Trust, and Immigration

How difficult is it to travel to a country? How easy it is to stay in a country? Americans make negative comments against the immigrants regarding to the immigrants are taking jobs, overusing social service, and creating distrust. In Add Diversity and Lose Trust, John Vinson uses Robert Putnam’s research to support his claim that “the level of trust in communities breaks down when ethnic and cultural diversity increases.” First of all, Vinson misquotes Putnam’s word when Vinson is proving his point. In Vinson’s argument, he makes many assumptions towards immigrants: “It clearly saps our strength with growing distrust and division”, “Our would-be diversity enforcers know very well that force is the only thing that can hold hyper diversity together,

In Add Diversity and Lose Trust, Vinson thinks that diversity is deteriorating the society by saying "[I]n the presence of diversity we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it 's not just that we don 't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don 't trust people who do not look like us." Yet, Putnam’s original statement is “The short run effect of being around people who are different from us is to make all of us uncertain - to hunker down, to pull in, to trust everybody less. Like a turtle in the presence of some feared threat, we pull in” (Lanzarotta). Vinson misrepresents Putnam’s meaning by symbolizing Americans as turtles. Vinson conveys that Americans are the inferiors ones and afraid of immigrants since turtles are small and they hide inside the shell. Vinson misleads the audience into believing that Americans do not trust people who do not look the same at all. In Putnam’s perspective, he thinks it is normal for Americans to feel insecure to trust foreigners in a short period of time. Occasionally, Americans slowly accept other people as members of the community because other people start to adopt America’s

Freedom of speech is a right that is granted to every individual, otherwise, it will be illegal. Vinson faults people of different ethnicity for taking the freedom of speech away. It is fine for anyone to express their opinion in an appropriate manner. A protest called “Black Lives Matter” grabs the attention of the public. The goal of the protest is to raise awareness that racism is hurting many people based on the incidents that happened. “Black Lives Matter” gathered many participants in an effort to fight for justice. Even “leaders from the Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Indigenous African and Unitarian Universalist faiths gathered to give witness to our unwavering support for the Black Lives Matter Movement” (Kolodny). The movement gathered a diverse group of people that portrays the spirit of unity in