Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There – from the presenter of the 2025 BBC ‘Moral Revolution’ Reith lectures

by Rutger Bregman

(2) They’re all criminals Not according to the data. As it happens, people making a new life in the U.S. commit fewer offenses and less frequently end up in prison than the native population. Even as the number of illegal immigrants tripled between 1990 and 2013 to over eleven million, the crime rate reversed dramatically.37 The same is true for the U.K.: a few years ago, researchers from the London School of Economics reported that the crime rate had fallen significantly in areas that had experienced mass immigration from Eastern Europe.38 So then what about the kids of immigrants? In the U.S. they, too, are less likely than those with established American roots to enter a life of crime. In Europe, it’s a different story. To take my native Netherlands as an example, the children of Moroccan immigrants more frequently run afoul of the law. The question, of course, is why? For a long time, research into this question was put off limits by the dictates of political correctness. But in 2004 the first extended study exploring the connection between ethnicity and youth crime got under way in Rotterdam. Ten years later, the results were in. The correlation between ethnic background and crime, it turns out, is precisely zero. None, nothing, nada. Youth crime, the report stated, has its origins in the neighborhood where kids grow up. In poor communities, kids from Dutch backgrounds are every bit as likely to engage in criminal activity as those from ethnic minorities.39 Subseque...