 Dr. Pappnam, you are a professor at Harvard University, but the next two years you will also be a distinguished visiting professor at Ohush University. In your inaugural lecture here at Ohush University, you underlined that immigration has benefits for countries. What exactly do you mean? Well, certainly my own country, America, has greatly benefited from successive waves of immigration. A disproportionate number of our Nobel Prize winners are immigrants or children of immigrants, a disproportionate number of our best artists are immigrants or children of immigrants, our economy benefits from the new energies and the youth and the vitality that immigrant groups have brought to the United States. So there's no doubt that our country is greatly advantaged by the fact that we're a country of immigrants. But on the other hand, some of your newest research show that it's not that easy to live in a diverse community and diversity has negative consequences for a community. Yeah, that's true. How does these, the benefits and then also the negative consequences go hand in hand? Well, let me say just a word about the negative consequences. Our research shows that the more diverse a community, the lower the level of social trust in that community and not just distrust between the immigrants and the native-born Americans, but trust white people, native-born Americans, trust other people like them less in more diverse settings. So everybody distrusts everybody less in more diverse settings. Volunteerism and philanthropy and civic engagement, involvement in the community, all of that tends to decline with greater civic engagement. We say, summarizing our work, that diversity seems to bring out the turtle in all of us. We all kind of hunker down in the face of diversity or I would say new diversity, unfamiliar diversity. And therefore that is a real challenge. Doing diversity, managing an immigration society is not simple, is not as simple as managing a society which everybody looks alike and talks alike and so on. Yeah, but because you also said that diversity, you said in your inaugural lecture that diversity is the key challenge of the 21st century. Yes. I think that's right. The challenge is to figure out how you can minimize these short-run costs that you can see in our data, the effects on social capital, the effects on social cohesion of the arrival of immigrants, how you can balance those and diminish those costs and therefore gain the benefits, the undoubted big benefits that come from immigration. And the way that happens is that over time a successful immigration society reduces the effect, reduces the degree to which people see one another as different. Sometimes in Europe nowadays the issue of immigration is discussed in terms of how to make them, the immigrants, more like us. To speak like us, to talk like us, to eat like us, to sing like us. The American experience suggests that's not the right way to think about the problem. The right way to think about the problem is not how to make them like us, but how to create a new us. Yeah. Not... A new us is a national identity that is not rooted in ethnicity, but a national identity that is rooted in shared civic engagement. So that to be an American, once upon a time to be an American meant to look like me, actually, my own ancestors came to America in 1620, we were one of the first, and we thought, my ancestors thought, this is what an American is. And then the Dutch arrived, and then the Germans arrived, and then the Danes arrived, and then the Swedes arrived. And then the Poles arrived. And then the Italians arrived. And then the Irish arrived. And then the Jews arrived. And then people from, and now the Cambodians, and the Vietnamese, and the Mexicans. And each time my people, the original, you could say, laughably, the original victims of all this, we've always said, each time we've said, no, no, no, please, not have any difference, we want to all be like us. And then gradually we began to see that they were like us. And so we stopped seeing the Dutch, or the Germans, or the, eventually the Italians and the Irish. We would not begin to see them as different, but we're all just the same. And I mean that in a deep sense, not just a happy talk sense, but in the sense that our, what it means to be American has changed. It's not that we require the Italians to stop being interested in opera when they came. We became more interested, as a country, in opera, because of that Italian characteristic. This is really funny. And when, the first time that, when Jews started coming to this country, most, to our country, most of the comedians in America are Jewish. But now, nobody thinks of Woody Allen as a Jewish comic. People think of him as an American comic. And that's because our sense of identity has been transformed by incorporating many of the features and many of the gifts and many of the accents that the foreigners bring to America. But you still have these hyphenated identities. You have Greek Americans, Italian Americans, and African Americans, all these hyphenated identities. So don't you still have these mixed identities? The hyphenation of identities, exactly as you say, Greek American or Italian American or Danish American, that is the key to our success. We don't require people to stop being Danish when they become American. They become Danish American. That in English, to say that someone is Danish American or Irish American or Mexican American, doesn't sound odd at all. It probably does sound odd to say that someone in Denmark is a Somali Dane. But that's the difference between a nationality that is rooted in a national identity that is rooted in ethnicity and a nationality that is rooted in shared civic commitments, but not necessarily shared ethnicity. It's right in Denmark. We would rather say bilingual or immigrants. You don't say Turkish things. You see, I think it's important to be clear at what's at stake here. Going into the 21st century, societies that manage diversity effectively, societies that manage immigration effectively will be the winners of the 21st century. America has many, many problems. We have great inequality. We have lots of problems in America. One of our greatest advantages is that we are not so bad at immigration. I don't mean we're perfect. We always have problems with each new wave, but we've had the experience, and so we know that it doesn't, in the end, threaten our identity to have large numbers of Mexicans or Cubans or Chinese people come into America. It enriches our nation. That fact that we are a multinational, a multicultural country depends upon hyphenation, depends upon our being comfortable with the idea that people have both Danish or Cuban or Chinese characteristics and they're still American. That's one alternative for the 21st century. The other alternative is a country like Japan, which has the great advantages of homogeneity. Homogeneity has advantages. It enables you to act and cooperate more easily because everyone is the same and you all know the same jokes and you all speak in the same language and so on. But it has, in a globalized world, as the 21st century will be, that homogeneity is a global disadvantage. So you say that America has a key advantage when it comes to immigration as opposed to Japan? I really want to say that's the choice that other countries face, including countries like Denmark, have the option of becoming comfortable with immigration and that means not merely expecting the immigrants to become like us but developing a new us, becoming comfortable with a new, more diverse sense of identity. That's one choice. Another choice is to continue to try to be homogeneous, all similar, with some advantages but with serious disadvantages. Japan faces a serious crisis. It's an older, slower growing, frankly in world terms, declining economy. But they have the benefits of homogeneity. That is the kind of choice. One should not think that one can get the benefits of diversity without transforming once the sense of what it means to be a member of that nation. So if you look into the future, are you an optimist or are you a pessimist when it comes to living together in a diverse group? Well, in the long run I'm an optimist and I'm certainly an optimist for America. My daughter happens to be married to a Costa Rican immigrant and therefore I have four Latino grandchildren. They don't look anything like me. I'm pink. They're brown. They speak Spanish much better than I speak Spanish. They speak English about as well as I speak English. Now, today, many other people in my country would think of those kids, my grandchildren, as being something other than American. I'm confident that that will not be true because the history of America is that we gradually, over time, with difficulty begin to think of these newcomers as us. And I'm confident that probably during my lifetime America will change in such a way that we won't think of Miriam, my granddaughter, as being something other than just an ordinary American. In that sense I'm an optimist. Not that it'll happen instantly, but that it will happen. Let's hope that we'll be able to create a new us also in Denmark. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Putman. Thank you.