> And while we don't have proven-better alternatives for many of the problems that arise
Oh please. The US has a recidivism rate within 3 years of 67.5%. Norway has a recidivism rate of 20% within 2 years. There are proven-better alternatives, but your society has decided not to implement them.
You can't compare recidivism rates between a 300M nation of immigrants a 5M nation with an extremely homogenous culture. The US has social problems that are worse than Norway's worst nightmares. Prisons are just the tip of the iceberg.
You can, however, compare to other anglo-centric melting-pot countries, and the US experience is still vastly worse. And no matter which way you carve it, with the rest of the western world having an incarceration rate between 70 and 150/100k, the US is clearly out of order with a rate of 750.
In any case, your handwaving away of "we have bad social problems" is missing the point. Norway tries to fix them, using rehabilitation in its prisons as one example. The US tries to ignore them, and uses prisons as punishment. It's a point of philosophy. No-one expects that the US recidivism rate would drop to Norway's levels should the focus shift to a Norway-style penal system, but they do expect it would still drop markedly.
compare to other anglo-centric melting-pot countries
There are no comparable countries. The US is the absolute worst in the West. But just you watch. The UK and Sweden and Norway are importing diversity at an alarming rate. Eventually, their prisons will turn hard, but not through policy. Policy follows reality.
California's excessive solitary confinement policies strongly belie its left-leaning government. Get a steady dose of murder/rape/robbery and that's what happens.
And prisons aren't punishment. Only victims want to punish criminals. Everyone else just wants kept far away from criminals, and if that means putting rotten people in cages, fine. You can see the effect here:
Do you have any evidence that immigration or diversity is the cause of social strife? The U.S. prison population is hugely disproportionately African American. The U.S. has not had a large influx of immigrants from Africa in more than a century (for the obvious reason). Our prisoners are by and large not immigrants, or the children of immigrants, or the grandchildren of immigrants. They're the homegrown domestic American poor.
Most immigration to the US consists of Hispanics who are relatively mild, only committing about 2x the crimes of the rest of population. I was referring to countries like Sweden which are hell-bent on importing Muslims and Somalians and the like.
As to social strife, this is a standard book, even though written by a leftist, who tries to make the best of it.
Immigrants were five times more likely to commit sex crimes
I absolutely do not believe that number. It is almost certainly more like 10 or 15 times. The Swedish government is a pure head-in-ass creature, and almost certainly bending the statistics.
I've actually been waiting for the Stockholm riots to settle down a little before I analyzed them, but the results I'm expecting is a disproportionate amount of immigrant participants.
You don't need to wait. As someone living in Stockholm I can tell you that there is not a shadow of a doubt that the riots have a majority of immigrant participants.
The reason is that these riots are highly localized to poor areas where the population is almost exclusively immigrant, being clumped together by Swedish immigration policies. (Map: http://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/394110718607097857/1024/10...) While international media might have given you an image of a Stockholm of fire, most Stockholmers have not seen a trace of the riots.
With large amounts of youth failing basic school, being unemployed, and lacking parents and role models who have jobs and have integrated into the Swedish society. Riots are almost bound to happen.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, since immigrants would tend to have a lower income level,
But I think my answer is yes, if you factor out middle-to-high income rioters, you would still see a disproportionate representation of immigrants to natives.
My theory is fairly simple: it's about incomplete integration. If natives fail to identify immigrants as accepted natives, there will be conflicts that regularly break out into anything from racial profiling to riots (such as the famous LA riots) to civil wars to secessions (such as South Sudan).
I could also be completely crazy in seeing this pattern, though; I'm not an expert in this area by any means.
Some of this has to do with African-Americans who have been living in poverty for generations stretching all the way back to slavery -- a situation which doesn't exist in Iceland.
It also has to do with the US economic policies which promote the flight of low-skill jobs overseas. Not everyone has the intellectual ability to be a doctor or a web developer (especially given our dismal education system), and there are only a limited number of low-skill non-relocatable jobs like food service or retail. Things were much better for people with limited education when labor unions had a monopoly on many unskilled jobs and could set monopoly pricing on wages. Now, with tariffs and high shipping costs no longer keeping manufacturers from moving overseas, competition from workers in desperately poor countries is forcing wages downward; when the going rate for a given job falls below the US minimum wage, those jobs simply disappear from the US entirely.
Unfortunately, global corporations who benefit from the situation have too much influence over US politics, opponents of this aspect of the status quo are too disorganized, and the analysis I outlined above is not widely enough accepted for change to happen in the near term.
"nation of immigrants" - You know that kinda getting old.
We're all immigrants if you dig back far enough, but in reality if you were born and raised in a country, you are not an immigrant and within a couple of generations, there are likely to be no real residual effects.
There are exceptions to this rule which are related to inheritance and cabals of cultre but for the most part, immigration seems to be a net gain, it's a lack of social mobility that is causing problems.
Modern Europe immigration policy seem are a bit fucked up, but I imagine you can pretty well correlate education and welfare with crime stats, but beyond that, hardening your ordinary criminal doesn't seem to help anyone.
Oh please. The US has a recidivism rate within 3 years of 67.5%. Norway has a recidivism rate of 20% within 2 years. There are proven-better alternatives, but your society has decided not to implement them.