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Donald Trump attacks “our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities”. Alabama’s Senator Tommy Tuberville calls their inhabitants “rats”. Rightwingers reckon that New York’s likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, supports terrorism. Trump’s aide Stephen Miller tweets: “NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.” Across the ocean, British pundit Matthew Goodwin pronounces that London is “over . . . a city in visible decline” with “no real sense of identity”.
That’s the rightwing consensus on big multicultural cities. Yet if you go by actual numbers, these places are astoundingly safe. A quick statistical taster: just before Miller’s warning, New York’s police announced “record low shootings and murders for the first five months of 2025”. The city of more than 800 languages is on track for its lowest annual homicide rate since 1944.
Where the critics have a point is that ethnically mixed places are potentially flammable. Race riots have afflicted New York, London, Los Angeles and even Singapore, where fighting between ethnic Chinese and Malays killed 23 people in 1964.
What matters is how metropoles handle racial tensions. These places can’t stop being multicultural. Only murderous ethnic cleansing could make them monochrome again. So when tensions erupt, the authorities visit “community leaders”, hear their grievances and try to patch things up.
Singapore wrote its obsessively anti-discriminatory laws largely to prevent future race riots. After London’s jihadist “7/7 bombings” 20 years ago this week, the British establishment united behind the city’s Muslims. The Conservative opposition leader, Michael Howard, said anyone throwing a stone at a mosque was “the enemy of all of us”. The priest of the church near where the number 30 bus exploded said in his sermon the next Sunday: “We can name the people who did these things as criminals or terrorists. We must not name them as Muslims.”
In some megacity right now, a besuited mayor is paying an awkward visit to a black-robed imam. The Dutch far right mocks this practice as “tea-drinking” — but it’s how megacities function. To live in London, say, is to accept mixing. Otherwise you can’t easily have a job, make friends or go outside. Moreover, most metropolitans seem to enjoy mixing. Academic studies show that they disproportionately display the psychological trait of “openness” to new experiences and ideas. Whereas outsiders often imagine cities divided into ethnic “communities”, many residents identify chiefly as Londoners, Singaporeans, et cetera.
Anyway, people in big cities rarely have the time for race wars. The knee-jerk retort to this is: “That’s fine for you urban elites”, but in fact many metropolitans are poor. Housing is unaffordable precisely because these places are seen as desirable. A quarter of New Yorkers live below the poverty line, double the national rate. Happily, megacities still offer a realistic shot at social mobility. London and Singapore have fantastic state schools. In Queens, New York, possibly the world’s most diverse urban area, there’s a ritual where thousands of parents gather to clap out the borough’s kids emerging from the entrance exams for selective high schools.
All this keeps these places safe. Only statistically innumerate critics could trumpet each brutal crime in a megacity as proof of Armageddon. After Trump sent troops into LA, Arkansas’s Republican governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted that in her state, unlike California, “we value order over chaos”. California’s governor Gavin Newsom replied: “Your homicide rate is literally DOUBLE California’s.”
Homicide rates are the best indicator of disorder, because murder is the most accurately reported violent crime. Writing a book on Greater Paris, I found homicides down three-quarters since 1994, even if public discourse implies the opposite. Visiting Singapore recently, I saw a city that barely even has a homicide rate. The 10 cities with most foreign-born residents include the almost tediously safe Dubai, Sydney, Toronto and Vienna.
What the far right feels about metropoles isn’t physical fear. It’s discomfort. Canadian urban planner Brent Toderian decodes this feeling as: “I’m not the majority any more, it isn’t my city anymore.” Recently the writer David Goodhart asked, in an endless screed against London: “What happens when London’s white British population falls below 20 per cent in 10 years time?” Well, what does happen? (Even presuming the dubious statistic was correct.)
Anyone who thinks London should be “white British” should say so. Just don’t pretend that the world’s most sought-after places are failures.
Email Simon at [email protected]
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