Toronto's Diversity

As Will Wilkinson in the 'This Week' explains Toronto defies the assumption that diverse cities are the cause of much mayhem and crime:

Toronto is the fifth biggest city in North America and also the most diverse city in North America. Nearly half the residents of Canada's most populous metropolis were born outside Canada's borders—47 percent according to the 2006 census, and the number is rising.

Theory by Sam Huntington and conservative writer John O'Sullivan suggest "the United States of America will suffer the fate of Sparta and Rome," should its founding Anglo-Protestant culture continue to wane and that if traditional patterns of national life are "removed or destroyed, then anomie, despair, and disintegration tend to be among the consequences." So we must take care to protect our precious cultural patrimony from the acid of "denationalizing" economic and cultural globalization. We must keep outsiders out.

But looking closely at Toronto suggests something very different from these theories! Toronto is the fifth most livable city in the world. So said the Economist Intelligence Unit in a report last year drawing on indicators of stability, health care, culture, environment, education, and infrastructure. (The Economist's world champion of livability, Vancouver, harbors a treacherous 40 percent foreign-born population.) Toronto is wealthy, healthy, well-educated, and much safer than any sizable American city.In 2006, its murder rate was 2.6 per 100,000 residents, which makes it less than half as deadly as Des Moines. The most culturally mixed city on the continent truly is one of Earth's closest approximations of urban paradise.