EDITORIAL - Are you into the multicultural agenda? Is the drive to diversity a big deal with you? Perhaps not. Maybe you're one of those people who actually like to judge people based on their individual personality and integrity.

A Harvard political scientist, Robert Putnam, did a little study that might interest you. His topic ... immigration and ethnic diversity. The results are shocking, not at all what he expected. In fact, the study results that this liberal, academia bed-wetter wanted to wait until after the immigration debate to publish it. Why? Because it is damaging to the pro-illegal immigration debate. Not only that, but he was scrambling to find ways to compensate for the negative effects of diversity. Are you getting this? He was afraid what right-wingers would do with the news. He had something that went against his liberal, academia beliefs and withheld the study until he could figure out a way to spin the results so as not to offend his and his liberal colleague's tender sensibilities.

OK ... gotcha. Now you're curious. You want to know what the study said, right? Putnam's study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. He uses the analogy of a turtle, saying that people who live in ethnically diverse setting "hunker down." They don't assimilate. They don't embrace each other and share tortilla dinners together. They sit in front of the television and waste away .. they pull into their shells.

Putnam found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. In ethnically diverse cities like LA and San Francisco, 30% of people say that they trust their neighbors. In ethnically homogeneous cities, the figure is as high as 80%. Putnam says that people in diverse communities tend "to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television." Sounds like a neighborhood you we would all really love to live in, doesn't it? This magic ethnically diverse community that we've been hearing so much about doesn't sound like a community that is going to be all that active in government. Perhaps they don't even care about who is representing them and what issues are facing the communities in which they live.

And it doesn't matter whether they are poor communities or safe communities ... the findings are all the same. In general, Putnam found that the more people are brought into contact with another race or culture, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others.

This is the America that our Senate have just promoted with their amnesty bill. We're not speaking racism here. We're speaking culturalism. People tend to gravitate toward a culture they understand and are comfortable with.

Here is a study that we're probably not going to hear much about.