Trust Requires Outsider Exclusion

Some societies maintain high levels of generalized trust by culturally privileging insiders and withholding it from outsiders; this produces strong social cohesion internally but also sharper anti‑immigrant attitudes and institutional barriers to newcomers. That trade‑off helps explain why countries that score high on trust metrics can still be hostile to migrants in practice. — If true, the claim reframes immigration debates by making high social trust a structural cause of exclusion rather than a simple social virtue, changing how policymakers weigh integration, openness, and social cohesion.