How many other countries (if any) come close to having as many people (as a percentage of their population) from as many other countries, or within a generation or two of being from another country?
It seems that a lot of the traits which define America (inconsistent spelling, and usage of language , argumentativeness, pride/arrogance, nationalism, etc.) are the result (either directly or indirectly) of having so many influences from such a wide range of cultures.
And no, I’m not saying that makes America great, just wondering what other countries may have experienced similarly diverse influences.
I’m from the US and have been to Canada and found Canada to be a rather diverse country based on the small parts of it that I saw. There were people of multiple races and there was the additional difference of French/English bilingualism where lots of things were in both languages and French speakers were not looked down upon as people who needed to grow up and learn English to survive.
I’ve been told that Argentina is actually pretty diverse and there are large numbers of people descended from Italian and German immigrants.
I’ve had students from various parts of the Caribbean. Many are quite diverse individually and proudly talk about how diverse their homeland is. Several had Asian ancestors, for example. Many expressed surprise at the open racism (and not just from whites) they see in the US. They thought nothing of being mixed race and didn’t consider themselves to belonging to any particular ethnic group. I think they would consider many of these islands to be more diverse than the US.
For its size Panama is very diverse due to the importation of much foreign labor to build both the Panama Railroad in the 1850s and the Panama Canal. While the bulk of the population is mestizo, there are eight different Indian groups, two distinct black ethnic groups (one descended from slaves brought in during colonial times, the other from West Indian laborers who started to come in in the late 1800s), and immigrants including Chinese, Lebanese, Greeks, Spaniards, Italians, French, Indians from India, Americans and many others.
While Argentina has a population descended from many different European countries, it has few indigenous people and almost no blacks. Buenos Aires may be the “whitest” city I’ve ever been too, far more so than cities in Europe.
Just to clarify, I’m curious about having actual people from other countries and cultures, not just attitudes or openmindedness.
Panama sounds exactly like what I was asking about.
I expect most countries have (and welcome) a decent amount of citizens immigrating from other nearby countries. But most US cities have entire neighborhoods of people from a single foreign culture/country, usually several (one for each country/culture).
I ran across these numbers recently - the percentage of population that is foreign born for various countries (taken from the Organization for Economic Cooperation http://www.oecd.org/migration/keystatisticsonmigrationinoecdcountries.htm)
2000 2009
USA 11.0 12.7 United States
DEU 12.5 12.9 Germany
ESP 4.9 14.3 Spain
SWE 11.3 14.4 Sweden
AUT 10.4 15.5 Austria
EST 18.4 16.6 Estonia
IRL 8.7 17.2 Ireland
CAN 17.4 19.6 Canada
NZL 17.2 22.7 New Zealand
ISR 32.2 26.2 Israel
CHE 21.9 26.3 Switzerland
AUS 23.0 26.5 Australia
Lots of countries have a higher percentage of foreign-born people than the US ( which seems like a decent measure of diversity)
I’m living in Trinidad and while it may be diverse and asian ancestors are not rare I’m going :dubious: at them being surprised at open racism, that is simply not true.
There are entire invented words for mixed race individuals, like dougla. There is plenty of racism and classicism trust me.
Here in Cayman we have 20,112 immigrants from about 119 countries on work visas within an overall population of about 55,000. (from 2008 data from our statistics office). That is down from a high of 26,517 immigrant workers on work permits pre-recession in 2008.
That does not count those immigrants who already have gained Caymanian citizenship or permanent residency.
I think you may be making a mistake in restricting your question to countries’ diversity “as a percentage of their population”. Much of the United States’ cultural diversity is a consequence of its sheer size, both in population and area. People in one part of the US can be culturally very different from people in different parts just because they are a long way away and rarely if ever get to interact directly (and also because purely geographical factors that affect culture, such as a climate, vary such a lot).
Relative to its size, I suspect that the USA is actually probably fairly low down in the rankings of cultural and ethnic diversity (many European countries, Britain or France for instance, are a lot more diverse than many Americans seem to imagine them to be), but absolute size does matter.
If you allow countries that no longer exist, the Soviet Union could win by a long shot for the sheer variety of cultures it enclosed from various countries and regions.