Canada and New Zealand have already been mentioned. Australia is similar in assimilitaing/integrating immigrants. Sky King mentioned “high government officials”. Of the 20 members of the Cabinet of Australia (the senior government ministers:
Julia Gillard (the deputy prime minister) was born in Wales.
Penny Wong was born in Malaysia.
Chris Evans and Stephen Conroy were born in England.
Anthony Albanese has an Italian background.
It’s not quite up to the proportion of foreign-born and ethnic minorities in Australia, but it’s not that far away.
Going on number three, the Iberian Peninsula and Italy have been melting pots for a couple thousand years… they simply weren’t as “patchycolored” as the US until recently because the majority of the new arrivals were a similar enough color to those already in that they didn’t look outrageously different. People came in, stayed, assimilated. Depending on the region’s attitude toward “outsiders,” on their own attitude about “the locals”, and on whether local laws included the principle of “different laws for different groups” (relatively common in Iberia during the Reconquista, the difference could be religion or immigrant status), the assimilation would take years or generations.
If your idea of melting pot requires having people of far-Asian and subsaharian coloring, then definitely any country in the Americas, no just the USA. And many of them haven’t been as big on… I want to say ghettos… as the USA. Costa Rica to name one I’ve seen is as multicolored as the USA, but there’s never been Chinatowns or Jewish quarters there, although Costa Ricans of Chinese ancestry did have the “bring a wife from the homeland” process.
I find your first point kind of strange. If most New Zealanders were Maori, they wouldn’t be a candidate for “melting pot” any more?
Do NOT say Ghetto. That word has some very unsavory meanings, and is flat-out wrong anyhow. It’s tantamount to saying that we Evil Racist Americans shoved all them damned foreign mongrels away. You may not have meant that, but there’s only two meanings to the word for us, and neither applies.
In America these communities formed because many first-egernation immigrants simply didn’t have the language skills to easily adapt, and because they arrived in number large enough to permit them to band together in a strange land. These kinds of communities occur just about everywhere you have a lot of recent immigrants, and they are NOT ghettoes. In the USA, they inevitably begin to fade after a couple generations. Chinatown is New York is now probably home to more young white yuppy couples than Chinese.
Well, the Maori haven’t been there for long either. I think her point one is an observation only; melting pot countries tend to have these characteristics. It doesn’t necessarily follow that a country without this characteristic can’t be a melting pot.
Yeah, what I meant was, IMO, countries with more “settled” populations are less good at welcoming outsiders. I’m basing this on comparisons between living for long periods in Scotland and Australia. Others may dispute my observations, but that’s just what I’ve found.
Oh, and I think I forgot one - prosperity. The more prosperous a country, the more attractive the culture is for newcomers to want to assimilate into, and the less threatened the locals feel by those same newcomers.
I’ve found enormous differences within the same country, including my own. Heck, even within the same province. My first time working in one of those countries was in a small town - our “this is so pretty!” was met with joy and people were more than happy to help us with anything. The second time was in one of the biggest cities, “this is so pretty!” was met with looks of “and you’re ridiculously provincial, dearie” and people couldn’t get off their asses to help me find City Hall (it’s a big red building, smack on Market Square).
My province in Spain is a reception point for “secondary immigration:” most immigrants arrive to Madrid, Barcelona or the Andalusian “plastic sea” (farms). After some time, many realize that you can have the same job in a small town with the same income and less expense, and they move out of the big towns. Some regions are more popular than others for this, mine seems to be a popular one according to the stats but we’re not sure why. We have a reputation of being “closed,” and I can tell you that I haven’t met any immigrant who was a member of, for example, a gastronomic society or a peña (both are kinds of social clubs pretty unique to the region). I can also tell you that I have been in peñas and gastronomic societies eating with immigrants who had been invited by a member (same as myself, I’m not a member of any of those).
I’ve lived in places where, being from Spain, I felt like I’d fallen up to the moon. Getting invited to somebody’s “club”? Impossible. You can’t take guests. OK, how does the club get new members? People get their kids in. So what happens if someone wants to found a new one? :dubious: That doesn’t happen.
It was the local festival and there was no information available anywhere… Tourism Information was on vacation. During the festival. And then they wonder why the festival of another town 60 miles further south (whose Tourism Info gets extra people during the festival, and where you can get a club in a matter of days, so long as you know one member) does get visitors from all over the world and they don’t :smack: Guess what? The town further south also gets immigrants from all over; the one further north doesn’t. And I’m talking about the same country, the same region, the town south is a couple centuries older, and the background racial makeup is the same.
The word “ghetto” has arrived to most languages via the US, referring not to Jewish ghettos but to black ones. American guides (both white) in both New York and San Francisco used them to describe how their respective Chinatowns came to be.
I wouldn’t think of applying it to, say, “areas with a lot of Italian population,” - but why do Italians and Germans count for the American melting pot and not for Spain? My college class of 79… heck, my final section of 15 students… included the lastnames Bek, Jurgens, Zanni and Chiarabini; the German lastnames were WWII arrivals, one of the Italian lastnames was from the XIX century and the other was born in Spain but had chosen to keep the Italian nationality. 30% of the people who work in Switzerland aren’t Swiss nationals.
I suspect that this is sort of a 1950s history lesson view of the situation.
In fact, very many of the ethnic enclaves in the U.S. were, indeed, originally ghettoes: locations where recent immigrants were steered upon arrival and from which they were barred from leaving once they were there. For European immigrants, the ghetto phenomenon generally lasted only about one generation and it was not enforced with the same rigor as the despicable statutes of Pope Paul IV and his cohorts in the sixteenth century, but there were a number of ways that recent immigrants were prevented from settling outside prescribed areas. And for people of East Asian or African descent, there were actual laws (for Asians in the West) and societal expectations supported by violence (for blacks in the East, particularly in the North) that physically prevented them from venturing outside their enclaves for several generations.
I would say that such confinement is far, far less likely, now, but it was still going on when I was a kid.