How many of that 13% were born in other European countries?
Most of the people coming here for the last 5 years are from Iraq and Somalia. (One medium sized town (Södertälje) has accepted more refugees from Iraq than the US and Canada have in total)
The most common source of immigration is of course always the closest ones. But then you have to adjust for other nations having sudden peaks in migration, usually because of war or other catastrophic events. So our base line immigration is mostly from Scandinavian and European countries. But the circumstantial immigration is bigger than the base line one.
Historically the cultures who have had the biggest influence on Sweden are German, French and Turk cultures.
I see multi-culturism the same way that I see genetic diversity. Genetic diversity can be a very good thing, especially in a changing world. A homogenous population, where individuals have all the same adaptations, is bound to be extinguished when a plague pops up or weather patterns change and kill off the main food source, or when a new competitor appears on the scene. But genetic diversity can also be bad. If the environment isn’t changing very much and the gene pool is wrife with alleles that frequently manifest deleteriously in that context, then that population will struggle to stay cohesive and survive as one unit.
Multiculturism works when when the population is able to absorb ideas and values from different cultures that are deemed valuable and they are incorporated into the mainstream, and when people are able to take advantage of those ideas and values as the overall culture faces pressure (like being more multilingual in response to globilization).
Even though we do have many national cultures and subcultures represented in the US, they seem to be concentrated in certain parts of the country (like NYC). I just came back from visiting relatives in small-town Indiana, and it was pretty homogenous there. I don’t know if there’s any correlation, but they also seem to be suffering economically there pretty badly. The few businesses there were pretty cookie-cutter (Cracker Barrel and The Golden Corral were the “places to be”). I went to a 4th of July street festival held in the downtown area, and noticed something. There were multiple Elephant Ear stands (flattened fried dough with sugar, for those not in the know), all selling basically the same product with the same overpriced lemonade. Don’t get me wrong–those places were doing brisk business, even if they were redundant. But I also noticed that there was one guy who was selling Asian food (Americanized Asian food, but still markedly different than the “normal” fare) and HE was making a real killing since he was the only one doing that. I don’t want to sound like a corporate-speak junkie, but he was definitely thinking “out of the box”. That’s what diversity in general allows for–the ability to create niches when the environment demands it. Multiculturism, when cultivated in the right way, allows for a more diverse economy and society. That’s what we need right now.
“Melting pot” and multiculturalism are inherently entwined. You can’t have a melting pot - or, more precisely, you wouldn’t really have any reason to even have the term - without accepting other cultures.
Multiculturalism naturally leads to “melting pot” behaviour. There’s really not a difference between the two; they’re part of the same process of shifting cultural norms that have been going on for centuries.
Really, there’s very little that the government can do to enhance or prevent this sort of thing. There is the odd success in preventing the seemingly inevitable, like the UK’s recent policy of doing everything in its power to keep the WElsh language alive. But this process is ongoing, always has been, always will be; hell,** we’re all writing English here.** Nobody who speaks English should be unaware of the natural process of cultural mixing, assimilation, and redivision.
I’m not terribly impressed with either side of this non-debate - neither the alarmists who shout and cry that multiculturalism is bad, nor the smug types who hold up their support of multiculturalism as some sort of bona fides for their own moral superiority.
While multiculturalism in Canada is being touted at every level it does not hurt to contextualize it, and this coming from a recent immigrant. To me, it is useful as a method of fighting all kinds of ignorance and prejudice, sometimes despite overwhelming urge to do so. Having government actively involved in encouragement of multiculturalism, in my opinion, makes for a potential of extracting the best and the brightest from each person regardless of their cultural background. It also helps that Canadian society is a well advanced democracy with a high degree of law abiding citizenry.
Message of multiculturalism is finely dosed with respect to individual or group background and it is built into society through schools and government institutions. It adds a layer of acknowledgment which helps an immigrant to adapt into new society, even if it means staying with it’s own language and community (Chinese or Sikh for example). However, there is a sense sometimes that acknowledgment of a group right is tied to the degree of relative advancement of their country of origin democracy occurrent stadning in the world affairs.
Now, in a well functioning society such as Canadian, you just don’t have time for daily indulgence in your own culture but rather, a nostalgic remembrance of it from time to time (think various cultural festivals which come down to food most of the time).
And, for my own challenge posed to recent immigrants or 2nd generation ones to name just one - and I really mean just one - cultural custom from their country that is superior to Canadian usually draws blank.
Howeve, I do feel bad for older immigrants dragged to this country to look aft their offspring’s offspring.
Then it’s incumbent on those who’d like to “forcibly prevent” folks from doing stuff to prove that the benefits outweigh the costs. If they cannot honestly talk about costs, that demonstrates that they’re unworthy of being allowed to use force.
it’s good that you noticed something…the diversity among food vendors. That’s nice, but it’s not the most important thing.
The really important thing is what you did NOT notice…because it was so obvious, and taken for granted:
- all those people at the street fair, with whatever their diversity or lack thereof, were celebrating the 4th of July.*
Not Cinco de Mayo, not Kwanza, not Ramadan , etc, etc…
Muticulturalism is great, as long as you share what you have in common more than you emphasize your differences.
“Variety is the spice of life.” isn’t just a fortune-cookie sentiment, it’s a universal truth. Maybe we need to allocate a place on Earth where those who don’t like variety can move to unhindered, and with the rest of society’s blessing?
Like New Hampshire?
Permanent unresolvable problems with multiculturalism in a democratic society:
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people always have been, are, and always will be, willingly redistributive (charitable) in homogenous societies, and decidedly not so in heterogeneous societies.
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in-race and in-class and in-culture status is more rewarding than extra-race, extra-class, and extra-culture status for all but marginal individuals. ie: people do not integrate. They have not integrated. Even the catholic/protestant differences, biases, preferences are apparent in behavior after generations of departing active religious participation. Nowhere in the world do the Muslims integrate into society, even in the UK where it should be easiest of all. This status seeking is the reason that people are, and always will be, marginally racist, culturist, and classist. Even if money were fully redistributed, this behavior would still occur. And since status affects opportunities, and mate selection, it will continue to be a permanent artifact of it. People cooperate when the marginal costs are low, and they compete when the marginal costs are high. This means that when times are good we can pretend we are integrating. But when times become difficult, natural tendencies prevail and people reform into class, race, and cultural groups for security.
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Cultural values contain group cooperative strategies, different concepts of property because of it, and different potentials for participating in an advanced division of labor. In other words, some cultures contain superior institutional habits, and some inferior cultural habits.
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Most importantly (and never stated), institutions (habits) are a cost. They are a society’s highest cost. Education, is overstated. Habitual education (indoctrination into the institutional habits of truth-telling, contract-adherence, inter-temporal production cycles, over-production, status ambition, tolerance and intolerance, manners, ethics, morals, and respect for organizational and legal institutions are all costs, and they are very high costs. This is why we cannot convert other societies to democracy. We assume too much of our laws. It is our habits that the laws codify.
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Lastly, because of these status preferences, and the fact that status seeking is the primary determinant of behavior in social orders, the differences in distribution of IQ between races, classes and cultures will have a permanent impact on the relative position of cultures.
IE: you can have a ‘sample’ multiculturalism, within a western society. But you cannot have a political or social multi-culturism, if you wish to have a democratic society that is competitive in a division of labor, wherein you redistribute resources, without REGRESSING TOWARD THE MEAN. In the long term, you will destroy your society.
This society is rare. It is abnormal. It is rare and abnormal for reasons that are 5000 years old. But it is not invulnerable. And without having discovered and exploited a continent, it might not have had enough wealth to recover from falling under the enchantment or oriental mysticism.
The “Schumpeterian Intellectual Curse”.
A single line in an Economist article some years ago really shocked my worldview. I no longer remember the exact wording, so the content will have to suffice for these purposes.
Multiculturalism is an inherently conservative aim.
It’s kind of a shocking statement, when “respecting other cultures” seems like just the wishy-washy, leftist, academic idea tough-minded but practical conservatives would sneer at. But when stated plainly, its truth is apparent. Multiculturalism is not a quest for recognition, it is a quest to keep things as they are. “I’ve been this way all my life; don’t make me change.”
Multiculturalism is like Chinatown: false integration. I don’t accept your ways, so we will hypostatize a border between us. I don’t accept your ways, so instead of living with you 365 days of the year, I’ll set aside these few for you. 7 days a week, our television programs are for us, but one day a year you can have a parade.
Der Trihs fears if we don’t prop up multiculturalism, we will have crushing uniformity. But to me, that sounds very strange, because it is saying, “If we don’t resist change, we will be stuck not-changing.” It doesn’t even make any sense.
Could you translate that into English, please? Give actual, real world examples.
It might help to understand your way of thinking if you identified where you are coming from. Look to the upper right–I live in Houston, TX. Texas has always been multicultural, although there have been some disagreements. Here’s what’s available in my city now.
Not as Americans use the term. “Conservative” in America is not a term that has anything to do with preserving; it has to to with moving the country and the world towards an idealized racist, sexist, corporate, Christian tyranny and destroying all competing beliefs.
Of course it does. We’d have plenty of change; just in one direction.
I’m sorry for not being more clear, Der Trihs. Perhaps if I put it this way: there may be arguments for multiculturalism, but fear of conformity is not one of them, as it suggests we should resist stagnation by stagnating. That, frankly, is sophistry.
I believe his counterargument works as follows (and, if not, then I’ll put it forward to at least play devil’s advocate): assume for the sake of argument that Country A has a stagnant culture and Country B has a different stagnant culture and – well, maybe Country C has a rapidly changing one, and maybe Country D has a slowly changing one, and so on; it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that Country U has a stagnant culture and is on the march: it has a (stagnant) dedication to expanding its particular brand of tyranny across border after border, destroying all competing beliefs.
And so, goes the argument, if that isn’t checked with preservative multiculturalism, then instead of Country A’s stagnant culture and Country B’s different stagnant culture and Culture U’s different stagnant culture, we’ll eventually just have Culture U’s stagnant culture. The argument gets better if you factor in C and D, but IMHO it’s still not self-contradictory to favor “A and B and U” over “U” on the stated grounds.
You put it quite well The Other Waldo Pepper.
Personally, I don’t multicultural diversity is beneficial not or the particular practices that people from different cultures bring to it. The value is in having, or perhaps learning, and embracing tolerance for all the unfamiliar practices of all these different cultures.
I don’t celebrate diversity, though sometimes I am entertained and amused by it. I tolerate it, because it is not harmful to me or mine, and so long as others are tolerant of my personal foibles, we are all the better for it.
Let’s see…
Monoculture is in some sense a “natural” state of affairs, and that state of affairs sucks, so we have to take action to support multiculturalism above and beyond what our natural conservative tendencies to not change cultures can muster.
- Why would monoculture be, in some sense, a natural trend or state of affairs?
- Why does it suck?
- If it so clearly sucks, why does it have to be resisted above and beyond the tendency of individuals to adhere to their culture in the first place?
- How can cultures change at all, if we are thinking and acting this way?
Because it benefits the survival and propagation of the culture in question. Evolution, in a sense.
Because it tends to render the culture inflexible and crippled in the long term. And because it is tyrannical towards all the people and subcultures and other cultures who don’t like being beaten into submission or killed.
For the same reasons any form of tyranny needs to be resisted.
Necessity, and the deliberate attempt to resist natural stagnation.
Wikipedia is close enough:
“Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy. In his vision, the intellectual class will play an important role in capitalism’s demise. The term “intellectuals” denotes a class of persons in a position to develop critiques of societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and able to stand up for the interests of strata to which they themselves do not belong. One of the great advantages of capitalism, he argues, is that as compared with pre-capitalist periods, when education was a privilege of the few, more and more people acquire (higher) education. The availability of fulfilling work is however limited and this, coupled with the experience of unemployment, produces discontent. The intellectual class is then able to organize protest and develop critical ideas.”
Ie: a schumpeterian intellectual is a label for everyone who is educated beyond their productive capacity, (there are limits to the useful number of people who can employ a classical liberal education) and as they are bored and powerless, idealistic and lacking material responsibility for the processes they debate (such as owning a business and taking risks, or engaging in credit, or fighting in war, or policing the streets) which would educated them realistically and practically rather than ideologically, a large gruop of these people will advocate for members of classes that they do not represent as a means of attaining self-perceived status that is not represented by their material function in society. In this process they will enable the incremental destruction of entrepreneurship and bring about socialism through the use of the democratic process.
He argues that this is the method of destruction of capitalism versus the marxist methodology of revolution.
ie: your professor who argues for marxism under the illusion that he will have greater influence and social status in that organization than the current one. Or the citizen who happily gives away resources without demanding adoption of habits that make his place in the productive order possible.
There is nothing new here. This has been considered by great minds well before us. But in general, schumpeter appears to be correct.
Fundamentally all social movements are collectivist. The problem is keeping entrepreneurship moving faster than regulation can destroy the concentration of capital that makes entrepreneurship possible in sufficient numbers, to increase the division of labor, faster than the growth of the population.
Cheers