Second thought about minority immigration

The BBQ Pit
1

Recently I’ve been developing second thoughts about minority immigration. I thought it cool to enjoy the mosaic of various cultures and interesting people coming from all parts of the world and saw my country, Canada, as a sort of United Nations microcosm of a future world where we could all get along and be an example.

Two situations have me currently questioning my previous attitude.

The first occured several months ago. I had an ongoing contract with a relatively new boatyard in a small coastal city in British Colubia to provide labour including my own towards yacht restorations and repairs. The demand was initially quite overwhelming and a city outfit from across the Strait of Georgia, living in a trailor comprising Burmese immigrants was hired. I initially was kind of exited about interacting with their leader who had a history as a jungle fighter against their government. To make a long story short, it took several months, but his people who can’t speak English are still working there and my local people aren’t. Really no skin of my back as I still have work in my shop for trailerable boats but I had to let several people go. No question, but these Burmese guys were as good as us, but no better. Given that these guys who didn’t interact with the rest of the workers at the boat yard because they couldn’t speak English, I strongly suspect that they were a lot cheaper. Fine, but that destroyed one of my ancillary goals to provide a decent wage for my own people.

The second incident resulted from a conversation with one of my brothers in law who was present in my town for a birthday party for my brother. I have often wrangled with his racist attitudes regardless of my challenges, but we are tight enough that I do not fear to present the alternative view.

He told me of an incident where the six Chinese co-workers in his department who comprise the total department within the Liquor Control Board of British Columbia invited him to have lunch at a restaurant that he knew was quite cherished for its soup. Fine, except that during the entire time they spoke Chinese. I had no response to challenge his negative view of multicultural immigration. Needless to say, he feels quite lonely at work, and declined further invitations to share lunch. For the first time I was speechless.

The macro view of the impact of multicultural immigration on our society sounds real neat, but unless you’ve experienced the down side, you are ignoring the fact that some of your own fellow citizens are getting hurt. So who’s side are you on ?

2

What are you pitting here? This seems more like a GD-style thread.

3

So would you be OK with majority immigration?

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I thought I remembered a bit about your posting history. A quick review did not show any interest in a “mosaic of various cultures.” Your sudden change of heart is a bit ingenuous.

I live in Houston, Texas. People have been speaking Spanish here for centuries. Central Texas, just up the road, has a history of Central European immigrants; German, Czech & Polish flourished. Louisianans, white & black, have always been drawn to Big Houston for jobs; modern zydeco was born in Frenchtown. Each generation is a bit more assimilated, changing Texas culture as they change. (Nationwide, Si TV caters to Latino Youth by programming in English.)

My precinct offers ballots in English, Spanish & Vietnamese. Our tourist agency offers a partial list of multicultural sites–old & new. None of this makes me afraid.

Perhaps your racist brother-in-law’s co-workers don’t like him. They were too polite to tell him they didn’t want to waste their lunch hour by putting up with his crap.

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Multicultural Immigration is not a bad thing. Excessive Multiculturalism, IMHO, is. Which does the OP have an issue with?

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I don’t have a problem with multiculturalism as long as Canadian is one of those cultures, and it is as respected and considered as valid as any other.

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What is “Canadian” culture? I’m sure you’d get very, very different answers if you asked someone from La Ronge, Toronto, or (certainly) Quebec City.

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Multicultural immigration is good because it enables people to live and work beside other people of different cultures and discover that they don’t have two heads and are actually kind of similar the world over (you know, interested in wierd stuff like getting a decent job, providing for their families, that sort of thing)

You do generally need to leave it a couple of decades for the initial friction to die down though.

In my grandparents’ day, it was a Really Big Deal if you were Catholic or Protestant (for which read: British or Irish extraction). My great aunt was very nearly disowned for marrying a Catholic. Before he proposed, my great-grandmother took her daughter on an insanely expensive 6-month tour of Europe to try to break the connection and get her to forget him. It didn’t work.

A couple of decades later the Catholic/Protestant thing had simmered down a bit because there was a new target - Wogs! There was a big wave of Greek/Italian/other Mediterranean families, and big chunks of them settled in the north of Melbourne, and the worst thing in the world was to be called a “wog”. They were weird and ate funny food like spaghetti and you couldn’t trust them a bit.

Twenty years later - eh, who cares. Second generation Greeks started proudly appropriating the word “wog” to themselves (especially comedians) and suddenly it was no big deal. Anyway, we had a new target. The Yellow Peril! Vietnamese and Cambodians took over a couple of suburbs and the world was pretty much ending. They had slanty eyes! You couldn’t even read their weird curly writing. They probably ate dog for lunch.

These days the roving target seems to have moved on to Somalis (Melbourne) and possibly Lebanese (Sydney). After all, a lot of them are muslims. Probably terrorists. As it happens, I lived next door to the housing estates where a lot of North Africans tended to live when they first arrived here. I was warned about walking there late at night. I ignored it. Can’t say I ever saw anything stranger than large bunches of teenagers playing basketball at ten o’clock at night. Wouldn’t want to live there myself (it’s pretty grim) but then, neither do they … I know a couple of families there from having done English tutoring, and generally they stay there a few years, get some cash together and move out somewhere nicer. On the estates, the ones you really need to look out for are the multi-generation Australians, who often have psychiatric problems or are multi-generation unemployed.

The thing is, at this point we’re running out of nationalities to be threatened by. We’ve had waves of immigration from every continent outside of the Americas, and all of them who’ve been here more than a couple of decades are now recognized as being completely ordinary members of the community. You’d be laughed at if you disdained someone for being a “wog” or a “chink”. I don’t know what the (ever smaller contingent of) racists are going to do in twenty years or so. I feel for them! (ok, no actually I don’t)

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Did you want me to go back? I’ve been here since I was 4.

Oh, you’re talking about Canada. Well, I kind of want to move to Montreal, though it’s probably not going to happen.

Listen. Those Chinese were very rude to your brother, no doubt. But I’d like to invite you to try to be the minority, constantly, in your work and home and play and everywhere you go, and see if you don’t seek out ‘your own’.

10

If your in the minority at home its your own damn fault.

Marry better next time.

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Wait - didn’t the OP say that his BIL’s Chinese co-workers invited him to lunch and then essentially ignored him by speaking only Chinese? That isn’t a minority immigration problem, that is an asshole co-worker problem.

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What’s “excessive multiculturalism?”

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Jeez, your views on immigration policy are changing because a few guys were rude to your BIL at lunch? And some other guys, who you admit are just as good as you in your field, are outcompeting you for work?

Honestly I have never heard of two worse personal observations on which to base government policy.

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Now we know who the coward in this thread is.

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I know what you mean, but let me explain. The idea of “multiculturalism” and a “mosaic of various cultures” is an important part of how many Canadians today define their culture and their values. They really seem to enjoy having people of different ethnic backgrounds, speaking different languages, eating different foods and practicing different religions living in the country. But, and for those Canadians who read this, I am sorry but this is how I see it, it’s entirely superficial. Multiculturalism as practiced in Canada and possibly in most other places in the world isn’t truly about various cultures coexisting in a single country, it’s merely about colour and spice, variety but not necessarily plurality of cultures.

And I don’t disagree with this. I definitely believe that when you move to a new country, you have to adopt this country’s ethos. This doesn’t mean losing all your identity, but it means accepting that some things are different here than they were where you came from. But some Canadians believe that there is something special about their country’s integration model, and might even say as Speaker for the Dead seems to do that there is no “Canadian culture”, just the sum of all ethnic cultures in the country. (In fairness maybe this isn’t exactly what he said.) But in truth, there is a Canadian culture, and the Canadian model for the integration of immigrant cultures is not all that different from other Western countries’, perhaps a bit more liberal than most European countries’ but still in the same ballpark.

The Flying Dutchman is a singularly unsophisticated fellow, and had swallowed the myths about multiculturalism wholesale. A few months ago he was blasting the Quebec government and Quebecers as a whole for this kerfuffle about niqab-wearing women needing to show their faces in certain circumstances. (It’s easy to find if you search for his threads.) I even saw him blast Quebec for not being willing to subsume its culture into the Canadian whole, saying, in essence, “Ontario Loyalists are one of the founding cultures of this country but today you don’t see them at all, they agreed to disappear as a distinct group, enriching Canada’s culture while doing so, in order to improve social cohesion; why don’t you guys do the same?!” This to me demonstrates an extreme faith in multiculturalism that just isn’t supported by facts or by what multiculturalism is all about in the first place, so I can only guess that he hadn’t thought about what he was writing at all.

Now he’s starting to realise that there is a Canadian way after all, and that for all the flag waving about multiculturalism, there is some sort of contract that we have to respect as part of this society. I’m not sure if I agree with his examples; the Chinese guys speaking Chinese for the whole dinner may be somewhat jerkish on their part but I can’t get myself wound up about it, but still, maybe it will help him gain more sophisticated views about this whole deal. Realise that multiculturalism is good, but it’s not what he was brought up to believe it is. I’m not holding my breath, but we’ll see.

And Martini Enfield, for these reasons I don’t think what you call “Excessive Multiculturalism” ever really happens. In theory it could exist, but even people who eat up all the myths about multiculturalism to make themselves feel all open-minded start getting uneasy before we reach that point.

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One way I’d describe it, actually: multiculturalism is about celebrating dead cultures. Cheer the traditional food and stories you brought from the old country, and honour your old grandmother (often mentioned using the word in her language, even when speaking English) at whose house you meet when there’s an important holiday, but all the while being completely disconnected from how “the old country” really is today.

You know, ever since these last few threads by TFD I’ve been wanting to start a thread about multiculturalism and what I feel it really means. If this is not the thread where it should be discussed, I can bring the discussion to GD.

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I don’t even think it makes them assholes.

I live in China, and on the rare occasions that I am out with English-speaking foreigners, damn right I’m speaking English. I live 90% of my life in Chinese. It’s mentally and emotionally really difficult to do all your communication in a language that you don’t really know well enough to talk freely from the heart. You need a break now and then, a chance to talk about how you really feel in your first language.

Granted, I usually don’t invite non-English speaking people out with me when I’m with foreigners. But occasionally one comes along and I honestly don’t feel too bad that I don’t work too hard to include them (that would generally be the job of whoever invited them.) I don’t see foreigners that often, and I don’t want to waste that precious time doing the same predictable and stilted small talk that constitutes the deepest conversation I can have in Chinese, which I repeat probably a dozen times a day.

Does it make me an asshole? I don’t think so. Living in another culture is HARD. I spend 90% of my life conforming to this culture. I’m working on my Chinese as much as I can. I need a break sometimes.

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Expecting people in your new country to publicly tolerate or accommodate your minority “foreign” culture even if they disagree with it, for a start.

19

Ooh, yet another Angry White Man!

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It would have better truth value if it read "Expecting people in your new country to publicly tolerate or accommodate your minority “foreign” culture even if You disagree with theirs, for a start. "

Like those Muslims in Britain who wish to impose Sharia law on the nation, they need a recalibration of their hypocrisymeter.